Banned Books/Censure at libraries: a remembrance

I was reminded the other day of something that happened when I was a teenager, before the “new” Woodbourne Library in Centerville was built, when they rented space in a strip mall near PK Hardware, where my mother worked part-time. Anyway, I tried to check out a book and the librarian at circulation told me in a prim voice that “this book is for adults.” I believe I was in high school.

The book was The Go-Between by L. P. Hartley. Published in 1953 it had a Victorian feel and theme of illicit love at the plot’s center. I say feel because it wasn’t as explicit in its treatment of sex as D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. You see, I checked it out anyway.

 I remember being a little lost while reading it. I knew something was going on between the adult characters. In fact, it made me wonder if adult material was discouraged because it was so oblique. Because the story is told from the naïve point of view of a young boy used as the lovers go-between we only catch glimpses of the transgressive relationship through his eyes. Mostly the adults are misbehaving because they have stepped outside of their rigid class distinctions, not because they are having an affair. The book opens with the phrase, “The past is a foreign country”—how well I remember a kind of traveler’s vertigo of not knowing exactly where I was or what I should be getting out of the story. Perhaps, I wasn’t quite ready for it—but I’m glad I read the book. All this reinforces the book’s main theme: that relationships are complicated and that the past doesn’t necessary erase the confusion, that we are exiles in time reconciling what we remember/possibly forgotten.

Anyway.