Jim and Will avoid this fate-barely-and even manage to rescue Miss Foley on her first foray into the mirror maze. One supposes it is not the maze itself but the carousel that has actually accomplished her doubling back in time; the mirrors in the maze show you a time of life you think you'd like to have again, and the carousel actually accomplishes it. The carousel can add a year to your age each time you go around forward or make you a year younger for every circle you make on it going backward. The carousel is Bradbury's interesting and workable metaphor for all of life's passages, and the fact that he darkens this ride, which is often associated with the sunniest pleasure we know as children, to fit the motif of this particular black carnival, causes other uneasy associations to come to mind. When we see the innocent merry-go-round with its prancing horses in this nether light, it may suggest to us that if time's passages are to be compared to a merry-go-round ride, then we see that each year's revolution is essentially the same as the last; it perhaps causes us to remember how fleeting and ephemeral such a ride is; and most of all it reminds us that the brass ring, which we have all tried so hard and fruitlessly to catch, is kept deliberately, tauntingly, out of reach.
In terms of the new American gothic, we can see that the mirror maze is the catch-trap, the place where too much self-examination and morbid introspection persuades Miss Foley to step over the line into abnormality. In Bradbury's world-the world of Cooger and Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show-there are no options: first caught in the glass of Narcissus, you then find yourself riding a dangerous carousel charger backwards into an untenable past or forward into an untenable future. Shirley Jackson uses the conventions of the new American gothic to examine character under extreme psychological-or perhaps occult-pressure; Peter Straub uses them to examine the effects of an evil past upon the present; Anne Rivers Siddons uses them to examine social codes and social pressures; Bradbury uses these self-same conventions in order to offer us a moral judgment. In describing Miss Foley's terror and grief in attaining the childhood she so desired, Bradbury goes far toward defusing the potential flood of sticky-sweet romanticism that might have destroyed his tale . . . and I think this defusing reinforces the moral judgments he makes. In spite of imagery that sometimes swamps us instead of uplifting us, he manages to retain his own clear point of view.
This isn't to say Bradbury doesn't make a romantic myth of childhood, because he sure does. Childhood itself is a myth for almost all of us. We think we remember what happened to us when we were kids, but we don't. The reason is simple: we were crazy then. Looking back into this well of insanity as adults who are, if not totally insane, then at least neurotic instead of out-and-out psychotic, we attempt to make sense of things which made no sense, read importance into things which had no importance, and remember motivations which simply didn't exist. This is where the process of myth making begins.*
Rather than trying to row against this strong current (as Golding and Hughes do), Bradbury uses it in Something Wicked This Way Comes ; blending the myth of childhood with the myth of the dream-father, whose part is played here by Will's dad, Charles Halloway . . . and, if Bradbury himself is to be believed, who is also played by that Illinois power-linesman who was Ray Bradbury's Dad. Halloway is a librarian who lives his own life of dreams, who is enough boy to understand Will and Jim, but who is also enough adult to provide, in the end, what the boys cannot provide for themselves, that final ingredient in our perception of Apollonian morality, normality, and rectitude: simple accountability.
*The only novels I can think of that avoid making childhood into a myth or a fairy tale and still succeed wonderfully as stories are William Golding's Lord of the Flier and A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes.
Someone will write me a letter and suggest that I should have added either Ian McEwan's The Cement Garden or Beryl Bainbridge's Harriet Said , but I think that, in their differing ways (but uniquely British outlook), both of these short novels romanticize childhood as thoroughly as Bradbury ever did.
Childhood is the time, Bradbury insists, when you are still able to believe in things you know cannot be true: "It's not true anyway," Will gasped. "Carnivals don't come this late in the year. Silly darn-sounding thing. Who'd go to it?” "Me." Jim stood quiet in the dark.
Me, thought Will, seeing the guillotine flash, the Egyptian mirrors unfold accordions of light, and the sulphur-skinned devil-man sipping lava, like gunpowder tea.
They simply believe; their hearts are still capable of overruling their heads. They are still sure that they will be able to sell enough boxes of greeting cards or tins of Cloverine Salve to get a bike or a stereo, that the toy will really do all the things you saw it do on TV and that "you can put it together in just a matter of minutes with a few simple tools," or that the monster picture going on inside the theater will be as scary and wonderful as the posters and stills outside. That's okay; in Bradbury's world the myth is ultimately stronger than the reality, and the heart stronger than the head. Will and Jim stand revealed, not as the sordid, dirty, frightened boys of Lord of the Flies , but as creatures built almost entirely of myth, a dream of childhood which becomes more believable than reality in Bradbury's hand.
