And yet ‘banned books’ are everywhere.
And yet ‘banned books’ are everywhere.
B anned Books Week, which begins this Sunday, ironically presents to the public a more monolithic face than the modern-day Anthony Comstocks it purports to counteract.
The four chairs of Banned Books Week include anti–Second Amendment activist Bess Kalb, who has written comedy for Jimmy Kimmel and Hillary Clinton; Marshall Romero, a self-described “transgender teenager with aspirations in politics”; and Azeemah Sadiq, whose bio lists her interests as “fighting for equity in underserved communities” and “electoral justice.” Given the heavy-handed DEI book displays one inevitably encounters at all times in any big-city library (a trip to my local library this week revealed three consecutive tables that highlights books by feminists, gays, and immigrants, respectively), the notion pushed by the American Library Association and other allied groups that libraries, schools, and other institutions overwhelmingly populated by left-wing employees do not themselves censor politically incorrect books but instead succumb to pressure by intolerant, external forces on the right seems rich.
Seven decades ago, University of Chicago English professor Richard Weaver anticipated the rise of political correctness with great precision.
“The NYC Board of Education has recently dropped Huckleberry Finn from its list of approved texts because it is ‘racially offensive,’” he wrote from — where else? — Weaverville, N.C., to National Review literary editor Frank Meyer in 1957. “An article needs to be written showing what would be the result if our literature were thus censored to leave out anything that could be objected to by any sizable minority, racial, religious, national, occupational, age, geographical, or whatever. It could be a very serious article, or a very hilarious one. E.g., no more of those jokes about Irishmen or traveling salesmen, no more cartoons of hillbillies and so on, ad infinitum. I may have a go at it as soon as I get back to Chicago.”
It turned out that Priscilla Buckley had already made sport of Gotham’s educational gatekeepers for the upcoming October 19, 1957, issue. Therein, she depicted the disappearance of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from New York’s junior high school curriculum as the work of people who style themselves as both anti-bigots and anti-book-burners. Here, the antis morphed into the pros in the small-minded removal of what so many regard as the Great American Novel.
The unstated reason for the book’s removal, she argued, owes to a “cruel,” “vicious,” and “bitter” word that so often prefixes the name of the runaway slave Jim in its pages. But that word, and so much of the racism depicted by the postbellum book about the antebellum South, serves to challenge prejudice. As Buckley puts it, “It is the white man, not the Negro, who is being attacked as any one who reads with his mind instead of his prejudice-consciousness would know.” The inclusion of such language additionally propels the realistic dialect of time and place that separated Twain’s book from so many American novels reliant on proper English that preceded it.
Reading the piece less than a month after he suggested the topic, Weaver signaled his approval as he indicated it did not quite address the point of his initial letter.
“I liked Priscilla Buckley’s piece on Huck Finn very well, but I think it covers only part of the subject,” he wrote Meyer in late October. “There is still room for an article on what would happen if we took the position that every social group is ipso facto above criticism (and there are those who are moving dangerously close to that view). I think this would mean the end of serious literature. Literature depends for its existence on the assumption that any type of individual and any type of group are subject to constant evaluation and re-evaluation through the lens of a critical realism.”
Possibly Weaver might appreciate, or appreciate the irony of, Banned Books Week more than most. Aside from contributing three dozen pieces to National Review during its first seven years, Weaver frequently lobbied the magazine to review what now might earn the designation of politically incorrect literature. The titles he suggested for review include Robert Penn Warren’s The Legacy of the Civil War, Madison Jones’s A Buried Land, and The Lasting South: 14 Southerners Look at Their Home, a collection of essays by Francis Butler Simkins, James Jackson Kilpatrick, Louis D. Rubin, and others including Weaver himself.
They strike as the type of books that neither populate themed display tables at public libraries nor are showcased by the Banned Books Week organization. Put another way, a censorship prevails among the people who next week decry censorship.