Literary Oddities Part I

Christmas Eve, 2017. And not a creature is stirring, not a bunny or a quail or even one of our cats. Just Rosalie doing her weekly laundry and me watching the Cardinals trying to give another game away. I don’t have anything to say about Donald, so I’m going to write several blogs about American literary oddities to bring this year to an end.

We know a lot about our best-known writers, but there’s much that almost no one knows about them. For example, the question of what books should or should not be banned from the public eye, or maybe just the prurient eyes of our youth. We’ve come a long way from the prudish Puritanism of the last two centuries. Whether that’s good or bad remains to be seen, but I think our present openness about sex and bodily functions is a good thing. J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye was banned somewhere in the U.S. every year from 1955 to 1980. And all because Holden Caulfield tried to keep from his little sister’s eyes the F-bomb he saw on a graffitied wall. One F-bomb kept this funny, sensitive, moral novel from our children’s eyes all the way up to 1980. See, even now, I and others like me in the media still are uncomfortable saying “fuck.” In 1957 New York State was still disapproving for its schools any of Twain’s writing. Erskine Caldwell’s God’s Little Acre was banned in Mississippi in 1950. This was a few years after the revolution in affordable books we know as paperbacks. I can remember in my youth sneaking a copy of this book off the rack to see what was thought then to be so titillatingly risqué. And Mickey Spillane came out with paperbacks of I, the Jury and My Gun Is Quick in the late 40’s. Oh, how we young lads loved the double entendre of that gun that was quick. This was the age in which grocers and druggists still had to wrap boxes of Kotex in brown paper so no one would be offended by a product for a female’s menstrual cycle. Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath was banned just after it came out in 1939. Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises wasn’t allowed in the San Jose, California, schools in 1960. There were many other books that were banned for sale in the U.S., like Ulysses by James Joyce and Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence. All of these books would now be considered as tame as kittens.

          Twain is one of America’s most frequently quoted because of his acerbic wit. Nearly everyone knows what he had to say about golf: “Golf is a good walk spoiled.” He would never have said such a thing if he’d ever taken up the game. But he also said, “A classic is something that everyone wants to have read and nobody wants to read.” Other notable quotes by other less notable people: Groucho Marx, “Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book—and does.” Dorothy Parker, “You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think.” Twain on critics, “The critic’s symbol should be the tumble-bug; he deposits his egg in somebody else’s dung, otherwise he could not hatch it.” E.B. White on critics, “The critic leaves at curtain fall / To find, in starting to review it, / He scarcely saw the play at all / For watching his reaction to it.”

         William Cullen Bryant was only seventeen when he wrote what is considered to be his best poem, “Thanatopsis.” It seems odd that a boy would have such a morbid view of death, but he admired a group called “The Graveyard School of Poets” and was obviously trying to emulate them. He meant it as consolation for anyone who fears dying, saying that we’re all in an almost infinite line of people, kings and wise men as well as paupers and idiots, who move through life in single file toward that cliff in front of us, slow-footed, dim-witted as we throw ourselves like lemmings over the precipice. I don’t derive any comfort from such an image. He goes on to say that you can’t set foot anywhere on the planet without stepping on someone who’s gone before us. Ugh, that’s an unappealing thought. He concludes with this advice, “Approach thy grave / Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch / About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.” Hmm, pleasant dreams? I’ll try to put that thought out of my mind when I go to bed tonight. You try also.