Do As I Say, Not As I Don't

I can see that one major factor in my procrastination is that I start reading something interesting on the Internet, and that leads to another related something interesting, and so on.  If I read print, there's no click-through, so reading a book may fill me with the desire to log into Blogger and start writing a blog post.  I need to make myself go directly from the book to Create Post, but it's often difficult to write a post without links.  I must work on this.

Meanwhile, I'm going to pass along a lovely aside from a 1960 discussion of Robert A. Heinlein's notorious novel Starship Troopers.  It was written by another sf writer, Poul Anderson.  Anderson noted that Heinlein had always been a writer of ideas as much as of science fiction, and indeed wrote a kind of philosophical fiction -- which Anderson (and I) thought was a good thing to do.  He contrasted this aspect of Heinlein with another well-known sf writer of the period.  Playing around with ideas was, Anderson said, a major part of Heinlein's work:

Infinitely more so than, say, Bradbury, who's a nice guy and a talented writer but whose philosophy is epitomized in his belief that the highest foreseeable use for technology is the construction of electric grandmothers.

Did Bradbury ever explicitly declare such a belief?  I don't know.  But Anderson's quip sums up very well, I think, Bradbury's bucolic-nostalgic-Norman-Rockwell-goes-to-Mars aspect.  Bradbury had his virtues, and I liked his work very much for a few years as a kid, but he's not by any means an intellectual writer.  That is one reason why Fahrenheit 451 doesn't work: he couldn't keep his agenda -- and it was a simple one: books good! censorship bad! -- straight for any length of time.  For all my disagreements with it, Heinlein's work continues to give me something to argue with constructively: that is to say, he wrote about things that matter and still matter, which people should try to think about clearly and correctly.  Some of his apologists will try the Limbaugh-esque "Hey, I'm just an entertainer, not a politician" line in his defense, but though Heinlein himself used it sometimes, I can't believe that he didn't agree that these things were important and should be discussed, even in fiction.

I notice, by the way, as I read more of Anderson's piece on Starship Troopers, that I agree with his "politics" -- his views on human nature and society, I mean -- much more than I'd have expected.  He didn't do so well when he confronted feminist sf fans and writers later in the same decade, but he was good here.

Ecce Homo

I was very pleased to see that Avedon Carol linked to my post on Ray Bradbury. One of her commenters was not:

Bradbury's critic nails him. He repeats motifs, he gets details wrong, he doesn't like abstract art. Let's crucify the bastard! Of course, the critic seems to hate representative art, he repeats himself, and he gets details wrong, too, so get that second cross ready. In particular, he cites Bradbury being critical of a magazine honcho catering to minorities just a year before a critical segregation case, but even in the quote he uses, it's clear that Bradbury is using the word "minorities" to mean "niche audiences" -- cat lovers, dog lovers, that sort of thing.

I'm reminded of the Medved books on bad movies, where they whale away on everything, including movies that aren't really all that bad.

My primary target wasn’t Bradbury. I was twitting some of his fans who were shocked! shocked! by his opinions on minorities and other matters, as though they were recent aberrations – when in fact, those opinions also appeared in the book they claimed to love. No one expects you to remember every detail of every book you read, but if you’re a fan who’s read Fahrenheit 451 many times, you should have noticed those dismissive remarks about "minorities." They’re not just a passing detail, they’re spelled out at length in an important (if tedious) segment of the book. I have the same reaction to professed Tolkien fans who spell his name “Tolkein”: if you love him that much, you can at least spell his name right.

And of course, I don’t expect a hostile commenter to get details right either – such as the fact that, even in the quote I used, “minorities” means not only “niche audiences” but “Colored people [who] don’t like Little Black Sambo.” This part startled me when I read it too, because one of the things that had stayed with me since I read Bradbury as a kid was the episode in The Martian Chronicles where all the Negroes leave Alabama to go to Mars.

