Summary*
(Bradbury does not actually label his chapters)
Chapter 1
It is a quiet morning – the first morning of summer. Twelve-year-old Douglas Spaulding wakes up in his grandparents’ third-story bedroom tower (he’s allowed to spend one night a week there) and marvels at this day. He is ready for his ritual. He stands and looks out over the town and begins to summon lights to come on, people to wake, the sun to rise.
He smiles that this will be a fine season. It is the summer of 1928 and it has just begun.
Chapter 2
Douglas, his father, and his younger brother Tom drive out of town to the silent forest. Douglas has a sense that today holds something special for him, that something will happen. The three walk through the tall trees. While Dad points out different flora and fauna, Douglas feels the overwhelming presence of something. He is surrounded – he knows it! He feels it coming, but Tom and Dad break the spell as they rattle in the bushes.
It is lunch and the three sit down to eat. Douglas tries to listen to the forest again, and he knows that something Big had approached but was scared off.
Tom prattles on about all the things he’s tallied up: baseball games he’s played, books he’s read, etc.
After lunch they grab their buckets to find grapes and strawberries. Douglas holds his breath and tells himself just to work and pretend not to see anything. The Thing nears but does not seem afraid of Tom, who chatters on.
A vast tidal wave threatens to engulf Douglas. It is coming nearer. He leaps on Tom and the two boys laugh and wrestle. He falls down on his back. He opens an eye. Suddenly the revelation is upon him – he is alive!
He feels the grass, sees the world pass by his eyeballs. He feels his breath, the ten thousands of hairs growing on his head. His heart pounds, his pores open. He is really and truly alive. He laughs and cries and swings Tom around.
Suddenly he stops and asks Tom if everyone knows they are alive. Tom says yes. Douglas’s eyes meet Dad’s, and he can tell Dad knows.
Douglas offers to carry all the pails and leads them home. He thinks he ought to never forget this feeling and that he’s got to feel everything there is to feel.
The pails are heavy and he is slow but it is marvelous.
Chapter 3
Grandfather tells Douglas and Tom that the dandelions are ready, and the two boys joyfully begin to scoop them up. These flowers will be dandelion wine, magical words on the tongue. These beautiful summer days will be sealed away in bottles and will be so delightful during the cold winter to come.
They gather water from the rain barrel. It is clear and crisp and perfect, and will be taken down to the cellar to the dandelion harvest.
Chapter 4
Douglas and his friends run and run and run, and Douglas finds himself left behind. He is on a path near the edge of the ravine, near the edge “of the softly blowing abyss” that contained “a danger that was old a billion years ago” (16). The path moves between town and wilderness and it is hard to say where each begins or ends. The ravine wilderness creeps a little more into the town every night. It seems as if the town is a life raft of survivors in the sea of wilderness. Douglas knows deep down that “towns never really won they merely existed in calm peril” (17).
Douglas stares down at his feet. The first rite of summer, dandelion wine, is over. It is time for the second.
Chapter 5
Douglas sees the tennis shoes in the window, and when he comes home to Dad he tells him he simply has to have the Cream-Sponge Para Litefoot Shoes. Dad asks calmly why he needs them but Douglas knows there’s no way to articulate what is so perfect about them. There is magic in new shoes, and the magic has gone out of his old ones. Dad suggests saving his money but Douglas rues the fact that summer will be over in five to six weeks.
That night in bed, Douglas thinks about reasons for the shoes, which are many. The slogan, though, is: “Find friends, ditch enemies!” (21).
The next morning Old Mr. Sanderson moves through his shoe shop, carefully and reverently adjusting things. He hears something behind him and turns to see Douglas. Mr. Sanderson stops Douglas before he even starts to talk, telling him he knows why he is here and he probably wants to buy the shoes on credit.
Douglas excitedly says he has a better idea than that, but he wants Mr. Sanderson to actually try on those shoes so he knows the magic he is selling. Mr. Sanderson sighs and agrees, puts them on, and stands. Douglas tells him to rock back and forth and bounce around. He then explains that he can pay some of the cost and will spend the day doing all manner of errands and tasks for the shopkeeper to take care of the remaining dollar.
