Book 'Em

I've never read The Catcher in the Rye. I suppose I could just drop everything and hustle up a copy and take the phone off the hook for an afternoon, but I just never have, and it's one of those funny little gaps that I suppose we have in our cultural education. Mine has a small story to go with it. When I was in high school, I spent a lot of time compiling reading lists from references to books and writers that came up in the course of what I was already reading (and, because I was a contrary little pimple head, stubbornly ignoring whatever was assigned for me to read in class, even if I'd have jumped at the chance to read it if the idea had occurred to me on my own time), and once, during Christmas break of my junior year, something--I can't remember what--left me with a strong feeling that this was a book I needed to read. Now, there weren't any bookstores anywhere near where I lived in Mississippi, and though there was a library in Tylertown, it was mostly a place where the senior citizens could have club meetings and people could donate their used Harlequin Romance paperbacks. As a high school student, my main access to books came--brace yourself--from my high school library, where I also worked an hour every day. So the first day after classes resumed, I strolled confidently into the library and asked Mrs. Whoshername, the librarian, if they had a copy of The Catcher in the Rye. She reacted as if I'd asked if she had any incest in her family. I gulped and dropped the subject and then had to spend the next several months adjusting to the fact that my asking for that particular book had permanently soured our relationship, and she treated me like pond scum for the rest of the term. It was especially frustrating because, in that pre-Internet age, I had no way of finding out enough about The Catcher in the Rye to deduce what was supposed to be so awful about it. (It's not as if that title was a lot of help.) I figured I'd read it when I got the hell out of Walthall County, but then a funny thing happened: when I hit college, I learned that reading Catcher when you're in high school is part of the great shared experience of literate snots in this country, and all the cool-geek kids I wanted to fit in and be friends with (dream on, Li'l Abner) had already read it and were fast moving on to Charles Bukowski. I was embarrassed, so I just didn't read it, and I never have. Nowadays, when somebody stages a kamikaze assault on Salinger's reputation or exploits their ties to him or makes the awful mistake of trying to pay tribute to his masterpiece by hitching a ride on it, I can only muster theoretical interest.

This thrilling tale about the costs of adolescent literary deprivation is brought to you as part of Banned Books Week, "an annual event celebrating the freedom to read and the importance of the First Amendment." The very phrase "banned books" conjures up images of angry mobs of people, stupid and bellicose enough to inspire dismay and pity in a Tea Bagger, yowling about the dangers of literacy and the awful possibility that little Shirley will be struck blind or, worse, turned into a scarlet woman if she gets hold of a copy of In the Night Kitchen and sees Mickey's winkie. In an editorial in last Friday's Wall Street Journal, Mitchell Muncy sniffed at the very idea that there might be a need for or a point to such a thing. Muncy cites some florid language in the American Library Association's "manifesto" ("To you zealots and bigots and false patriots who live in fear of discourse. You screamers and banners and burners. . . .") as proof that "the sponsors are more interested in confrontation than celebration", which may be a fair cop. But Muncy also ridicules the idea that "banned books", as a concept, even exist. According to John Lundberg, "the ALA reports that just 513 challenges to books took place last year, and the vast majority of those were unsuccessful." The ALA might point to those numbers as evidence that their efforts to discourage book banning have been successful; Muncy doesn't see that there's anything to discourage. "If a book isn't available at one library or bookstore, it's certainly available at another. Not even the most committed civil libertarian demands that every book be immediately available everywhere on request—though in the age of Amazon that's nearly the case."

Banned Books Week was created in 1982, early in Ronald Reagan's presidency, when the Moral Majority (as the religious right was then) was in its fat and sassy phase and schools were under attack by organizations trying to "return" America to some imaginary Leave It to Beaver era. Churches, including my old Mississippi Southern Baptist worship center and snake pit, urged parishioners to bring in their sin-soaked record albums to be fed into communal bonfires, and with these bloodshot eyes I saw such proponents of devil worship as Elton John and Billy Joel consigned to the cleansing fires. For the most part, even the most wacko church leaders restrained themselves from holding book burnings, because even people whose knowledge of twentieth-century history is mostly gleaned from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade knows that book burning is one of those things that will forever be associated with the Nazis. But asking that some vulgar text be removed from school library shelves and reading lists because it offends some parent's sensibilities will always strike many people as sweet reasonableness personified, because there will always be too many parents who think that their tender flowers have soft, squishy brains that must be protected from infiltration from dangerous ideas and upsetting images than they simply cannot fight off, whether it's Holden Caulfield denouncing the phonies or President Obama being so sneaky as to tell kids to study hard while not wearing his swastika arm band and werewolf mask.

Things have changed a lot since 1982, and I suppose that Muncy has a point when he says that there aren't many books that a kid couldn't get his hands on someway, at least if the kid, unlike me back then (unlike me now, too) has a credit card and scads of disposable income. But for the sake of the one or two kids in this country somewhere who still might be have need of the services of a school library because they just can't afford to track down and buy every book they're interested in reading, it would be nice to keep those shelves well stocked. And no, it's not a matter of making every title imaginable in every venue; it's about making sure that, if a teacher or librarian who's doing his or her job thinks that a particular title might be of interest to the people whose needs are there to be served, no mealy-mouthed self-righteous spoilsport should be allowed to prevent them from doing it. At its simplest level, this is simple a matter of gratitude to people who have chosen to perform important and thankless jobs that don't pay as well as they should and who should be spared the bother of having a bunch of jackasses screeching at them. And despite the obvious conclusion one might reach from seeing one side of this issue endorsed by the WSJ op-ed page and the other side sort of saluted at the Huffington Post, it's really a bipartisan, or nonpartisan issue. Conservatives who object to the "troubling" elements in Slaughterhouse-Five, Catch-22, or Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret ought to have the fire hoses turned on them, but the water should be no softer or warmer when it hits those who would ban Huckleberry Finn because its uneducated, pre-Civil War characters toss around "the N word", or even those who would protect their children from casual exposure to Ann Coulter's latest unofficial sequel to The Turner Diaries or one of Glenn Beck's coloring books. As for those who would ban what they see as Roald Dahl's or J. K. Rowling's celebrations of the dark arts, there really should be no partisan classification for "Rock Stupid."

It's probably easy for me to see the issue of what kids should or should not be "protected" from as a simple, clear cut matter, because I've never been a parent. My own outlook is that of a former child, one who remembers what it was like to be curious about things that larger people could deny me the chance to experience, and who remembers how frustrating that was. It was frustrating, and enraging, in fact, to a degree that dwarfs the degree to which anything I actually read in a book or saw in a movie as a child turned out to be upsetting or traumatic. I did read and see some things that were awfully confusing to me as a child, and it would have done me a world of good to have had some adults to talk to about it at the time. I didn't have that option, because the adults in charge of my upbringing had already taught me that a large chunk of my education would have to be conducted in guilty secrecy, because they didn't want it to happen, or at least didn't want to know about it. (And be assured that it felt like the latter; my parents may have really thought that they were trying to do what was best for me by pretending that there were things that I was just never going to find out about, but as a kid, it just felt as if they didn't care enough about me to bestir themselves to talk with me about things that made them uncomfortable.) In the absence of parental guidance, a library is a hell of a good thing for a kid to have unfettered access to, though ideally all kids should of course have the chance to enjoy both, just as librarians should have the chance to do their jobs in relative peace and quiet. Maybe Banned Books Week is a corrective to a non-problem, but by now, you could say the same thing about the Salk vaccine. Would we have more pressing need of them if they didn't exist? I vote that we never find out.