Before reading F451 last summer (and remember, I had not read it before), I reread The Martian Chronicles and The October Country. That chapter had the same soft-focus Norman-Rockwell sentimentality that suffuses a lot of the book. It’s touching, but as a cynical old adult I can’t help noticing that Bradbury’s Negroes are humble and long-suffering – they’d never pitch a fit over Little Black Sambo, and one way to make sure they never do is to ship them off to Mars. (I wonder now if that episode might have inspired Derrick Bell’s parable, in Faces at the Bottom of the Well [1992]) of an alien race offering white America a treasury of wealth and technological goodies in return for all ‘our’ black folks.)

I’m not singling out Bradbury for disparagement here. He's not really worse than most of American science fiction; the noble engineer Heinlein, to name just one other Midwesterner who struck pay dirt in the ore fields of space, is if anything even worse on race than Bradbury. The science fiction available to me as a kid was mostly the work of white males, and it imagined a future with few women and no non-whites. Isaac Asimov’s Foundation, which I also reread last summer, imagined a galactic empire in which everyone was white and male, except for one or two walk-on females. (In We boys together: teenagers in love before girl-craziness [Vanderbilt UP, 2007], Jeffery P. Dennis showed how inadvertently queer Foundation is. That’s not to say that the notorious cockhound Asimov was gay, only that his hothouse all-male imaginary world left his characters no one to lust after but each other.) Despite his sexism Heinlein, as feminist critics discovered to their surprise, created better female characters than most of his male contemporaries: they might have been Vargas girls in appearance, but they were smart, competent, and played significant roles in his stories.

That began to change at about the time I was losing interest in Golden Age SF, in the late 60s. White women and black men – or rather, a black man, Samuel Delany -- began making an impression on the field. In the mid-seventies, some women friends alerted me to the work of Joanna Russ, Anne McCaffrey, Elizabeth Lynn, and others, and SF began to interest me again. Delany was joined by a few other black writers, notably Nalo Hopkinson and the late Octavia Butler. SF and fantasy now have more variety in them, though they are still dominated by white boys.

No, I don’t want to “crucify” Bradbury. He’s just not all that good, and never was. And his views on minorities in F451, whether cat-lovers or Colored, are unfortunately not antediluvian: they survive whenever someone gripes about Political Correctness. Bradbury was prophetic all right.

Something Toothless This Way Comes

I was something of a Ray Bradbury fan in my early teens, back in the mid-1960s or so. The Martian Chronicles, of course, then R Is For Rocket, Something Wicked This Way Comes, Dandelion Wine, S Is For Space, The October Country … That was, I think, a good age to discover Bradbury. At some point, though, I realized that Bradbury didn’t have that many stories to tell, though that didn’t keep him from retelling them, and that he relied too much on his “poetic” style and not enough on substance, so I began losing interest in his writing.

I seem to remember that I read The October Country, Bradbury’s collection of horror stories, in high school, after giving up on his science fiction, and I liked it more. I’m not sure when I tried to read Fahrenheit 451, only that I gave up after a few pages. And there I stopped.

Last summer, Fahrenheit 451 was chosen for a program in my city to encourage reading, and I began thinking it was time to read it myself at long last. I’d also heard that Bradbury had objected to Michael Moore’s adaptation (or co-optation) of his title for Fahrenheit 911, whether on political or intellectual-property grounds I’m not sure. Then I read on the web that Bradbury had upset some of his liberal fans (via) by praising George W. Bush. (Not exactly news – the article had appeared in 2001, two weeks before the Big One.) As with some other recent embarrassments, Bradbury’s fans blamed his thoughtcrime on his age and ill health. They couldn’t have been such big fans, for most of the idiotic things he said to Salon’s reporter were straight out of Fahrenheit 451, as I discovered when I finally read it. (For that matter, some of the relevant material was quoted in the Salon article.)

It is, I must tell you, a silly book. (Spoilers Ahead! … if you care.) The premise is that in The Future, firemen burn books. Reading is, if not forbidden, considered deviant, and books are contraband except for romance magazines for the ladies, trade journals for the gents, and comic books for the younger set. As science fiction it’s painful: the image of “the lapping pigeon-winged books [dying] on the porch and lawn of the house", while prettily poetic, founders on the reality that books don’t burn easily.

