I recently met Nicholas Allan, the author of (among many
other children’s books) Where Willy Went: The BIG story of a little sperm.
He mentioned to me that his agent had recently sold rights for this story to be
produced in Japan as a theatrical production. He (and I) would love to see that
play. As we spoke about it, I wondered whether it would be produced in the USA
in the current climate of censorship.
I recall that in 1996 I had a conversation with one of the
telephone sellers in my New York office who was aggrieved because he had just
lost a sale worth some $8,000, and the corresponding commission cheque, of the
(forthcoming) The Dictionary of Art (34 volumes). He had been talking to
the librarian of a Christian four-year college (university in British English).
To close the sale, he had sent the librarian proofs of a selection of articles
from the thousands in the book, and had not hesitated to include an entry on Gay
and lesbian art. That one text out of thousands lost him the sale. The
salesman explained to the librarian that the article did not advocate
homosexuality or lesbianism, to no avail. The librarian explained to him that
students graduated from the college without ever being made aware of those
topics, let alone reading about them in the library.
Of course, that librarian had not censored the book itself,
since it was still, widely available, but she had denied her students access to
the latest scholarship on the history of art worldwide. This kind of censorship
was nothing new, although librarians generally stand on the side of access
to books, not withdrawing them. A recent article in The Observer by
Richard Ovenden, librarian of the Bodleian Library in Oxford noted that the
American Library Association reported that, between 2001 and 2020, 273
individual titles were challenged each year. In 2023 the number was 9,021.
Ovenden’s article attributes the increase in censorship in
libraries to the activities of “extremist groups that expound conspiracy
theories, such as QAnon and the Proud Boys, and to political action committees
that channel funds to rightwing causes.” He mentions, in particular, Moms for
Liberty. Friends in Florida will be familiar with this organization, since it
persuaded governor Ron de Santis to pass legislation that permits citizens to
demand that “harmful” books be removed from school libraries. Books that are
challenged are to be removed from the shelves and scrutinized by a committee
that decides whether or not to uphold the challenge. Moms for Liberty promptly
challenged large numbers of books in many schools, with the intention of
creating such a quantity of books to be scrutinized that the titles would, in
effect, be banned because of the sheer quantity of books that committees had to
examine. One parent complained that his son had been embarrassed when he showed
friends a book that he had borrowed from his school library. No matter that the
school librarian checked her records and reported that the boy had not borrowed
the book: it had been challenged so off the shelves with it.
The denial of access to ideas is not confined to schools and
children. The US Secretary of Defense has ordered that all books that discuss
diversity, equity and inclusion, gender, critical race theory and other
out-of-favour subjects be removed from the library of West Point and other
military libraries. One of the titles removed is Maya Angelou’s classic work I
Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. I suspect that the enemies of the USA will
be encouraged to learn that the nation’s Secretary of Defense thinks that his
soldier lack the moral fortitude and powers of discernment to deal with books
and their ideas that challenge their assumptions.
Censorship of school textbooks is a long-established
tradition in large, politically and socially conservative US states such as
Texas. For decades, members of conservative groups there have been elected to
the state boards that select school textbooks. These boards examine publishers’
textbooks and demand that “objectionable” material be removed. Because Texan
schools are an enormous market, these state boards, can in effect censor books
adopted in states with less restrictive ideologies since publishers cannot
afford to produce multiple editions of textbooks. In other words, publishers
can be coerced to censor their own books.
Ovenden’s article prompted me to examine my own career to
consider whether I had censored books. I must confess that, in some cases I
have exercised some degree of censorship, although, to the best of my
knowledge, never to the extent of excluding a subject entirely. For example,
one of my great successes was a textbook for US college Art Appreciation
courses, Gateways to Art. One of the three authors included in the
second edition a discussion of the artist Jenny Saville, whose oeuvre includes
nude, full-body, self-portraits, which depict the artist from a low, severely
foreshortened viewpoint. The author proposed a particular work which, depicted
in part the artist’s genitals (the author denied that this was the case, but I
knew that that particular work would lose sales in conservative regions). We
discussed alternatives and found a work that was typical of Saville’s output,
was still quite shocking, but not quite so explicit. The result was that
Saville’s work was made available to students, while reducing the likelihood
that instructors might prohibit the entire textbook on account of a single
image.
