What you don’t know about can’t be forbidden, so D H Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover passed me by until I was into adulthood. When I did finally read it, I wondered what all the fuss was about? Not his best novel by any measure. The first ‘adult novel’ came my way at 14 and I still have, the old battered copy of God’s Little Acre by Erskinr Caldwell that I was given in 1958. I re-read it during lockdown, as gritty, sexy and sensuous as ever, still on the side of the working class. No wonder I loved it then and still love it now. I guess the man may have pissed of the American right back then. Robert Howard. A PS. 3 hours ago I was having a cataract removed and here I am reading and typing on my iPad. Amazing!
My parents had built in bookshelves and a fireplace in their bedroom. It was nice, but austere. It was only for them, not a family reading area. On the bookshelves were many books I used to look at, but the ones that struck me in that time, 1969, (I was 9)were the books about WW2 my dad kept. He never talked about the war, so seeing the books he purchased opened my eyes a bit to what he experienced. It felt like I was snooping. I know that sounds odd, but I remember that well. No books were really off limits though. I practically lived for going to the library.
I was probably around 10 when I found a thin hardcover book on one of our living room bookshelves. It was a long, beautiful erotic poem -- or at least that's how it struck me at such a young age. I took it to my room to read and put it on one of my own bookshelves. In no time at all my mother confronted me. Where was the book? Why did I have it? Give it back! She wanted that book back and she was furious with me. What a lasting impression that gorgeous poem left on me. Ever after, I was a pretty good writer of erotica. Erotica wasn't what I thought I was meant to write, by any means, but at the age of 14 I wrote an erotic book-length poem while sitting in classes at school and at night locked in the bathroom. The only book I have ever managed to publish, to date, is an erotic memoir! I blame my mother....
I love this post. I was just talking to friends about what our parents shared with us and what they didn't back in the sixties and seventies when I grew up. I read what I wanted and sought out the forbidden quite naturally. I wasn't ever hurt.
At home no book was forbidden to me, which is how I ended up reading The Well of Loneliness when I was ten. I grasped it well enough. When we finally moved to town I was 11, and was shocked to learn the public library (such as it was) did not allow me to check out ANY books that were considered adult. This is where I first read Nancy Drew, The Hardy Boys, Trixie Belden. At home I continued to read every book that entered the house.
Mine: a bit of a reversal from "don't read that" to "don't write this" with the censorship of a poem I wrote in grade 6 for a poetry competition through (as I recall) a Junior Scholastic publication. The "too adult" across my words in my teacher's lovely cursive made no sense to me, despite the red ink. I asked and was told she wouldn't submit my entry. My mother read the poem then responded with a visit to the school, which in those days was a remarkable event.
The offspring of a picking-the-scab marriage of shame and persistence can be self-censorship as a writer. It can be doubt, that burgeoning, endlessly aching pregnancy. It can be the rejection bastards we set fire to in the waste bin. It can also grow into a bloodhound for words held back, sniffing out when a writer doesn't haul us to the reader's riverbank of desire and the only place we might see everything we'd otherwise be afraid to look at, god forbid put into words. In 10th grade Tom Robbins' Even Cowgirls Get the Blues was my permission slip, and by the time a professor highlighted my sentence "He fucked the pennies out of her loafers" to note his approval on a paper I wrote, I no longer needed it.
The lines of my 6th grade poem Mrs. Miller objected to:
Her beautiful countenance shone untold/of her body he longed to hold
I was a good girl reading Fear Street from R. L. Stine. No banned books for me. The most controversy I courted was Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. No one questioned it though.
One interesting thing happened later in life, though. I looked back at high school reading lists out of curiosity and saw how my honors class was reading Circle of Friends, East of Eden, Gone with the Wind (yes, close to 1k pages). But the “regular” class read Connecticut Yankee, Les Miserable, etc. I picked up Animal Farm in my 20s and thought, “Oh my god…”
They gave the “smart” children all these high brow and lengthy texts to read but had they given us something like Animal Farm, we would have sniffed out those themes right away. The way we overcome and overthrow, the way we lay down law, become more restrictive, and then, become our oppressors. Imagine teaching those lessons to ears that would receive them? Anyone I talked to back then who actually was supposed to read the book, wasn’t really tapped in, just trying to get the tests passed.
So my story is not about banned books, but how a school system could keep critical messages from children who would be able to expand on them. We cannot accept the phrase “absolute power corrupts absolutely” without getting that illustration of just how it happens. Of just how someone takes the helm under the guise of needing order or of helping out. We would maybe learn to recognize the people who are on their own side and not ours. We would learn not to be deceived. Revolution among children. What a radical idea.