The Salon reporter gushed over the technological details:

There's interactive television, stereo earphones (which reportedly inspired a Sony engineer to invent the Walkman), immersive wall-size TVs, earpiece communicators, rampant political correctness, omnipresent advertising and a violent youth culture ignored by self-absorbed, prescription-dependent parents.

But there’s also a scene where the hero, Montag, has “his knee slammed by the fender of a car hurtling by at ninety miles an hour. He was afraid to get up, afraid he might not be able to gain his feet at all, with an anesthetized leg.” It would be a lot more than "anesthetized", it would be shattered. But a few hours later he's able to run on it. Yes, in Bradbury’s dystopian future automobiles careen down city streets – not expressways – at extremely high speeds. Unlike the noble engineer Heinlein, Bradbury felt no need to work out how this could be; as a poet, he felt no need to visualize it clearly.

We’re told that the US has “started and won two atomic wars since 2022!” The book ends with Montag on the run with a group of other men as another atomic war begins:

The concussion knocked the air across and down the river, turned the men over like dominoes in a line, blew the water in lifting sprays, and blew the dust and made the trees above them mourn with a great wind passing away south.

So, atomic bombs have been dropped on the city from which Montag is fleeing, with the assumption that many other cities are also being struck. Bradbury seems a bit vague about how that would work. Montag and his companions are knocked over by the blast wave, but there's not a word about heat or radiation. In short, these guys are already dead, long before they get to Saint Louis, their destination, which would also surely be gone anyway. Such a small detail.

Much of the novel is mere crankitude, nostalgia for an America that never was. Early on, Montag the fireman meets Clarisse, a sylphlike young girl, who’s been raised outside the system by her uncle but now has to attend the public schools. She says, “But I don't think it's social to get a bunch of people together and not let them talk.” But that is what school was about long before this book was written, not only in my day but in Bradbury's day and long before. There never was a golden age when school was about asking questions; Clarisse's image, "It's a lot of funnels and a lot of water poured down the spout and out the bottom, and them telling us it's wine when it's not”, is a reasonable picture of the rote learning and recitation that was traditional schooling for most of human history.

“And the museums,” Clarisse goes on, “have you ever been? All abstract. That's all there is now. My uncle says it was different once. A long time back, sometimes pictures said things or even showed people.” This is interesting, because it's archetypal philistines who condemn abstract art as degenerate and demand representations: the Nazis, the Soviets, probably the Red Guards. If anything, it seems that Bradbury is quite a Red Guard himself, wanting to place severe limits on what artists can do. But it hardly matters, because it's clear that there's plenty of representation on TV and elsewhere in Bradbury / Montag's world.

Bradbury mocks the absorption of Montag’s wife Mildred in her tv show, which sounds like a soap opera: “ ... what are they mad about?” he has Montag cry. “Who are these people? Who's that man and who's that woman? Are they husband and wife, are they divorced, engaged, what? Good God, nothing's connected up.” No doubt he'd say the same thing if he walked into the middle of a play by Shakespeare. How is Mildred's interest different from, say, the crowds waiting at the New York docks, anxious to know if a fictional character (Little Nell) in a print serial was alive or dead? Tolstoy mocked foolish women's absorption in novels too (not his own, though, I take it). Who are these people in Anna Karenina? It might even be that print is the culprit, because it made it possible to flood the world with Dickens and Austen and Grisham and Danielle Steele and Ray Bradbury.

“It took some man a lifetime maybe to put some of his thoughts down," Montag laments. Women don't write, of course; women in Bradbury’s fiction tend to be either suicidal, whiskey-tippling housewives like Mildred or vague neurasthenics like Clarisse. Not that the men are anything to write home about either. Most of the great writers Bradbury reveres ground out the product, like Bradbury himself. Scribble, scribble, scribble -- eh, Mr. Gibbon? And thanks to printing, the loss of a copy, or a hundred, or a thousand, is not necessarily the destruction of a book.