And I must confess that I took the illustrations suggested
by the author of the article on Erotic art in The Dictionary of Art to
my bosses. We decided that some would lose us sales in several countries and
edited the selection of illustrations accordingly. Similarly, I was
sufficiently concerned about the impact on sales of works that depicted the
Prophet that I contacted Professor Oleg Grabar of Harvard for advice. He told
me that the insistence of some Muslims that depictions of the Prophet are
forbidden is historically unsustainable, since there are many works produced in
Islamic societies that depict him. Nevertheless, he suggested that we need not
be overly zealous in including all the illustrations suggested by authors, but
that those of great historical significance must be included. Again, the
result was to deal with an important historical phenomenon, but not to be
overly provocative. In both cases, nothing of historical importance was censored,
but judgements were made about exactly how far it was wise to include
provocative examples that could be omitted without depriving the reader of
significant information.
Sometimes, it was not I as publisher who censored works of
art in my books. The first edition of Gateways to Art discussed the
controversy concerning an exhibition entitled Sensation at Brooklyn
Museum of Art in 1999-2000. The show included a portrait of the Virgin Mary by
Chris Ofili made with elephant Dung, which some considered sacrilegious. Rudi
Giuliani, then Mayor of New York, tried unsuccessfully to close the exhibition,
thus guaranteeing international fame for Ofili’s work. However, the gallery that represented Ofili’s
work refused permission to reproduce the work in our book, arguing that it had
been over exposed. Given our schedule, we had to choose another work from the
show. We chose Marc Quinn’s Self, a sculptural self-portrait made with the
artist’s frozen blood. When I visited an art professor at Central New Mexico
Community College in Albuquerque she told me that it was clear that we should
have illustrated Ofili’s work, and that she and her colleagues could not
support a publisher who they believed to have censored its own books. I tried
to explain that it was not I who had censored the book, but the artist’s own
representative, but to no avail. I left aggrieved but full of admiration for
the professors who stood firm on a matter of principle.
It is also possible for publishers to censor books by including,
rather than excluding material. When I examined the textbooks of rival
publishers designed for college courses in evolution and prehistory, I noticed
that some made a virtue of “impartiality” by including a discussion of
Creationism to “balance” the discussion of evolutionary theory. Neither I, nor
the publisher I worked for, would have contemplated lowering standards by
pretending that Creationist ideas had the same intellectual and scientific
status as Darwinian evolution. In a religion textbook, my decision might have
been quite different, but not in a prehistory text.
Publishers take many decisions in the course of publishing a
book that might be defined as censorship, by deciding whether illustrations or
topics discussed in the text should be included or excluded. These might be
driven by financial reasons (fears of lost sales), by legal reasons (fear of
being sued for libel etc.), but in the great majority of cases are the result
of a publisher’s instinct to offer the reader the best book possible. Of
course, such decisions are conditioned by the social norms of the time. I am
sure that the original publisher of Conrad’s novel The Nigger of the
Narcissus, for instance, never stopped for a moment to consider the
propriety of title, but a work with that word in the title could not be
published today. Conrad’s book is an example of a classic that lives on despite
that objectionable title. Nevertheless, while the title had been accepted by
his British publisher, the novel was originally published in 1897 in the USA as
The Children of the Sea: A Tale of the Forecastle. In other words, there were doubts about the
propriety of the title even in 1897.
In the days when I read to my sons at bedtime, I picked up
children’s books published by my employer, Macmillan. At one time we had large
numbers of titles from the Just William series of Richmal Crompton.
Although they were by then very old-fashioned, and included some distasteful
social attitudes, the stories were well-enough written that those factors
seemed not to matter to me or my sons. However, William and the Nasties
was another story. In this novel, William and his friends, at a loose end,
decide to play at being Nasties: i.e. Nazis. Since Nasties are nasty to Jews,
the boys decide to be unkind to Mr. Isaacs who owns the village sweetshop, but
instead they end up capturing a robber stealing from Mr. Issacs. I don’t think
I would have published this in 1934, and certainly not now.
