The Bradbury Chronicles (25 page)

Walter Bradbury passed on “The Fireman” and agreed to allow Ray to publish it elsewhere, so long as it was not published as a novel, but within a collection of stories. Walter Bradbury did not want his prized author to write his first novel for another publisher.

In the meantime, Don Congdon spoke with Ballantine, to see if there was any interest in a new Bradbury collection. In the early 1950s, Ray Bradbury, while not yet a household name, was one of the top players in the science fiction field; he was a celebrity to fans of science fiction, horror, and fantasy.
The Martian Chronicles
and
The Illustrated Man
—thanks in large part to healthy paperback sales—had sold respectably. Ray's first book of mixed fiction,
The Golden Apples of the Sun,
had received more reviews than all of his previous three books combined. And the reviews were largely glowing. The
New York Times
stated, “He writes in a style that seems to have been nourished on poets and fabulists of the Irish Literary Renaissance. And he is wonderfully adept at getting to the heart of his story without talking all day long about it and around it.”

In Bradbury, publisher Ian Ballantine recognized the potential for much more. Ballantine wanted Ray Bradbury to write a book for his company—a company that would break new ground in publishing by offering, simultaneously, both paperback and hardcover books. After discussions, in late 1952, Ray signed with Ballantine to write a collection that would include the novella “The Fireman,” to be rewritten with an additional 25,000 words. All parties involved agreed that the story could be elaborated on. The advance for this new book was five thousand dollars. Though his stature as an American writer had grown dramatically, Ray was still financially strapped, and the advance from Ballantine was welcome.

By now, the two Bradbury girls, Susan and Ramona, were aged three and two, respectively. Full of toddler energy, they liked to romp about the three-bedroom home on Clarkson Road and play in the backyard, where there was a man-made pond. The girls especially adored watching the tadpoles in the pond, and inside the garage, which Ray had finally converted into an office, Ray tried to work as the girls called to him from outside the window. The girls threw pebbles at the garage window and their father giggled as he typed. A playful man, easily distracted and ever the child at heart, Ray could hardly ignore the pleas of his kids, so he almost always gave in and ran outside to play. But he had a book to write, and he needed a real office. However, with a meager annual income and monthly mortgage payments, the Bradburys could ill afford it. In addition, they had bought a dishwasher and a dining-room set on installment. When Ray Bradbury opened the first dishwasher bill and saw the amount going to interest, he was alarmed and swore to finish the payments quickly. So, he again returned to UCLA, this time to finish his book for Ballantine.

Another round of days and dimes ensued. Ray Bradbury joined the typists in the typewriter rental room to add 25,000 new words to “The Fireman.” In revising his novella, he knew he had to consult his original story, “The Fireman,” but at the same time, he didn't want to overintellectualize his approach to writing; it ran counter to his usual style.

“I feared for refiring the book and rebaking the characters,” noted Ray. “I am a passionate, not intellectual writer, which means my characters must plunge ahead of me to live the story. If my intellect caught up with them too swiftly, the whole adventure might mire down in self-doubt and endless mind play.”

Despite these concerns, Ray Bradbury was determined to turn “The Fireman” into a short novel. However, the story would be just a centerpiece, surrounded by other stories, to adhere to his agreement with Doubleday.

As he wrote the book, he determined not to consult the original story. “I just let the characters talk to me,” he said, remembering his first hours writing
Fahrenheit 451
and invoking the age-old writer's cliché. “I didn't write
Fahrenheit 451,
it wrote me.” The plot line was still the same, the characters still in place: Fireman Montag; his pill-popping wife, Mildred; Clarisse McClellan who told Montag about the power of the books that he burned each night. There were some minor changes: Fire Chief Leahy became Fire Chief Beatty, certain scenes were tossed out, others were fleshed out, the language waxed more poetic, and the story expanded as Ray wrote. Additionally, he hyped up the fire and sun symbolism. Once again, in just nine days, he finished, this time producing the first draft of the book.

