The Banned and the Beautiful

“Flophouse” made me giggle.  I’d never heard such a word, and when I pulled the slim yellow volume from my parents’ bookshelves, admiring the bold red print along the spine and the rough, burlap texture of  its cover, I wasn’t certain at first I’d read it correctly.  But there it was: “flophouse”.

Paging through the book I found it once, twice, and twice again.  I giggled every time I read it, and went running down the stairs to the Big People’s party.

“What’s a flophouse?” I asked my Dad.  “What are you reading now?” he asked in turn, not even bothering to look up from his cards.

What I was reading was John Steinbeck’s  Cannery Row. Unlike another of his classics, The Grapes of Wrath, the saga of Doc and Dora, Mack, Hazel and Eddie never was banned by any library or school board I know of, but in my parents’ household, banning would have been irrelevant. Books were written, and books were meant to be read. If the reader happened to be a third-grader who’d pulled a grown-up novel off the shelves because she was attracted by the cover, so be it. Their assumption was that I’d be interested, or not, and if a grown-up book piqued my interest there was plenty of time to look up unfamiliar words or talk about life in a flophouse.

My parents’ willingness to allow my friends and I to roam their library at will reflected a tolerance not usually associated with 1950’s middle America, but it was common in our community.  Grade-schoolers started with Dick and Jane and worked their way through the children’s classics, but as early as third grade we were allowed to browse more “grown-up” sections of the school library. At the town library, all that was needed was a note from a parent to allow older grade-schoolers access to the stacks and freedom to check out whatever books they pleased.

In that world of Bookmobiles, neighborhood reading clubs and programs for Junior Librarians, the importance of reading was assumed, and the freedom to read considered inviolable. If a book captured our imaginations or told a story particularly well, it might be re-read a dozen times or more. If we found a book offensive, upsetting, poorly-crafted or flat boring, we’d simply put it down and walk away.

In either case, it was assumed the decision was ours to make. Teachers, parents and librarians certainly shaped, suggested and prodded as we made our way along our literary paths, but censorship in the form of a flat prohibition never touched our lives.

As this year’s  Banned Books Week draws to a close, that absence of censorship during my school years seems even more remarkable. There was no shortage of literary classics in my high school curriculum – Melville, Hawthorne, Shakespeare, Bronte, Aeschylus, Dickens and Tolstoy all were included – but there was room for more contemporary writers as well.

Our reading list was rich and varied, a feast of contemporary American letters. And yet every book pictured above, and more, have been targeted for removal from classrooms and libraries. Some have been burned. Some authors have been threatened with death. Booksellers determined to make copies available have lost their business or been forced to move. Many authors have had to fight decades-long battles on behalf of their work.

According to the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, at least 42 of the Radcliffe Publishing Course Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century have been the target of attempts to ban. Reading through the list  itself is bemusing. Contemplating the reasons for the challeges can be horrifying.

While the burning of books by the Nazis, the Irish, or the East St. Louis Public Library (The Grapes of Wrath,1939) is dramatic, the on-going pressure to silence authors, distort points of view and manipulate facts is both insidious and pervasive. When combined with attempts by both liberals and conservatives to force textbooks to serve as vehicles for particular social and political agendas, the result is what Tamim Ansary calls the “blanding” of education. In the textbook approval process in states such as Texas and California, the need to please politically-appointed state boards and bureaucracies leads to a self-censorship on the part of textbook writers fully as damaging to the educational process and freedom of expression as the blatant removal of The Color Purple from a library or issuance of a fatwa against Salman Rushdie for his Satanic Verses.

The reasons for censorship certainly vary from one decade to another and among communities. Prudishness, prejudice of every sort and the particular form of self-righteousness known as political correctness all have played their role.

But in the end, it is fear which seems to underlie the impulse toward censorship and nearly all attempts to control the world of others: fear of complexity and ambiguity, fear of the stranger, fear that one’s judgments about the nature of life itself may be wrong and above all a fearful refusal to see the world as it is, in all of its glorious and sometimes disturbing manifestations.  When an author says, “This is how I see the world”, we are free to look away, but we have no right to deny publication of the vision.

That said, in a world still vulnerable to censorship and intimidation the question remains: what are we to do?

One of the first recomendations of the American Library Association is to read a banned book. This doesn’t mean you have to pick up  Lady Chatterley’s Lover or Lolita. Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and Jack London’s The Call of the Wild have taken a few hits themselves, and would make fine selections for banned-book reading. One of the happy secrets of life is that banned books often are great books, filled with insight, beauty and the pure pleasure of words.  To read a banned book is neither a chore nor a distasteful obligation. It simply is another route to that wonderful destination called “taking some time out to read”.

Another, quite practical step is to become aware of challenges to literature, textbooks and library materials, services and programs.  Talk to librarians and teachers. Make an effort to find out which groups are attempting to influence textbook content, and why.  Acquaint yourself with local school board policies, evaluate them for fairness and appropriateness, and monitor their application.

Finally, become a reader who explores new pathways and learns to appreciate quality.  If you prefer essays, try Neil Gaiman.  If you’ve never met a bodice-ripper you didn’t enjoy, sidle into the Literary Fiction aisle and see what Southern Gothic is about. Take advantage of the bookblogging movement on the internet for quality reviews and trenchant discussion. Bloggers such as Dolce Bellezza, Stainless Steel Droppings, and The Third Storey Window are rich with recommendations, analysis and links to other authors and critics.

Over a half-century has passed since I clattered down those stairs into my parents’ bridge party, clutching my first copy of Steinbeck and confident my Daddy would satisfy my curiosity about flophouses. 

If the world has changed far beyond our imaginings, the larger lessons he taught on such nights have not. Books are treasures to be cherished and protected. Reading matters because life matters. The freedoms to write, publish and read must remain inviolable if freedom itself is to prevail, and censorship violates everyone it touches. As Ray Bradbury puts it, “There is more than one way to burn a book, and the world is full of people running about with lit matches.”

Keep your garden hose handy.

 

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