Tinderbox Page 12
Most of the moments in my life are moments spent not writing. Bradbury didn’t have this problem. When he died on June 5, 2012, at the age of 91, he had published more than five hundred works including short stories, novels, plays, screenplays and verse. Yet his tombstone simply reads: author of Fahrenheit 451. The novel remains his most famous work; every banned books day the internet is aflame with quotes from Fahrenheit 451. Bradbury’s classic dystopia stands for freedom of speech and love of literature worldwide.
I recently read Bradbury’s book Zen and the Art of Writing. If there is anyone who needs this book it’s me. I am the least Zen person I know. This is Ray’s mantra: Work. Relax. Don’t think. I think he’s right. Creativity comes from the subconscious mind. That’s where Iggle Piggle came from. Iggle Piggle is beyond censorship, especially self-censorship. People often say I think I’ve got a book in me. Well, I thought I had a book in me too. But it turned out that I actually had Ray Bradbury’s book in me.
I tried to rewrite Fahrenheit 451. Permission denied. Autobiography: the consolation prize. I knew I wasn’t going to rise from the flames like the phoenix emblazoned on the uniform of Bradbury’s firemen. But perhaps like the salamander I could scuttle out of the fire and live within it, despite it? I could evade my predators by using tail autonomy.
In the morning I got up, shelved the letter from the Estate in my underwear drawer and read Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretation. Bloom begins by spelling out that Fahrenheit 451 is a period piece, noting, ‘this short, thin, rather tendentious novel has an ironic ability to inhabit somewhat diverse periods’. Totes. I found the rest of the essays in the book academic and boring. Even the one titled ‘To Build a Mirror Factory: The Mirror and Self-examination in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451’.
Bradbury was once a consultant for NASA. In 2009 he told the New York Times that the Internet wasn’t real, it was just out there in the air somewhere. Fair point, but Fahrenheit 451 isn’t real either and now it’s in the air too.
Online the fan fiction is teeming like rain. In ‘Water Droplets Falling’ by Ashleigh12917, Clarisse looks back over her shoulder and sees Montag taste the rain. Then she tastes the rain again, anew. Perhaps this is a metaphor for the relationship between author and reader? In her last moments Ashleigh12917’s Clarisse feels only the tingly sensation of water droplets falling, unfettered by the Bradbury Estate.
Most of the Fahrenheit 451 fan fiction runs out of steam after a few paragraphs. Like me, the fans only manage to emit sparks. Not many have taken on the narrative from Mildred’s perspective, except Angelcupcake1. In her story ‘My Lost Love’ Mildred tears up old photographs of Montag, her cheeks as rosy as a peach. You go girl.
I closed my laptop and walked to Aro Video. Spring was on the make. The sky clear of clouds. My work safely stored in the cloud. I was free to be just another pedestrian. Aro Video is housed in a two story wooden villa on a friendly street populated by other Indies. Pedestrians sat crosslegged outside cafes: flat whites, flat screens. Outside the video shop a box of discounted stock.
At the counter the owner told me, ‘You can sponsor a DVD.’
‘Can I sponsor Fahrenheit 451?’ I asked.
‘No. That’s not how the scheme works.’ He told me about their new patronage system. Customers can contribute money towards the purchase of new titles – DVDs that are not already in the store catalogue. It’s part of their effort to stay afloat in the wake of online streaming and illegal downloads.
‘But I want to sponsor Fahrenheit 451,’ I said. ‘Maybe you should invent a new scheme where people can pay to sponsor their favourite DVD.’
The owner frowned. I outlined the concept again but he wasn’t buying.
I paid my late fines and rented Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 for the upteeneth time. I could have watched it on YouTube but it’s not the same. YouTube doesn’t have the DVD extras. It’s what happened behind the scenes that really interested me. How else could I have learnt about the film’s editor Thom Noble, who would go on to win an Oscar for his work on Thelma and Louise? Or Ann Bell the young actress whose best scene was lost on the cutting room floor? Bell would later star in Tenko (Tenko! I fucking loved Tenko, especially the opening title sequence of that red moon prisoned behind barbed wire). Or that the composer Bernard Hermann had worked exclusively with string and perscussion instruments on the soundtrack – including the jaunty xylophone that accompanied the bright red fire engine as it raced round the set of Pinewood studios, burning rubber.
