THE STORY OF FAHRENHEIT 451
Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. ere is nothing magical in them, at all. e magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.
—Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
THE STORY OF FAHRENHEIT 451
Jonathan R. Eller
Ray Bradbury never really figured out how to learn in a lecture hall or a classroom environment. e printed word seemed far more real to him, and the pages of countless library books formed the core of his education. Bradbury would never attend college; after his 1938 graduation from Los Angeles High School, he spent four years selling evening newspapers at the corner of Norton and Olympic, earning one penny for every three-cent newspaper he sold. But he continued to read voraciously, absorbing a wide range of classics as well as the works of contemporary writers. Sometime in 1944 he read Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, and from that point on, Fahrenheit 451 was inevitable.
In revealing the underlying terror of Stalin’s show trials, Darkness at Noon became the great cautionary tale for Bradbury. It fueled his subsequent confrontations with intolerant authority, and with those who denied the existence of intolerance. Bradbury’s unpublished speaking notes of the mid-1950s contain his most forceful acknowledgment of this inspiration: “People have often asked me what effect Huxley and Orwell had on me, and whether either of them influenced the creation of Fahrenheit 451. e best response is Arthur Koestler. . . . [O]nly a few perceived the intellectual holocaust and the revolution by burial that Stalin achieved. . . . Only Koestler got the full range of desecration, execution, and forgetfulness on a mass and nameless graveyard scale. Koestler’s Darkness at Noon was therefore . . . true father, mother, and lunatic brother to my F. 451.”
e “intellectual holocaust” revealed by Koestler recharged Bradbury’s own conviction that literature is every bit as precious as life itself. From a young age he was greatly affected by accounts of the burning of the ancient library at Alexandria and the loss of many classical works that we now know only by title or through fragments of surviving parchment. Bradbury virtually lived in the public libraries of his time, and came to see the shelves as populations of living authors: to burn the book is to burn the author, and to burn the author is to deny our own humanity. Koestler’s cautionary tale soon inspired a series of writing experiments about books—and about those who would burn them. But nine years
would pass before the reading public first learned the temperature at which book paper combusts.
Bradbury made notes for a story about book-burning firemen as early as February 1946, but he soon set this project aside. Initially, the path to Fahrenheit 451 led through an unfinished and entirely different story line
—Where Ignorant Armies Clash by Night, which survives only in
fragmentary drafts of a few episodes written at intervals during 1946 and 1947. ese all focus on a nightmare inversion of traditional values in a post-apocalyptic world where death provides the best way out of a ravaged landscape. e modernist lament for lost homelands and lost values weighed heavily on him during this time, and Bradbury briefly experimented with the darker possibilities of the rapidly emerging atomic age: “If you can’t fight the meaninglessness with a religion, then slide along down the chute with it into oblivion. Make a religion of Meaninglessness.” To this end, Bradbury imagined an elite class of public assassins who also performed ritualized burnings of the books and fine art that gave meaning to an earlier age, including the poem that would play a central role in Fahrenheit 451—Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach.”
In the fragmentary Ignorant Armies, which takes its title from the last line of Arnold’s poem, a prominent assassin actually reads “Dover Beach” to a massed crowd “in order that you may know what we are destroying,” and subsequently burns all of Arnold’s works as a warm-up to the destruction of what is perhaps the last copy of Shakespeare’s works. But the assassin finds that he cannot take the ultimate step of cultural annihilation by burning Shakespeare and becomes a fugitive from the mob. For Fahrenheit, Bradbury transformed this image into the scene where Fireman Montag reads “Dover Beach” to his wife and her friends.
is reading would become the pivotal point of no return for Montag, who will be betrayed by his own wife for giving voice to the forbidden words.
Where Ignorant Armies Clash by Night ended up a creative dead end for Bradbury, but his metaphor-rich description of the burning of Matthew Arnold’s book offers an early glimpse of the powerful prose he would bring to Montag’s story:
e book turned and fought, like some small white animal caught within the fire. It seemed to want very much to live, it writhed and
sparkled and a small gust of gaseous vapor blew up from it. Leaf by leaf it burned in upon itself, as if hands of fire were turning each page, scanning and burning with the same fire. e pages cringed into black curls and the curls departed on puffs of illumination.
is unsettling image—the death of living words—emerges from a world without hope or meaning, but Bradbury soon realized that predicting this kind of dark future ran counter to his creative instincts. He was more effective at exploring the sources and celebrating the achievements of the human imagination, and gradually began to examine where present-day threats to creativity might lead. At first, these new stories focused on supernatural fiction, a field where he had found his first success as a writer during the early 1940s; his extended tale “Pillar of Fire” (1948) and his story “e Mad Wizards of Mars” (1949; better known as “e Exiles”) warn that such labels as horror, fantasy, and supernatural—genres that were already coming under increased scrutiny in the late 1940s—could be extended to include many of Shakespeare’s works as well as other classics of mainstream literature.
Bradbury’s well-known “Carnival of Madness,” given an even longer life as “Usher II” in e Martian Chronicles, extended the scope of his storytelling to include broader threats to canonical literature and other creative aspects of the cultural tapestry. His vengeful protagonist Stendahl, the millionaire who builds all of Poe’s infamous death devices into a single, Usheresque mansion, uses these horrors to destroy the governing elite responsible for the burning of all art and literature. Stendahl’s account of this future history is clearly a trying-out of the explanations that Professor Faber will convey to Montag in Fahrenheit 451: “ey began by controlling books and, of course, films, one way or another, one group or another, political bias, religious prejudice, union pressures, there was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of thefuture, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves.”
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