★★★★★ 4
One boy’s early awareness of magic and mortality
Format: Kindle
As part of my growing adolescent fascination with the work of Ray Bradbury, of course I read ‘Dandelion Wine’. However, it was one I have not revisited in almost 50 years so my recollection of it is less detailed than many of his other classic books. It’s a collection of interconnected short stories, some previously published, again set in Green Town, Illinois, the fictional counterpart for Waukegan, Illinois where Bradbury spent his first years up until the beginning of his adolescence.
Many of his stories, whether they’re set in Green Town or some other anonymous Midwest town in the 20’s and 30’s resonated with me from the beginning. My father was born just a few months after Bradbury and grew up during that same time in another small town in Missouri, which I recall visiting a few times in my childhood and seeing a neighborhood not much different from Bradbury’s, and a house almost literally unchanged from the time when my father was a boy.
That nostalgia, that yearning for the freshness and intensity of a child’s perception, when a boy will find magic in a birdbath and an earth-scented basement, definitely spoke to my soul and still does, 50 years later.
The main character is a Ray surrogate, a twelve-year old boy named Douglas Spaulding (Bradbury’s middle name is ‘Douglas’) who has a ten-year old brother named Tom. They live with their parents, grandparents, and great-grandmother in an old house that is sturdy and roomy enough to accommodate a few boarders. One of the ‘beginning of summer’ rituals is the bottling of dandelion wine that will last the entire summer and beyond, at which point it will be a way of preserving what was memorable about the summer that just passed.
‘Hold summer in your hand, pour summer in a glass, a tiny glass of course, the smallest tingling sip for children; change the season in your veins by raising glass to lip and tilting summer in.’
During this particular summer, Doug fully realizes, for the first time, that he is alive and, conversely, that he will die. He holds mortality at bay as much as he can, with special sneakers in which he can run from one end of the town to the other and working out a clever bartering trade with the shoe salesman as a way to “buy” the sneakers. Doug could be a future salesman himself, persuading the salesman to try on a pair himself so he will know what he’s selling and how it actually feels to wear a pair. The future writer Doug also wants to document every significant event that happens to him this summer of 1928.
His younger brother Tom, on the other hand, is more logical and reasonable. While Doug chronicles the events of the summer, Tom records data such as the first rainfall and other meteorological data. Tom also seems to me to be the wiser of the two, reasoning with and calming down the melodramatic Doug on more than one occasion.
Everything in the town acquires new meaning to the otherwise carefree and playful Doug. There are discernible boundaries between civilization and wilderness in this little hamlet, the most notable example being the ravine:
‘The ravine was indeed the place where you came to look at the two things of life, the ways of man and the ways of the natural world. The town was, after all, only a large ship filled with constantly moving survivors, bailing out the grass, chipping away the rust.’
The death of his great grandma also occurs this summer. After a lifetime of activity and housekeeping and family keeping, she decides that she has lived long enough. She has no discernible ailment, just a “mild but ever-deepening tiredness”. She has to assure Doug and Tom that the time for doing all this activity has come to an end and that they must learn to accept it.
Just as disturbing for Doug is when his best friend John Huff tells him that his father is being transferred to Milwaukee .His family is leaving on the train that evening. John is a budding young superman. He is a master pathfinder, swimmer, climber and jumper. He is also not a bully. He is kind as well as smart. As far as Doug is concerned, he is a god. For their last play activity, they play a game of hide-and-seek. Doug volunteers to be ‘it’, hoping by controlling the pace of the game to prolong John’s departure. John wraps that one up and agrees to play one more game, with him as ‘it’. With Doug and the other boys frozen into ‘statues’, John punches him on the arm gently, saying “So long” and then runs.
There is even a serial killer in Green Town, referred to as The Lonely One. Young spinster Lavinia Nebbs and some of her friends are worried about the disappearance of another of their friends. Rumors of the Lonely One being on the loose abound with the deaths of two young women occurring within the past two months. With the disappearance of their friend they have ample reason to be concerned. Then they find her, lying dead on the ground. They find the police and, after he finishes questioning them, they are free to leave. Lavinia, putting on a brave front, suggests they go to a Charlie Chaplin movie to stave off their fear. This works pretty well until the film ends, the last feature of the night, and they all have to walk home in the dark. Lavinia, still trying to hide her fear behind a brave front, agrees to walk her friends home first, meaning that she’ll have to walk the rest of the way to her house by herself. Bradbury’s mastery of suspense is particularly evident in this chilling and terrifying episode. I won’t reveal the outcome.
There is one episode in which Doug and Tom, primarily Doug, come to believe that a wax, fortune-telling “Tarot Witch” automaton is actually a mummified queen from ancient Egypt. In reality it is a slot machine in which you put in a penny and out comes a card with your fortune written on it. The alcoholic owner is disgusted with it and his failing slot and pinball machine business and ready to throw it in the trash heap. Doug and Tom attempt to rescue it. This sequence is long and tedious and has the effect of Tom and Huck rescuing Jim near the end of ‘Huckleberry Finn’. In both cases it’s an unwelcome diversion that detracts from the power of the novel.
Overall, ‘Dandelion Wine’ works. It is not as disjointed as it seemed to me 50 years ago when I could detect the short story origins of much of it. Depicting the course of a summer is by its nature episodic. There are moments where it seems that everybody talks like Bradbury writes, even the semi-literate characters, and with a zeal and enthusiasm that gradually took over most of his later fiction. At its core, however, it captures, through a poetic filter, the magic and intensity of a child’s perception and his awareness that all this beauty surrounding us is fleeting so we may as well appreciate it as much as we can while we can.
WAS THIS REVIEW HELPFUL?YesReportShare
Reviewed in the United States on May 10, 2022
