Imaginary Worlds - Fahrenheit 451 Still Burns

Episode Date: June 27, 2018

The writer Neil Gaiman first became entranced with Fahrenheit 451 as a kid, but he says the novel is the kind of masterpiece that seems like a different story every time you read it depending on where you are in life, or in history. I also talk with novelist Alice Hoffman and various Ray Bradbury scholars about why a book written in the McCarthy era still has a lot to say in the age of "fake news." And we hear from students at a high school in Texas about how Fahrenheit 451 reflects their own struggles fighting hate speech while honoring freedom of speech. A version of this episode originally aired on PRI's Studio 360 as part of their American Icons series. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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This is me. This is me talking. This is me still talking. Peter Piper, Peter Piper, Peter Piper. That is the voice of Neil Gaiman, master of modern fantasy. But he did not come to the studio to talk about the stuff he's best known for, like American Gods or Coraline. Although I did tell him that when I was a teenager, like many Gen Xers,

I had a bit of a crush on his version of Death from the Sandman comics, who to me looked a little bit like a gothed out Winona Ryder. But the reason he agreed to come in to talk with me is because he's a huge fan of Ray Bradbury. I was asked to write the introduction to the 60th anniversary edition of Fahrenheit 451. Ray Bradbury and I had known each other at that point for, I think, over 20 years. And he has a vivid memory of discovering Fahrenheit 451 when he was a kid. And he says he was particularly fascinated by the main character. He was a fireman.

He burned down houses of people with books. And that seemed a cool science fictional idea in itself because I lived in a world in which firemen came and saved you and they put out fires. And I didn't really understand things like his marriage falling apart. Huge swatches of the plot I missed, but that's fine because when you're nine years old, you know that you're going to read the book later, and you'll take from it what is there for you. Alice Hoffman is the author of many wonderful books, including Practical Magic and The Red Garden. She also discovered Fahrenheit 451 as a kid, but her circumstances were different.

Her parents had just gotten a divorce, and one of the few things that her father left behind was a box of books, which were full of Ray Bradbury novels. You know, it was a time really when I needed a sort of a father figure or moral voice. And I feel like Ray is that. He was such a moral voice. There was such a center. There was a sense of right and wrong in his books. And, you know, that's a good thing, especially when you're a young reader. But as a young reader, she eventually put the book away, and she didn't pick it up again until September of 2001. You know, I didn't believe in writer's block until I had it. And I had it after 9-11 because I felt like there was no point in doing anything, but certainly no point in writing. I felt like books were going to burn up and there was just no point in going on. So I had this horrible writer's block and my inner child or my inner

self told me to go back and read Fahrenheit 451. And when I read that book again, I realized how important books were. And I realized how important stories were. And I got, you know, I was able to write again. Fahrenheit 451 is the kind of novel that a lot of kids are assigned to read at some point in school. I was actually never assigned to read it, just by weird coincidence. So I never got around to it. Although, I really like Ray Bradbury. In fact, when I was a kid, one of my favorite novels was Dandelion Wine. But after the 2016 election, this old literary classic jumped to the top of bestseller lists, along with other dystopian novels like 1984 and Animal Farm. So I finally

read it, starting with Neil Gaiman's excellent introduction. And by the way, we'll hear more from him later. But when I read the book, I couldn't believe how much the story, written 65 years ago, feels so relevant today. And I think that each of the characters in Fahrenheit 451 represents a challenge to the reader.

