Ban the Banning
September 28, 2008

Few books are banned at least for any length of time in the United States. But a lot are challenged for their content and face temporary removal from public access. That’s what Banned Books Week (BBW), the annual “celebration of the freedom to read,” is about. Since its beginning in 1982, more than one thousand books have been challenged in every city and hundreds of communities. Some are challenged for sexual content, others for violence or profanity, some for political views, others for offensive portrayals of racial or religious groups or even for positive portrayals of gays and lesbians. But in all cases, some one or some group decided that what was wrong for one was wrong for all.

Now I’m not a parent, but it seems to me that if there’s one way to get an older child or especially a teenager to read a book it is to forbid her to read it. That’s what has always puzzled me about parents who go out of their way to stridently take up the cause of censoring or attempting to ban books from their school and public libraries or classrooms. I can clearly remember enough of my rebellious feelings to know that if my parents had done that I would have thrown over my television crush of the moment to get at those books.

Bear in mind that I do believe parents have and must retain the right to control their children’s reading. Not all books are appropriate for everyone, even for adults. But, really, those of us who have been teenagers—which is of course all of us—know that sexual curiosity is a natural part of that time. At that age you are going to seek out sexual content whether online or in books.

For me, the most salacious book of my early teen years was Harold Robbins’ The Carpetbaggers. I was eleven years of age when it was published in 1961, though I don’t think I read it until I was about thirteen. I can’t remember if my parents knew I had it though I doubt they did. This was at a time when I couldn’t go and see the Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello beach party movies because the Catholic Church banned its members from seeing them. But this book wasn’t exactly innocent. There was real sex in it, tame though it would be by today’s standards. That book with that  made my body tingle. Though I had many years to go before I knew what sex was the sexual feelings aroused by reading the book were powerful, and the name of Jonas Cord, even today, brings back some of those feelings despite the fact that the book is not much more than, as someone wrote in an Amazon review: “business deal, gratuitous sex scene, business deal, gratuitous sex scene.” I probably skipped the business deals.

Not much later I found another decidedly non-literary but equally hot-at-the-time novel, Valley of the Dolls. I was reaching the end of my teen years and the beginning of my adult ones when it was published in 1966, and while it seemed tamer in one respect it was hotter in another with its emphasis on drugs (though there was plenty of sex as well).

As I grew up so did my literary tastes. A number of books that routinely make challenged lists are on my Proud to Have Read list: The Grapes of Wrath, All Quiet on the Western Front, 1984, The Ugly American, Slaughterhouse-Five, Mein Kampf, The Ugly American, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Pentagon Papers, Montaigne’s essays, An American Tragedy, The Bluest Eye, And Tango Makes Three, The Color Purple, Fanny Hill, Our Bodies, Ourselves, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Madame Bovary, Women In Love, The Bell Jar, Catch-22, Fahrenheit 451, Of Mice and Men and many more.

One of my favorites is Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov’s tragicomedy interspersing wry observations of American culture with the story of a man’s sexual obsession and seduction of a twelve-year-old girl. I first read it in my early thirties, and have read it several times since. Thought disturbing it is also an extraordinary piece of writing. Nabokov uses the English language (not his native one) as  carefully and perfectly as master carpet maker weaves his threads. Words are precise and strung together in a way that makes sentences blaze with a thousand candlepower. They hold the reader in captivity with its horrifying story so beautifully expressed.

In a 2005 article celebrating the 50th anniversary of Lolita’s publication, Leland de la Durantaye wrote, “What has so fascinated and divided readers is how one should react to the novel. Or, in other words, how to be ‘entranced with the book while abhorring its author.’” He also quotes Lionel Trilling, who in 1958 noted that “we find ourselves the more shocked when we realize that, in the course of reading the novel, we have come virtually to condone the violation it presents . . ..”

It can hardly be a surprise that such a story would have a long history of censorship and banning. It has been termed “filth” and called “sheer unrestrained pornography.” First published in Paris in 1955, it was finally issued in the U.S. by G.P. Putnam’s Sons three years later. And it hasn’t had a moment’s rest since. Presented as a psychiatric case study but written by the pedophiliac protagonist Humbert Humbert prior to his trial (he died before being tried), the novel is a self-portrait of the reasons and actions of a reflective man and his obsession with young girls. In less skilled hands than Nabokov’s, the idea would no doubt have been mere, probably bad pornography. In his, it is Literature.

When Humbert, who has not yet revealed her mother’s accidental death to Lolita, picks her up from a summer camp to leave their hometown and travel, he plans his seduction carefully. He also rationalizes himself as a “tenderhearted, morbidly sensitive, infinitely circumspect hero” pleading through the manuscript to the potential jurors to “discern the doe in me, trembling in the forest of my own iniquity.” How clear he is about his wickedness yet how justifying of his own evil!

She was again fast asleep, my nymphet, but still I did not dare to launch upon my enchanted voyage. La Petite Dormeuse ou l’Amant Ridicule. Tomorrow I would stuff her with those earlier pills that had so thoroughly numbed her mummy. In the glove compartment—or I the Gladstone bag? Should I wait a solid hour and then creep up again? The science of nympholepsy is a precise science. Actual contact would do it in one second flat. An interspace of a millimeter would do it in ten. Let us wait.

