May 24, 2018 11:55AM

That Time When They Censored Fahrenheit 451

The reviews of HBO’s “Fahrenheit 451” haven’t been so good, but at least the publicity should lead more people to read a great dystopian novel. Talking about the book many years later, Bradbury said, “I wasn’t worried about freedom, I was worried about people being turned into morons by TV…the moronic influence of popular culture through local TV news and the proliferation of giant screens and the bombardment of factoids.” If only he could see our current culture, where TV news agitates viewers into warring tribes.

But he certainly portrayed a society in which an authoritarian government burns books, and most people have seen it as a powerful warning about censorship. Which makes it particularly ironic, and more significant every day, that Fahrenheit 451 itself was censored — trimmed, expurgated, bowdlerized — by people who no doubt thought they had the best of intentions.

When Bradbury discovered what had been done, he wrote this Coda to the 1979 Del Rey edition. It’s worth reading today. What he said then is still true: “There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people run­ning about with lit matches.” Read the Coda, then read the book:





Two weeks ago my mountain of mail delivered forth a pipsqueak mouse of a letter from a well‐​known publishing house that wanted to reprint my story “The Fog Horn” in a high school reader.

In my story, I had described a lighthouse as hav­ing, late at night, an illumination coming from it that was a “God‐​Light.” Looking up at it from the view‐​point of any sea‐​creature one would have felt that one was in “the Presence.”

The editors had deleted “God‐​Light” and “in the Presence.”


Simplicity itself. Skin, debone, demarrow, scarify, melt, render down and destroy. Every adjective that counted, every verb that moved, every metaphor that weighed more than a mosquito — out! Every simile that would have made a sub-moron’s mouth twitch — gone! Any aside that explained the two‐​bit philosophy of a first‐​rate writer — lost!


Do you begin to get the damned and incredible picture?

How did I react to all of the above?

By “firing” the whole lot.


The point is obvious. There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people run­ning about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist / Unitarian, Irish / Italian / Octogenarian / Zen Buddhist, Zionist/​Seventh‐​day Adventist, Women’s Lib/​Republican, Mattachine/​Four Square Gospel feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse. Every dimwit editor who sees himself as the source of all dreary blanc‐​mange plain porridge unleavened literature, licks his guillotine and eyes the neck of any author who dares to speak above a whisper or write above a nursery rhyme.


“Shut the door, they’re coming through the win­dow, shut the window, they’re coming through the door,” are the words to an old song. They fit my life‐​style with newly arriving butcher/​censors every month. Only six weeks ago, I discovered that, over the years, some cubby‐​hole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating the young, had, bit by bit, censored some 75 separate sections from the novel. Students, reading the novel which, after all, deals with censorship and book‐​burning in the fu­ture, wrote to tell me of this exquisite irony. Judy‐​Lynn Del Rey, one of the new Ballantine editors, is having the entire book reset and republished this summer with all the damns and hells back in place.


But, for now, the university wrote back that they hardly dared do my play — it had no women in it! And the ERA ladies on campus would descend with ball‐​bats if the drama department even tried!



For it is a mad world and it will get madder if we allow the minorities, be they dwarf or giant, orangu­tan or dolphin, nuclear‐​head or water‐​conversation­ist, pro‐​computerologist or Neo‐​Luddite, simpleton or sage, to interfere with aesthetics. The real world is the playing ground for each and every group, to make or unmake laws. But the tip of the nose of my book or stories or poems is where their rights end and my territorial imperatives begin, run and rule. If Mor­mons do not like my plays, let them write their own. If the Irish hate my Dublin stories, let them rent type‐​writers. If teachers and grammar school editors find my jawbreaker sentences shatter their mushmilk teeth, let them eat stale cake dunked in weak tea of their own ungodly manufacture. If the Chicano intel­lectuals wish to re‐​cut my “Wonderful Ice Cream Suit” so it shapes “Zoot,” may the belt unravel and the pants fall.


In sum, do not insult me with the beheadings, finger‐​choppings or the lung‐​defiations you plan for my works. I need my head to shake or nod, my hand to wave or make into a fist, my lungs to shout or whis­per with. I will not go gently onto a shelf, degutted, to become a non‐​book.


And no one can help me. Not even you.