‘So why this again? Are you studying the film?’ the video store owner asked.
‘No. I’m writing a book about Fahrenheit 451.’ I explained the ruckus with the estate. The end of Borders.
The knowledgable owner looked uncomfortable.
‘Sounds a bit meta,’ he said.
‘Yes, it is a bit meta,’ I reached up and touched my face, cheek burning. Time for another apology. ‘That’s the last thing we need,’ I said.
What do they look like: the booksellers of the future? What do they think about in cities we can only imagine through the lens of science fiction? Do paperbacks still exist? Do people continue to type? Has the Kindle been eradicated, its memory wiped? Imagine a world with no internet. A lonely search engine evacuated; the sun seen through a gauze of smog; the moon its pale fascimile. But maybe the future has turned out simpler than we ever dreamed.
The white page. The cave wall. The wavering screen. A finger swiped across a tablet, a quill dipped in ink, the nib of a pen quivering, sniffing out the scent of a new story.
Now.
Are you ready for the SparkNotes Fahrenheit 451 quiz?
It took me fifteen seconds to answer the quiz. I only got one question wrong.
Q. Which of the following is not presented as a reason why books are banned in the future?
Other forms of entertainment become more popular.
Books contain ideas that might undermine authority.
The amount of printed material is too overwhelming.
Books make people feel inferior.
The timer went off.
Incendiary Notes
This is a work of non-fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are, sadly, not the products of my imagination. Including Nicky Boardman the general manager I worked for at Borders Norwich. In 2015 Nicky died – at 34-years-old – from a rare type of cancer. Nicky was one in a million. After Borders UK was liquidated he wrote over 500 references for ex-employees. I hope he’s been promoted to God.
Also, I think I should state for the record that a group of staff at Borders Norwich once complained that I was a nightmare to work with. My crimes included shouting and refusing to give a staff member a toliet break. I have nothing to offer in my defence.
I did finish NaNoWriMo in 2013. I wrote 50,000 words. Most were incoherent. It’s taken a few more matches to strike Tinderbox. The draft I finally sent out to agents pitted my failed rewrite of the novel against my failed Borders career. Truffaut’s film entered the frame late in the piece because I needed a way to write about Fahrenheit 451 without writing directly about Bradbury’s characters. And I felt sorry for Truffaut. His film was a flop too.
Recently I was amused to come across film critic Pauline Kael’s original review of Fahrenheit 451. For Kael the whole conceit was a bad idea from the get go. She said Truffaut’s F451 wasn’t a very good movie – but she thought the idea behind it was so naff it was actually brilliant – ‘people want to see it and then want to talk about how it should have been worked out.’
I laughed. How true. Kael argues that Fahrenheit 451 is a gimmick that turns books into totems, tapping into a kind of liberal hysteria. She points out that print is ultimately as neutral as the screen. I felt liberally hysterical reading her review. At one level I was off the hook. It’s not me, it’s Bradbury. But it was me too. Because I was another book fetishist that had been inflamed by his vision.
One good thing to come out of all this is that
Aro Video took me up on my marketing idea and it has been a raging success. Customers love adopting their favourite film titles and they get a certificate to prove it.
Last but not least:
Dear Ray Bradbury, I never wanted to write a book about your book or a book about the film of your book but redundancy can do funny things to do a girl. It can make her uncomfortable.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to my long suffering family for their support and cheer: Rico, Fearnebot, Mum, Dad. Thanks to Jenny Downham for calm under fire, Yvonne for help with Photoshop and Kushana, the pigeon-fancier. Special thanks to all the staff at Borders who put up with me over the years and to the 2013 class of CREW 257, especially Helen Curran. And my gratitude to Harry Ricketts for first suggesting this book could be so. Last but not least thanks to Elly and Sam at Galley Beggar (I think it helped that you had both read Fahrenhiet 451) and to Creative New Zealand for the arts grant that enabled me to finish this book; and to my agent Veronique Baxter.
And dear Ray Bradbury: Here’s to your book. I hope the future within it never ever comes true.
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Copyright
First published in 2017
by Galley Beggar Press Limited
37 Dover Street, Norwich, NR2 3LG
All rights reserved © Megan Dunn, 2017
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Paper ISBN: 9781910296820
This ebook ISBN: 9781910296868
Original typeset by Tetragon, London