LEISURE & ARTS
Fahrenheit 451, 50
years later.
By John J. Miller
OpinionJournal.com, 14 May 2003
“It's better to go to bed and
make a baby, isn't it?”
That's what Ray
Bradbury thinks of cloning. One of
He also doesn't care to be
called a science-fiction writer, even though it's a tag he's worn for most of
his life. “I write fantasy,” says the 82-year-old author of The
Martian Chronicles. “Science fiction is the art of the possible. I
imagine the impossible.”
Yet this October marks the
golden anniversary of the one book in his corpus that he will admit is science
fiction: Fahrenheit
451. Half a century after its publication, it remains a favorite of
teachers who assign it to English classes and librarians who appreciate its
celebration of literacy as the hallmark of civilization.
The public loves it, too.
Last year, Fahrenheit 451 reached No.
1 on the Los
Angeles Times best-seller list after Mayor Jim Hahn made it the
centerpiece of a citywide reading program. Next month, Ballantine
will release a special 50th-anniversary edition.
Mr. Bradbury has written some
30 books, more than 600 short stories, and countless numbers of poems, essays
and screenplays. Even as an octogenarian, he gets up every morning and spends a
few hours composing. His most recent novel, Let's
All Kill Constance, came out in January to mixed reviews. A new
collection of 100 short stories is slated for release in August.
Amid this prodigious output, Fahrenheit 451 is the book for which Mr.
Bradbury will be best remembered. Perhaps that's
because the concept is so unforgettable: In the near future, firemen don't put
out fires; they start them instead. Books have been outlawed. When they're
discovered, first responders hurry to the scene. The title refers to the
temperature at which paper burns.
One of the paradoxes of
science fiction -- and a fact poorly understood by many people who don't read it
-- is that much of the genre displays deep doubts about the future. Some of the
finest books in the field, from Mary
Shelley's Frankenstein
to Aldous Huxley's Brave
New World to William
Gibson's Neuromancer, regard technology as dangerous and
dehumanizing.
Fahrenheit 451
falls squarely into this dystopian tradition. Kingsley
Amis said of it: “Bradbury's is the most
skillfully drawn of all science fiction's conformist hells.”
Jules
Verne is famous among science-fiction writers for predicting 20th-century
technologies, such as submarines and rocket ships. Mr. Bradbury rivals him in Fahrenheit 451. He envisioned the
popularity of headset radios, plus interactive TV and live news broadcasts.
In one scene, Mr. Bradbury's
protagonist -- a renegade fireman who commits the crime of reading -- tries to
evade his pursuers by running down a street. He looks through the windows of
the houses he passes and sees the chase being shown on television, as if he
were O.J. watching himself in a white Bronco.
This kind of prognostication
is remarkable for a man who verges on technophobic:
Mr. Bradbury has written about space travel, but he's never driven a car. He
refused to fly in a plane until his 60s. Today, he won't go near a computer. He
wrote “The Fireman,” the 1950 novella upon which Fahrenheit 451 is based, on a coin-operated typewriter in the
basement of the UCLA library, over the
course of nine days and at a cost of 10 cents every half hour. (Call it a dime
novella.) He never saw the point of updating his methods, apart from buying a
typewriter of his own.
Mr. Bradbury insists that the
purpose of Fahrenheit 451 was not to
prophesy. “I wasn't trying to predict the future,” he says. “I was trying to
prevent it.”
In one immediate sense, he
failed. In 1979, he discovered that “some cubby-hole editors” had bowdlerized
his book in 98 places. One line – “Feel like I've a hangover.
God, I'm hungry” -- became “Feel like I've a headache.
I'm hungry.” The changes first appeared in a 1967 edition for high-school
students, but it wasn't until Mr. Bradbury learned of the problem a dozen years
later and complained that his publisher saw the irony of censoring a powerful
anticensorship novel. “I will not go gently onto a shelf, degutted, to become a
non-book,” he wrote of the incident.
Today, Mr. Bradbury is more
concerned with another problem that he thinks he didn't prevent. “There's no
reason to burn books if you don't read them,” he says. “The education system in
this country is just terrible, and we're not doing anything about it.”
One of the often-overlooked
details of Fahrenheit 451 is that the
censorship Mr. Bradbury describes was not imposed from the top by a ruthless
government. Rather, it seeped up from the indifferent masses. As a villain
explains: “School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories,
languages dropped, English and spelling gradually neglected, finally almost
completely ignored. . . . No wonder books stopped selling.”
Only part of that speech
captures our world now, because books haven't stopped selling. Mr. Bradbury,
however, finds many of the latest ones worthless. He spends his free time
reading the plays of Shaw
and the poetry of Pope.
“I'm learning from the past,” he says. “Few modern novelists teach me
anything.”
That may be true for him.
With Fahrenheit 451 still being read
and loved, though, it's not true for the rest of us. And if we can ever figure
out a way to clone Ray Bradbury, it won't be true for our kids, either.
Mr. Miller is a writer for National Review.
Copyright © 2003 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All
Rights Reserved.
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