I have now read the book and found it powerful.ย ๎e sort of future society that he portrays is only too possible.
โBertrand Russell, March 13, 1954
Nelson Algren (1909โ81), whose best-selling novels of social realism propelled him into the ranks of Americaโs most popular midcentury authors, received an advance copy ofย Fahrenheit 451ย from Ian Ballantineโs senior editor Stanley Kau๏ฌmann in early September 1953. Both Algren and his wife foundย Fahrenheit 451, as well as the two companion stories โAnd the Rock Cried Outโ and โ๎e Playground,โ absorbing and relevant cautionary tales. Algrenโs September 30 reply was incorporated into Ballantineโs fall 1953 advertising campaign.
FROM Aย LETTER TOย STANLEYย KAUFFMANN, BALLANTINEย BOOKSโ
Nelson Algren
Mr. Bradbury can bring the future closer to the reader than most writers can bring the present. ๎is is because, no matter how prophetic, he is always topical: like Orwell, his fantasies are never so remote but that we see their beginnings all about us. His understanding of our own times a๏ฌords a special force to his portraits of manโs future, and a humor not possessed by any other science-๏ฌction writer.
Orville Prescottย (1907โ96) was the lead book reviewer ofย ๎e New York Timesย for nearly twenty-๏ฌve years. His in๏ฌuence spanned the middle decades of the twentieth century, and his October 21, 1953, โBooks of the Timesโ review provided a crucial endorsement forย Fahrenheit 451ย that raised the novelโs plea for intellectual responsibility and independent thinking above the conformist pressures and political polarization of the early 1950s. Prescottโs assertion that Bradbury was already โthe uncrowned king of the science-๏ฌction writersโ re๏ฌected Bradburyโs emergence as one of the most recognized names in a ๏ฌeld that was rapidly expanding its readership into mainstream American culture.
Orville Prescott
๎roughout history, in times of crisis and disaster, men have looked to the future, if not with con๏ฌdence, at least with hope. It would be better than the unhappy present. ๎ere would be plenty to eat. ๎e enemy would be defeated. ๎e Messiah would come. ๎e heathen would be converted. Education, universal su๏ฌrage, scienti๏ฌc discoveries would usher in a brave new world. But in the mid-twentieth century all this has been reversed. One of the characteristic aspects of our time is that we fear the future. We fear the unholy powers unleashed by science. We fear the absolute power of states more tyrannical than the tyrannies of the past because they strive to rule menโs minds as well as their bodies. And writers, who can imagine the dreadful details of such a future more vividly than the rest of us, write books capable of troubling our sleep inde๏ฌnitely. . . .
Ray Bradbury is the uncrowned king of the science-๏ฌction writers, a young author whose fanciful imagination, poetic prose and mature understanding of human character have won him an international reputation. ๎is is his ๏ฌfth book and, alas, the ๏ฌrst I have read. It contains one short novel, โFahrenheit 451,โ and two excellent short stories. One of these is a gruesome fantasy about the barbarous world of childhood. ๎e other is a grim and exciting thriller about two American tourists stranded somewhere in Latin America just when most of the white race is exterminated in an atomic war.
๎e title of the short novel refers to the temperature at which book paper burns. ๎is is the story of a ๏ฌreman whose job was not to put out ๏ฌres, but to start them. In answer to alarms put out by informers, ๏ฌre companies burned books and the houses of the lawbreakers who concealed them. Books were false, useless and only made people unhappy. It was eccentric to think, psychotic to enjoy the beauties of nature. Normal people doped themselves with synthetic entertainment.
Mr. Bradburyโs account of this insane world, which bears many alarming resemblances to our own, is fascinating. His story of the revolt of his ๏ฌreman, who refused to burn any more books and actually wanted to read them, is engrossing. Some of his imaginative tricks are startling and ingenious. But his basic message is a plea for direct, personal experience rather than perpetual, synthetic entertainment; for individual thought, action and responsibility; for the great tradition of independent thinking and artistic achievement symbolized in books.
