I have now read the book and found it powerful. e sort of future society that he portrays is only too possible.
—Bertrand Russell, March 13, 1954
Nelson Algren (1909–81), whose best-selling novels of social realism propelled him into the ranks of America’s most popular midcentury authors, received an advance copy of Fahrenheit 451 from Ian Ballantine’s senior editor Stanley Kauffmann in early September 1953. Both Algren and his wife found Fahrenheit 451, as well as the two companion stories “And the Rock Cried Out” and “e Playground,” absorbing and relevant cautionary tales. Algren’s September 30 reply was incorporated into Ballantine’s fall 1953 advertising campaign.
FROM A LETTER TO STANLEY KAUFFMANN, BALLANTINE BOOKS
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 affords a special force to his portraits of man’s future, and a humor not possessed by any other science-fiction writer.
Orville Prescott (1907–96) was the lead book reviewer of e New York Times for nearly twenty-five years. His influence spanned the middle decades of the twentieth century, and his October 21, 1953, “Books of the Times” review provided a crucial endorsement for Fahrenheit 451 that raised the novel’s plea for intellectual responsibility and independent thinking above the conformist pressures and political polarization of the early 1950s. Prescott’s assertion that Bradbury was already “the uncrowned king of the science-fiction writers” reflected Bradbury’s emergence as one of the most recognized names in a field 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 confidence, 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 suffrage, scientific 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 men’s 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 indefinitely. . . .
Ray Bradbury is the uncrowned king of the science-fiction writers, a young author whose fanciful imagination, poetic prose and mature understanding of human character have won him an international reputation. is is his fifth book and, alas, the first I have read. It contains one short novel, “Fahrenheit 451,” 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 fireman whose job was not to put out fires, but to start them. In answer to alarms put out by informers, fire 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. Bradbury’s account of this insane world, which bears many alarming resemblances to our own, is fascinating. His story of the revolt of his fireman, 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 (1906–78), a distinguished literary critic and classics professor at Columbia University, was also an influential 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 program People, Places, and Books was widely syndicated in America, Canada, and Great Britain, but it was as chief literary critic for Harper’s that he wrote one of the first reviews of Fahrenheit 451 to appear in a major-market magazine. His December 1954 review, “New Wine, Old Bottles,” led to a long friendship; in his 1965 introduction to e Vintage Bradbury story collection, Highet would place Bradbury among those rare authors whose work “can be instantly recognized by any sensitive reader, and once recognized can never be forgotten.”
Gilbert Highet
e finest living American fantasist, Ray Bradbury, has produced another wonderful story, called Fahrenheit 451. . . . 451º is the temperature at which paper catches fire. 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 which all 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 effort to assimilate, despising books because they are beyond us, changing schools into “activity centers,” 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 Parry (1916–2008), 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 of Fahrenheit 451 appeared in e Listener, the BBC’s national broadcast publication, and provided one of the first influential assessments of Fahrenheit 451 in Great Britain. It also marked the BBC’s first interest in Bradbury’s work, eventually leading to a number of dramatizations. Parry’s fascination with Bradbury’s 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.
Idris Parry
America of the remote future is the scene of 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 Bradbury’s 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 fireman, but in this machine state of the future the business of the fire brigade is not to put fires out but to start them; their hoses spout kerosene, not water. Possession of books is a crime against happiness, so the fire 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 (everybody’s ‘wavelength’ kept on file) and kill with poisoned fangs?
Light flickered 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 presented e Tempest set on another planet, with Antonio and Sebastian arriving by spaceship), but can it satisfy serious readers of fiction? 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 Bradbury’s style is something you will scarcely notice at the first reading. It is an organic expression of personality, pulsing—now fast, now slow—supple, 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 Montag’s, not observed and accepted, forgotten as soon as the light dies in the screen, but suffered 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 Betjeman (1906–84) 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 of Fahrenheit 451 in the April 2, 1954, London Daily Telegraph played a significant role in the successful March 1954 release of the British hardbound edition. Betjeman’s strong praise of Fahrenheit 451’s cultural criticism was more openly received in Britain, where the Cold War climate of fear had less of an effect on publishing and the literary marketplace.
Sir John Betjeman
Ray Bradbury, an American, is by far the best science fiction writer. But it comes as no surprise to me to find Fahrenheit 451 a betrayal of modern science and the false idea that “progress” can be reckoned in terms of scientific 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 flights of bombers and is over in
48 hours. All houses are fireproof. 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 firms and Our Lord is used for toothpaste advertisements.
His hero is a man called Montag, a fireman. Firemen in his world are used to start fires, 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. Montag’s 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 flats 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 country— if those places are allowed subversive books.
Adrian Mitchell (1932–2008), 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 “shadow poet laureate” of Britain, and his early attraction to Fahrenheit 451 testifies to the way that Bradbury’s novel cut across political and sociological ideologies. Mitchell penned this early review for the April 28, 1954, issue of Isis, Oxford University’s literary magazine, while serving as student editor; in spite of his youth, Mitchell’s signature mix of carnival effect and shadowy terror is already evident in his dark and brooding praise of 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 first novel, Fahrenheit 451, is an attempt to prevent the crime by anticipating the moves of a delinquent civilization. Prophetic detection is no work for flatfoots; the private eye must have vision and intellect. Wells educated science fiction but left it skinny and uncertain, Orwell gave it strength and now Bradbury employs it to carry his fears.
His hero is a fireman; his job is to set fire to any house suspected of harbouring books, the contraband of a televiewing age.
“It’s fine work. Monday burn Millay, Wednesday Whitman, Friday Faulkner, burn ’em to ashes, then burn the ashes. at’s our official slogan.”
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 flat-faced television screens; her only misery is the absence of a fourth wall-screen. Outside the house, seasons change and murder wears a fine uniform.
Inside, her senses are slack; she does not notice the smell of dead love, stale in the bright house. Only her television ‘family’ affects her pulse.
Bradbury’s style weakens when he pictures his sympathetic characters.
e fireman and his terrified 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. Bradbury’s 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 fire 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 first 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 man’s 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 off; it has prejudiced too many careful readers already. Fahrenheit 451 has faults, but it also has blood in its veins and nerves in its skin.
Sir Kingsley Amis (1922–95) was a lifelong reader of science fiction 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 1958–59 academic year. e lectures Amis gave for his Gauss Seminars, presented during his year at Princeton, were soon gathered and transformed into New Maps of Hell (1960), a detailed study of the dystopian aspects of certain science-fiction writers. His lengthy and very positive analysis of Fahrenheit 451 spreads across two chapters in New Maps of Hell, and remains the most extensive commentary on this novel by a major literary figure.