A more recent
trend, which to some extent meets he definition of censorship, is the question
of the character of the author, and whether some misdeed on the part of the
author should prevent a book being published. A friend who is President of the
New York publisher W. W. Norton, had to deal with just such a case. Norton had
published, to critical acclaim, a biography of the writer Philip Roth (who was
himself controversial for being a misogynist) by Blake Bailey. Sometime after
the book had been published Norton received an anonymous accusation that Bailey
was guilty of sexual misconduct. Since the accusation was anonymous, the
publisher could not do anything other than to ask Baily whether the accusations
were true. However, the anonymous accusation was then sent to the New York Times. The Times accused Norton of failing to act on the accusation, to say
the least a harsh judgement since the newspaper itself could not confirm or refute
the accusation since it was anonymous. However, the controversy resulted in
more accusations about Bailey’s conduct which were not anonymous. Norton faced
a dilemma. Since the book was clearly an excellent account of Roth’s life as
reviews had attested, and since many copes had already been sold, was it
Norton’s place to withhold it from the public? On the other hand, should a
person who was probably guilty of, at least, severe misconduct, be allowed to
profit from the book’s publication. Norton’s decision was to withdraw the book
from bookstores and online retailers, to cancel the contract (another publisher
eventually reissued the book) and to donate the equivalent of Bailey’s advance
to charities that supported women who had suffered sexual assault. I know from
discussions with my friend that this was a very difficult set of decisions; no
solution would have been perfect, and it was not possible to make Bailey’s book
disappear. However, my friend’s decision did not censor Bailey’s book: it had
been distributed and was available to readers, and another publisher issued it.
This story reminded
me, in a small way, of a case from my own work as a publisher. I was once asked
by a colleague, when I next visited New York, to call on an author who was an
authority in his field, to write a new book. When I happened to mention this to
another colleague, I was asked whether I knew that this author had been
convicted of a federal felony, and offence connected with his area of
expertise? I met the author, and, unsurprisingly, the subject of his conviction
was not discussed. We met two or three times and the book was duly published.
In my opinion, a spent conviction was no reason for the author’s expertise to
be withheld from the public.
A controversy,
somewhat similar to these cases, has arisen in the UK concerning a book called The Salt Path, a memoir-cum-inspirational book about a couple who found the resolution
of severe setbacks in long-distance walking. The book was a bestseller, was
followed by two more books, and a fourth was about to be published. But then The
Observer published a series of articles that accused the author of
not telling the truth about the
financial troubles that she and her severely ill partner endured: according to The
Observer, the author had
embezzled a substantial sum from an employer, and the debt that resulted from
paying the money back was the cause of the couple’s financial problems.
Apparently, the account in The
Salt Path omits the alleged
embezzlement and attributes the author’s money problems to something else.
The Observer account rather primly blames the
publisher for not “fact-checking” the book, attributing this to reduced
editorial standards driven by profit-seeking. Noting that book publishers do
not oblige authors to base their work on multiple sources as (presumably more
virtuous) journalists do. The paper also seems to be astonished that publishing
contracts oblige authors to submit text that is, to the best of the author’s
knowledge, accurate (and, incidentally, I might add not to breach anybody
else’s copyright nor to libel or defame anybody). The Observer seems to
consider this a dereliction of duty on the part of the publisher, as serious as
the supposed lack of fact checking. But think about this a moment. When you
employ a craftsman to do a repair at your home, don’t you explicitly or
implicitly expect him to do a professional job, not to use stolen materials,
and not to damage your neighbour’s property in the course of the works? Well,
unsurprisingly, publisher’s ask authors to deliver a professional product that
has not been stolen from another writer and does not harm anybody. As for fact
checking, it is one thing to check facts for two or three columns in a
newspaper, quite another if you are responsible for tens of books of several
hundred pages per year. And, as for the background of Bailey or the author of The Salt Path, is it really reasonable for publishers to investigate the personal
background of the hundreds of authors it publishes every year?
As of writing, the
only consequence of this controversy is that the publisher has delayed the
fourth book written by the author, presumably to wait for the brouhaha to die
down. There is no simple answer to the question of whether or not the publisher
should have checked the story behind The
Salt Path and either refused to
publish it or instruct the author to tell the truth. Although readers can
reasonably expect a memoir to reveal misdeeds in the author’s past, even
confessional memoirs may not be entirely truthful, and no doubt quite properly
omit sensitive or personal details, especially if they affect others – this is
self-censorship which may be quie right and proper. And it seems that The Salt Path is in part intended as an inspirational tale of the role of
long-distance walking in overcoming adversity. In that respect it may well be
true, and seems to have enchanted and inspired many readers.
In short, there are
many degrees and forms of what one might consider censorship, and a number of
players may be involved in quasi or partial censorship. However, the censorship
exposed by Richard Ovenden is another matter. The most appalling fact in a tale
of appalling denial of the right to read what one wishes is the ruling of a judge
in Llano County, Texas, just west of Austin. According to Ovenden, the judge
ruled that library users have no first amendment rights of access to books: the
provision of books in a public library is allowable “government speech”,
entitled to no constitutional protection whatsoever. Dictators everywhere will
agree.
