In the West, Much News
In late January 1929, Erich Maria Remarque’s anti-war novel Im Westen, Nichts Neues (In the west, nothing new) was published by Propyläen Verlag. In England the book was quickly translated by the Australian librarian Arthur Wesley Wheen and republished under the title All Quiet on the Western Front.
Auckland Public Library’s decision to ban All Quiet on the Western Front was probably made by an unofficial book-selection committee of academics, senior journalists and businessmen who met with the Chief Librarian, John Barr, to decide on the literary quality of the books which the library would make available to its readers. This committee had been created to select the library’s books in the days before the Auckland Public Library had a qualified librarian in charge. Mr Barr was Auckland’s first qualified librarian.
Ref: Two original 1929 editions that finally made it
into the Library, the
one on the left is from the Quaker Collection.
Remarque’s
novel soon caused controversy among patriotic ex-servicemen, moralists and
right-wing politicians in various parts of Europe and America. However when the
book was considered for accession to New Zealand public libraries All Quiet on the Western Front stirred
up new controversy of quite another kind.
The librarians of the Auckland, Wellington and Dunedin public
libraries decided the novel’s language was coarse and lurid; it was immoral and
amoral and that it contained plain and frank descriptions of sexual activity,
bodily functions, human depravity and the shocking naked truth of war’s
brutality which was likely to be injurious to the morals of women and children.
However the Dunedin librarian, Mr W.B. McEwan, did concede that his adult male
readers should be able to cope with the book.
The
librarians’ attitudes were well summed up in Mr McEwan’s statement printed in the New Zealand Herald on 29 June 1929: ‘It
is a coarse book, and not a publication for general circulation. I admit it is
a strong book on the war, but it is the naked truth, and nothing but the truth.
It is not a book for circulation by a public library.’
Auckland Public Library’s decision to ban All Quiet on the Western Front was probably made by an unofficial book-selection committee of academics, senior journalists and businessmen who met with the Chief Librarian, John Barr, to decide on the literary quality of the books which the library would make available to its readers. This committee had been created to select the library’s books in the days before the Auckland Public Library had a qualified librarian in charge. Mr Barr was Auckland’s first qualified librarian.
In
the Evening Post’s aptly titled
article, ‘Barred
From Shelves’ (22 June 1929), John Barr explained the way this committee of
self-appointed literary critics and moral guardians made their judgements. ‘Our first consideration in the selection of books is their literary merit.
It occupies much of our time ferreting out reviews from recognised literary journals and reading criticisms. The [library] staff also
co-operates in the reading of new books. It is not a capricious system, and
very few undesirable books reach our shelves.’
‘Mr. Barr said that from 1000 to 1500 books
were passed into the lending library each year. A novel need not be offensive
to earn exclusion. Trash was rejected simply because it failed to measure up to
literary standards. The widely-discussed German novel, Jew
Suss, had been passed. It was not altogether free from a certain
grossness but it had undoubted literary quality, and a fine historical vein. The
novel Simon Called Peter had not
reached the library shelves (but
eventually made it), and the Tarzan series of stories had been rejected as
‘trash’.
When the decisions of the book-selection
committee were put in front of the Council’s Library Committee, it seems as if
the
councillors simply approved the decisions placed
before them by the book selectors. The chairwoman of the Library Committee, Miss
Ellen Melville, told the Council meeting that the Library Committee’s
policy was to leave the selection of books to the Chief Librarian, and that
‘the Committee desires to reiterate its confidence in the Chief Librarian’s judgement.’
It is clear that the chief librarians of
the time seemed to regard themselves as moral policemen and the guardians of
decency in modern civilisation. An editorial
in the Otago Daily Times on 2 July 1929 notes: ‘It is possible
that the demand for All Quiet on the
Western Front may not be prompted so much by the fact that the work is
calculated to further the cause of peace as by the excitation of curiosity
respecting the aspects of the work that lead the public librarians to regard it
as unsuited for general circulation. If there is much in Remarque's book that
is coarse and objectionable, if it contains expressions, as it does, that are
commonly regarded as unprintable, surely that is a sufficient reason why those
who have charge of public libraries should be as reluctant to hand it out to
anybody in the ordinary way as parents would be to place it in the hands of
their boys and girls.’
In other words, the librarians seemed to
take a lofty, elitist and basically prudish view about the kinds of people who
might be tempted to read All Quiet on the
Western Front. While they grudgingly conceded that the book dealt with a
serious subject – that of war and the degrading effects of war, they were
afraid that another type of casual, sensation-seeking and prurient reader would
now seek to read the book solely because of its notoriety. Along with the
sensation-seekers went uncritical and impressionable younger readers whom, the
librarians feared would be easily corrupted by Remarque’s immorality and
amorality.
How sordid and bannable was All Quiet on the Western Front?
The article ‘German War Story’ in the Herald
of 22 June 1929 mentions two English reviews. The first is from The Publisher’s Circular and Book-sellers’
Record. It concludes: ‘we regret the quite unnecessary use of certain
vulgar words which may have been used by the German soldiers, but which are
usually considered unfit to appear in print. Certain situations, also, are
described in a manner that can only be called objectionable. We think the
crudity of the language will disgust the average English reader.’
However the Herald article then quotes from the review in the Times entitled ‘A Wonderful Portrait’.
It said ‘The English reader must be prepared for what he may dub coarseness or
frankness, according to temperament, of a type that he will not find in English
novels. We do not mean merely insistence upon the realities of war - for a war
novel would not be of much value without that - but a constant preoccupation
with bodily functions. There is reiterated complaint of lack of food, of
dysentery caused by starvation, of paper bandages for the binding of wounds, of
misery caused by an increasing shortage of every necessity for the soldier s
comfort and sustenance.’
‘It is a wonderful portrait, built up
little by little, without a superlative. There emerges the ideal soldier - brave,
steady, crafty, never excited, but never off his guard. We have had grim
English war novels in which the wine of victory is represented as tasting
bitter enough; but it is doubtful if we shall ever have one with a note so
hopeless as that of the concluding chapters. That wine may to many have tasted
bitter, but it could not have been so bitter as this vinegar of defeat.
To put the censorship of All Quiet on the Western Front into
further perspective, the Auckland Star (2 July 1929) praised
the decision of the Christchurch city librarian to allow the book into the
Christchurch Public Library, where it would not be displayed on the shelf but
would be issued to subscribers (presumably adults only) and only when those
subscribers applied to read it. While the Star’s
correspondent thought that ‘this decision was strictly correct and ought to
commend itself to the general public’, he said that:
‘The library authorities in Auckland,
Wellington and Dunedin have decided that their institutions shall not be used
to circulate the volume, and they are well within their province in so
deciding. They are entitled to the opinion that their shelves should harbour no book that would offend the susceptibilities of the most sensitive, or bring a blush to
the cheek of the most innocent. If that is their policy, the coarse language of
All Quiet on the Western Front might
well have brought that volume under their ban. We do not quarrel with them on
that score. Doubts have been expressed whether the book should ever have been
written, but written it was, and published it has been, and he would be a very
daring censor, or a very foolish one, who denied it circulation. This is quite
clearly the view taken by the librarian of the Canterbury Public Library and it
should be approved by everyone who gives the subject serious thought.’
And at the far end of the country Mr. H.
Greenwood, the librarian at the Dunedin
Athenaeum (the mechanic’s institute private lending library), already had
two copies of All Quiet on the Western
Front in circulation. Furthermore, he reported that demand for the book was
so great that the Athenaeum had ordered six more copies!
Author: Chris Paxton
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