Dead Letters: "The Fire"

Filed by Fletcher Moody — Literary Correspondent
 

I was sent to Eldon, Missouri, in November 1953, to cover a bonfire.

The Parent-Teacher Council of Eldon had voted, by a margin I was told was comfortable, to collect and publicly burn a selection of comic books, paperback novels, and other materials deemed — the word used in the press release was "injurious" — to the moral development of children. This was not unusual. Dozens of towns across the country were holding similar events that year. I was sent because my editor thought a small item about it might fill a half-column on page nine, and because I was, as always, the one who could be spared.

The bonfire was held in the parking lot behind the First Baptist church on a Saturday afternoon. Someone had built a wooden frame and filled it with kindling. The books were in cardboard boxes. There were perhaps sixty or seventy people in attendance, plus a minister, plus the head of the PTA, plus, eventually, me.

It was a cold day. People had brought their children. Someone had brought coffee in a percolator. The mood was not angry. That was the thing I noted in my pad and later could not get out of my head. The mood was cheerful. Civic. These were people doing what they believed was right for their community, and they were doing it with the satisfaction of a job that needed doing.

The minister said a few words. The PTA chair said a few words. The books were placed on the pyre. Someone lit it. The fire caught quickly. Paper burns at 451 degrees Fahrenheit, a fact I did not know at the time and would not learn until some months later, when I read it on the cover of a novel.

I was standing near the back of the crowd, writing in my notebook, when I became aware that someone was standing next to me.

He was a young man — early thirties, dark-haired, wearing a coat that was too thin for the weather. He was not writing anything down. He was not taking photographs. He was watching the fire with an expression I have spent fifty years trying to describe and have never succeeded. It was not anger. It was not grief. It was the face of a man watching something he had already seen — something he had written down before it happened and was now watching come true.

He did not speak to me. I did not speak to him. We stood side by side for the duration of the burn, which took approximately twenty minutes. At one point a page, not yet fully consumed, lifted on the heat and floated upward, still burning, and we both watched it rise until it was ash.

When it was over, the crowd dispersed. The man remained for a moment, looking at the embers. Then he put his hands in his coat pockets and walked to a car parked on the far side of the lot. He drove away. I did not get his name.

Eight months later, in a bookshop in Chicago, I saw a novel on the front table with a cover the color of a match head. The title was Fahrenheit 451. The author's photograph was on the back.

It was the man from Eldon.

I bought the book. I read it in one sitting. I have never written about that afternoon until now, because I did not know what to say about it. A man wrote a novel about a country that burns its books, and then he drove to a town that was burning its books, and he stood in the cold and watched. He did not protest. He did not intervene. He did not introduce himself to the crowd or to the minister or to the PTA chair or to the reporter standing next to him with a notebook and nothing to write in it. He just watched.

I think he was taking notes. Not on paper. Somewhere else.

I filed 200 words about the bonfire. It ran on page eleven. I did not mention the man in the thin coat.

I never got the quote.

— F.M.

Fletcher Moody is a literary correspondent. His column, "Dead Letters," covers the stranger truths of literary history. It appears when it appears.