If you lived in this world, what would you do? Who would you be? Rich Orlow has thought about that a lot. I do have the ability, you know, pat yourself on the back, but to sort of morph myself into other characters. myself and to other characters. For the last decade, he's been performing a one-man show of Fahrenheit 451 using a script that was approved by Ray Bradbury before Bradbury died in 2012. Now, Rich does all the voices in the show, but the character he says he identifies with the most is Guy Montag, the main character, the fireman, who starts to question why he's burning books. You know, he goes from someone who is kind of destructive, thinks he knows it all,

he's kind of angry, but there's a core in him that tells him that there's something more than this. And that's kind of how I was when I was young. I was kind of a not the happiest kid. That's for sure. I was very angry. I grew up in not the best circumstances per se. And he doesn't know anything. Eventually, at the end of the book, he says, I was an idiot the whole way. I can identify with that, you know. So here's Rich performing a scene where Montag reveals for the first time to his wife Millie that he's unhappy with his work.

When I wake up, I have chills and a fever. Oh, you can't be sick. You were all right last night. Millie, do you know what happened last night? We burned a thousand books. We burnt a woman. Well? Well? Well, you should have seen her, Millie.

God, there's got to be things in books. Things that you can't imagine to make a woman stay in a burning house. You wouldn't stay for nothing. She was as rational as you and I, and we burnt her. Have you ever seen a burning house? It smolders for days. I've been trying to put it out in my mind. I'm crazy with trying.

And I'm sick. And it's not just the woman that died. I'm thinking about all the kerosene that I have used in the past 10 years. And I am thinking about those books. And for the first time, I realized that there was a man behind each one of those books. A man had to think them up. A man had to put them down on paper. It may have taken some man a lifetime to put his thoughts down on paper. And then along I come in two minutes and boom, it's all over. Oh, leave me alone. I didn't do anything to you.

Wow, that was chilling. Thank you. So, wow, it's so interesting to hear Millie. When I think of Millie, I mean, Millie is, she self-medicates. I mean, the whole book, she's kind of, you know, she's half out of it. Her character never really confronts the really underlying cause of all these things. And she distracts herself with television. And that's her life. She even calls them her TV family.

Now, the opposite of Millie, who just kind of goes along with the program, is Montag's next-door neighbor, Clarice McClellan. She only appears in the beginning of the book, but she plays a pivotal role. She awakens Montag's conscience. You know, I'm not afraid of you at all. So many people are, they're afraid of firemen, but you are just a man after all. How long have you worked at being a fireman?

Since I was 20. Ten years ago. Do you ever read any of the books that you burn? No. That's against the law. Oh, yes, of course. Hey, it's fine work. Monday, you burn Edna Millay.

Wednesday, Walt Whitman. Friday, Faulkner. You burn them to ashes, and then you burn the ashes. That's our official slogan. Is it true that a long time ago, firemen used to put out fires instead of going to start them? No. That's strange because I heard that houses used to burn by accident and they needed firemen to stop the flames. and they needed firemen to stop the flames.

Now the fourth major character in the book is Montag's boss, the anti-intellectual Captain Beatty. We must all be alike. Not everybody born free and equal like the Constitution says, but everybody made equal. Each man the image of every other. For then, all are happy. For there are no mountains to judge yourself against or to make you cower.

So, a book is a loaded weapon in the house next door. Burn it. Burn it! Who knows who may be the target of a well-read man. Now that is actually a very important moment, because Beattie reveals something to Montag which may be surprising to some readers. It was actually surprising to me the first time I read the book. This whole book-burning business did not come from the government, at least not at first. It came from the people.

Every book contained something that somebody found offensive. So firemen began burning the most offensive books, the people cheered, and they kept going. When the houses were finally fireproofed completely, there was no longer a need of firemen for the old purposes. They were given a new job as the custodians of our peace of mind, the focus of our rightful dread of being inferior, official censors, judges and executioners. That is you, Montauk. And that's me. Jonathan Eller is the director for the Center of Ray Bradbury Studies at Indiana University. He's the director for the Center of Ray Bradbury Studies at Indiana University. And he says book banning was very much on Bradbury's mind when he wrote Fahrenheit 451 in the early 1950s on the eve of the McCarthy hearings.

