Ban My Books. Please!
Book banning is back in, and this is a good thing.
I myself have two notable recollections of this practice, which in my experience also included movies. As a boy growing up in a lily-white, Catholic family in the hills of Oakland, California, in the middle-class neighborhood called Montclair, I heard the strictures of The Church frequently. The most fearsome priest then at Corpus Christi parish was Father Keller. Maybe seventy years old, his sermons were notable for their disapproval of just about everything. He spoke in a rough-edged, noisy, even shouting monotone, using intense gestures that my mother, for one, found foolish. “He’s a bum, that’s all,” she once opined for me. I was shocked by her intensities. I served many a mass for Father Keller, and was terrified by him.
The one movie I remember him railing against was 1955’s Picnic, which starred William Holden as a ruffian lover-boy and Kim Novak as one of the several women in the little town in which lover-boy arrives, he having hitched a ride on a freight train. To this day, I have not seen the film. My disinterest in it is not genuine. It’s just that I still hear the voice of Father Keller ringing from the altar, that the love scene in the movie between Novak and Holden was…I don’t remember the priest’s actual language. But it had to do with evil, sin, and behavior deleterious to the very souls of little children and adults alike. I was smart enough even then, though, to wonder how it was that Father Keller knew all this, although I realized that The very Church hierarchy itself had condemned the movie. But, had Father Keller and the arch-bishopric, Lord help us!, actually seen the film? One wonders what he would have done with himself during the love scene. But it was truth enough for me that he so railed against and excoriated that scene. You did not want to argue with Father Keller, especially if you were twelve years old.
So, I never went to see it.
However, in part due to The Church’s condemnation of William Holden’s surly kisses of the irresistible Kim Novak, the film was one of Hollywood’s biggest box office successes of 1955.
The Church has always stood guard against the sins committed by such movies, as well as by books deemed dangerous to the morals of youths like me and adults alike. Just this year, I’ve been reading about the very famous Irish Archbishop John Charles McQuaid and his life-long war against prurient, sinful writing by all those benighted Irish novelists like Brendan Behan, Edna O’Brien, J.P. Donleavy, John McGahern, and playwrights like Sean O’Casey and Samuel Beckett. Fintan O’Toole’s recently published We Don’t Know Ourselves features fascinating accounts of McQuaid’s influence on the Irish governments between 1940 and 1972. He was a fearsome condemner, even of the Jews, of whom he said (perhaps it slipped his mind that Christ was one himself) “the Great Depression was the deliberate work of a few Jew financiers." And, according to O’Toole, because The Church held such political sway over the governments of Eamon de Valera and even into Charles Haughey’s administrations of the early 1990s, numberless books indeed did have trouble getting read in Ireland.
Elsewhere, government interference with novel-reading was less intense, but The Catholic Church outside of Ireland has long intended to keep up the book-banning effort, although to not much avail. These days, you can read what you want, although one of the very valuable assets that banning a book provides to that book is far better sales, immediately…much better than would be realized if no ban were imposed.
The most recent proof of this is the kerfluffle over Art Spiegelman’s Maus books. This January, the McMinn County school board in Athens, Tennessee decided that Spiegelman’s books must be banished from the eighth grade reading curriculum. These are graphic novels in comic-book form about the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews. The board said in a statement that it had banned Maus because “of its unnecessary use of profanity and nudity and its depiction of violence and suicide.” It denied diminishing the importance of teaching students about the Holocaust, and went on to say that schools indeed have an obligation to teach students about the Holocaust. It persisted, however, in nonetheless banning Spiegelman’s specific books.
Rank anti-semitism hidden behind the gushings of civic virtue? You be the judge.
Miffed, Spiegelman himself opined that maybe the school board wanted “to teach a nicer Holocaust.” He also compared the McMinn County school board to Vladimir Putin. One unsought effect of the McMinn ban, though, was that Maus climbed right away to the head of the Amazon best-seller list.
In her New York Times article about the events, Sophie Kasakove writes, “The McMinn County decision to ban Maus was widely interpreted as a rejection of or disregard for Holocaust education. The book, which portrays Jews as mice and Nazis as cats in recounting the author’s father’s imprisonment at Auschwitz, has been used in social studies classes across the country since the early 1990s, when it became the first graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize.”
I suspect that overall sales of the books since the McMinn ban exceed what the sales were when they were first published, beginning in 1973…and those sales were significant.
So, my own hope lies in writing a novel that will be banned.
I’ve been trying for years to upset school boards and archbishops with my writing, so that they will declare it dangerous to the general morality. But such organizations seem uninterested in serious fiction about social situations that often result in difficult moral decisions that must be made by the characters. Well written exhibitions of what can happen when family secrets emerge years later. (See my novel, When Clara Was Twelve.) Another novel about a San Francisco archbishop’s fruitless ban on a Mexican muralist’s designs for the entire exterior of the grand Cathedral of Saint Mary in San Francisco. A novel and short stories about an American State Department official living in the west of Borneo (to be republished, as it happens, in new editions next year.) A novel about the great Pablo Neruda’s death-defying 1949 escape from Chile through the Andes cordillera to Argentina, his life having been threatened by the then-president of Chile. Story collections about those two sin-beset capitols, San Francisco, just published this June 1, and New York. And several other books.
I just can’t seem to write anything that is bannable, and am sure that my income has suffered because of that. So, here’s my urgent request…. Ban my books. Please!
© Copyright 2022. Terence Clarke. All rights reserved.
“News from Terence Clarke” columns are free of charge. You can subscribe to them here, or if you would like to help the effort financially, you can also do it here. It’s your call.