What I Saw on Mulberry Street

At first, I was slightly amused by the whole brouhaha that followed the announcement last week by the estate of Theodor Geisel, a.k.a. Dr. Seuss, that it would stop republishing and selling six of the famous author’s books, including such classics as And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street, If I Ran the Zoo, On Beyond Zebra, and McElligot’s Pool.  I know all these books; they were classics of children’s literature so long ago that I remember reading them when I actually was a child and enjoying them immensely. We all did. Dr. Seuss was part of the children’s canon back then: read by all, touted endlessly by librarians and teachers, and considered controversial—as far as I recall—by none. Just the opposite, actually: if there was one children’s author from back then whose whimsy was deemed charming and fully acceptable, it would certainly have been Dr. Seuss.

But times have changed. And there is no question that illustrations in all the books in question feature caricatures of various minority groups, particularly Asians (depicted with slanty lines for eyes, pigtails, and conical coolie-style hats) and Black people (shown shirtless, shoeless, and wearing grass skirts). On the other hand, Dr. Seuss himself was a powerful enemy of fascism who published more than 400 wartime cartoons savaging Hitler, Mussolini, and the Japanese leadership. And some of his books were thinly veiled anti-fascist parables: it is widely understood, for example, that Yertle the Turtle (1958) was meant as a direct attack on fascism (apparently dictatorial Yertle originally sported a Hitler-style moustache) and that Horton Hears a Who (1954) was meant as a kind of encouraging parable about the American occupation of Japan. More to the point for Jewish readers is that The Sneetches (1961), a book that the estate will continue to publish, is a focused, double-barreled attack on racism and anti-Semitism and was understood that way from the time it was published. Nor was this imputed meaning—the author himself was widely quoted at the time as saying formally, that The Sneetches “was inspired by my opposition to anti-Semitism.”

So we are left with an interesting dilemma. Geisel, a life-long Lutheran who actually suffered a bit of anti-Semitic discrimination in college when he was mistaken by some bigoted classmates for a Jew, was a proud anti-fascist, a virulent opponent of racism and anti-Semitism, and a true American patriot. And he published some books that featured images which feel—at least by today’s standards—racist or at the very least inappropriate for books pitched at impressionable children. The managers of his estate solved their problem the easy way by deciding simply not to republish six of the man’s books, thus ending the controversy by eliminating the problem. An alternate approach, of course, would have been to re-edit the books, eliminate the offensive imagery, and bring out versions that feature the original text with illustrations tailored more precisely to suit modern sensitivity. And speaking specifically as a Jewish American, the fact that there aren’t any Stürmer-style caricatures of hook-nosed Jews holding huge bags of money in these books shouldn’t be a factor in our evaluation of the evidence: if anything, the thought of Black parents cringing when they come across racist caricatures of Africans should be more than resonant with Jewish parents able to imagine being in exactly the same position and feeling exactly the same level of hurt and outrage. And that brings me to the question that feels to me to be at the heart of the matter: should works deemed utterly non-offensive in their day be altered, either slightly or dramatically, to suit evolving standards with respect to race, religion, ethnicity, gender, etc.? It’s an interesting question, one that goes to the heart of the question of what literature actually is and what role it could or should play in society.

There are, of course, lots of examples of books that have been successfully revised to suit modern tastes. Agatha Christie’s book And Then There Were None was originally published in the U.K. as Ten Little Negroes (and the third word on the cover was specifically not “Negroes”). That was deemed offensive here, so the publisher just made up a different title. (The English publishers eventually did the same and brought the book out under the marginally less offensive title Ten Little Indians.) In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, a favorite of my own children years ago, Roald Dahl originally depicted the Oompa-Loompas who worked in the factory as African pygmies and the depiction was basically of them as slaves and certainly not as dignified, salaried employees. A century earlier, Dickens himself was prevailed upon to tone down Fagan’s Jewishness in Oliver Twist, which he did by halfheartedly removing some of the references to Fagan’s ethnicity. Of course, when the author himself makes the revisions we are having an entirely different discussion: surely the actual authors of books should feel free make whatever changes they wish to their own work. The question is whether the world should “fix” published works to make them suit issues that were on no one’s radar, or hardly anyone’s radar, when the book was written and published.

