Memories and Realizations: Looking Deeper at “Dandelion Wine”

John Hallwas

            Every summer I do some rereading of books that have mattered, and still matter, for me. It’s rather like visiting with old friends---except books don’t change much over the years. My experience with them sometimes varies, however, because I continue to change.

            One book that I encountered long ago is Ray Bradbury’s fictionalized memoir of his boyhood days, “Dandelion Wine.” It appeared in 1957 and is focused on a 12-year-old boy named Douglas Spaulding. (Bradbury’s middle name was Douglas.)

            I was 12 in 1957---although I didn’t read the book until I was in high school. And “Dandelion Wine” is based on Bradbury’s memories of Waukegan, where he was born in 1920. I was born there, too, 25 years later, and although I grew up in nearby smaller towns (Loon Lake and Antioch), I was often in Waukegan, our county seat, and like the famous author, I had relatives there.

            Bradbury died earlier this month, at age 91---which is what prompted me to take “Dandelion Wine” off the shelf once again. Although the noted science fiction writer includes some fantasy in the memory-based novel (a weird local genius builds a “Happiness Machine,” for example), “Dandelion Wine” has attracted a huge readership in the past 55 years partly because it reflects, in a poignant way, things that so many people recall: grandparents and childhood friends, strange neighbors and special places, old rituals and new realizations.

            I’ve loved the book for half a century, largely because it deals with issues in my own experience and focuses so well on themes that became central to my reading and writing over the years: death, time, memory, place, community, and belonging. The book centers, in fact, on the growing awareness of young Douglas Spaulding that momentous issues are reflected in our everyday experience. It’s also a book about the emergence of a writer’s vision of life---and his commitment to remembering a place (called “Green Town” in the book) that was home.

            More than anything else, young Douglas, back in that summer of 1928, struggles to come to terms with death. That’s partly because two people he knows (his great-grandmother and an old Civil War veteran) die during the summer and partly because a killer, called “the Lonely One,” stalks people in “the Ravine” near the Spaulding home. In one of the central passages about his inner growth, Douglas realizes that every community has a ravine, or threatening aspect: “Life was a horror lived in [ravines] at night, when, on all sides, sanity, marriage, children, happiness were threatened by an ogre called Death.” And each person faces it alone.

            At a climactic moment in the book, shortly after his beloved great-grandmother dies, Douglas realizes that he must someday die as well. Moreover, his consciousness of death, and experience of personal loss, separates him, inwardly, from his chums, who “weren’t thinking about death.” Long ago, that was one of my deep connections with the book’s central figure.

            Associated with this is the theme of memory, which was perennially important to Bradbury. He loved his early years in Waukegan, where his grandfather was the mayor, and his grandparents lived right next door. When his father lost his job as a telephone lineman in 1932, the Bradbury family moved west, first to Tucson and later to Los Angeles, and that removal from multi-generational family closeness, and from Ray’s boyhood world, prompted a longing for the past that remained throughout his life. He sometimes wrote nostalgic poems about his childhood.

            In “Dandelion Wine” young Douglas and his friends love listening to the memories of an elderly Civil War veteran named Colonel Freeleigh, who recalls the great conflict, as well as the people and songs of that era. Douglas realizes that he’s a kind of “Time Machine” whose recollections can sharpen your awareness: “The more he talks, the more he gets you to peering around and noticing things.” As a result, for example, Douglas experiences more deeply the old Civil War cannon in the courthouse square.    

            And shortly after the boys find Colonel Freeleigh dead at his house, Douglas realizes that, with his death, a whole local world has passed away: “The Civil War ended right here in this town forever.” And Douglas becomes committed to writing as a means of keeping the things he has experienced, and the people he has known, alive.

            That much I understood half a century ago, when I first read the book. But more recently I’ve realized how much the author celebrates temporality. While it’s true that passing time inevitably takes things, and people, away, it is a marvelous force that keeps the world amazing, and revelatory, for us. In Bradbury’s fictionalized memoir, which is laced with disturbing changes, experiencing temporality is far better than living inside the ill-fated “Happiness Machine,” which enforces a timelessness that destroys everything precious in life.

At the end, as September arrives, young Douglas reflects on a great, meaningful summer in his familiar, small-town world---one which we are sure he will remember forever. And he feels a satisfying sense of relationship with both the living and the dead in his community.

            It is remarkable to me, as I read the book now, how much the boyhood world of Douglas Spaulding, with its courthouse clock and Civil War cannon, its downtown library and old homes with porches, its familiar faces and respect for the past, resembles Macomb, not the Waukegan that I recall. But then, I was of a different era than Bradbury---and I was never so deeply connected to that place.