Through noon after noon, they had screamed up half the rides, knocked over dirty milk bottles, smashed kewpie-doll-winning plates, smelling, listening, looking their way through the autumn crowd trampling the leafy sawdust . . . Where did they come by the wherewithal for their day at the fair? Most kids in a similar situation have to count their finances and then go through an agonizing process of picking and choosing; Jim and Will apparently do everything. But once again, it's okay. They are our representatives in the forgotten land of childhood, and their apparently endless supply of cash (plus their dead-eye aim at the china plates and pyramids of milk bottles) are accepted with delight and little or no rational hesitation. We believe as we once believed that Pecos Bill dug the Grand Canyon one day when he came home tired, thus dragging his pick and shovel behind him instead of carrying them over his shoulder. They are in terror, but it is the unique ability of these myth-children to enjoy their terror. "They both stopped to enjoy the swift pound of each other's heart," Bradbury relates.
Cooger and Dark become Bradbury's myth of evil, threatening these children not as gangsters or kidnappers or any realistic bad guys; Cooger is more like Old Pew returned from Treasure Island , his blindness exchanged for a hideous fall of years that has been dropped upon him when the carousel goes wild. When he hisses at Will and Jim, "A . . . sssshort . . . sad life . . . for you both!" we feel the sort of comfortable chill we felt when the Black Spot was first passed at the Admiral Benbow.
Their hiding from the emissaries of the carnival, who come into town looking for them under the pretense of a free parade, becomes Bradbury's best summation of this childhood remembered in myth; the childhood that might really have existed in short bursts between long stretches of boredom and such cheesy chores as carrying wood, doing dishes, putting out the trash, or sitting baby brother or sister ( and it's probably significant to this idea of the dream-child that both Jim and Will are only children).
They . . . hid in old garages, they . . . hid in old barns . . . in the highest trees they could climb and got bored and boredom was worse than fear so they came down and reported in to the Police Chief and had a fine chat which gave them twenty safe minutes right in the station and Will got the idea of touring churches and they climbed all the steeples in town and scared pigeons off the belfries . . . . But there again they began to get starchy with boredom and fatigued with sameness, and were almost on the point of giving themselves up to the carnival in order to have something to do, when quite fortunately the sun went down.
The only effective foil for Bradbury's dream-children is Charles Halloway, the dream-father.
In the character of Charles Halloway we find attractions which only fantasy, with its strong myth-making abilities, can give us. Three points about him are worth mentioning, I think.
First, Charles Halloway understands the myth of childhood the two boys are living; for all of us who grew up and parted with some bitterness from our parents because we felt they didn't understand our youth, Bradbury gives us a portrait of the sort of parent we felt we deserved.
His reactions are those which few real parents can ever afford to have. His parenting instincts are apparently supernaturally alert. Early on, he sees the boys running home from watching the carnival set up, and calls their names softly under his breath . . . but does no more. Nor does he mention it to Will later, although the two boys have been out at three o'clock in the morning. He's not worried that they've been out scoring dope or mugging old ladies or shtupping their girl friends. He knows they have been out on boys' business, walking the night as boys sometimes will . . . and he lets it go.
Second, Charles Halloway comes by his understanding legitimately; he is still living the myth himself. Your father cannot be your pal very successfully, the psychology texts tell us, but there are few fathers, I think, who have not longed to be buddies with their sons, and few sons who have not wished for a buddy in their fathers. When Charles Halloway discovers that Jim and Will have nailed rungs under the climbing ivy on their respective houses so they can escape and reenter their bedrooms after bedtime, he does not demand that the rungs be torn down; his response is admiring laughter and an admonition that the boys not use the rungs unless they really have to. When Will tells his father in agony that no one will believe them if they try to explain what really happened in Miss Foley's house, where the evil nephew Robert (who is really Mr. Cooger, looking much younger since he has been reissued) framed them for a robbery, Halloway says simply, "I'll believe." He will believe because he is really just one of the boys and the sense of wonder has not died within him. Much later, while rummaging through his pockets, Charles Halloway almost seems like the world's oldest Tom Sawyer: And Will's father stood up, stuffed his pipe with tobacco, rummaged his pockets for matches, brought out a battered harmonica, a penknife, a cigarette lighter that wouldn't work, and a memo pad he had always meant to write great thoughts down on but had never got around to . . . . Almost everything, in fact, except a dead rat and a string to swing it on.