What you don’t know about can’t be forbidden, so D H Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover passed me by until I was into adulthood. When I did finally read it, I wondered what all the fuss was about? Not his best novel by any measure. The first ‘adult novel’ came my way at 14 and I still have, the old battered copy of God’s Little Acre by Erskinr Caldwell that I was given in 1958. I re-read it during lockdown, as gritty, sexy and sensuous as ever, still on the side of the working class. No wonder I loved it then and still love it now. I guess the man may have pissed of the American right back then. Robert Howard. A PS. 3 hours ago I was having a cataract removed and here I am reading and typing on my iPad. Amazing!
My parents had built in bookshelves and a fireplace in their bedroom. It was nice, but austere. It was only for them, not a family reading area. On the bookshelves were many books I used to look at, but the ones that struck me in that time, 1969, (I was 9)were the books about WW2 my dad kept. He never talked about the war, so seeing the books he purchased opened my eyes a bit to what he experienced. It felt like I was snooping. I know that sounds odd, but I remember that well. No books were really off limits though. I practically lived for going to the library.
I was probably around 10 when I found a thin hardcover book on one of our living room bookshelves. It was a long, beautiful erotic poem -- or at least that's how it struck me at such a young age. I took it to my room to read and put it on one of my own bookshelves. In no time at all my mother confronted me. Where was the book? Why did I have it? Give it back! She wanted that book back and she was furious with me. What a lasting impression that gorgeous poem left on me. Ever after, I was a pretty good writer of erotica. Erotica wasn't what I thought I was meant to write, by any means, but at the age of 14 I wrote an erotic book-length poem while sitting in classes at school and at night locked in the bathroom. The only book I have ever managed to publish, to date, is an erotic memoir! I blame my mother....
I love this post. I was just talking to friends about what our parents shared with us and what they didn't back in the sixties and seventies when I grew up. I read what I wanted and sought out the forbidden quite naturally. I wasn't ever hurt.
Reading Ian Fleming in 7th grade . . .
At home no book was forbidden to me, which is how I ended up reading The Well of Loneliness when I was ten. I grasped it well enough. When we finally moved to town I was 11, and was shocked to learn the public library (such as it was) did not allow me to check out ANY books that were considered adult. This is where I first read Nancy Drew, The Hardy Boys, Trixie Belden. At home I continued to read every book that entered the house.
Mine: a bit of a reversal from "don't read that" to "don't write this" with the censorship of a poem I wrote in grade 6 for a poetry competition through (as I recall) a Junior Scholastic publication. The "too adult" across my words in my teacher's lovely cursive made no sense to me, despite the red ink. I asked and was told she wouldn't submit my entry. My mother read the poem then responded with a visit to the school, which in those days was a remarkable event.
The offspring of a picking-the-scab marriage of shame and persistence can be self-censorship as a writer. It can be doubt, that burgeoning, endlessly aching pregnancy. It can be the rejection bastards we set fire to in the waste bin. It can also grow into a bloodhound for words held back, sniffing out when a writer doesn't haul us to the reader's riverbank of desire and the only place we might see everything we'd otherwise be afraid to look at, god forbid put into words. In 10th grade Tom Robbins' Even Cowgirls Get the Blues was my permission slip, and by the time a professor highlighted my sentence "He fucked the pennies out of her loafers" to note his approval on a paper I wrote, I no longer needed it.
The lines of my 6th grade poem Mrs. Miller objected to:
Her beautiful countenance shone untold/of her body he longed to hold
I was a good girl reading Fear Street from R. L. Stine. No banned books for me. The most controversy I courted was Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. No one questioned it though.
One interesting thing happened later in life, though. I looked back at high school reading lists out of curiosity and saw how my honors class was reading Circle of Friends, East of Eden, Gone with the Wind (yes, close to 1k pages). But the “regular” class read Connecticut Yankee, Les Miserable, etc. I picked up Animal Farm in my 20s and thought, “Oh my god…”
They gave the “smart” children all these high brow and lengthy texts to read but had they given us something like Animal Farm, we would have sniffed out those themes right away. The way we overcome and overthrow, the way we lay down law, become more restrictive, and then, become our oppressors. Imagine teaching those lessons to ears that would receive them? Anyone I talked to back then who actually was supposed to read the book, wasn’t really tapped in, just trying to get the tests passed.
So my story is not about banned books, but how a school system could keep critical messages from children who would be able to expand on them. We cannot accept the phrase “absolute power corrupts absolutely” without getting that illustration of just how it happens. Of just how someone takes the helm under the guise of needing order or of helping out. We would maybe learn to recognize the people who are on their own side and not ours. We would learn not to be deceived. Revolution among children. What a radical idea.