Discover science-fiction writer Ray Bradbury's views on Edgar Allan Poe's “The Fall of the House of Usher”

RAY BRADBURY: Hello. I'm Ray Bradbury, best described as a friend of Edgar Allan Poe's. And Poe, he was a friend of the Gothic novel. That was his rote system. And where did all that start? Well, you go back to a gentleman named Horace Walpole, who later became the fourth Earl of Orford. He published, in the year 1764, a novel entitled "The Castle of Otranto," which he described as "a Gothic story." Why Gothic? Well, the events related are supposed to take place in the twelfth century, when the great cathedrals of that architectural style were beginning to be built. Gothic, therefore, equals medieval, and medieval--to the rational mind of the eighteenth century--meant the age of unreason, of superstition, of belief in the supernatural. "Otranto" was imitated by dozens of writers at the time, but the cult seemed to be dying out until it was given a permanent place in the minds of the public by Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein," certainly the most tenaciously popular of all of that sort of novel. So it's not surprising that the young Edgar Allan Poe should follow his own obsession with the macabre and grotesque. He resolved to outdo them all and wrote "The Fall of the House of Usher." Yet, as always with Poe, there is much more here than we see on the printed page. All Gothic romances have one aspect in common. Without fail they are set in some remote landscape, a feature of which has to be a semi-ruinous and forbidding castle replete with all the apparatus of secret malevolence. Every castle is a castle perilous, and despair is its chief inhabitant. The building itself plays an active role in the story. The author uses his descriptions of it to establish from the beginning an atmosphere of terror and foreboding. Poe knew this very well and used it to great effect.

Poe believed that the short story should be carefully, even minutely, planned and organized. The writer should first decide upon one specific effect he wants to achieve, such as a feeling of terror or pity or despair. This concept affected the entire course of the short story. Poe was more influential than any writer of his time in leading the short story away from the formless, casual episode toward a higher art of more formal organization. The list of American authors whose work was shaped by Poe's ideas reads like "Who's Who": Mark Twain, O. Henry, Ring Lardner, Katherine Anne Porter, Stephen Crane--the list goes on and on. Poe also created the genre story, pioneering several of the types of specialized stories we enjoy today. He single-handedly invented the detective story with such tales as "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," which featured a French detective named C. Auguste Dupin. By making Dupin a strong, individualistic, highly educated personality, Poe set the style for generations of fictional detectives to follow. For example, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle based his immortal Sherlock Holmes directly on Dupin.

Poe also shaped the course of the modern horror story with stories such as "Usher" by mixing the supernatural with abnormal psychology. And let's not forget science fiction; that's right, science fiction. Poe was greatly interested in the rapid strides science was making in the 1800s, and he wrote some of the earliest short stories which could be called science fiction. In them we find hypnotism, space travel; and in "Usher" we even find a clear, concise concept of the sentience of all matter. Stories like "A Tale of the Ragged Mountains" and "A Descent into the Maelstrom" gave us for the first time fictions based on science, in which every departure from the norm had to be explained scientifically, not supernaturally. Writers such as Jules Verne and H.G. Wells have acknowledged their debt to Poe. I've tried to acknowledge my own debt to him in my stories "Usher II," "The Exiles," "Pillar of Fire." They're all tributes in one way or another to Poe and a fierce revenge against the censors and book burners of a hopefully never-to-arrive future. To sum up: Poe's influence on the modern short story is unmatched in English and American literature. He gave it style, organization, dignity, and meaning and set it on the road to becoming one of the most challenging forms of fiction a writer can attempt.

"The Fall of the House of Usher," first published in 1839, is one of Poe's finest short stories. It is no simple exercise in mood and terror like those of its Gothic predecessors. This is one of Poe's deepest and most complex works. Let's consider some of the problems involved in translating such an introspective story into a film. In the original story the friend is shown directly into Usher's studio. We learn about Roderick's physical appearance, the nature of his strange illness, and the morbid acuteness of his senses--his terror and his conviction that fear itself will destroy him. And we learn of the effect of the house upon him, and we hear about his tragic sister, the Lady Madeline. All of the above is given to the reader purely by means of descriptive narrative; yet so engrossing is the author's command of words, we become absorbed into the weird atmosphere of his story. But films are not words alone. We must think of a play or a film as a story told by the actors, not by the author.

