Honestly, The Building by D. Gheorgheni is simply a must read. It is really quite unique. Iain CM Gray, author of Doctor Oadwin: The Making of a Maniac. See? People read these things.

Did you ever get in trouble as a kid for reading a book?

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Answer: yes. Thereby hangs a funny little tale.

One day when I was about 15 or 16, I came home from a trip to the library and carelessly left my usual stack of about 10 books on the dining room table. Also as usual, the light-weight stuff, such as paperbacks, were on the top of the stack. This time, it was a book I'd picked up from the rack near the book checkout. I wasn't all that invested in it, just curious. The stuff I really intended to read was heavy and bound in plain old covers with no pictures at all. You'd have had to pick them up to read the titles – and even then, you'd have had to know something about the authors.

I got busy with homework and was barely aware that my parents had received a visitor. Until I came back into the living room to find my mom upset.

'The pastor was here,' she said unhappily. I wondered why: we all liked him. I said I was sorry I'd missed him.

'He wasn't happy about this book.' She held up the paperback copy of Hair. I studied it. There was nothing actionable about the cover unless you were an artist and objected to the colour scheme.

'Why? Has he read it?'

'No. But he's heard bad things.'

I was puzzled. 'I still don't know what it's about. It's a musical libretto. I read a lot of those. I thought I'd check it out.'

My mom sighed. 'You can read anything you like. Just please don't leave your books in the living room or dining room.'

I promised in future to keep my subversive reading material out of the public eye, lest it be seen by impressionable people. I took the stack of books to my bedroom. I reflected that it was a good thing the preacher couldn't read German or Italian and didn't know the libretti to most operas. There was a lot worse in most of them than a pean to long hair. . .

To make sure nobody was offended by the cover of that book, I put one of the hardcovers on top. Justine, by the Marquis de Sade. (I read a few pages, decided the marquis had mental problems I wasn't ready for, and gave up.)

The local library had an awful lot of stuff in it that might have given the censors vapours. But not to worry: some of those books had uncut pages before I got to them. The community was more into Georgette Heyer and Erle Stanley Gardner than de Sade.

Oh, be careful, little eyes, what you see,

Oh, be careful, little eyes, what you see,

There's a Father up above looking down in tender love,

Oh, be careful, little eyes, what you see.

That jingle was promulgated by some silly lady in Vacation Bible School when we were small children. There was another verse about ears, I recall. There were 'motions.' At about the age of six, I regarded this 'song' with contempt.

You cannot get away with that kind of nonsense if the kids are already familiar with the Bible. Jesus said it wasn't what went into you, but what came out of you, that was the problem. This fear of being corrupted by mere reading matter was a non-starter with most of us. Besides, most television was junk – but nobody ever objected to it, that I could tell. Nobody except that man who went on about a 'vast wasteland'. . .

Mind you, I had caught more than one preacher completely misinterpreting literature and pop culture. One pastor had heaped scorn upon William Ernest Henley's 'Invictus', which I thought was mean-spirited. The poet was obviously suffering from clinical depression. That same pastor inveighed against 'Folsom Prison Blues', which I found to be a good piece of song-writing that showed empathy. Weren't Christians supposed to have empathy with those in spiritual need? Of course, I knew better than to say this out loud. Privately, I thought it would be better if we kept pastors out of libraries and limited their car radio privileges, for their own good.

Why were people in the Fifties and Sixties afraid their kids would read something disturbing? I think it was because they themselves were lazy. They were worried that their kids would read something with an idea in it that would make them think. Then they'd want to discuss it. Maybe even do something about a problem. And they'd have to get up out of their comfortable armchairs and do something about it, too. And they were too tired to get up. At least, that's been my experience.

Don't worry: The kids have more energy than you do. If you let that silly noisemaker of a neighbourhood busybody take the bad books out of the library, they'll read them online. Or they'll pass them around as samizdat. They'll get ideas – at least, for a while. Some of them will do something about those ideas.

The rest will feel that they have been sufficiently daring and rebellious, and giggle. Then they'll get older and inherit the comfortable armchairs, where they will sit and hope the young folk don't find any disturbing books in the library.

Dmitri Gheorgheni

04.03.24 Front Page

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