Ray Bradbury felt that the ban on books or the censorship of books would probably start with supernatural literature and fantasy. And so he started to write a series of about a half a dozen stories in the late 40s that touched on the issue of the banning of supernatural fiction or the burning of supernatural fiction. Did I read that he was descended from Mary Bradbury, who's one of the people in the Salem Witch Trials? Oh, yes. Mary Bradbury was his direct ancestor. She was tried, of course, in the early 1690s, found guilty of taking on spectral forms. I think it was the form of a wild boar someone accused her of. She was found guilty and sentenced to die. But over time,

the colonial government changed, and she was spared. But Ray Bradbury's initial spark of inspiration for Fahrenheit 451 came from personal experience. One night, he was walking with a friend in Los Angeles and a policeman stopped and questioned them because apparently it was strange to just be walking at night in Los Angeles. Bradbury was so annoyed, he wrote a short story called The Pedestrian, which took place in a totalitarian future where people were so distracted by technology they didn't even bother going out of their houses and take a walk. And that short story eventually evolved into the world of Fahrenheit 451,

where technology is so all-consuming and distracting, people don't even read books anymore. And one of the most endearing details about Fahrenheit 451 is that Bradbury wrote the novel on a coin-operated typewriter at his local library. He later would jokingly refer to it as his dime novel. When it was done, he called the fire department to ask what temperature a book would burn. They told him 451 degrees, and that's how he got the title. When it was done, he called the fire department to ask what temperature a book would burn. They told him 451 degrees, and that's how he got the title. When it was finally published in 1953, Fahrenheit 451 was considered a success, critically and commercially. But it was not seen as an instant classic. For a long time, other Ray Bradbury books, like the Martian Chronicles, were much more popular.

Again, Jonathan Eller. But by the 80s and 90s, as we're dealing with these technological marvels, and we have the challenge of preserving unmediated literature and great ideas, people began to see that to remind us all that literacy is important. Then Fahrenheit began to become a staple in school. But according to the American Library Association, every year there are parents lobbying them to remove Fahrenheit 451 from the shelves of school libraries

because they claim it has offensive language, like hell or damn, which is a little strange because there are other books with hell or damn, which is a little strange because there are other books with hell and damn that are not constantly the target of such anxiety among parents. In fact, for a while, there was an edited version of Fahrenheit 451 that was circulated in schools that had words like hell and damn removed. And when Bradbury himself found out, he was furious. He got the original text reinstated and wrote a new coda that's in every copy of the book.

It's a coda in which he says at the end, I will not go gently onto a shelf degutted to become a non-book. And here is Ray Bradbury himself. I get letters from teachers all the time saying, my books have been banned temporarily. I said, don't worry about it. Put them back on the shelves. And they come in and find them on the shelves again.

And you say, gee, how'd they get back on there? And you keep putting them back and they keep taking them off and you finally win. But be very quiet about it and don't ask for my help because if I come to your town to help you, I'm a big frog in a small puddle. They're going to hate me, all of them, all the people. So you can't ask me to interfere. You do the job. You're the librarian.

You're the teacher. Stand firm and you'll win. And they always do. Stand firm, and you'll win, and they always do. In a moment, Fahrenheit 451 leaps off the page and becomes something that's much harder to burn. Now, part of what helped Fahrenheit 451 endure was the way that it got adapted. It's been turned into a graphic novel, movies, a play.

Now, don't make me use this. There have been radio drama adaptations on both sides of the Atlantic. Well, that's one way to get an audience at the end of a flamethrower. Phil Nichols teaches TV and film at the University of Wolverhampton in the UK. His specialty are media adaptations of Ray Bradbury's work.

I think if all the adaptations were straightforward, faithful adaptations, I would get very tired. But they've all been so different and so playful. And strangely enough, the first film adaptation of Fahrenheit 451 did not come from Hollywood. The 1966 film was directed by Francois Truffaut. It's a very strange film. It's a combination of French New Wave filmmaking and an American story. And it was shot in England, and it was directed by a director who didn't speak a word of English, even though the film was made in English.

