The Fire This Time

Tim Madigan on Ray Bradbury, Bertrand Russell and Fahrenheit 451.

- Tim Madigan

“If I were asked to describe my ideal ‘intellectual-with-a-small i’ I would do it thus: a person who can start an evening with Shakespeare, continue with [Fu] Manchu and James Bond, jog further with Robert Frost, cavort with Moliere and Shaw, sprint with Dylan Thomas, dip into Yeats, watch All in the Family and Johnny Carson, and finish up the morning with Loren Eiseley, Bertrand Russell and the collected cartoon work of Johnny Hart’s B.C.”

Ray Bradbury (1920-2012)

Ray Bradbury's novel Fahrenheit 451 was published over seventy years ago, in 1953, and yet continues to be a source of controversy, being banned by many school boards, libraries, and other institutions throughout the United States – an ironic fate for a novel about literary censorship.

On March 13, 1954, the philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) wrote a letter to Bradbury’s London publishers praising Fahrenheit 451, and enclosing with it a photo of himself, pipe in hand, with a copy of the book on the arm of his reading chair (the photo became one of Bradbury’s most cherished possessions). Russell wrote:

Dear Mrs. Simon,

Thank you for your letter of March 8 and for Ray Bradbury’s book Fahrenheit 451. I have now read the book and found it powerful. The sort of future society that he portrays is only too possible. I should be glad to see him at any time convenient to us both, and perhaps you might ask him to ring me up when he returns from Ireland and then we can fix a time.

Yours sincerely,

Russell

Unbeknownst to Russell, Bradbury – a Los Angeles native who hated to fly and seldom left the United States – was actually not in Ireland (where he had recently gone by ship from America to work with director John Huston on the screenplay for a film adaptation of