Brave Heart in a Book Battle

Battlefields can erupt in unexpected places, and generalships devolve on unlikely persons.

The Long Beach public library is observing Banned Books Week--for the record, it is against them--and it does so not only in concert with the American Library Assn. and other libraries, but mindful of its own celebrated skirmish, more than 30 years ago, in an epochal world war that has, in its millennial span, drafted Socrates and Langston Hughes, Walt Whitman and Anne Frank.

Of some wars, nothing remains but bones and cinders. Passions fade, purpose is caricatured, the way my grandmother’s walk to school got longer and the snow deeper with every telling.

Not this war; not the war over words.

In Long Beach’s main library, set out in glass boxes like museum pieces, the exhibits shock precisely because they are not museum pieces, but contemporary literary target practice for the fearful and the tetchy on the left and the right:

“Little Red Riding Hood,” faulted for the bottle of wine in her basket. “The Little Mermaid,” adjudged pornographic for her bare breasts, satanic for her transformation from sea creature to woman. The solid, solitary bulk of the American Heritage Dictionary, laden with “objectionable language.”

Other glass cases tell the story--in memos and clippings and the minutes of rancorous, five-hour meetings--of the time when the war of words moved its front lines to Long Beach, summoning the attentions of Mike Wallace and Hugh Hefner, and for a time, sundering Iowa by the Sea.

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The censorship war didn’t so much draft Blanche Collins as blow reveille one day and find that she had enlisted as a four-star general.

She was a Visalia girl who had been a Long Beach librarian since the Coolidge administration. By 1962, she was head librarian, and had approved, among many purchases, a book by Nikos Kazantzakis, a writer who missed the Nobel Prize by one vote. The book was “The Last Temptation of Christ.” It circulated for two years without incident until November 1962, when a Long Beach housewife complained.

A month before, in October, the nation had faced down Soviet missiles steaming for Cuba. Now, suddenly, a smallish library in a seaside city had a flotilla of critics heading its way.

Iowa by the Sea wasn’t quite River City, Iowa, the town in “The Music Man,” but Blanche Collins became Marian the Librarian, about whom the River City biddies nattered for giving shelf space to naughty writers like that Chaucer fellow and Rabelais.

All day long Dec. 4, the City Council presided over the battle. Ministers denounced book banning as a Nazi technique, and ministers condemned the book as “the most despicable thing” ever published. In the end, the council sided with Miss Collins, as it would two years later when, in another riotous meeting, she was accused of purchasing only books “which advance the cause of one-world socialist government.”

That same year, 1964, Playboy magazine--decidedly not to be found on the library’s shelves--wrote that the Kazantzakis novel had been banned from the Long Beach library. Miss Collins, unfamiliar enough with Playboy to misspell its editor’s name, hastened to demand a correction, and a chastened Hugh Hefner complied.

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The library has long been alert to its patrons’ sensibilities. A 1960 memo from one employee about historical novelist Frank Yerby cautions that he “goes ‘all-out’ in his newest book and it could give some of you a spot of trouble,” and notes of a racy Irving Wallace novel, “The writer is Jewish, and the Jewish people have a more, shall I say ‘sophisticated’ attitude toward this sort of thing. . . . They are very realistic people.”

Offended citizenry in the present day can file a “request for reconsideration of a book,” in which they are asked quite sensibly whether they have read it, and what, specifically, they object to.

As Miss Collins warned 34 years ago (with a dramatic splurge of Shakespeare), “If books were removed because of an individual’s negative reaction . . . the person . . . should realize that if we accede to his request, we must then tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow remove books as patrons demand, thus eventually removing the books that he himself most needs.”

Blanche Collins died in 1983. Five years later, “Temptation” made it to the movie screen. People picketed outside theaters and, in one case, went inside and slashed the seats to shreds.

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On a sale table near the library entrance are hardbacks and paper, romance novels and treatises, and a coin box on the honor system, on the presumption that people who love books do not steal them.

Four bits bought me 700 pages of John Milton’s prose. The book practically fell open to the right chapter: Milton’s 1644 speech on “The Liberty of Unlicence’d Printing”:

”. . . who kills a Man kills a reasonable creature, Gods Image; but hee who destroyes a good Booke, kills reason itselfe, kills the Image of God. . . .”