PHOTO ILLUSTRATION: BRYAN GEE/THE GLOBE AND MAIL. SOURCES: GETTY IMAGES
Sam Leith’s most recent book is The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading.
I was 11, or possibly 12, when I innocently asked my grandfather “what’s masturbation?” I was reading Stephen King’s non-fiction book Danse Macabre, and was puzzled by Mr. King’s description of what Regan does with a crucifix in The Exorcist. With, admittedly, a slightly red face, my grandfather did what he could to explain. I went away a little wiser.
Such moments of awkwardness are, it seems to me, part of the process of coming of age: part of the process of discovery about the world that can be midwifed, in bits and pieces, by a child’s wide and curious reading. And the awkwardness itself, too, was information. It is to spare such awkwardness that the province of Alberta seems increasingly determined to purge its libraries of books whose content – mostly sexual content, but also some involving substance abuse – is deemed age-inappropriate.
It started, as these things often do, with a modest proposal. Last summer it was announced that titles containing what Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides called “very inappropriate content” were to be banned from school libraries. In a peculiar piece of doublespeak, Mr. Nicolaides declared, at the same time as announcing a list of specific sex acts that can’t be described in school libraries, that “this was never about erasing particular narratives from school libraries.” Since then the scope has expanded, with the announcement that public libraries are to restrict open-shelf access to sexual material lest it fall into the hands of readers under the age of 15.
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Yet the free exploration of library shelves – the essential unruliness, and the personal nature of that exploration – is the essence of childhood reading. In every generation, children will find things in books that their parents will not want them to find. And let’s be honest: that is part of the attraction of reading for those children. Not for nothing did Jason Schilling, of the Alberta Teachers’ Association, argue in opposing the ban that it “would discourage teachers from seeking out materials that interest and engage students.” To read is to experience imaginative freedom, freedom beyond the prescriptions of your parents, and with it, a soupçon of risk and shock.
My late father once said to me, gesturing at the well-stocked bookshelves in our house: “As far as I’m concerned, I’m happy for you to read anything you find in here short of outright pornography. If you’re old enough to read it, you’re old enough to cope with it.” The preteen me thought two things. One, though I doubtless didn’t frame it quite this way, was: “I am blessed with a wise, liberal father, a true apostle of Enlightenment, and treasures now await me.” The other was: “Huh? So where’s he got this outright pornography stashed?”
I didn’t find any of that, exactly, though I did stumble on a questionably tasteful coffee-table book called Masterpieces of Erotic Photography. (My friend Tom, we being of that generation, found The Joy of Sex in his parents’ bookshelves and described its contents to his classmates with wide-eyed horror.) Still, there was plenty of spice. Wilbur Smith, Jack Higgins, Robert Ludlum, James Michener and – my oh my – Harold Robbins were all to be found in those shelves. I read them with fascination. Our female contemporaries, meanwhile, were passing around Shirley Conran, Jilly Cooper, Jackie Collins and Jacqueline Susann. Did the adventure stories cause us to stumble on the smutty bits, or did the promise of smutty bits encourage us to read the stories? A bit of both, probably. Nor did the sexual content of the great 1980s vogue for horror writing – Stephen King, James Herbert and the intriguingly perverse Clive Barker foremost among them – escape me and my contemporaries.
In every generation, there have been bluenoses keen to protect the public by censorship, and they all come furnished with an utter sense of their own rightness, and they now look quaint.
Was I traumatized, or damaged, by my exposure to all this? Did my ingestion of gory horror novels make me think that violent murder or Satanism were the way forward? Did reading Harold Robbins turn me into a pervert? I tend to think not. Indeed, it’s to Harold Robbins, I think, that I owe having been able to embarrass the pompous man delivering the sex-education lecture at my high school. He at one point presented a labelled diagram of a vulva in the spirit of a general showing his troops a map of enemy territory. He indicated various features with the pointer: “Labia majora… labia minora… perineum…” Any questions? Me, earnestly: “Please, sir. Where’s the clitoris?” He flushed deeply and muttered something very telling about not having considered that important. I’d submit that he was wrong in that – and that it was the filth of Harold Robbins we have to thank for putting him on the spot.
Older readers may remember the mighty battles fought in the second half of the last century by Judy Blume – who, in defiance of exactly the sort of people now seeking to remove books from library shelves in Canada, determined to speak in her fiction to teenagers about the real experiences of teenage life. In novels like Deenie, Forever, and Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret She talked about menstruation, sexual anxiety, divorce, masturbation and bullying – and Ronald Reagan’s allies in the Moral Majority went off the deep end. There was a superbly gladiatorial standoff between Ms. Blume and Pat Buchanan on CNN’s Crossfire, in which the conservative commentator questioned why the author couldn’t “write an interesting, exciting book for 10-year-olds without getting into a discussion of masturbation?” To which Ms. Blume asked: “Are you hung up about masturbation?”
Without writers like Ms. Blume – with her compassionate attention to the experience of early adolescent interiority – teens would be marooned in a trackless wilderness of ignorance; or getting their information from influencers of questionable motive and pedigree on YouTube or TikTok. Judy Blume met children where they lived. She spoke to them, directly, about what they were going through. And at the peak of her 1980s popularity she was receiving as many as 2,000 letters a month from her readers.
Yet the battles Ms. Blume fought are having to be fought over and over again. In every generation, there have been bluenoses keen to protect the public by censorship, and they all come furnished with an utter sense of their own rightness, and they now look quaint. Great social advances sometimes come on the back of their defeat (the vernacular Bible; Lady Chatterley’s Lover), and sometimes – like the evangelical pastors who burned Harry Potter books because they thought they were adverts for witchcraft – they just look ridiculous.
Keeping children “innocent” more often bespeaks a need to protect an adult idea about childhood innocence – one we have inherited from Rousseau and the Romantics and never quite shaken off – than a realistic reckoning of the capacities and interests of children themselves. Adults hated Roald Dahl, while children loved him, because he spoke to a gleeful cruelty in children that adults were reluctant to admit was there. Did his child readers enact the cruelty they were titillated by in his work? We can tend to assume not. As Aristotle argued, we enjoy imaginary horrors precisely because we know they aren’t real ones.
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So why should we assume that any school board or government’s unevidenced judgment of what’s damaging or corrupting will be correct this time round? “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” asked Juvenal. Or: “Who watches the watchmen?” I first came across this phrase, incidentally, at age 12, in a comic book of that name containing a big blue naked man with his bright blue penis on display.
We should remember, too, the context in which all this is happening. We know that reading – the skill that built human civilization – is under threat from the fast-food algorithms of the digital world. We know that you can remove any number of dead-tree books from a school library, and that our 10-year-olds will still be able to call up hard-core porn involving men choking and spitting on women ad lib on the screens of their mobile phones.
The bars to entry – you have to read the book, or at least some of it – are higher with the written word, the accidental rewards greater (the child is reading!), and the inappropriate material is almost always more graphic, more disturbing, and less discursively contextualized when it comes in its digital form. I would much rather my 12-year-old son was reading Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (one of the books targeted by the ban) than learning about the world from Andrew Tate.
Let libraries be places of pleasure and instruction and freedom – and, yes, in some cases the thrill of the transgressive. Or something far worse will supply our children’s curiosity.