The Icelandic Canadian - 01.12.1959, Page 44

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THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
Winter 1959
Qaad Jliten,atu>ie and Bad
By ARTHUR M. REYKDAL
What is bad literature and what is
good literature? Isn’t that a matter of
opinion? And doesn’t the very act of
censoring a 'book, either by parents
-to their children or by the government
to the public, make that book all the
more desirable?
Left to his own devices, a child wall
develop his own reading tastes. He will
accept what appeals to his personal-
ity and he will reject what doesn’t. And
he will read hundreds of stories about
bandits robbing -banks or gunmen kill-
ing off -their enemies without feeling
the slightest urge to do those things
unless it happens to be in his nature
to do so anyway.
If his parents -are to him, as they
should be, the most important people
in the world, their standards of be-
havior will influence him far more
than any book possibly can.
Mark Twain’s “Tom Sawyer’’ and
“Huckleberry Finn” are classics today.
But at the time when they were writ-
ten; children had to sneak up to the
hayloft to read them in secret. For
they fractured all the traditions of
goody-goody, sanctimonious Little
Lord Fauntelroy heroes of the then
acceptd juvenile literature.
They presented boys who said
“sweat” when they should have said
“perspiration,” -who disobeyed their
parents, played hookey from school,
sneaked behind the woodshed for a
surreptitious smoke, and did all the
naughty -things that boys have done
since Cain and Abel-^though -they
didn’t commit fratricide, as did Cain.
Hundreds of vice squads campaign-
ed to have the books removed from
the juvenile sections of the nation’s
public libraries. No move was ever
-made ito ban them entirely; the adults
wanted to read -them themselves. A
large library in New York employed
a man who read aloud to classes of
children. He wrote to Mark Twain,
told him about the move to remove
the books, and asked hmi if he couldn’t
present an argument to prevent it. He
said that they were always the first
books he read to each new group of
children, for the youngsters always en-
joyed -them, as he did himself. Mark
Twain replied that he was afraid he
would have to agree with the com-
mittee, for he had written the books
for adults and had never intended
them for the young. .He went on to
point out that some of the world’s
universally accepted classics contained
insidious passages and requested that
if copies of them were on the shelves,
would the librarian “kindly remove
Huck and Tom from that questionable
companionship.”
No book was ever written that some-
body didn’t censure—and desire to
censor.
Linked with the same subject, but
hardly rating -the dignity of being
labelled literature, are the crime
comic books, so often -cited as a con-
tributing cause of juvenile delin-
quency. Professor Bernie Hill told of
a friend of his who -conducted research
on the influence of comic books, in-
tending to use it as a thesis in obtain-