And the actor playing Montag had a thick Austrian accent. We burn them to ashes and then burn the ashes. That's our official motto. You don't like books then? Books are just so much rubbish. The writer Neil Gaiman was never a big fan of that movie. And he was particularly disturbed by the ending. Now, to some extent, the ending of the movie is similar to the book. Montag quits the fire department and he joins the resistance,

where he discovers the, quote, book people, who invented a really ingenious way to preserve books. Each of them chooses a book to memorize. I think in the book, you can almost hear the trumpets as people are introduced, as you realize that, yes, you can destroy a book, but you cannot destroy the content of the book. And as long as some books are people, the books are inside us and we can bring them out again. Would you like to read Plato's Republic? Yes, of course.

Well, I am Plato's Republic. Would you like to read Marcus Aurelius? Well, Mr. Simmons is Marcus. This fella's Charles Darwin. He's Schopenhauer. Others are Einstein, Confucius, Buddha, Jefferson, Lincoln, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. In the film, nobody is telling the content of their book to another person. And I think that is the thing that makes it seem like madness, like a waste of time, like pointless. They're all on their own, not making eye contact with each other, mumbling their stories, mumbling their books. They've remembered.

The one thing that I don't think Fahrenheit 451 warns us about enough, which is, because why would it have done? Which is, it seems to me like the best way to lose the good books and to lose literacy and to lose all those points of view is not to burn them,

but it's to bury them under a million bad books. And, you know, we're now at a point where more data is being produced every hour than was being produced in the previous centuries. You know, in the old days, you needed a guide through the desert to find the one flower growing in the desert of information, of knowledge, of story. of story. And now we're wandering through an overgrown jungle and we need a flamethrower just to clear out the weeds and a map to try and find where the good stuff is. Ray Bradbury always had mixed feelings about the Truffaut film, but he wrote a play in the 1970s

that incorporated a lot of ideas that Truffaut had invented for the film into Bradbury's new theatrical version of Fahrenheit 451. But the biggest change that Bradbury made was something brand new that did not come from the Truffaut film. He took the character of Captain Beatty, who had been sort of a two-dimensional villain in the book, and made him more of an anti-hero. Jonathan Eller says this actually came from Bradbury's own insecurities as a writer. He always worried the most about writing character. He knew that he had very interesting ideas based on basic fears and hopes and aspirations and terrors and loves of human beings. But sometimes he had to work very hard to develop characters.

And all the work that Ray Bradbury did on the character of Captain Beatty struck a chord with Julia Wilhelm. In the spring of 2018, she was a senior at McKinney-Boyd High School outside Dallas. And when she learned that her drama teacher was going to put on the play of Fahrenheit 451. I read the script and the character that I really wanted to play was Beatty. And because it was the most complex and contradictory character in the show, kind of like an Aaron Burr, like a Judas, you know. kind of like an Aaron Burr, like a Judas, you know.

Now, I wanted to hear from these kids because I was curious, how does Fahrenheit 451 hold up today? I mean, how do kids who were born in the 21st century relate to this story? Julie Wilhelm's teacher, Jonathan Pitzer, was wondering the same thing. That's why for this play, he didn't do the usual auditions. He interviewed the kids to find out how deeply they had thought about Fahrenheit 451. And he was totally blown away when Julia came in. She came with notes and she had like a PowerPoint and she had drawings of the characters and she had really put in the time for Captain Beatty.

