Saving Alaska from literature

by David Benjamin

“So now do you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life. The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless.” 

— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

MADISON, Wis. — The latest illiterate school board to get into the book-banning biz is in Alaska’s Matanuska-Susitna borough. Last month, the gang voted 5-2 to strip five books from the district’s high-school curriculum because they contained “sexually explicit material” and profane language, as well as mentions of rape, incest, racial slurs, misogyny and sexual molestation in “graphic terms.”

(I’m tempted to protest here the misuse of the word “graphic” — which I tend to associate with printing technology — as a synonym for “vivid,” “explicit,” “frank” or forthright.” But this is a quibble for another rant.)

The Matanuska-Susitna blacklist panel took issue with five books widely deemed— especially by librarians and English teachers (the alleged experts in this area) — as modern classics. The list the Eskimo expurgators chose to deny their high-school kids are Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, Ralph Ellison’s masterpiece, Invisible Man and Catch-22, by Joseph Heller. 

To clarify this kerfuffle, let’s go straight to Catch-22. I read it when I was fourteen. By then, I’d already read the smutty parts in a novel by Grace Metalious. I was well-acquainted with Mark Twain’s references to “nigger Jim” in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and his blasphemies in Letters from the Earth. I’d also read Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel, which contains juicy passages like, “Shittard, squittard, squattard, turdous, thy bung has flung some dung on us.”

By the time I was thirteen, I’d learned pretty much all the mechanics of sex from reading novels available on book racks at Walgreen’s. More significantly, I was a subscriber, since age 12, to MAD magazine, in which artists like Mort Drucker, Art Spiegelman, Will Elder and Don Martin filled in my sexual knowledge while editor Bill Gaines and the “usual gang of idiots” every month schooled me in satire, sarcasm, irony and lubricious innuendo.

By ninth grade, I was still an ingenue, but I’d been substantially wised-up — and immunized against the moral hazard inherent in characters like Daisy Buchanan and Nately’s whore — by a vast absorption of eclectic storytelling and by the minions of Alfred E. Newman.

Moreover, since birth, I’d been fielding “profane” language from — let’s see — both my parents, all my grandparents except one (Grandma Schaller), at least a dozen uncles and aunts, most of the drinkers who elbowed the bars in Tomah where Dad poured booze, and fifteen or twenty of my Catholic-school classmates. I heard the F-word, for the first time, at recess on the St. Mary’s playground. 

I was required to read Gatsby as a high-school junior and found in it nothing that conveyed the sly eroticism of, say, a Wallace Wood comic-book parody in MAD or the anatomically improbable violence of ten bizarre panels by Don Martin. 

By the time I’d gotten around to reading Catch-22 in the spring of 1964, I was accustomed to what movie censors call “adult themes.” I’d been left unprotected — like every inquisitive kid I knew — from the depredations of unexpurgated lit and I’d emerged unscathed on the other side, arm-in-arm with Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451) and J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye). I had been allowed to pursue this literary safari without adult guidance, interference or even interest because, in those days in those places, grownups had better things to do than monitor teenage reading lists. The only adults who cared were my teachers.

These included Richard Swanson, freshman English, second semester. Early in the term, he sprang a quiz on some subject, perhaps a short story by Maupassant. I’d read the story. So I finished the quiz in a trice and resorted to the paperback I was consuming at the time.

(A college roommate, Gerald Mackie, had a saying: “Never go out without a book. You never know when you might get stuck somewhere.”)

The paperback of the moment was Catch-22, the best war novel ever written. I had just reached Clevenger’s court-martial, in which the hapless draftee is grilled abusively by the vindictive “bloated colonel.” No one can read this clash of innocence and raging vindictiveness without spasms of spontaneous laughter. So, there I was in class —last seat, middle row, right behind a tall pretty girl with whom I talked about her motorcycle boyfriend — and I was laughing. I did so with as much restraint as I could, but not so much that Mr. Swanson didn’t notice. 

Logically, he surmised that I might be lollygagging with the cupcake in front of me, or even cheating on the quiz. He started in my direction, scowling his way between the rows. But halfway, suddenly, he halted. His expression softened. He’d seen that distinctive blue paperback. He raised his hands, bestowed a crooked — almost grateful — smile. He tiptoed back to his post at the head of the class. 

Like every good teacher I’ve known — and many of the bad ones — Mr. Swanson would never discourage a kid from reading. Anything. He didn’t worry that I might learn about whores from Heller, or that I might perceive in Hungry Joe or Milo Minderbinder an unsavory role model. If I was reading a book willingly, and comprehending even some of it, he assumed — correctly — that I could, on my own, figure out its message, moral and ambiguities. 

And if I didn’t get Joseph Heller’s drift in Catch-22, so what? Repeated exposure to good writing tends to nibble away at stupidity. Those lessons would dawn on me in the next book, or the next ten books, Or, if I was slow on the uptake, a hundred books later. 

One of the Matanuska-Susitna prudes cited a Maya Angelou passage in which a character is molested “graphically”(possibly on a drawing board?). This Board member, Jim Hart, interpreted the passage not as poignant drama, but as a how-to manual for sexual predators. Hart said, “If I were to read this in a professional environment, at my office, I would be dragged to the equal opportunity office.”

Let’s not argue the likelihood of anyone, in an Alaskan office, reading aloud from a novel. Nor need we picture Mr. Hart, in his suit and tie, as he’s physically seized and fired on the spot for his controversial taste in modern poets. 

Instead, let’s talk about me. In the spring of 1964, I was the only kid in my freshman English class — and probably in the whole school — reading Catch-22. The tragedy that the Matanuska-Susitna bluenoses don’t understand — and school boards everywhere, since the dawn of public education, have never understood — is that most kids don’t read. Weirdass kids like me, who carry around a book all the time, barely exist. I’m the only adult I know who always carries a book.

People don’t read, unless they’re forced to, or the reading has something to do with their work. Or if they join a reading group as a sort of midlife virtue signal. 

The five clueless censors of suburban Anchorage seem not to realize that putting those five books, or any five books, on the approved curriculum reading list was the absolute best way to ensure that no kids — except for the odd wised-up ingenue — would ever look at those books. Books that grownups think kids ought to read are, to kids, rat poison. You could put the Marquis de Sade, Henry Miller and the impenetrable drivel of William Burroughs on the approved list and trust thereafter that no kid would touch these authors. But forbid these kids from reading, say, Burroughs, and curiosity would queer the blacklist. Suddenly, copies of Naked Lunch would start appearing in the back of the classroom, right behind the cute girl with the easy-rider boyfriend.