Dear Ellen,
Surfing the Literary Saloon website (a place I highly recommend), I found a reference to an article last week in the Sydney Morning Herald called “Blame It on the Cucumber” by Australian author Linda Jaivin. I remembered her well: Her first novel, “Eat Me,” provided me with a lesson in censorship v. standards.
In 1997, I planned to run a review of that novel along with the book’s cover, when my then-boss walked by the galleys and gasped at the picture on the cover: a section of a papaya. Along with the book’s provocative title, it was too much for him. I showed him the back of the book — a banana with two plums — and jokingly asked him if he thought that was better. He was not amused. Bowing to his standards, I killed the review.
The book, a bestseller in Australia and France, was a book club selection in Italy and other countries; it made the San Francisco Chronicle bestseller list. “Vintage, in Britain, is publishing a special edition of it as one of the 12 books for its Summer Reading promotion this year, alongside Portnoy’s Complaint, Fear of Flying, Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion, and novels by Martin and Kingsley Amis, among others,” reports Jaivin.
Yet my former boss wasn’t the only one who was squeamish about Jaivin’s title and book’s cover — and its content. According to her article, last summer an 83-year-old grandmother in Marion County, Florida, found the book in the local library and filed an objection, stating that it was “to [sic] obsene [sic] for general reading.” The library committee considered the objection and, although it was not unanimous in its decision, voted to keep the book on the shelf. But the battle didn’t stop there. The library’s director read the book herself and decided it needed to be pulled out of circulation.
This set off a censorship battle that finally ended with the book being put back on the shelf — thanks to the Star-Banner, the local newspaper which came down against the censorship; Brian Creekbaum, a Marion County activist, and Mary Lutes, a former chair of the Library Advisory Board, who called the first chapter of “Eat Me” a “knee-slapper.” The Library Advisory Board, which took up the issue, voted 7-3 to reinstate the book.
The battle over “Eat Me,” however, has apparently just begun.
According to Jaivin, “conservative county commissioners, assisted by their county administrator, a retired two-star general from the U.S. Marines, have united to push for more political control over the library collection.” The library board is set to be reorganized. Some people obviously feel their own standards ought to prevail in their local library.
Someone else’s standards: That was what led me to refrain from publishing the book’s cover in our newspaper. My boss didn’t order me to pull the package, but his disgust made it clear to me that he would not be comfortable defending its publication. I made the decision to let his judgment prevail.
Now Jaivin’s article has me thinking. Whose standards should prevail at the library? It’s easy for me to advocate freedom of expression and denounce those who want “Eat Me” off the library shelves. But then why didn’t I fight to print what I thought was a comical cover of a clearly satirical book? Is there really a difference in bowing to the standards of others in the newspaper arena, so as not to offend readers, and caving in to a group that effectively wants to censor what books are available to us? In both cases, we are abdicating our own power to decide.
We all want standards — but when does the imposition of our standards become censorship in the eyes of others?
Hi Margo,
You couldn’t have picked a more timely topic. Not so much because of “Eat Me,” of course, but because, thanks to the U.S. Congress and the FCC, the muck is being cleaned out of the media pipeline. I’m not unsympathetic: Although we put freedom of expression up there with mothers and apple pie, a certain amount of restraint is required to maintain a civil society. I’m not talking about a polite society, or a genteel one. But don’t you think that it’s reasonable for people to expect that depravity won’t be served up with our cornflakes?
This expectation has been sorely tested this week. Over and over again, we see the same photos of prison abuse in Iraq. And now, you can even witness the slaughter of an American innocent on the Internet. When does freedom yield to a form of depravity, of witnessing torture and death as if it were normative?
It’s clear to me that the censorship issue is not just about library filters for the Internet, or Michael Moore’s fight with Disney over the company’s refusal to distribute his film, or even the puritanical turn of broadcasters now that fines for running X-rated material have been increased. It’s about figuring out what facts are fit for print. My high school journalism teacher objected to my newspaper running the picture of Lee Harvey Oswald being shot. Last week, my hometown newspaper ran pictures of the prisoner abuse on its features page, one step away from Dear Abby.
