The forbidden book club
In mid-November I finished reading the historical novel The Paris Bookseller (Berkley, 2022) by Kerri Maher, about Sylvia Beach and the Shakespeare and Company bookstore in 1920’s. I already knew about the Shakespeare and Company store, it’s founder Sylvia Beach, and the role the shop played as a meeting place for Lost Generation writers in Paris. But I didn’t know any details about Beach’s life. So for those reasons, it was an interesting read.
2022 was the hundredth anniversary of Beach’s publication of James Joyce’s banned book Ulysses. Considered by many to be the greatest novel of the 20th century, Ulysses was banned for a time in the USA and the UK because it was deemed obscene and pornographic.
As I was reading The Paris Bookseller, I realized that in some American school districts today this book would likewise be subject to censorship because of its descriptions of Beach’s sapphic relationship with her French companion, Adrienne Monnier.
Book censorship is one of the things America is known for in the world now. Let’s face it - Americans like to censor and ban books. Frankly, American culture does not genuinely believe in either freedom of speech and expression, or freedom of conscience. I’ve read stories in the media of some defiant American high schoolers forming ‘banned book clubs’ in which the members only read books that have been forbidden and banned from their school libraries.
I haven’t read Ulysses, and I’m not very interested in it because I don’t dig stream-of-consciousness writing. I did read, finish and enjoy Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) and Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, but that’s about it. But Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound? I’m old fashioned enough that I like stories that make sense. I like grammatical sentences and punctuation.
People who are motivated to ban, censor or challenge books are diminished human beings.
In the United States, the majority of banned, censored or challenged books are not banned, censored or challenged nation-wide by the government or by federal courts, but here and there across the country by individual public libraries and public school boards whose administrators are elected to office. The reasons for being banned, censored or challenged are varied, including pro-socialist views, pro-communist views biased religion, violence, adult content, descriptions of nudity, explicit sexuality, sex education, rape, LGBT content - a lot of sex stuff - homosexuality, supernaturalism, witchcraft, offensive language, coarse language, racial stereotypes, profanity, abortion, murder, suicide, drug use, anti-religion and anti-family themes, bullying, racism, incest, tobacco and alcohol use, disobedience, obscene language, child abuse, general crime, references to masturbation, references to death, misogyny and more. Everything a person can imagine plus the kitchen sink. Banning books like this seems like a ridiculous attempt to cleanse our human lives of the realities that we live with. Literature and are supposed to reflect our humanity, therefore to ‘cleanse’ our libraries and gallery walls is a disservice to our own nature. The motives to ban, censor or challenge books are dishonest and misanthropic. It’s less that the censors hate the art than that they hate themselves and reject the mirror that artists hold up to society. It’s sad, because people who are motivated to ban, censor or challenge books are diminished human beings. Or not.
I began to consider the challenged or banned books that I have read, the books that would comprise my own library of banned and censored ideas. This is my personal banned library:
the Bible,
the Quran,
The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774),
Rights of Man (1791),
Frankenstein (1818),
Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852),
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885),
The Communist Manifesto (1848),
The Call of the Wild (1903),
The Great Gatsby (1925),
Mein Kampf (1925),
A Farewell to Arms (1929),
Brave New World (1932),
Gone With the Wind (1936),
Of Mice and Men (1937),
The Grapes of Wrath (1939),
Animal Farm (1945),
The Naked and the Dead (1948),
Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl (1948),
Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949),
The Catcher in the Rye (1951),
Lord of the Flies (1954),
Lord of the Rings (1954),
Howl (1955),
Doctor Zhivago (1955),
To Kill a Mockingbird (1960),
A Clockwork Orange (1962),
In Cold Blood (1966),
The Outsiders (1967),
White Niggers of America (1967),
the entire Harry Potter series (1997-2007),
The Anarchist’s Cookbook (1971),
The Joy of Sex (1972),
Sophie’s Choice (1979),
The Color Purple (1983),
Less Than Zero (1985),
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985),
The Satanic Verses (1988),
A Time to Kill (1989),
The Pillars of the Earth (1989),
American Psycho (1991),
Fifty Shades of Grey (2011).