The Whole Town’s Sleeping (1950)

by Ray Bradbury

I’ve never really been enamored with Ray Bradbury’s writing. For me he has always occupied a strange middle space between genuine horror fiction and hard science fiction that never seemed to pay off for me in the end. He also seems to indulge in that most damning of criticisms, purple prose. Yes, it is very descriptive writing, but almost to its detriment, and for me the excessive description is actually a distraction. “The Whole Town’s Sleeping” is a case in point. First published in McCall’s Magazine in September 1950, this particular story occupies a space that I would call women’s fiction, similar to what film studios like RKO were doing in the previous decade in Hollywood. The setting is early evening in the summertime, while the sidewalks are still hot and crickets and frogs are just beginning to sing. Lavinia Nebbs is on her front porch waiting for her girlfriends to walk with her to the movies, a Charlie Chaplin picture. Francine shows up first, and they head out together talking about the murders that have been taking place over the last few months by a killer known only as The Lonely One. “Hattie McDollis was killed two months ago, Roberta Ferry the month before, and now Elizabeth Ramsell’s disappeared . . . all of them, strangled, their tongues sticking out of their mouths, they say . . . Maybe we shouldn’t go to the show tonight . . . The Lonely One might follow and kill us.”

It’s then that the two women, on their way to the home of their friend Helen, must cross the ravine where the river flows through town. But before they can cross it they find the body of Elizabeth Ramsell. After calling the police, and staying around to tell them the circumstances of finding the body, they make it to Helen’s house an hour late. While Francine wants to turn back and call it a night, Lavinia is determined to see the movie and cleanse her mind of the frightful sight she has just witnessed. Before they go in, however, they stop at the drugstore and the clerk is apologetic because he wasn’t thinking that afternoon when she was in and told a strange man who thought she was beautiful her name and where she lived. Francine, of course, is horrified, but Lavinia is strangely unemotional about it. “Lavinia stood with the three people looking at her, staring at her. She felt nothing. Except, perhaps, the slightest prickle of excitement in her throat . . . ‘If I’m the next victim, let me be the next. There’s all too little excitement in life, especially for a maiden lady thirty-three years old, so don’t you mind if I enjoy it.’” There is some excitement at the movies when Francine thinks the man is behind them is the killer, but then they walk home without incident and Lavinia drops the two women off before starting on her way home back through the ravine by herself.

One of the most fascinating things for me about this story is the juxtaposition with the story “Cigarette” by Cornell Woolrich. Both stories are primarily suspense stories, but where Woolrich has streamlined his story to nothing but action, Bradbury is effusive with his descriptions, building his suspense slowly and then not unleashing it until the very end. “She took a step. There was an echo. She took another step. Another echo. Another step, just a fraction of a moment later. ‘Someone’s following me,’ she whispered to the ravine, to the black crickets and dark-green hidden frogs and the black stream. ‘Someone’s on the steps behind me. I don’t dare turn around.’ And before long she’s running headlong across the ravine toward the safety of home. “She told her legs what to do, her arms her body, her terror; she advised all parts of herself in this white and terrible moment, over the roaring creek waters, on the hollow, thudding, swaying, almost alive, resilient bridge planks she ran, followed by the wild footsteps behind, behind, with the music following, too, the music shrieking and babbling.” It’s a terrifying scene, every bit as suspenseful as Woolrich, but in a completely different way, one that emphasizes description and character over plot.

Though Bradbury packs a lot into his story, there are some omissions that, while not particularly glaring, are still troublesome. One is the fact that when Lavinia is hearing the echoes of the man she thinks is behind her and begins her run across the bridge to the other side of the ravine, she never once thinks of her shoes as being something that would prevent her from eluding her pursuer. Once at home she thinks, “It stands to reason if a man had been following me, he’d have caught me! I’m not a fast runner.” But nowhere do her shoes, with their fifties heels, much narrower even than those from the forties, come to mind. The other thing is that when she is leaving the other women at their doors, they don’t hug. “‘I don’t want you dead,’ sobbed Francine, the tears running down her cheeks. ‘You’re so fine and nice, I want you alive. Please, oh, please!’” And yet no hug after this? It’s a small thing, but a very noticeable omission to me. One description that does stand out, however, in looking at this as a woman’s story is this one of Lavinia walking on the hot sidewalk.

          Lavinia heard the old women’s door bang and lock, and she drifted on, feeling the warm breath of
          summer night shimmering off the oven-baked sidewalks. It was like walking on the hard crust of
          freshly warmed bread. The heat puled under your dress, along your legs, with a stealthy and not
          unpleasant sense of invasion.

That’s a nice image--with its frisson of sexual implication of rape, something that is never mentioned about the murders--and rings true, though it would need a woman to say for sure if it really is or if it is simply a man’s fantasy. In the context of the story, however, it could also be seen as a foreshadow as well as the female fantasy of Lavinia, a “maiden lady” who has apparently missed out on the possibility of marriage and by association, given the strict morality of the day, sex. But then the story as a whole can be seen as a commentary on the fifties, even though the decade had barely begun when it was published and was no doubt written in the forties. The title of the story comes from the idea of isolation that came about after World War Two, when people moved out of apartment buildings and into single-family homes. And even though the small town world Bradbury describes was already like that, that residential trend in the country was ubiquitous. Where once people looked out of their apartment windows, used the fire escape as another room, sat on the front stoop and visited with friends and passers by in the neighborhood, now people retreated into their own individual homes, locked away from the outside world.

          Now the lights were going, going, gone. The little house lights and big house lights and yellow
          lights and green hurricane lights, the candles and oil lamps and porch lights, and everything
          felt locked up in brass and iron and steel, everything, thought Lavinia, is boxed and locked and
          wrapped and shaded. She imagined the people in their moonlit beds. And their breathing in the
          summer-night rooms, safe and together. And here we are, thought Lavinia, our footsteps on
          along the baked summer evening sidewalk.

As much as I’m ambivalent about Ray Bradbury’s writing, there is an awful lot to like about this story. For those who like this sort of thing, he collected this story and several like it and tied them all together to create his 1957 novel Dandelion Wine. But the story stands alone, and while the fact that the novel is set in 1928--the Charlie Chaplin film in question is The Circus--would appear to defeat much of the fifties analogy on a literal level, it doesn’t have to on an analytical level. In fact, this happens all the time in film, where a 1936 movie on the Crimean War starring Errol Flynn can also be seen as an allegory for world affairs in Europe at the time. The fact is Bradbury wrote many of the stories in the novel during the early fifties, and while they were based on his childhood in Waukegan, Illinois, there is still much that can be associated with the time period in which they were written. “The Whole Town’s Sleeping” is a case in point. The numbing effects of consumerism, the isolation of suburbanism, the reactionary implementation of a more Victorian morality after the liberalized standards of the war years--a similar reaction that happened at the end of the twenties--all point to a way of seeing the fifties through Bradbury’s subconscious, and in that respect it’s actually a more honest and truthful representation of the period than many stories written about the period.