Category Archives: Censorship

What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Banning YA Books

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The clashes between  my mother and a librarian over access to potentially objectionable books sound impossibly quaint now. My mother’s observation to me that the books in the children’s section weren’t challenging enough was a directive to explore the adult section of the Manhattan Beach Public Library.  I sneaked  past the circulation desk to avoid the disapproving Mrs. Brown and slithered into the W-Zs of adult fiction. The authors’ names on the spines were unfamiliar, but “Wodehouse” on a top shelf caught my eye and I pulled out one of the misadventures of Bertie Wooster, complete with gaspers,  cocktails, and morning-after cures.  I was allowed to check it out, but then I hadn’t handed over The Portrait of Dorian Grey.  Another time Mrs. Brown refused to let me have a book from the adult section until she spoke with my mother, who coolly confirmed that I had her permission. Mrs. Brown pulled a sour face while the transaction was completed.

I have no idea what Mrs. Brown would have made of the new policy of the Hamilton East Public Library in Indianapolis to relocate sexually explicit YA books to which parents have objections to the adult section. In this weekend’s Wall Street Journal,  Daniel Lee looked at this “culture-war skirmish,” which John Green, the beloved Indianapolis writer whose acclaimed YA novels  Looking for Alaska and The Fault Is in Our Stars were targeted, denounced  the move as “political theater of the lowest and most embarrassing order.”

Green’s novels, which feature young characters struggling with class conflict, dysfunctional families, terminal illness, and chronic depression, who also chain-smoke, experiment with sex, binge-drink and drive,  Lee suggested, would not have resonated with Booth Tarkington’s Penrod, whose Hoosier boyhood in the early twentieth century was unmarked by any trauma more devastating than surviving cotillions.  Penrod, says Lee, “knew which bathroom to use.”    He continues:

Yes, some young people today are in terrible situations.  But it seems profoundly pessimistic—and ideologically loaded—to think most kids don’t live lives much like Penrod’s and worse, that they lack parents who are eager and competent to help when trouble comes.

Unfortunately, coverage of book bannings in public schools and libraries often contain glib comparisons, which score points at the expense of oversimplifying the difficulty of judging the contents of the books in contention.  Lee’s description of Penrod suggests he didn’t read Tarkington very carefully or he might have noticed that this once classic American novel about boyhood contains any number of awkward situations similar to Tom Sawyer or Peck’s Bad Boy that don’t involve precocious sexual activity.

The cotillion episode, which Lee considered anodyne, is a good example of Penrod acting on impulse for purely selfish reasons.  The day of the cotillion he discovers a basket of expired medicines, dentifrices, hair oil, condiments gone off, etc. in the stable put out for the trash.  After he and his friend Sam set up a drug store to fill prescriptions, Sam mixes up some “small pox medicine” using the contents of the basket and part of a bottle of licorice water to make it look palatable.  Penrod’s dog Duke the tester can’t keep it down and the boys dream of administering a dose to Professor Bartlett, which would lead to the cotillion’s cancellation.  Instead their frenemy Maurice Levy saunters by.  Penrod resorts to a desperate measure to take out Maurice, so he, with two left feet, can squire the adored Marjorie Jones and hand off his partner Baby Rennsdale to Sam, whose fair lady has had to send regrets.  Maurice is invited to drink as much licorice water as he can in one pull and the bottle of small pox medicine is substituted for the real one.   He swallows it all, has a smoke, and heads home without exhibiting any ill effects to change for cotillion.

Left unsupervised to an extent unimaginable today, eleven-year-old Penrod has acted on enough ideas like this one to have earned the reputation as the worst boy in town.  His family worries that he is headed for the penitentiary.  The ladies in town tut-tut about the ineffectual Schofields when his  mother and sister aren’t present.  Certain families forbid their sons to associate with him.  His peers, on the other hand, take vicarious pleasure in his antics, like talking back to the teacher and managing to elude punishment temporarily with the claim he was exhausted from comforting his distraught aunt, who has taken refuge from her drunken, abusive husband with the Schofields.   A tall tale  inspired by the silent film he watched when he should have been in Sunday school.

If Penrod’s reputation was affected by his friendship with the Black brothers, Herman and Verman, who live in the nearby alley, Tarkington didn’t come out and say so.  What strikes us now are the ambiguities of the power dynamics between the white boy and two “darkies.”  Verman suffers from ankyloglossia and his words have to be translated by his older brother Herman.  Herman is missing a forefinger, because his little brother chopped it off with an axe when told to as a joke. The boys’ father is in jail term for stabbing a man with a pitchfork.  Penrod finds  Herman and Verman so fascinating that he immediately proposes to Sam they could be the star attractions of a show.

