Books By People Who Hate Books
My first original Substack entry, about the censorship of books by Left that we aren't allowed to talk about.
Amongst those of us who are on the old-school classical liberal Left, everyone has a story of when it finally hit them. The growing discontentment, the odd feeling of unreality as the illiberal, authoritarian identity Left slowly gobbled up everything. It was difficult to believe, hard to see from the inside, overlaying as it was the familiar territory of universal, individual rights that we were raised in and loved. But sooner or later, the disbelief breaks.
For me, it was the books.
One spring weekend this year, news articles declared that new, revised and censored Roald Dahl books would be issued by his publisher and estate, “cleaning up” any language that may be offensive to modern children, such as “ugly,” “fat,” “and female.” Because as we all know, children will automatically stop using such words once they are taken out of the books.
Only days afterwards we were told that Ian Fleming’s James Bond books would receive the same treatment, this time for the removal of antiquated racist language and concepts (though interestingly, none of the sexist content—rather indicative of the editors’ obsessions, more than Fleming’s I’d say). The new revised editions would be the only ones printed from now on, and the original text would never been seen again. For those of us who have Fleming in our personal libraries, we are now the owners of books that no longer are allowed to exist.
I’m going to say that again. We are the owners of books that are no longer allowed to exist.
One of those evenings I stood in front of my bookshelves, possibly slightly inebriated, and looked at them. Slowly scanning each row, each shelf, I thought, what’s next? What else would soon be a forbidden book, existing nowhere else but here in my own collection?
Roughly a week later I was at Barnes buying a collection of Hemingway short stories, trying to hunt down one story in particular. At the register the bookseller remarked that he had been selling a lot of Hemingway lately.
I thought yes, because we don’t know who is going to be next. We need to buy it now.
I won’t recount here all the news stories we saw in the first half of the year of this and that censored book and author. We all remember them. But do you remember when the reporting stopped?
The last one I recall was about the time R.L. Stine learned that his books had been rewritten without his permission, that is, the exact same time that the general public learned because his publisher had never bothered to tell him. Over on the website LitHub, the only acknowledgment of the incident was a short piece that jokingly said something to the effect, jeez guys wait until he’s dead at least!
For LitHub, one of the literary Left’s main watering holes online, censorship is now a source of humor.
Censorship from the Left, anyway. It existed and was reported and then the reporting stopped because, well, it was our side doing it so it is good! It is necessary! And no one needs to know anymore about it anyway.
Right-wing censorship? Of course we get weekly news articles, Moms For Liberty and all that. I don’t support that censorship either, though I also say I have not read any of those children’s books that they are trying to remove from libraries so I can’t make any statements about the content. The reporting (from both sides) I ignore with the assumption that the bias makes the articles unreadable. I just follow my principle that any censorship in any form is wrong.
So, after the R.L. Stine incident I noticed the reporting of censorship from the Left just...stopped. Nothing. Did the wave pass? Are books still being censored? We’ll never know.
But the Moms For Liberty stories fill an important niche in the illiberal Left’s narrative about the big bad evil Right. Because the Moms censored, or attempted to censor, books in the old fashioned way (by taking them off shelves) it fit neatly into the imagery of book burning and destruction undertaken by Fascists, all those torch-lit Nuremberg rallies, not to mention the photographs and video of middle-aged women from the Left’s hated Middle America, just inviting snide remarks. It makes for good news stories, no?
The censorship of the Left isn’t so photogenic. They don’t have to go into libraries and pull books off the shelves, for the most part. Why? Because, after decades of filling the publishing, journalism, and all other cultural industries with their ideologists, they don’t need to take books off the shelves. They just ensure that the stories they don’t want to exist never will.
It is just as much censorship to prevent something being published as it is to remove it from existence once it is published. More so, for if it never was allowed to exist how would we know what we lost?
Oh, except one time the Left did in fact pull books off the shelf. In September of this year the public school district in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada, did just that. In the name of “equity” and the usual identity politics of the authoritarian Left, all the books published before 2008 were removed from the shelves and destroyed. Not donated but actually destroyed. It was explained that the books were deemed not fit for any readers, of any age, sex, gender, race, etc. No one should read any books published before 2008.
No one.
I first learned of this desecration from The Free Press here on Substack, and any subsequent reporting came from web searches that hit conservative news sites. The main book and publishing web pages, Lit Hub, Kirkus Reviews, Publisher’s Weekly, Book Riot? Not a single article. Silence. Tumbleweeds in the dusty breeze. Their Leftists destroyed a library and they didn’t want anyone to know.
These people may work with books, work in the industry, write, edit, buy, sell, acquire, teach, and promote books. But to me it’s quite clear that the illiberal Left-dominated publishing industry hates books.
Because for us book people, real book people, books are romantic. They are magical. It is a form of miracle that I can pick up a Penguin edition of, say, some ancient Greek comedies and laugh along with a Greek audience sitting in an amphitheater two and a half thousand years ago. Books are time travel, they allow us to connect to voices anywhere, and are the continuity of human civilization. If you read, you are dipping into the stream of humanity and if you write, you are adding your voice to the great Human Conversation.
But to those who run the industry now, the purpose of books is only for the dissemination of their ideology, and anything that does not fit that ideology must be destroyed. There is no romance, no wonder, no love for books themselves. The illiberal Left must destroy it all, reset to Year Zero, and make sure no one gets to feel wonder ever again.
In that Hemingway short story collection I bought, there was a note on the copyright page:
“A Note on the Text: This book was published in 1927 and reflects the attitudes of its time. The publisher’s decision to present it as it was originally published is not intended as endorsement of cultural representation or language contained herein.”
Well a no-censorship guarantee, ain’t that nice! Now I know I’m reading Hem’s original words, unsullied by modern cowardice.
But what about the books without such a notice? Are the censored? Are they not?
Will we ever know?
In terms of progressivism, censoring the past is one of the worst things you can do because it smooths out all the blemishes of the past. Some of my childhood favorites are problematic. I love Victorian literature which is rascist is all hell. It's harder to exist acknowledging that people are imperfect and times change. Without knowing how imperfect the past can we truly understand and change it? Also, racism and sexism and homophobia and transphobia are systemtic problems and not just individual moral failings. Nowhere is that more clear than when shocking shit shows up in old children's literature.