In January 1953, Ray returned to his garage office to revise the draft. He was still without a title for the book; he sought a particularly powerful, symbolic title. On the afternoon of January 22, as sunlight streamed in through the garage windows, he had a revelation.

“I decided I might well use the temperature at which book paper catches fire,” Ray recalled. “I telephoned the chemistry department at several universities and found no one who could tell me the right temperature. I made inquiries, also, of several physics professors.

“Then, still ignorant, I slapped my forehead and muttered, ‘Fool! Why not ask the fire department!'”

After a quick phone call to the downtown Los Angeles firehouse, Ray Bradbury had his answer: The temperature at which books burn is 451 degrees Fahrenheit. “I never bothered to check to see if that was right,” Ray said, with a laugh, many years later. “The fireman told me that book paper ignited at 451 degrees Fahrenheit. I reversed it to
Fahrenheit 451
because I liked the sound of it.”

While he was obsessively cleaning and polishing
Fahrenheit 451,
the editors of the eminent magazine
The Nation
contacted Ray. As science fiction gained global prominence and popularity, the genre was also drawing detractors, and Ray was asked to write an article in defense of the field. The editors asked Ray to explain why he wrote science fiction. The resulting article, titled “Day After Tomorrow: Why Science Fiction?,” was published in
The Nation
in May 1953.

In June, Ray opened his mailbox to find a letter addressed in a spidery handwriting from B. Berenson, I Tatti, Settignano, Italia.

Ray turned to Maggie.

“Good Lord,” Ray said. “This can't be from
the
Berenson, can it?”

“For God's sake,” said Maggie. “Open it!”

Ray tore open the envelope and unfolded the letter. Indeed, the note, dated May 29, 1953, was from renowned Renaissance scholar and author Bernard Berenson. The nearly illegible handwriting was ornate and spindly, and written on the stationery of the Italian hotel Grand Hôtel Des Etrangers. It was, in Berenson's words, his “first fan letter,” written in reaction to Ray's article “Day After Tomorrow” in
The Nation
. “… It is the first time I have encountered the statement by an artist in any field, that to work creatively he must put flesh into it, and enjoy it as a lark, or as a fascinating adventure. How different from the workers in the heavy industry much professional writing has become! If you ever touch Florence come to see me.”

Ray and Maggie were delighted, if not flabbergasted. It was a most unlikely fan letter, from an eminent intellectual and an esteemed scholar of the arts. “The letter terrified me,” said Ray. The words “come to see me” rang in his head. Come to see me. But it was impossible. There was no money for travel and certainly no money for Europe.

Ray recalled watching a film with Maggie and “looking at far places—Rome and Paris and London and Egypt—with tears streaming down my cheeks. I turned to my wife and said, ‘My God, when will we ever have enough money to travel [to] all these far, wonderful places?'”

Not only did the Bradburys have no money to travel and meet Berenson, but if they did, what would Ray say to a man of such stature? He had felt the same when Gerald Heard and Aldous Huxley invited him for tea. “And so I put off writing Berenson,” said Ray.

Ray continued working on
Fahrenheit 451
. The book was set for publication in October, and by mid-June, Ray was still toiling away. He sent the first half of the unfinished manuscript to Ballantine's editor in chief, Stanley Kauffmann, who acted as Ray's editor on the novel. The two agreed that Kauffmann would travel to Los Angeles in August to review the proofs with Ray. “We did that,” said Kauffmann, “so Ray would have a final deadline and so that he wouldn't continue to polish it forever.” After nearly fifty years, Kauffmann's memory of the editing process was blurry, but he was adamant about one thing: “Every single word in
Fahrenheit 451
is Ray Bradbury's.”

After Ray posted the unfinished manuscript to New York on June 15, Kauffmann recalled making some structural changes and suggested shifting some scenes, with which Ray agreed. Ray continued to send pages to his editor throughout the summer, and, as promised, Kauffmann flew to Los Angeles on August 10 with the typeset proofs of the book in hand.

Despite the anti-McCarthy sentiment of the book, Kauffmann claimed he was unaware of what he had on his hands. “None of us at Ballantine had any idea how political the book was,” remembered Kauffmann. “You must recall, World War Two had just ended and we all thought the story was a response to Hitler.”