Wait he did. But not for long. The next morning, on the road, she in the front seat of the car with him when she forces from him the revelation that her mother is dead.

In the gay town of Lepingville I bought her four books  of comics, a box of candy, a box of sanitary pads, two cokes, a manicure set, a travel clock with a luminous dial, a ring with a red topaz, a tennis racket, roller skates with white high shoes, field glasses, a portable radio set, chewing gum, a transparent raincoat, sunglasses, some more garments—swooners, shorts, all kinds of summer frocks. At the hotel we had separate rooms, but in the middle of the night she came sobbing into mine, and we made it up very gently. You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go.

It is that last line that for me is the most frightening, most powerful line I have ever read in any book. Its horror comes from its context, of course, but the nine words, seven of which are single syllable words, together form a sentence that left me gasping. The first time I read that line I had to put the book down and walk away. I stayed away from it for three weeks. I knew I would go back to it, but I needed time to face what I was reading, to try and not only decipher my feelings about the story but to attempt to come to an understanding of my feelings about it.

I don’t think I ever wholly accomplished that. The book still distresses me. I do not have a black-and-white perception of Humbert, Charlotte, Quilty Lolita. I tend to see a little more with each rereading, to gain a deeper insight into the role of complex relationships between people and in cultural values and mores. I chose to read it for what it teaches me. And isn’t that what we all deserve—the right to choose? Remember that this week.

(Many thanks to Unshelved for their kind permission to reproduce the cartoon.)

Upcoming Book Festivals:
From October 2-4, Amelia Island, Florida, will be hosting its Amelia Island Book Festival. A desire to make their home known as a “book island,” the founders created this event where that offers readers the opportunity to hear their favorite authors talk and read their own work, attend workshops, and enjoy signings, luncheons, a cruise and parties, and schedule agent pitches in a historic town. Part of the event includes the “Authors-in-Schools” day where children get to meet those who make their living through words.

The Novell Festival of Reading in Carlotte, North Carolina, “A festival celebrating books and learning” is the tagline for this two-week long fair which offers evenings with various authors, a Carolina Writers Night, a Book Brunch, a WordPlay Saturday, book signings and readings and more.

Litquake, appropriately held in San Francisco, California, is a week long book festival, this year running from October 3-11. Celebrating the city’s reputation as a literary and arts center as well as the earthquake-prone area that it is, Litquake showcases hundreds of authors and 22 events spread over eight days at various theatres, bars, galleries, retail outlets, laundromats, even libraries and bookstores. An amazing festival.

The Louisiana Book Festival, which will take place in Baton Rouge on Saturday, October 4, features a wide array of authors covering many genres from Arts to Westerns, and activities specially for children and teens (including a Young Readers Pavilion), cooking demonstrations and an entertainment stage.

The 6th annual Collingswood Book Festival features over 30 authors and entertainers this year in New Jersey on Saturday, October 4. It will be held under tents along the historic Haddon Avenue. Events include poetry readings, a special Loompaland children’s areas, live entertainment, an extensive used book section, A week of activities lead up to this day-long festival which includes appearances by adult and children’s authors, poetry readings, and plenty of music and live theatre performances.

Also on Saturday, October 4, is the Book ’Em: Buy a Book and Stop a Crook book festival in Lebanon, New Hampshire. A unique idea for a book festival, but one that works extremely well! Its purpose is to raise funds for organizations dedicated to increasing literacy  rates, decreasing crime rates, helping police solve crimes, and  raising public awareness of the link between high illiteracy  rates and high crime rates. The Lebanon Police Department is the primary host for this fair which features dozens of authors in many genres who talk about writing, the publishing industry and other topics of interests and entertainment for children.

Sunday, October 5 is when the Orange County Children’s Book Festival happens. It’s a two-day event, this festival includes three different stages (animal, international and sports) with authors and vendors of books related to them, an entertainment stage, and panels. More than 80 vendors and a dozen renowned illustrators, who will talk about and demonstrate their work, will be there. Food and drink as well as an abundance of children’s activities such as face painting, clowns, musicians, readings and drawings are guaranteed to keep children of all ages happy.

Of Interest:
The University of California Press is having a fantastic book sale from now through October 31. You can visit their sale page and browse titles. I think you will be amazed at the variety (including art, cinema & performance art, classical studies,  earth science & ecology, food & cooking, gender studies, geography, history, literature, music, natural history,  poetry, politics, religion, wine) and quality. When you are ready to order—and I am sure you will be—enter the discount code: 09M5306.

This Week . . .
FMR, an Italian publisher of exquisite art books, recently released a breathtaking volume—Michelangelo: La dotta mano (Michelangelo: The learned hand). Click on the arrow at right to journey though it. Yes, that  cover is real marble, the image a miniature of the Madonna della Scala. Handmade endpapers lead the way in to original photographs by Aurelio Amendola. It even comes with a guarantee of 500 years which, a good thing given its price tag of  $155,000. Thankfully, you can browse a few of its lovely pages for free just by clicking the arrows.   

Until next week, read well, read often and read on!

Lauren