And I told her, I said, you know, you know that's a man, right? And she said, yeah, but it doesn't have to be. That's the part I want. And Julia's pitch for the character was really interesting. She said, what if Clarice McClellan, the idealistic girl who lives next to Montag, didn't die as a martyr, as she does in the book, or turn into a resistance fighter, as she does in the movie and the play, what if she became cynical? What if that is the type of person that Captain Beatty used to be before she became an adult? As this world is changing and people aren't listening to each other. She sees books and they offer no comfort to her, no solace, no peace. That's

actually one of the lines. And she doesn't see books as helping her anymore. And because she doesn't think the answer is in books. She looks to the government or these restrictions because books haven't fixed the terrible things that have happened to her. She says, well, might as well burn them. Yeah, and I would say it like it's something that you've heard said every single day when you're at the firehouse or something. Kind of like if you're in my class, you hear every day is an audition all the time and stuff. And when Jonathan Pitzer decided to put on Fahrenheit 451

at McKinney-Boyd High School, he thought the kids would relate to the show because a lot of it is about technology. I mean, Bradbury was really prescient. The characters walk around with devices in their ears called seashells, which look remarkably like Bluetooth earbuds. Everybody has wall-sized,

flat-screen TVs, even interactive television. And the HBO movie adaptation from 2018 featured all that stuff pretty heavily. Michael B. Jordan played Montag as a social media star who burns books on live simulcasts with emojis of fire and smiley faces floating up around him. They call me a walking incinerator for happiness. Damn, it's a pleasure to burn. And the teenage kids at McKinney Boyd High School did relate to the technology aspect of the play. But something else spoke to them, something that they deal with on a more regular basis. but something else spoke to them, something that they deal with on a more regular basis. It's the question of how do you fight dangerous ideas in a country that guarantees freedom of speech? In Fahrenheit 451, those are two different issues. The books on paper contain all the ideas. The technology is full of empty distractions. But in the real world these days, technology is the battleground for offensive ideas.

Here is Bennett Burke, who played Montag at the McKinney-Boyd High School play. You hear a lot of people, they'll spout bigotry and whatnot, and they'll argue that when someone criticizes them, they'll say, well, I have free speech. It's like, yeah, it's a two-way road. People have the free speech to say nasty and vile things, but their employers and their friends and their family have the free speech to shun them for it and say that's a bad idea. Once, Montag, we were a small country, but then we grew. This is Jilly Wilhelm performing as Captain Beattie.

And by the millions they poured in upon us and finally you have 300 million doctors, lawyers, Baptists, block-headed Swedes, beer-fat Germans. Blacks don't like little black Sambo? Burn it. White people hate Uncle Tom's cabin? Burn it. The Jews hate Fagin and Oliver Twist. Burn Fagin. Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. Women's Lib hates that. Into the furnace. More comic books, more gossip, plenty facts, but no meaning. And there you have it, Montag. Lecture's over. I want people to keep reading Fahrenheit 451 for things like that speech. Again, Neil Gaiman. The idea that if this is offending you, we cut it out. And eventually you will find nobody who is unoffended by something.

So no books, you know, nothing left. The idea that ideas need to be out there in the wild. They need to offend. They need to challenge. They need to make you think. They need to turn the assumptions you previously made upside down. Fahrenheit 451 has grown beyond being just a book. It's an idea. It's a living document that's taken on a life of its own. Ideas are resilient, especially good ideas. They can be more powerful than any author, book, movie, or play. Or, as the novelist Alice Hoffman put it, You know, I think it's iconic because every generation has the fears that are in Fahrenheit 451? How do we continue to be people who care about books

and care about life and care about the truth? And I also think right now there's this sense of the news can be manipulated, which it is manipulated in Fahrenheit 451, and that books can be viewed as dangerous, the truth can be viewed as dangerous, and there's kind of a mob mentality. And I think this book should be on every reading list.

Well, that is it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Neil Gaiman, Alice Hoffman, Jonathan Eller, Phil Nichols, Rich Orlow, students and teachers at McKinney-Boyd High School, and Hani Mawagdi from the Dallas Public Radio Station KERA, who recorded them. This episode is an adaptation of a piece that I did for Studio 360's American Icon series. Imaginary Worlds is part of the Panoply Network. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. You can like the show on Facebook.

I tweeted emalinski and imagineworldspod. Thank you. my site imaginaryworldspodcast.org.