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Todd R. Nelson is a former English teacher.
Banned books and I go way back. Shards of their “toxic” contents still lodge in early memory. Many remain influential intellectual guideposts and writing. Banned books made me the man I am today.
The books I was reading complemented what I was seeing on The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. “That’s the way it is….” he would say, to end his 30 minutes of current events. The most trusted man in America. It was the 1960s.
There was “Soul on Ice” by Eldridge Cleaver. The title alone beguiled me, as did the cool cover with the Black Panther leader. He wrote of Chubby Checkers’ twist as a libidinal secret missile from the heart of Black America into white suburbia. The book still resonates as the source of this: “There is no more neutrality in the world. You either have to be part of the solution, or you’re going to be part of the problem.” One man’s solution is another man’s problem.
Then I read “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” which was an awakening for me about an American life so starkly different from my own. Could there be two Americas? It did not make me uncomfortable, it made me irate.
No, these were not books on my middle school language arts curriculum. They were just the ones I found lying around the house. At school, we were reading “The Outsiders” and “Huckleberry Finn” (often banned), and “Catcher in the Rye.” If Holden’s language was considered swearing, then J.D. Salinger hadn’t heard my cohort. It was impressed upon me that there was a time and place for said vocabulary.
My mother must have been a banned books activist, in an ironic inversion. When she found a truly smutty novel in my room, she banned it. She couldn’t define “smut,” but she knew it when she saw it. She suggested” Lady Chatterly’s Lover” by D.H. Lawrence. “If you’re going to read about sex, you ought to read something well written,” her note said. Always a stickler for better syntax and vocabulary, my mum.
I read “Catch-22” in 9th grade. Its catch phrases are still in play. I had the good fortune of high school English teachers whose choice of Great Books could come from today’s banned books lists. Where would my education have been without “Ulysses” and “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” to say nothing of Shakespeare and the canonical, dangerous poetry anthologies I pored over.
Soon, I was teaching banned books! “Night” by Elie Wiesel, “Grapes of Wrath” by John Steinbeck, “Animal Farm” and “1984” by George Orwell. (That one’s gotten a lot of references recently. To my former students: you’re welcome.) “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee, and even “the great American novel” “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald. “The Lord of the Flies” and “A Separate Peace” proved incredible middle school discussion fodder. It takes a good book — realistic characters, true ethical dilemmas, and plots ripped from the CBS Evening News — to anchor quality, educational, life-changing discussion.
Well, the banned list goes on. Some of the banned books predict their own banning! “Fahrenheit 451” (the temperature at which paper burns, in case you haven’t read it) and Orwell alone tell us how the thought police playbook works, how making certain books subversive corrals free speech and thought.
And what of that subversive music called Rock and Roll? The youths have danced around restrictive school curriculums and vigilante pillages of library bookshelves. In my day, we just had the airwaves. FM radio started playing deep cuts (and social criticism) from my favorite bands, like Jefferson Airplane, Steppenwolf, and Buffalo Springfield. But now the world is flat and the genie is out of the internet bottle. The range has no fences. Banning is over — except as a hoary ghost of autocracies past.
I think frequently of the last sentence in “The Great Gatsby”: “And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Must we? “There’s something happening here. What it is, ain’t exactly clear.” Deja vu all over again, with a new twist.