Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury, 1953 ★★★

Playing with Words

Books will mislead you even before you ever read them.

Take Fahrenheit 451, a very famous book understood by many to be about censorship. In it, books are commonly burned for containing dangerous ideas. Even the author noted the irony of it being banned by school boards decades on.

So it’s about censorship, right? Not exactly.

The novel is actually about three things. At its core, Fahrenheit 451 is a satire on suburban conformity. It is also a meditation on the power and purpose of the written word. Censorship actually finishes a distant third.

The novel opens by introducing us to Guy Montag, a bored drudge whose line of work happens to be burning books. He’s what is called a “fireman,” who spends his days at the stationhouse watching his work chums sic a killer robot on stray cats and mice between calls. He likes the burning part, comparing the kerosene stench on his workclothes to perfume. But, like a lot of 9-5ers, a certain ennui has crept in:

Whistling, he let the escalator waft him into the still night air. He walked toward the corner, thinking little at all about nothing in particular. Before he reached the corner, however, he slowed as if a wind had sprung up from nowhere, as if someone had called his name.

That ghostly feeling may well be a young woman named Clarisse McClellan, whose many innocuous-seeming questions for Guy will nudge him in a new and dangerous direction. Whatever we think of Clarisse or what she represents, it is clear Guy needs shaking up.

“It was a pleasure to burn...” Guy begins the novel demonstrating a clear enjoyment for his job, and how it sets him apart from society. Image from https://www.ted.com/talks/iseult_gillespie_why_should_you_read_fahrenheit_451/transcript.

What Fahrenheit 451 also delivers: A lot of writing about writing; its power, its intoxication, and even its limitations:

“Well, Montag, take my word for it. I’ve had to read a few in my time, to know what I was about, and the books say nothing! Nothing you can teach or believe. They’re about nonexistent people, figments of imagination, if they’re fiction. And if they’re nonfiction, it’s worse, one professor calling another an idiot, one philosopher screaming down another’s gullet. All of them running about, putting out the stars and extinguishing the sun. You come away lost.”

The above speaker is Beatty, the captain at Montag’s firehouse and a perverse voice of consciousness, if not actual conscience, in the novel. Beatty seems to know what Montag is thinking before Montag himself does, trouble once Montag’s thoughts become unquiet. Though himself an arbiter of conformity, Beatty seems to enjoy a kind of love-hate relationship with books as seeds of rebellion.

While a dystopian novel reminiscent of 1984 and Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451 has a curious off-brand feeling to it. Bradbury has seen the future and it doesn’t work. It’s a singularly dull future that will be recognizable to those of us reading it 60 years on: Wall-sized television screens, ear-buds, rampant anti-Americanism, even 3-D porn.

Clarisse pushes Guy out of his comfort zone, but what really breaks him is when he encounters an old woman who prefers to burn with her books than be parted from them. She quotes a Christian martyr: “...we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.” Image from https://www.playboy.com/read/fahrenheit-451-hbo-playboy-legacy.

But his focus is not on a futuristic society, but an all-too-recognizable one where materialism and commercialism have run amok. Billboards are ten times bigger as people often drive past them too fast to notice. Disposability has become a virtue. Religion has been co-oped into an anodyne, no longer about good or evil but fitting in:

“Christ is one of the ‘family’ now. I often wonder if God recognizes His own son the way we’ve dressed him up, or is it dressed him down? He’s a regular peppermint stick now, all sugar-crystal and saccharine when he isn’t making veiled references to certain commercial products that every worshiper absolutely needs.”

One remarkable thing about Fahrenheit 451 is how it came to be. Bradbury explains in an Afterword of my 50^th Anniversary Ballantine paperback edition how he wrote his original manuscript on a typewriter which required ten cents for each hour he typed. “I didn’t know it, but I was literally writing a dime novel,” he recalls.

The need for speed was essential to get his money’s worth. The result are sentences often too crammed for their own good.

Before being expanded into a novel, Bradbury's tale saw publication in the February 1951 issue of Galaxy, a science-fiction magazine, under the title "The Fireman." Image from https://www.ebay.com/i/193296349628.

Thus a potentially exciting war scene is transformed into something opaque, even Blakean:

Now, a full three seconds, all of the time in history, before the bombs struck, the enemy ships themselves were gone half around the visible world, like bullets in which a savage islander might not believe because they were invisible; yet the heart is suddenly shattered, the body falls in separate motions, and the blood is astonished to be freed on the air; the brain squanders its few precious memories and, puzzled, dies.

