MASTERPIECES AS CARTOONS
469
lisher and editor who has exhibited a well-meaning solicitude for the
juvenile reader's tender sensibility. For whoever is responsible for the
cartoon version is very much aware of the true character of
Gulliver's
Travels
and wishes to spare the feelings and the mind of the juvenile
audience. But where does this solicitude stop?
I must turn to personal experience to show how far the
solicitude and the censorship can go. When I taught English com–
position to freshmen and coeds ten years ago along with some twenty–
five other instructors, a crisis occurred as a result of the modern novels
which the students had been assigned to read. One of the coeds had
been reading late at night at her English assignment, which was John
Dos Passos'
U.S.A.
Dos Passos' savage indignation, which resembles
Swift's, and his explicit account of the sexual experiences of his char–
acters, terrified the young lady to the point where she had to waken
her father (not her mother!) and tell him that she had been scared
and shocked by her reading assignment in English. The unhappy
father conferred with the head of the English staff, who in turn discussed
the entire issue with the entire staff. The head of the staff was very
much aware of both sides of the problem and he tried to be just to the
interests and rights of his instructors as well as to the problems of
adolescents who are in the first year of their undergraduate careers.
But in such a situation, judiciousness and compromise can accomplish
very little. Most of the instructors felt, whether rightly or wrongly,
that they had been told not to assign Dos Passos, or Joyce, or Thomas
Mann, or Proust, or Gide or Celine to their students. They felt that they
probably would be fulfilling their duty as teachers of English com–
position and literature better if they went no further than such
authors as Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, and George Meredith.
Thomas Hardy was an ambiguous and questionable author, given the
point of view which a shocked coed had brought to the fore, since
Jude the Obscure
and
Tess
of
the D'Urbervilles
were both books which
might very well be shocking again as they had been when they first
appeared (as a result of which scandal, the heartsick Hardy ceased
to write novels).
The juvenile and adolescent reader certainly ought not to be
scared and shocked. But he ought not to be cut off from the reality
of great literature and of modern literature (the latter being, because
of its contemporaneity, the best way of getting the ordinary adolescent
reader interested in literature of any kind). And it is essential and
necessary to remember that if a human being does not become interested
in literature when he is an undergraduate, it is quite unlikely that he will
become a devoted reader at any other time of life.