Gilbert Highet (1906โ78), a distinguished literary critic and classics professor at Columbia University, was also an in๏ฌuential adviser for the Book-of-the-Month Club who spent a lifetime promoting the values of literature for general reading audiences. ๎roughout the 1950s, his radio programย People, Places, and Booksย was widely syndicated in America, Canada, and Great Britain, but it was as chief literary critic forย Harperโsย that he wrote one of the ๏ฌrst reviews ofย Fahrenheit 451ย to appear in a major-market magazine. His December 1954 review, โNew Wine, Old Bottles,โ led to a long friendship; in his 1965 introduction toย ๎e Vintage Bradburyย story collection, Highet would place Bradbury among those rare authors whose work โcan be instantly recognized by any sensitive reader, and once recognized can never be forgotten.โ
FROMย โNEWย WINE, OLDย BOTTLESโโ
Gilbert Highet
๎e ๏ฌnest living American fantasist, Ray Bradbury, has produced another wonderful story, calledย Fahrenheit 451. . . . 451ยบ is the temperature at which paper catches ๏ฌre. ๎e book is a meditation on the theme of book burning. But it is much more than an assertion that we ought not to burn unorthodox books. Its hero lives in an epoch in whichย allย books are burned, simply because it is a bore and a disturbance to think, and people are happier watching TV all day long and going to bed with a miniature radio whispering and crooning in their earholes. ๎e danger (as Mr. Bradbury sees it) is not that the X group want to burn the Y books and vice versa, not even that a dictator wants to keep all the people ignorant, but (worse) that, moving down one of the slopes on which we are poised, we may reach the stage of hating literature because it is an e๏ฌort to assimilate, despising books because they are beyond us, changing schools into โactivity centers,โ and abandoning the search for happiness because we prefer soothing or exciting pleasures. All this is presented in a series of clearly described, superbly imagined pictures, part of a terrifying yet hopeful plot: the Mechanical Hound following silently, the City ascending into the air . . .
Idris Parryย (1916โ2008), an eminent literary scholar, was best known for decades of illuminating and engaging radio programs for the British Broadcasting Corporation. His March 25, 1954, review ofย Fahrenheit 451ย appeared inย ๎e Listener, the BBCโs national broadcast publication, and provided one of the ๏ฌrst in๏ฌuential assessments ofย Fahrenheit 451ย in Great Britain. It also marked the BBCโs ๏ฌrst interest in Bradburyโs work, eventually leading to a number of dramatizations. Parryโs fascination with Bradburyโs novel emerged from his own deep interest in the totalitarian nightmare worlds of Franz Kafka, and from his attraction to all literature that explored the boundaries of rationality.
โ
Idris Parry
America of the remote future is the scene ofย Fahrenheit 451. We can assume that a novel set in the past or the present is an account of something that has happened, but of which we have never heard. But the writer who chooses the future does not have this advantage. He is making it all up; he must be. Ray Bradburyโs short novel has all the ingredients of absurdity. Well, no, not all: nobody could get them all into one book, though many have tried. ๎e title refers to the temperature at which book-paper burns. Guy Montag is a ๏ฌreman, but in this machine state of the future the business of the ๏ฌre brigade is not to put ๏ฌres out but to start them; their hoses spout kerosene, not water. Possession of books is a crime against happiness, so the ๏ฌre brigade is alerted only to burn down houses where books are found. Perhaps that prospect is not so absurd. Neither is the fact that people are psychoanalyzed if they walk alone in the woods and watch birds. But what are we to make of a mechanical hound, a contraption of wires and cells and steel, that can be tuned to hunt down any individual (everybodyโs โwavelengthโ kept on ๏ฌle) and kill with poisoned fangs?
Light ๏ฌickered on bits of ruby glass and on sensitive capillary hairs in the nylonbrushed nostrils of the creature that quivered gently, gently, its eight legs spidered under it on rubber-padded paws.