Such a paragraph in isolation may have a moment-seizing charm, but Bradbury writes like this a lot. “Digression,” he calls it, calling it the “soul of wit” and the stuff of great literature. Prose fantasias crop up often in Bradbury’s work, in novels and short stories more given than this one to their myriad effects. Be warned that Bradbury likes digression for its own sake, and that in a simple story like Fahrenheit 451, it can get in the way of fuller appreciation and enjoyment.

Fahrenheit 451 consists of three long chapters; I only really enjoyed the middle one, subtitled “The Sieve And The Sand.” In it, you feel Bradbury taking stock of his creation, relishing his world-building as well as the social satire which is central, at least to my reading.

Author Ray Bradbury when he was a young writer. Through the 1950s, while in his thirties, Bradbury produced some of his most famous books: The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, Dandelion Wine, and Fahrenheit 451. Image from https://www.dailyherald.com/article/20120606/news/706069853/.

“The Sieve And The Sand” culminates in an encounter Montag has with his wife, Mildred, and two of her friends, Mrs. Bowles and Mrs. Phelps. They are watching television, which incorporates three entire wallscreens, and engaging in banal dialogue which Montag interrupts with an impromptu reading of the Matthew Arnold poem “Dover Beach.” This sets one of the women to crying.

Finally Montag has enough of his stab at conscience-raising. He tells Mildred’s friends to beat it:

“Go home and think of your first husband divorced and your second husband killed in a jet and your third husband blowing his brains out, go home and think of the dozen abortions you’ve had, go home and think of that and your damn Caesarian sections, too, and your children who hate your guts! Go home and think how it all happened and what did you ever do to stop it?”

All this may smack less of the Eisenhower-era conformity of its time, where divorce and abortion were less common than today, but you see in it Bradbury taking on middle-class mindsets more than a future world of books being burned.

About those books: At least in the novel, the regime is not too hardcore, not as much so as in the 1966 movie adaptation directed by François Truffaut. In that film, all words are banned, to the point where newspapers consist entirely of illustrations. Even its opening credits are read aloud, rather than appearing on screen.

Cyril Cusack plays Captain Beatty in the 1966 Truffaut adaptation, which has become a classic in its own right. Bradbury, a tough critic, actually liked some of the differences in the movie version, and worked at least one of them into his later stage production. Image from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9iyKI2pJbE.

Bradbury’s dystopia has words, and reading, and even some books of a determinedly inoffensive variety. He has other fish to fry, like how a rudderless society can serve as its own censor.

A quiet old rebel named Faber explains the situation:

“Remember, the firemen are rarely necessary. The public itself stopped reading of its own accord. You firemen provide a circus now and then at which buildings are set off and crowds gather for the pretty blaze, but it’s a small sideshow indeed, and hardly necessary to keep things in line. So few want to be rebels any more.”

For me, “The Sieve And The Sand” lays out the situation better in isolation than with the rest of the book. True, the first chapter, “The Hearth And The Salamander,” introduces the beguiling Clarisse and sets Montag off on his mission of discovery, but it’s a dead end by itself; the Clarisse subplot dropped unsatisfactorily. I missed the humor that pops up often (if subtly) in the Truffaut adaptation.

The final chapter, “Burning Bright,” is a rushed denouement. It gives us most of the action in the book; Montag in combat with that killer robot, dubbed “the Mechanical Hound,” and on the run. The science-fiction element that is secondary in the rest of the novel comes out in force here.

It all ends in flames, as one might expect, but by then the story has moved on to the surrounding wilderness. There we meet a group of outcasts who store inside their collective subconscious accumulated texts from books consigned to immolation in the now-burning city they flee.

A 2018 HBO film updated the Bradbury novel to fit modern sensibilities, but didn't connect with critics. Neither did the 1966 film, so maybe it will be rediscovered, too. Image from https://www.mymovies.it/film/2018/fahrenheit-451/poster/.

It’s an arresting image to go out on, but a bit of a shrug, too. They aren’t really doing anything with this learning they have acquired. Bradbury has one offer, rather optimistically: “We’re remembering. That’s where we’ll win out in the long run. And someday we’ll remember so much that we’ll build the biggest goddamn steamshovel in history and dig the biggest grave of all time and shove war in and cover it up.”

But this war theme has been muted for two-thirds of the novel, and is never satisfactorily connected to Montag’s own journey.

Still, what you get for the first two-thirds is arresting enough by itself, a mad tale of one man’s revolt against a vacuum of conformity. That’s what I got out of it, with Fahrenheit 451, I sense, your miles may vary. As Beatty puts it, getting the best lines as always: “What traitors books can be! You think they’re backing you up, and they turn on you.”