Celebrities Rally ‘Round Written Word

The faces were recognizable. Their voices were familiar. Their names drew top billing. But for the celebrities who spoke Saturday in the stillness of a Malibu afternoon, the featured attraction was the written and--in some communities--unread word.

“You are here because you are standing in front of darkness,” author Harlan Ellison told the audience of 250 people who had gathered on a sprawling estate to listen to him and other writers and actors read passages from books that, at one time or another, have been banned from library shelves, stricken from student reading lists and denounced by community groups.

Noting that literature has survived some “dangerous times,” Ellison said the threat of censorship has not abated. “There are always those who know what it is you should not know,” he warned. “There are always those who are going to tell you what it is that you cannot read because it’s not good for you.”

That was the somber theme for the outdoor kickoff to National Banned Books Week, which began Saturday.

The event was organized by PEN Center USA West, which is based in Los Angeles and is part of the international writers’ organization that includes poets, essayists, novelists, playwrights and journalists. In addition to Ellison, 19 writers and actors took their turn on an outdoor stage underneath a towering sycamore tree to read from literary works that have been considered by some to be obscene, blasphemous, racist or merely controversial.

Actor Tom Poston read from Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” which has been taken off some school reading lists after it was called racially offensive. Actress Esther Rolle read from Lorraine Hansberry’s play “Raisin in the Sun,” which a Utah school district once restricted at the insistence of an anti-pornography organization. And 14-year-old actress Sara Gilbert read from “The Diary of Anne Frank”--a book that PEN organizers said has been challenged by some parents as “sexually offensive.”

Others read passages from “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “Madame Bovary,” “The Wizard of Oz” and the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, which was removed from classrooms in one New Mexico town because it defined obscene words. And there were excerpts from “Catcher in the Rye”--J.D. Salinger’s critically acclaimed novel that two weeks ago was removed from the Boron High School reading list in that northeastern Antelope Valley community.

Parents in the desert town had pressured the local school board to remove Salinger’s novel of adolescent crisis from a 70-book reading list for high school students. And that recent example was not lost on Saturday’s crowd.

“This is not something that just happens in Nazi Germany,” actress Bonnie Franklin said. “This is something that is happening all over this country, and right here in California as well as in the South and the North and wherever else it’s happening. A lot of us don’t recognize that.”

It was an afternoon that featured high tea, high-brow literature and some notable high-jinks artists such as disc jockey Casey Kasem, who reeled off the names of banned books like a top-20 hit record countdown, and comedian and author Steve Allen, who read from the Bible, a book that over the years has been burned in Germany and banned in the Soviet Union and other countries.

Despite the relaxed poolside scene with tables of scones and cucumber sandwiches, the participants voiced an urgent message: censorship is dangerous and still exists.

“The fact that you see so many books banned, you have to ask yourself how could that book offend anybody,” novelist Amy Tan said. “But then you realize how insidious personal opinion can be when it tries to dictate what other people’s tastes should be.”