๎is may be tolerable to comic-strip addicts or Yale University (which recently presentedย ๎e Tempestย set on another planet, with Antonio and Sebastian arriving by spaceship), but can it satisfy serious readers of ๏ฌction? It can, provided the theme is handled by a writer as capable as Ray Bradbury. He gives his impossibilities such vital shape that spiritual truth overwhelms rational disbelief. Montag begins to think, and, as everyone knows, this is disastrous. He steals a book; he begins to read; his treason is discovered and police and the Mechanical Hound pursue him across the city. ๎is hunt will raise the strike, words per minute, of any reader who is not actually dead. I am afraid the book is so exciting that it stands little chance of being considered serious literature.
Ray Bradburyโs style is something you will scarcely notice at the ๏ฌrst reading. It is an organic expression of personality, pulsingโnow fast, now slowโsupple, incisive, so moulded into his tale that matter and manner are one and indistinguishable, a physical symbol, a structure of irrational truth. ๎e symbol is valid because it compels us into itself. ๎is is our experience as much as Montagโs, not observed and accepted, forgotten as soon as the light dies in the screen, but su๏ฌered intimately, a tearing of old scars. So it ceases to be the terror of a particular man in the impossible future. ๎is happens to us, today, in our eternal present.
Sir John Betjemanย (1906โ84) became poet laureate of England in 1972. As a youth he was taught for a time by T. S. Eliot before entering Oxford, where he was tutored by C. S. Lewis. By the early 1950s Betjeman was already well-known as a journalist, essayist, and poet, and his review ofย Fahrenheit 451ย in the April 2, 1954, Londonย Daily Telegraphย played a signi๏ฌcant role in the successful March 1954 release of the British hardbound edition. Betjemanโs strong praise ofย Fahrenheit 451โs cultural criticism was more openly received in Britain, where the Cold War climate of fear had less of an e๏ฌect on publishing and the literary marketplace.
Sir John Betjeman
Ray Bradbury, an American, is by far the best science ๏ฌction writer. But it comes as no surprise to me to ๏ฌndย Fahrenheit 451ย a betrayal of modern science and the false idea that โprogressโ can be reckoned in terms of scienti๏ฌc inventions. He is too much of a poet in all he writes, too full of imagination to be anything but a prophet.
He foresees an America living in cities and at war with the rest of the world. A war is a matter of sending out ๏ฌights of bombers and is over in
48 hours. All houses are ๏ฌreproof. Interior walls are huge television screens. Conversation is just mutual back-slapping. Education is just committing facts to memory. No opinions, no philosophy or sociology are allowed. Religion is run by advertising ๏ฌrms and Our Lord is used for toothpaste advertisements.
His hero is a man called Montag, a ๏ฌreman. Firemen in his world are used to start ๏ฌres, not to prevent them. ๎ey are a sort of sanitary squad and rush out, at the command of the State Police, to burn any secret hoards of books. Books are illegal. One reads from State-selected books thrown on to the television screen.
Montag is so foolish as to steal one of the books from a pile he is burning and to read it. He also makes friends with a young girl who is a rebel and subsequently liquidated. Montagโs wife betrays him to the police and he escapes in a thrilling chase wherein he is pursued by an eight-legged Mechanical Hound.
I have left out of this description the powerful horror of this unlikeable but compelling tale. I advise it for all worshippers of speed, popular wireless entertainment, luxury ๏ฌats and mechanical labour-saving devices. Once read it will never be forgotten, and should be in every laboratory and technical college and atomic plant in the countryโ if those places are allowed subversive books.
Adrian Mitchellย (1932โ2008), a prominent English poet and playwright, was a creative leader of the antiwar and antiauthoritarian movement in Britain for more than four decades. He was equally at home writing for the Royal Shakespeare Company, the National ๎eatre, and countless regional and fringe venues. Critics considered him the โshadow poet laureateโ of Britain, and his early attraction toย Fahrenheit 451ย testi๏ฌes to the way that Bradburyโs novel cut across political and sociological ideologies. Mitchell penned this early review for the April 28, 1954, issue ofย Isis, Oxford Universityโs literary magazine, while serving as student editor; in spite of his youth, Mitchellโs signature mix of carnival e๏ฌect and shadowy terror is already evident in his dark and brooding praise ofย Fahrenheit 451.