Some readers will recall that one of my pandemic coping exercises last spring was embarking on a re-read of Mark Twain, a favorite author of my younger years. I was surprised how well many of his books stood the test of time, but I found myself most engaged of all by my re-read of Huckleberry Finn. Widely and entirely reasonably acclaimed as an American classic, the book is basically about the relationship of Huck and Jim, who is almost invariably referred to as Negro Jim. (Again, that’s not the word that appears in the book.) Of course, Mark Twain was writing about Missouri life in the 1830s and he himself was from Missouri and a child of that era. So he certainly knew how people spoke and I’m entirely sure that that word was in common use to reference Black people. Today, that word is anathema to all and is considered unusable in normal discourse, written or oral. But what about the book itself? Should it be “fixed” by having the dialogue altered specifically to reflect a dialect of English spoken in those days by no one at all? Or should the book itself be dropped from high school or even college reading lists as something too offensive to allow, let alone to require, young people to read? Huckleberry Finn is an interesting book for many different reasons, not least of all because Jim, a slave, is depicted sympathetically as a man of character, virtue, and strong moral values—a fact made all the more poignant by the fact that he is depicted as almost wholly uneducated. Indeed, Jim is a grown man with a wife and family, while Huck is a boy of thirteen or fourteen and the clear implication is that while the white world has failed utterly to make Huck into a decent adolescent, Black Jim, an uneducated slave, is quite able to bring him to the threshold of decency by showing him how to behave in an upright manner. So the book is hardly anti-Black. Just the opposite is far more true: in many ways, Jim, not Huck, is the hero of the book. And yet the constant use of that word is beyond jarring. Editions have been published for use in school that simply omit the word or change it. Is that a rational compromise? Or does that kind of bowdlerization deprive the book of its essential honesty, of its ability to depict a society as it truly was and not as moderns vaguely wish it had been? It’s not that easy to say.

When I was deeply involved in the research that led me to publish my translation of the Psalms, I became aware—slightly to my naïve amazement—of the existence of Christian editions of the Psalms from which all references to internecine strife, violent clashes between opposing groups in old Jerusalem, the corruption that led at least some poets to condemn the Temple priesthood, and the deep alienation from God with which at least some psalmists struggled—that the psalms depicting all of that challenging stuff had been nicely excised from the book so as to create a book of “nice” poems. (This parallels a Christian edition of the Old Testament I once saw from which the entire book of Leviticus had been omitted, presumably lest readers be offended by the notion that animal sacrifice and the safeguarding of ritual purity were essential elements of the covenant between God and Israel.) Those editions of the Psalms struck me as ridiculous and precisely because the resultant book was specifically nothing like the original work and gave a totally incorrect impression of the original work. But would one of the Dr. Seuss books under discussion really  have been substantially altered by some of the drawings of black or Asian people replaced with more respectful images?

My feeling is that the Dr. Seuss affair is indicative of a larger issue in society. Obviously, changing a few drawings in a book is not such a big deal and is something that I’m sure happens without fanfare in the world of publishing all the time. But this specific issue seems to have struck such a chord with so many precisely because Dr. Seuss is deemed, not entirely incorrectly, as representative of a simpler world—by which term people generally mean one in which it wasn’t deemed necessary to care what smaller groups in society felt or thought. We’ve come a long way since then, and rightly so. The Seuss estate could certainly have felt justified in commissioning some new drawing to avoid going against modern feelings about ethnic or racial stereotyping. The books themselves would have been substantially the same. Once that line is crossed, however, and the book no longer is the same as it was—“fixing” the language in Huckleberry Finn, for example, or eliminating Shylock’s Jewishness from the play or Othello’s blackness—that is missing almost entirely the reason literature exists in the first place: to stir up emotion, to challenge readers’ preconceptions, and to educate—in the literal sense of the world: to draw the reader forward to a new level of understanding of the world of the author…and of the reader as well.