I’ll risk being the heavy here: Both the news media and book publishers have an obligation to pull back at some point — just as you did when you rightly ditched the pomegranate and review. But I’m not throwing the baby out with the bathwater: The book itself has no obligation to fit your newspaper’s standards, only those of its publisher’s making. Books are guests in your home, invited there by the decision to buy them or check them out at the library. If a book offends one individual’s sensibilities, that person shouldn’t read it. Literature without sex and violence is like dinner served without the main course: Just as they figure in our lives, they’ve been part of storytelling since ancient times (how about that Bible for racy material?).
Some push the boundaries more than most. The most prominent example in recent memory was Bret Easton Ellis’ “American Psycho,” featuring a Wall Street trader who liked to kill people — a sort of Hannibal Lecter of the finance world. Simon & Schuster gave Ellis a $300,000 advance but then backed out of its plans to publish after staff and women’s groups protested the book — perfectly fair, it seems to me. Vintage jumped into the fray and brought it out in 1991. The movie version followed.
Vintage editor Gary Fisketjon, who edited “American Psycho,” is currently working with French novelist Michel Houllebecq, whose raunchy book, “The Elementary Particles,” has raised eyebrows even among the oh-so-suave citoyens in his own country. Fisketjon believes as fervently in “American Psycho” as he did more than a decade ago, telling me “it is an important piece of fiction that speaks powerfully to some of the most awful failings of our society.” Of those who reacted negatively to it, he argues that “their reasoning and motives were bad, unfounded, and irrelevant to the novel itself.” (My turn: Although Ellis pierces the veil of materialism and mixed-up values of city sophisticates, let’s not get carried away! Hyperbole, it seems to me, is among the most obvious literary devices.)
But back to censorship: I’m against it. I will vote for self-censorship, though, believing that at some point unfettered free speech leads to barbarism. And our culture, as evidenced by the shocking photos from Abu Ghraib, seems to be teetering ever closer to the edge. Of course, you can’t draw a direct line to these atrocities from Howard Stern or, more to our point, a sexually explicit novel. But unless there’s some general agreement about what is normative in a society, and a recognition that variations from the standard are, indeed, variations, we risk anarchy or the censor’s club.
Dear Ellen,
You and I may be able to readily agree that the world would be a better place if racist and anti-Semitic books didn’t exist, but the reality is, they do. So do a lot of books that would make that 83-year-old grandmother in Marion County gasp in horror, but that you and I want to read. So, the question is still on the table: Whose standards should prevail?
In a democratic society, I always thought people were supposed to sit down and hammer out their differences amicably. But that seems increasingly harder to do. As Mike Kelly, the Atlantic Monthly editor who died covering the Iraq wars, used to say, “Wouldn’t it be pleasant if we could do something with the forces of evil other than hunt them down and kill them?” (That quote comes from P.J. O’Rourke’s new book “Peace Kills: America’s Fun New Imperialism”).
The truth is, decisions always have been made by the people who have power. It’s just that in a democratic society, since that power is not absolute, those decisions are supposed to be arrived at through compromise rather than by dictatorial decree. Sometimes you win, and then sometimes I win.
Lately, however, the political system has become a winner-take-all affair. In the library battles, there is a concerted effort by groups such as the Virginia-based Family Friendly Libraries to take over decision-making bodies like the Marion library committee, not to seek a consensus of opinion, but to impose their particular standards on the whole community. That is the real danger. Calling what’s going on a culture war is not just semantics. It really is a war, which means there are people out there vying for ultimate control.
So, no, I don’t want to choose between anarchy and the censor’s club (from either end of the political spectrum). I would like to see a return to real democracy, a messy process in which some people will always be shocked and others will always be disappointed, standards will be in constant flux, and people will be trusted to make up their own minds about what they deem objectionable. As the Israeli novelist Amos Oz once said about the Middle East conflict (and I’m paraphrasing): The only viable solution is the one that makes everyone unhappy.
[ Where is the line between standards and censorhip? ]
CORRECTION: The papaya on the cover of Jaivan’s novel was incorrectly described as a pomegranate in an earlier version of this article.