Kauffmann stayed in a hotel on Wilshire Boulevard about a mile from the Bradbury home, and he and Ray spent long days in the hotel room editing the proofs of
Fahrenheit 451
. There, Ray paced back and forth anxiously. “Ray's attention span has always been short,” said Maggie Bradbury, citing
Fahrenheit 451
as her personal favorite of her husband's canon. “So when it came time to edit proofs, it drove him crazy because he had to do it; he had no choice if he wanted the book to get published.”

Kauffmann remembered one more detail: Ray was constantly asking him to go out for ice cream—his one lifelong vice. “Some people are addicted to cocaine. Others choose marijuana. Ray is addicted to ice cream,” said Maggie dryly.

Kauffmann and Ray walked to a nearby soda fountain at least once, sometimes several times, a day. “I've never eaten more ice cream in my entire life,” Kauffmann exclaimed. By the end of the week, after strenuous work and many pints of vanilla, the editing process was complete and
Fahrenheit 451
was done. “We knew it was brilliant,” remembered Kauffmann, “but we had no idea what it would become.”

In mid-August 1953, Kauffmann flew back to New York City; in his luggage was a classic. To fulfill his agreement with Doubleday that the book be a collection rather than a novel, the first edition of
Fahrenheit 451
included two additional short stories—“The Playground” and “And the Rock Cried Out.” (The original plan was to include eight stories plus
Fahrenheit 451,
but Ray didn't have time to revise all the tales.) “The Playground” and “And the Rock Cried Out” were removed in much later printings; in the meantime, Ray had met his contractual obligation with the first edition.
Fahrenheit 451
was a short novel, but it was also a part of a collection.

Upon its publication on October 19, 1953,
Fahrenheit 451
earned high praise from critics across the nation. Noted
New York Times
critic Orville Prescott lauded the book: “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.”

Though not immediately,
Fahrenheit 451
went on to be Ray's best-selling book. The first hardcover printing was 4,250 copies, while 250,000 paperback copies were simultaneously released. Sales were steady over the decades, gradually building as the book gained cultural prominence. By the end of the 1980s, the novel was in its seventy-ninth printing, with four and a half million copies in print. “I could retire on the royalties of that one book alone,” Ray revealed in a 2002 interview. Beyond its enduring sales figures (both Ray and Don Congdon contended that they were unaware of the total worldwide sales of
Fahrenheit 451,
and added that sales numbers were unimportant),
Fahrenheit 451,
perhaps more than any other Bradbury title, has become a literary classic. It is comfortably couched next to other dystopian masterworks, such as Orwell's
1984
and Huxley's
Brave New World
. And it is just as easily situated on high school reading lists alongside Hemingway, Faulkner, Harper Lee, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

While Ray Bradbury has always considered himself a fantasy writer rather than a science fiction author (“Science fiction,” Ray stated, “is the art of the possible. Fantasy is the art of the impossible”),
Fahrenheit 451
helped establish its author as a visionary. A half century after it was written, it may be seen that Ray's impassioned story of social commentary predicted much of the future in striking detail. Certainly, the book's main book-burning premise is pure Bradburian metaphor—that is, a rendering of an imagined world that explores problems vexing our own. Ray succeeded in addressing Hitler's wave of book burnings during the Second World War, while at the same time examining the growing rash of censorship on the home front led by Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee. But some of the uncanny details of
Fahrenheit 451
suggest that Ray had somehow looked into a crystal ball and seen the future. The book predicts, among other things, society's reliance upon television, plasma-screen wall televisions, the invention of stereo headphones (the seashell radio has long been rumored to be the inspiration behind the invention of the Sony Walkman), and even live media coverage of sensationalistic news events.
Fahrenheit 451
's climactic finale, in which the story's hero, Guy Montag, is being chased by media helicopters as the event is broadcast into millions of homes, was an eerie precursor to the real-life events surrounding O. J. Simpson and the now-infamous slow-speed Ford Bronco chase on a Los Angeles freeway.