Equally troubling  is the Rupe Collins episode.  An older white boy from the wrong side of town comes around to play, which means he bullies and tortures Penrod and Sam.  Verman whacks Rupe with a board to make him stop and gets called the N-word.  Herman tells Rupe to lay off his brothers and his friends, setting off a terrific fight, in which the rules of fair play are suspended, while Penrod and Sam watch on the sidelines. Verman opens hostilities by striking Rupe with a rake because in “his simple, direct, African way, he wished to kill his enemy…and to kill him as soon as possible.”  The brawl comes to an end when Herman grabs a scythe and threatens to cut out Rupe’s gizzard and eat it.  It was probably trash talk, but Penrod and Sam are too shaken by the brothers’ “unctuous merriment” after their victory to say thank you.

Tarkington’s Penrod can’t be characterized as a book written back in the good old days when children were still innocent a hundred years ago.  Daniel Lee’s assertion in the Wall Street Journal that in the novel still reflects the circumstances of many children’s lives today was an oversimplification supporting the comforting illusion that classic books are alternatives to contemporary problem YA novels which hold up a mirror to contemporary teenagers” lives.  However excessive realism is defined, the line where it crosses over to the exploitative is always being redrawn in contemporary discussions. But the analysis will be more productive the more carefully the books in question are studied.

Yes, critical race theory is integral to George M. Johnson’s manifesto-memoir All Boys Aren’t Blue. The author’s search for a meaningful, fulfilled sex life as a gay man is too, but that account, which is not overly graphic, occupies far fewer pages than you might expect, given the book’s notoriety.   What the book’s critics neglect to say (probably because they haven’t read it), is that it’s also a warm, loving tribute to the Black family that had his back while he was growing up painfully conscious of being different and unsure where he belonged.  The book is worth reading just for the portrait of his Nana, with whom he was very close, or his memories of jumping Double Dutch with the girls, to mention just two passages.  Don’t damn a book without giving the author a chance and don’t praise it without a detailed sense of how the strengths and weaknesses may be intertwined.  Regardless of when a book was written, it is probably more complex than its reputation.

Roald Dahl and His Posthumous Editors: Send in the Crocodile…

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Roald Dahl told painter Francis Bacon in 1982 that he did not wish to be edited posthumously. “I’ve warned my publishers that if they later on so much as change a single comma in one of my books, they will never see another word from me. Never! Ever!” he announced.   “When I am gone, if that happens…I will send along the ‘enormous crocodile’ to gobble them up.”  He had no intention of passing along control over his texts to anyone else: he would decide if editing himself was necessary and execute the job himself.

He famously characterized his audience as “much more vulgar than grown-ups.  They have a coarser sense of humour.  They are basically more cruel.”   Not everyone will agree with this (although those who protest may need to watch children play unsupervised) and even those who are sympathetic have grounds to fault him for the extent to which he stooped to engage them.  It’s fair to ask if he might have put his gifts to better use than he did, but perhaps the truth is he deployed them perfectly.

Critics have found it easier to attack Dahl’s anti-Semiticism, racism, and misogyny than  his  craftsmanship. . Yet the wild word play, tumbling energy of the prose, and ability to conjure up extravagant characters in few words are not within the powers of an indifferent or careless writer, any more than is the creation an instantly recognizable fictional world where downtrodden children overcome monstrously cruel adults.  It’s a world which recalls the rise fairy tale and Dickens, with the knock-about humor of a Punch and Judy show punctuated with the gleeful cautionary alarms of Struwwelpeter.

As the years have passed, Penguin has found its star children’s book author’s unpleasantness more problematic.  No one released a crocodile last week when Puffin Books, a division of Penguin-Random House and Roald Dahl Story Company announced that  the author’s most popular works for children would be published in new texts revised to be more accessible and inclusive, a decision made on the basis of a routine  reassessment of steady-selling older stories that contain elements likely to offend a new generation of prospective purchasers, according to Rick Behari, a Story Company spokesman.  The study began in 2020 before Netflix  purchased the Story Company to obtain the film rights to Dahl’s books in 2021.