Mr. Sanderson surrenders to the feeling of the shoes, Douglas’s stream of words, and his own emotions. He opens his eyes and tells Douglas he ought to sell shoes one day. He then writes up a list and gives it to Douglas.
Douglas rushes away, elated, and Mr. Sanderson muses on the feeling of being an antelope or a gazelle in the shoes.
Chapter 6
Douglas informs Tom that he’s going to keep a record of things this summer. One category will be things they do for the first time ever, like finding out he is alive and realizing Dad and Grandpa don’t know everything ever. There are the “rites and ceremonies” that happen every summer and then those “discoveries and revelations,” or maybe “illuminations” or “intuitions.”
Tom, who loves his statistics, excitedly tells Douglas he has one for him – there are five billion trees in the world. That means there are five billion tree shadows, which he thinks make night itself. Douglas writes this down.
Chapter 7
One summer ritual in the town is the front-porch swing. There comes a time when Grandfather and Douglas set it up and sweep off the porch. A time when house after house finishes up its evening duties and the people begin to come outside. The men sit and smoke. The women eventually join them.
Everyone chats all evening but no one remembers about what. Douglas is completely content as he sprawls across the porch planks. These are the right and lasting rituals, and he and the other children blissfully sink into the voices on the porch.
Chapter 8
One night, Grandfather and Douglas are walking around town and encounter Leo Auffmann, the town jeweler. He is nervous and distressed over the sounds of a burial nearby. Douglas calls out to him to build a Happiness Machine. Leo begins to muse aloud about this. Grandfather says they were joking, but he and Douglas looks at each other, certain that Leo actually will do it.
Chapter 9
Leo Auffmann is not a sufferer but a brooder. He begins to think on the big shocks of life – birth, growing up, growing old, death. What can be done about the last three?
He arrives home and greets his six children and wife Lena. The family comfortably eats ice cream. Leo asks his wife what she thinks of his inventing a Happiness Machine. She asks him, startled, if anything is wrong.
Chapter 10
Grandfather, Tom, and Douglas are walking home one evening. Douglas encounters his friends and rushes off happily to the ravine. Grandfather calls out for him not to get lost, and he and Tom return home.
It is nine at night and smells like rain. Mother is ironing while Tom lies down. Right before Mrs. Singer is about to close her ice cream shop down, Mother sends Tom to go get some. When he returns he asks her what time Dad will be home from the lodge meeting and she replies eleven or eleven-thirty.
Mother and Tom enjoy their ice cream in the deep, quiet summer night. They listen to the soft sounds of the outdoors. Mother begins to fret about Douglas and tells Tom not to get undressed yet. She stands out on the porch and calls and calls for Douglas but there is no answer.
Suddenly Tom feels a bit cold inside. Douglas still does not answer. Mother tells Tom they’ll take a quick walk.
Hand in hand, they head down the street. There is no “life, light, and activity” (40) – all is silent. Mother comments that she wishes his father was home and that she is mad at Doug for being out since the Lonely One has been around, killing people recently.
Mother and Tom reach the ravine with its “dark-sewer, rotten-foliage, thick-green odor” (41). There is a church nearby but it is not comforting. Tom thinks about death. He is only ten and knows little of it, but does know death was Great-Grandfather passing away, his baby sister cold in her crib one morning, the Lonely One coming to kill three women in the last three years.
The edge of the ravine seems like the edge of civilization. He trembles and feels his mother do so as well, which surprises him. Doesn’t being an adult mean the end of fear? Is there any strength or solace in growing up? Society propagates oneness but essentially everyone is alone. The impact of the essential loneliness of life begins to crush Tom. He must accept this, though, and act.
Tom tries to tell his mother that Doug is fine but she grumbles in a frightened voice about telling him not to come here. There could be anything here – tramps, criminals, darkness, accidents, death. Tom thinks all of these types of small towns are lonely and full of horrors.