So in translating "Usher" to film, the writer has rearranged the material in such a way that the story is carried on by visual action and dialog. Poe can describe an atmosphere, a mood, but the viewer must experience it visually. At the same time, the screenwriter must remain faithful to the original.

DOCTOR: I beg of you, sir. Stay where you are. Excuse me, sir. Excuse me. No wish to be abrupt. Oh, you must be the gentleman come to stay with the young master.

FRIEND: I am.

DOCTOR: So very kind, very kind. Excellent.

FRIEND: And the lady?

DOCTOR: Ah, yes--yes, the Lady Madeline.

FRIEND: His wife?

DOCTOR: He has no wife, sir. Nor will he ever have a wife. She's his sister, his twin sister.

FRIEND: I had no idea.

DOCTOR: I must introduce myself. I am the family physician to the House of Usher.

FRIEND: The house?

DOCTOR: The house, the family--you must understand that for centuries one has been completely identified with the other. No family, no house. The line has descended unbroken from father to son for seven hundred years.

FRIEND: Yet you say the master has no wife, no children.

DOCTOR: I mustn't keep you, sir. Your host awaits you. Alas, my poor patient.

RAY BRADBURY: Here the screenwriter has taken a character only mentioned by Poe for the sake of atmospheric mystery and writes a brief scene for him. The viewer now absorbs necessary information through the dialog, as well as the shock of the confrontation with Madeline and the uneasiness produced by the doctor's appearance and odd manner. He is now psychologically prepared to meet Roderick. Let's take a closer look at Roderick Usher. On the simplest level he's a man enslaved by terror, by the fear that his fate is interwoven with that of his strange twin sister, Madeline, who is slowly wasting away from an unknown disease. He is the protagonist of a tale of guilt and madness and terror, which builds up to a fantastic and catastrophic conclusion. However, if we look a little deeper, what other interpretation can we add? Is Roderick Usher a man suffering from an abnormal and ultimately destructive obsession, one which has drastically altered both his mental and physical health? Or is he merely a hypochondriac?

Is he drawing his initially sane friend into sharing his delusion that although Madeline's body lies in her tomb, she's still alive? Do Usher and his friend share the hallucinations which culminate in their seeing the bloody, living corpse of Madeline in the doorway, escaped from her tomb? Is the final collapse of the House of Usher itself symbolic of the final disintegration of Roderick's mind, allowing the friend to return to sanity and escape? So, do we have here both a simple terror tale and a penetrating study in abnormal psychology? Can both interpretations be equally valid and equally self-consistent? So who is Roderick Usher? Hervey Allen answers: "The description of Roderick Usher is the most perfect pen portrait of Poe himself which is known."

Is Poe giving us, then, a glimpse into his own mind and soul in this story? Surely, here are all the obsessions of his life and art brought together under one roof: his concern with death, disease, and decay; his fear of being buried alive, which he so vividly dramatized in such stories as "The Cask of Amontillado" and "The Premature Burial"; the death of a beautiful young woman, Poe's ideal of true beauty in poetry; and a host of other hidden horrors as well. Perhaps this is Poe's own journey into himself, a dreamlike excursion into his dark inner and spiritual nature, symbolized by Roderick Usher. Does the narrator, or friend, then represent the rational, daylight side of Poe, summoned--or ushered--into the house of his own soul by the command of his tortured subconscious? Impossibilities; morbid obsessions; wild theories; death, doom, and decay--not exactly bedtime tales, these flights of fancy of Edgar Allan Poe. Some of us may find him absurd, even repulsive, but once exposed to him, none of us can ever forget him. His hold on the minds and hearts of all of us is a grip we cannot break. And our debt to him as writers and lovers of literature is one we can never repay.