The announcement raised as many questions as it dodged.  Not a word was said about the release dates of the new editions.  According to a British and an American bookseller I spoke with, they had no copies for sale and had no idea when the books would be shipped.  Another interesting conundrum: would the revised and original texts both be available simultaneously, or would the originals be withdrawn, following the precedent of the six Dr. Seuss picture books judged in 2021 unacceptable by today’s standards.

Yesterday Puffin retreated in the face of criticism from PEN, Sir Salman Rushdie, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, and a host of Dahl defenders in the media.   A set of the seventeen novels in the original versions will be reissued as “The Roald Dahl Classic Collection” at the end of the year alongside “the newly released Puffin Roald Dahl books for young readers, which are designed for children who may be navigating written content independently for the first time.”  The various stakeholders in this venture seemed to be avoiding the mistake of Hachette’s  attempt to alter outdated language and gender-role stereotypes in Enid Blyton, the only other children’s writer whose popularity approaches Dahl’s.  Her “Famous Five” series was tweaked, but the publisher withdrew the improved texts some years later when it became clear that readers had not responded enthusiastically.

The Daily Telegraph published the changes detected by four staff writers after collating the 2001 and 2023 texts of ten Dahl titles. (The Telegraph also sprung the story that the sensitivity consultant  Inclusive Minds, an organization dedicated to promoting diversity and inclusion in children’s literature, was secretly engaged to edit the stories.)  Eliminating the shaming adjective “fat” was a obvious target, given Dahl’s delight in creating grotesques whose bodies are as overweight as their personalities are repellent.   In the passages devoted to Augustus Gloop in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,  the word  “fat” no longer appears, “enormous” having been substituted for it.  The comparison of his face to “a monstrous ball of dough with two small greedy curranty eyes” now reads simply a “ball of dough.”

Perhaps these smallish changes would be improvements if the rest of the passage had been carefully edited as well, but his mother still tells the journalists that “He eats so many candy bars a day that it was almost impossible for him not to find one.  Eating is his hobby.”   He still steals down to the chocolate river and kneels “scooping hot melted chocolate into his mouth as fast as he could.”   “Deaf to everything except the call of his enormous stomach” now reads “Augustus was ignoring everything” as he still sprawls down “full length on the ground with his head far out over the river, lapping up the chocolate like a dog.”   How many readers, regardless of age, will fail to agree with the Oompa-Loompas when they sing that  Augustus Gloop is a “great big greedy nincompoop”  by the time he blocks the pipe?   Will the  ninety-year-old Sir Quentin Blake be asked to redraw his two illustrations so that Augustus no longer personifies gluttony?   And Penguin is powerless to soften the even more hateful representation of Augustus Gloop in Tim Burton’s film, which leaves nothing left to the imagination and reinforces distasteful stereotypes of Germans.In The Witches, the edits in the scene where the grandmother teaches the little boy how to tell a witch from a real woman has received a good deal of publicity.  When the grandmother explains that  a real witch is bald and conceals her bare head under an expensive wig, the boy no longer responds with “Horrid.”  His suggestion that he’ll pull the wig off is flatly rejected.  “Don’t be foolish,” she says.“You can’t go round pulling at the hair of every lady you meet, even if she is wearing gloves.  Just you try it and see what happens.”  This has been struck and replaced with “There are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.”   Would the grandmother, an old Norwegian witch hunter say anything like this in the middle of revealing her secret knowledge about these diabolical creatures to her grandson, who is completely enthralled?  Was the intention to remove triggers for women stricken with aleopecia or cancer?  By the way, why wasn’t the grandmother’s dirty of smoking “foul” black cigars that “smell of rubber” eliminated?

If the revisions were supposed to neatly and unobtrusively excise offensive elements from Dahl without significantly altering the ethos, then the exercise was indeed a success, although a Pyrrhic victory, because largely cosmetic changes were not enough to dismantle his fictional world. Parents made uncomfortable by his nastiness may feel pressured to introduce their children to the books because they rank among the classics of children’s literature for the moment.  But if the stories are not consistent with their values, they can vote with their pocketbooks or library cards.    A classic for children does not live forever, but has a life span, contrary to received wisdom.  When it no longer finds an audience, it will go out of print.  As Philip Pullman suggested, let Dahl’s books run their course and in the meantime encourage children to explore the works of other better writers who are not household words..  There may be no perfect solution to this conundrum, but for my money the home is a better place to ban or censor books than the publisher’s offices.