The silence reigns; even the crickets stop chirping. It feels as if the ravine is tensing up and drawing power from the sleeping countryside and that something will happen any second…
Suddenly Douglas’s voice breaks the spell and the sound of tennis shoes and giggling of three boys are heard. The darkness, startled, pulls back in defeat. Mother puts away her fear right away and Tom knows they will never say anything about it. They all walk home. Later that evening, Tom quietly tells Douglas that the ravine does not belong in Leo Auffmann’s machine. Douglas considers this, and solemnly agrees.
Chapter 11
Lena joins Leo out in the darkness of the front porch. She is perfect to him; her body is “always thinking for her” and she is “absolutely right” (46). Haltingly, she tells him she does not think they need the machine.
His eyes afire, he says others do and he would be lucky to invent such a thing. Lena is silent and uneasy.
Chapter 12
Grandfather smiles as he gently wakes. He hears a sound that, for him, is better than any other – it is the sound of the lawn mower for the first time in summer. To him it is like “a great swelling symphony” (49).
Happily Grandfather heads downstairs, waving hello to his young neighbor Bill Forrester, a newspaperman, outside the window. Grandma tells him they won’t be needing the lawnmower much longer because Bill put in a new type of grass that never needs cutting.
Shocked, Grandfather goes outside and Bill cheerfully tells him about the grass that he took the chance on and put in for Grandfather as well. Grandfather is upset and chastises Bill for not consulting him and for getting rid of things that allow people to savor time and their existence. He pauses and apologizes for talking too much, but Bill says he wouldn’t hear anyone else.
Grandfather continues his lecture and calls gardening a way to be a philosopher. He becomes even more upset, however, when he learns that the dandelions will also be eradicated. He takes out three five-dollar bills and gives them to Bill and tells him to humbly remove that grass from his yard and that while Bill’s motives are understandable and above reproach, they are not his motives. He concludes that to him the sound of lawnmower really is “the most beautiful sound in the world” and he’d miss it if it was gone and “I’d miss the smell of cut grass” (52).
That afternoon Grandfather naps. When he wakes he hears the sound of a lawnmower and looks outside. To his surprise and delight, he sees Bill enthusiastically mowing his own lawn with the old grass back in its place.
Chapter 13
Leo is still working on his Happiness Machine, brainstorming to his wife who has no interest in helping. She is frustrated that he seems to think they are not happy and that he keeps looking at her like she is something new. He has also distracted her and her bread burns.
At the end of ten days and nights, Leo finishes his machine. He wanders wearily inside and announces to his children that the machine is done. Lena is scathing, pointing out that while the Happiness Machine is done, Leo lost fifteen pounds, he hasn’t talked to his children, his wife is nervous and gained weight. Leo barely notices this as he faints to the ground in his immense fatigue.
The next morning, he notices a few men, children, and dogs gathered near the machine. There are many kinds of humming coming from it.
Leo is excited but Lena remains upset. She asks if the machine can find a new way for how babies are born or make a 70-year-old 20, or comfort her if he died. She goes inside and he dreamily thinks about using the machine with his family tomorrow.
That night he hears his son Saul crying, but the boy will not tell him what is wrong. He realizes Saul went into the machine, though, but wonders why. Is the boy unhappy? He is bothered. Out by the machine, he looks up at the window and the curtains flowing in the breeze make it look like his son’s soul gently escaped out the window. He goes upstairs and closes it.
The next day, Lena announces she is leaving because she cannot be here anymore. She counsels him bitterly not to give their son any more nightmares. She then says she will go into the Happiness Machine herself because she has to know what this thing is that has upset her family.
The children and Leo gather anxiously outside the machine while Lena enters. They first hear her delight as she shouts out places like Paris and Rome and says she is dancing, but suddenly she begins to weep. Leo is shocked. When Lena emerges she explains tearfully that the machine lies and that she never knew how much she wanted to go to Paris before but now she knows she never can. She explains that the wonderful things in the world like sunsets are valuable because they do not happen all the time.
Leo is glum but knows he has to try out the machine himself to see if what she says is true. He enters it but all of a sudden he hears his family screaming and he is pulled out. The machine is on fire, and eventually it is completely destroyed.