“School is shortened," his fellow fireman Beatty gloats to Montag, “discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling gradually neglected, finally almost completely ignored. Life is immediate, the job counts, pleasure lies about all after work. Why learn anything save pressing buttons, pulling switches, fitting nuts and bolts? ... The zipper displaces the button and a man lacks just that much time to think while dressing at dawn, a philosophical hour, and thus a melancholy hour." Come now, buttons are for servants to fasten for us.

“With schools turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators, the word 'intellectual,' of course, became the swear word it deserved to be.” When did the schools turn out critics, etc.? It's intellectuals, by the way, who like abstract art, while a levelling society like this one would be more likely to fill its museums with Norman Rockwell, Keane children, and Elvis on black velvet. Bradbury's also ignorant of history: “Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says.” That's the Declaration of Independence, Ray. (I know – picky, picky, picky!)

Then there’s the part that Bradbury’s twenty-first century fans thought was the stroke-addled ranting of an old man, but which he committed to print in 1953. Beatty’s lecture continues: “Now let's take up the minorities in our civilization, shall we? Bigger the population, the more minorities. Don't step on the toes of the dog-lovers, the cat-lovers, etc. ... The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that! … You must understand that our civilization is so vast that we can't have our minorities upset and stirred.” It's worth remembering that this book was originally published the year before Brown v. Board of Education. “... Colored people don't like Little Black Sambo. Burn it! White people don't feel good about Uncle Tom's Cabin. [Neither do 'colored.'] Burn it. Someone's written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping? Burn the book.” And yet this piece of tripe is still in print after 55 years.

“But the public, knowing what it wanted, let the comic books survive. And the three-dimensional sex magazines." And the science fiction pulps that published not Bradbury (who got into the slicks early on) but other sf writers. "... you are allowed to read comics, the good old confessions, or trade journals." Again, Bradbury is vague on just who’s to blame here: is it the Public, the Gummint, or the Corporations?

But I think its incoherence helps Fahrenheit 451: in all the speechifying and pretty symbolism, there’s something for everyone to fasten onto. I liked Montag’s questions after his account of the two atomic wars: “Is it because we're having so much fun at home we've forgotten the world? Is it because we're so rich and the rest of the world's so poor and we just don't care if they are? I've heard rumors, the world is starving, but we're well fed. Is it true, the world works hard and we play? Is that why we're hated so much?" Fahrenheit 451 is a mirror. It contains a gripe and a bitch about our decadent society for just about everyone; look into it and you’ll see your own complaints reflected back to you. The rest you can forget.

The final irony isn’t part of the book proper, it’s the “Note About The Author” at the end of the Fiftieth Anniversary Edition that I read. It mentions Bradbury's books in passing while dwelling on his TV and film credits:

Ray Bradbury has published some twenty-seven books -- novels, stories, plays, essays, and poems -- since his first story appeared when he was twenty years old. He began writing for the movies in 1952 -- with the script for his own Beast From 20,000 Fathoms. The next year he wrote the screenplay for It Came From Outer Space. In 1953 he lived in Ireland writing the script of Moby Dick for John Huston. In 1961 he wrote the narration spoken by Orson Welles for King of Kings, and the short animated film Icarus Montgolfier Wright, based on his story of the history of flight, was nominated for an Academy Award. Films have been made of his "Picasso Summer," The Illustrated Man, Fahrenheit 451, and Something Wicked This Way Comes. Since 1985 he has adapted his stories for his own half-hour show on USA Cable Television.

For a famously technophobic author who told his Salon interviewer, “You can't have a civilization without that, can you? If you can't read and write you can't think. Your thoughts are dispersed if you don't know how to read and write”, Bradbury seems to have gone over to the Dark Side. If this were his Fahrenheit 451 future, he'd be one of the people grinding out the pap for those immersive TV screens, ensnaring housewives in their web of banality.