Banned in the Berkshires
Three Banned Berkshire-based authors to fuel your imagination (not stoves!)
The Book Mill, next to Shaker Mill Books, is large, lofty, and rustic. It’s drafty and chilly in the winter. It’s welcoming in the early days of spring, and a downright furnace in the summer. A stove is a last thing it needs.
Yet, a stove is among the first items visitors see when they walk through the Mill’s wide-open double doors. It’s not just any stove. It’s a Station Agent #24, made by Union Stove Works in Peekskill, NY, at the turn of the twentieth century. A gentle glow emits from the stove’s potbelly, and it is comforting until one discerns the fuel for its (fake) fire: books.
Banned books.
Two copies of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, about censorship and book burning, sit atop the stove. Nearby, a banned books poster suggests some of the stove’s fuel, including Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, George Orwell’s 1984, and Peter Tarnell’s and Justin Richards’s And Tango Makes Three.
Titles that don’t show up, but could, include Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, and Edith Wharton’s Summer. Each author spent time in the Berkshires within a hop, skip, and a jump of the Book Mill’s West Stockbridge location. In their lives and after their deaths, each author has been subject to backlash, attempted censorship, and the banning of their books.
Salem native Nathaniel Hawthorne moved his family to Lenox, MA shortly after The Scarlet Letter's 1850 publication. His veiled tale of adultery and sexual passion launched the shy author to fame and then infamy (or ignominy, in The Scarlet Letter’s parlance). In a review, Rev. Arthur Cleveland Coxe accused Hawthorne of “perpetuat[ing] bad morals.” Other clergy joined him in demanding The Scarlet Letter’s banning. The Scarlet Letter faded from would-be censors’ vision for a while, but in the 1960s parents tried to have it removed from their school district’s curriculum on charges that it was obscene and pornographic. The American Library Association’s (ALA) Censorship Search Portal reveals two recent reported attempts to limit its circulation. The first, in 1996, involved Texas parents protesting its politics. The second, in 2023, involved a government official trying to remove young adults’ access to the book from libraries.
Herman Melville followed his friend Hawthorne to the Berkshires around the time Rev. Coxe began to rain fire and brimstone upon The Scarlet Letter. Melville settled in at Arrowhead, in Pittsfield, to write Moby-Dick. The vengeful Captain Ahab may have thought he was the epic’s protagonist, but the fact that book is named after the white whale he's chasing tells us otherwise. The whale’s name troubled British publisher, Richard Bentley. He renamed it The Whale, and according to several sources made other changes to make it suitable for British sensibilities. There’s nary an “ain’t” in the British version, with its shined-up, slang-free grammar. And there was little chance that Moby-Dick – er, The Whale – could be deemed pornographic, obscene, or immoral after Bentley cleansed it of its homoerotic overtones and irreligious attitudes. Its irreverence toward God troubled some in the United States, but it only made small ripples until the 1990s. Then, according to the ALA, the ripples swelled into book ban-sized waves when a parent sought its removal from their child’s school. They argued that it was inappropriate reading material for students because its representations of Black characters and animal cruelty “conflicted with community values.”
Edith Wharton’s Summer is the Berkshires through and through, unlikeThe Scarlet Letter and Moby-Dick, which have nothing directly to do with the Berkshires. Wharton lived at the Mount, her mansion in Lenox, in the first decade of the twentieth century. Her keen observations of landscape and customs enrich Summer, her coming-of-age story of Charity Royall. Charity's dreams and spirit are too large for the hardscrabble patriarchal world that contains her. She’s marked with her own scarlet letter after she’s seduced. Unmarried and with few options, she terminates her pregnancy in an obliquely-referenced abortion and then marries, a broken woman who has finally learned her place.
Local authorities recoiled at Summer's portrayal of women’s sexuality and its depiction of “hillside degeneracy” (as the Berkshire Eagle phrased it in late September 1917). Librarians and their governing bodies wasted no time in limiting its circulation. Area newspapers report that Pittsfield’s library restricted youths’ access. The North Adams Library trustees, of whom Wharton was once numbered, came together to debate Summer's fate.The Lenox Library and Berkshire Athenaeum banned the book entirely. The Eagle reported that the Athenaeum’s decision resulted in a run on the forbidden fruit. As a result, local booksellers had empty shelves and full pocketbooks!
Those who hotfooted it to buy copies of Summer affirm the Isaac Asimov quotation on the Book Mill’s banned books poster: “a book worth banning is a book worth reading.” Come winter, when it feels that summer has indeed been banned in the Berkshires and much of the world, we can warm ourselves by our stoves, fireplaces, and furnaces. We can stoke the fire of our imaginations with a banned book held firmly in our hands and a warm glow cradling our hearts.
Comments