Lena tells Leo to think for a bit and come back and talk to her. He does, and chatting with Grandfather and Douglas outside, reveals that his ruminations made him realize he is a fool and that he knows what the real Happiness Machine is. He motions them near and points inside his living room window where his family contentedly goes about their business.
Analysis
For readers familiar with Ray Bradbury via The Martian Chronicles or The October Country, Dandelion Wine might initially seem like a divergence. And yes, there isn’t anything overtly magical or fantastical or terrifying – no aliens, monsters, or space travel. Nevertheless, readers will find themselves sinking right into Bradbury’s luscious prose, delighting in the rich sensory world he creates and marveling at the way he brings the smallest detail, the most seemingly anodyne moment, the most fleeting smell or thought, to life. Dandelion Wine is perhaps as full as it is because Bradbury based it on his own youth in Waukegan, Illinois, turning his revelations and memories and rituals into a thoroughly engaging and warmly nostalgic novel with just enough of the Bradbury darkness and mystery that characterize his other works.
Dandelion Wine is a novel but one loosely structured. Several of the vignettes, none of which are labeled as actual chapters but follow that format, were published as short stories before Bradbury took them and added others to create the whole work. Douglas Spaulding is the link between all of them, with his “magic” in his grandparents’ tower both beginning the summer/book and ending it. Through Tom and Douglas in particular, Bradbury presents his biggest themes of time, change, memory, loss, and coming of age.
However, Bradbury goes beyond the Spaulding boys and turns his lens on other townspeople to flesh out the work. It is a coherent whole, but the individual threads are very apparent. Critic Terry Heller notes, “each story is well-connected to the overarching structure, often in several ways. The story may contain a ceremony, a revelation, or a combination of the two, and it may contribute to one of several thematic patterns that structure Doug’s awakening."
That awakening is one of the most salient parts of the first few chapters. While the novel isn’t a complete bildungsroman, there is a coming-of-age element that plays out over Douglas’s summer. When the summer begins he travels out into nature with his father and brother and feels a profound sense of something. That something is his own consciousness, his own unity with nature, his own awakening. He knew from the moment the day began that it would be special and when out in the forest realized “it was Big, my gosh, it was Big!” (7). Ultimately he realizes “I’m alive” (9) and that life is marvelous. He thinks, “I never knew it before, or if I did I don’t remember!” (10). Critic Marvin E. Mengeling explains further that the forest is used allegorically as the forest of life that we must all make it through and that there are definitely religious elements to Douglas’s experience. He says, “[the] religious images… suggest the profound seriousness of these ‘rites of passage,’ as well as their ritualistic nature. Douglas is being initiated into some of the adult mysteries; a secular type of confirmation is taking place.” It is fitting, Mengeling adds, “Doug [is] appropriately leading his father and brother out of the woods.”
Douglas is so thrilled about what he’s realized that he begins a log of the summer’s discoveries/revelations/illuminations/intuitions. The bottling of the titular dandelion wine is another potent rite, as are the bringing out of the porch swing and the purchasing of new, lightning-fast shoes.
Not everything in Green Town, Illinois in the summer of 1928 is carefree, however. Bradbury interweaves a real danger in his work with the ravine and its reputed inhabitant of the Lonely One, a man who strangles women. The Lonely One is a frightening enough figure, but the ravine is perhaps even more so because it is quietly insidious, an antediluvian evil that defies human attempts to control it. Bradbury writes of Douglas considering this Nietzschean abyss, “he snuffed a danger that was old a billion years ago. Here the town, divided, fell away in halves, here civilization ceased. Here was only growing earth and a million deaths and rebirths every hour” (16).
Douglas’s observations are mirrored in those of his mother, who genuinely fears for her son’s safety one night when he does not return home from playing with his friends. They are also mirrored in the fears of Tom for his brother and manifest themselves in Tom’s realization that adults are afraid too. Bradbury writes about the ravine as a living, breathing monster that is rising to swallow up Douglas and the town but is vanquished by Douglas’s vibrant energy and life. The ravine has life too, but it also has death.
