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The Well of Loneliness
by Radclyffe Hall |
With the American Library Association's Banned Book Week just around the corner and another film based on the novel Fahrenheit 451 due to be released next year, it is clear that what Ray Bradbury saw as the "thought-destroying force" of censorship in the 1950s still draws an audience today. The title of this iconic book - in which a shallow, hedonistic America outlaws the possession of books and 'firemen' are the professional incinerators employed to ensure their destruction - has become a by-word for the importance of a liberal society. In Bradbury's dystopian civilization the pursuit of knowledge is as taboo as original thought in 1984 yet, unlike Orwell's novel, the censorship Bradbury describes is not imposed from the top by a tyrannical government, but seeps up from the indifferent masses: "School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling gradually neglected, finally almost completely ignored. . . No wonder books stopped selling." As eerily familiar as this may sound to some, Bradbury insists he was never trying to predict the future; he was trying to prevent it. All the more ironic then that, unknown to Bradbury, his publisher released a censored edition of the book in 1967 that eliminated the words "damn" and "hell" and changed Montag's naughty "hangover" to a "headache". Bradbury's reaction was predictably strong: "do not insult me with the beheadings, finger-choppings or the lung-deflations you plan for my works... I will not go gently onto a shelf, degutted, to become a non-book."
Challenged Classics
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Yet such non-books remain the aim of many an aspiring Big Brother. According to the American Library Association, 42 of 100 books recognized by the Radcliffe Publishing Course as the best novels of the 20th century have been challenged or banned. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Boccaccio's Decameron, and Defoe's Moll Flanders were banned for decades from the U.S. mails under the Comstock Law of 1873, which remains for the most part on the books today, though un-enforced. Thomas Bowdler notoriously cleaned up the bard for children with The Family Shakespeare and James Joyce's Ulysses, selected by the Modern Library as the best novel of the 20th century, was barred from Britain for 14 years and for 15 years from the United States. Roald Dahl's James and the Giant Peach was removed from some classrooms in Virginia because it promoted disobedience towards authority figures. Twelfth Night was challenged by the school board in Merrimack, New Hampshire, for encouraging an "alternative lifestyle", whilst a children's book about Cuba was removed from Miami-Dade County school libraries because of its positive depiction of life on the island. With all the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass, the books a society upbraids often betray more problems with the would-be censors than with the book itself. The lawyer acting for the prosecution in the famous Lady Chatterley's Lover trial in 1960 exposed a pleasing hint towards the state of his own family life when he asked the jury: "Is it a book you would wish your wife or servants to read?" Anna Sewell's well-loved children's book Black Beauty may seem innocent enough, but was banned under South Africa's apartheid regime. And when authors face difficulty in getting their controversial works printed, they are obliged to join forces with other figures on the outskirts. The first publisher Nabokov could find for Lolita was the Olympia Press, with its shady backlist of works such as The Sexual Life of Robinson Crusoe and With Open Mouth, while the saving grace for Ray Bradbury's dystopian manuscript was a young Hugh Hefner, who published a serialized version of Fahrenheit 451 in the March, April, and May 1954 issues of Playboy.
Profit and Proscription
The fact that a book has been banned in the past does not generally add a premium to its value. The highly effective PR that controversy over a book can be means that it is difficult to pinpoint whether or not a book is desirable specifically because it was banned at some point, because of its subsequent notoriety, or because the author was well known anyway. The outcome of the Chatterley trial reflects a turning point in Western governments' attitude towards 'obscene' books, especially if they could be proven to have literary merit. It happened at a time when increasing numbers of mainstream British and American publishers were starting to pounce upon manuscripts that would once have found a home in the niche market of Olympia; a relieved Nabokov was able to take his works elsewhere. And it also illustrates the ultimately impotent and self-defeating nature of censorship. On publication day after the ban on Lady Chatterley's Lover was finally lifted, a queue of 400 people gathered outside Foyle's before opening time; in the words of Montaigne said, "To forbid us anything is to make us have a mind for it" and, indeed,
A longer version of this article appeared in the February/March issue of Rare Book Review.
Books on Banning
The Banned Books of England and Other Countries: a study of the conception of Literary Obscenity by Alec Craig
This book deals with the conception of literary obscenity as found in law and practice and its cultural and social effects. The author's primary concern is the restraint which this conception exercises on serious literature and consequently on intellectual freedom and artistic creation.
The Good Ship Venus : the Erotic Voyage of the Olympia Press by John De St Jorre. The story of the Olympia Press which as well as publishing erotic literature also published classic authors such as Beckett, Lawrence Durrell, Genet, Henry Miller & William Burroughs.
Forbidden Knowledge by Roger Shattuck. Shattuck argues that there are moral taboos that we violate at our peril and that there are in fact limits to what humankind is meant to know and experience.
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