Adrian Mitchell
Ray Bradbury is not in love with the future. For him it contains the already planned murder of the individual, an easy victim in a metal landscape. His ๏ฌrst novel,ย Fahrenheit 451, is an attempt to prevent the crime by anticipating the moves of a delinquent civilization. Prophetic detection is no work for ๏ฌatfoots; the private eye must have vision and intellect. Wells educated science ๏ฌction but left it skinny and uncertain, Orwell gave it strength and now Bradbury employs it to carry his fears.
His hero is a ๏ฌreman; his job is to set ๏ฌre to any house suspected of harbouring books, the contraband of a televiewing age.
โItโs ๏ฌne work. Monday burn Millay, Wednesday Whitman, Friday Faulkner, burn โem to ashes, then burn the ashes. ๎atโs our o๏ฌcial slogan.โ
๎e plot follows his crippled progress, which leads to a voluntary exile from the negation of his enemies: drug-headed humans and intelligent machines. Mildred, his wife and traitor, is drawn in thick, vicious lines; she sits in her parlour watching the three walls, which are ๏ฌat-faced television screens; her only misery is the absence of a fourth wall-screen. Outside the house, seasons change and murder wears a ๏ฌne uniform.
Inside, her senses are slack; she does not notice the smell of dead love, stale in the bright house. Only her television โfamilyโ a๏ฌects her pulse.
Bradburyโs style weakens when he pictures his sympathetic characters.
๎e ๏ฌreman and his terri๏ฌed professor talk and look like people, but the fey Clarisse and the exiles are half-obscured in romantic mist. Clarisse runs in the moonlight and drinks the rain; she might have been real, instead she is made up with cosmetic sentimentality. Fantasy should glitter like hard-frozen snow; it should have no patches of grey slush. Fortunately these patches are rare, but they stand out like pimples on a hard face. ๎is looks like a temporary rash, for Mr. Bradburyโs imagination is in good health and maturing rapidly; the complaint is no more than a touch of the spring and should be easily cured.
๎e book could have been absurd; in the clever hands of its author it becomes a serious novel, not a heavyweight, but still a well-made and balanced body. ๎e images of ๏ฌre encircle a scorpion civilization, which we watch as its tail stings its little head to death. For this is a hell that ends; the book concludes with the cremation of an era and the ๏ฌrst word of its successor. At the death, large-scale horror is transformed into poetic narrative as the hero listens to the bombers screaming overhead, and in his hysteria knows what must happen:
He felt that the stars had been pulverised by the sound of the black jets and that in the morning the earth would be covered with their dust like a strange snow. ๎at was his idiot thought as he stood shivering in the dark, and let his lips go on moving and moving.
No manโs vision is perfect, but Ray Bradbury has better second sight than most. ๎e dry attackers of novels set in the future should drop the gaudy paperbacks to deal with a sterner man, and perhaps the Science Fiction label could be torn o๏ฌ; it has prejudiced too many careful readers already.ย Fahrenheit 451ย has faults, but it also has blood in its veins and nerves in its skin.
Sir Kingsley Amis (1922โ95) was a lifelong reader of science ๏ฌction who developed a particular interest in the cultural commentary of dystopic novels. His 1950s breakthrough as a popular master of comic realism came during his years on the faculty of the University of Wales at Swansea, and led to a Princeton fellowship in creative writing during the 1958โ59 academic year. ๎e lectures Amis gave for his Gauss Seminars, presented during his year at Princeton, were soon gathered and transformed intoย New Maps of Hellย (1960), a detailed study of the dystopian aspects of certain science-๏ฌction writers. His lengthy and very positive analysis ofย Fahrenheit 451ย spreads across two chapters inย New Maps of Hell, and remains the most extensive commentary on this novel by a major literary ๏ฌgure.
