In honor of Banned Books week, I offer this memory of my daughter’s stand against book burning.

It would be difficult to find a neighborhood more concentrated with left-leaning intelligentsia than the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Which is not to say there are not conservatives, curmudgeons, and random people who think the world is going to hell in a handbag, but the traditional Person On The Street on the Upper West Side is likely, at the very least, to be four-square for the First Amendment.

Which is why my daughter burning a book on the sidewalk occasioned considerable outrage.

It was a perfectly gorgeous Saturday in spring; Julie, age 11 and at the tail end of 6th grade, had to do a multi-media report on a book of her choice, and the book of her choice was Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. She had discussed the project with her teacher, and decided to do a three dimensional collage representing the pile of books that are burned in the book; ringed round the pile would be text from the novel (one of the major discussions was which quote; the book is chock full of good lines).

If there’s one thing we have around the house, it’s books. Some of them so old and tattered they would probably go up in smoke at an incendiary glance; others still young and green enough that a match would be required. And I’m afraid I feel rather proprietary–nearly maternal–about all of them. It took us several hours to find a grocery-bag full of books that could be sacrificed in the name of education, and I insisted, for safety’s sake, that this all be done outside on the sidewalk, where nothing much could catch fire. A book-burning kit was added to the bag: matches, oven mitts, a bucket (to be filled with water just before we went downstairs), a couple of tired old dish towels which would be sacrificed if necessary to smothering flames. In my head I had moved beyond issues of censorship and was thinking of getting my kids through this alive.

Saturday morning Julie and her little sister and I went downstairs and found a nice clear patch of sidewalk on our quiet side street, and set up for business. I supervised and distracted Becca (who was six, and to whom this was Just Another Inexplicable Thing Her Sister Did) while Julie went to work.

The first book burned too fast. Kid didn’t want a pile of ashes; she wanted books in various stages of char. This was how we decided that old, worn paperbacks were a bad idea. She took up a book of actuarial tables and had better luck with that, although working out the routine of lighting the page, blocking the breeze, pulling on the oven mitt, and putting out the flame when just the right amount of book had been burnt, took a little work. About the time the third book had been lit, an elderly couple came down the street, moving urgently. The man was practically waving his cane. The woman yelled: “WHAT ARE YOU DOING!”

Julie, to her credit, finished putting out the book before she turned around. “It’s for a class project,” she said.

“WHAT KIND OF SCHOOL ASSIGNS YOU TO BURN BOOKS?” (I was not sure if the woman was upset or deaf or both, but she was very loud.) “DON’T YOU KNOW WHO BURNED BOOKS?”

For a moment Julie looked a bit confused; in her mind at that moment, the answer would have been Montag, the “fireman” from Fahrenheit 451. “My school didn’t assign me to burn books; I’m doing an art project about a book about a man who–”

“BURNING BOOKS IS A TERRIBLE THING TO DO!”

“I know! That’s what the book is about.”

“WHAT BOOK IS THIS?”

Fortunately, we’d brought her copy of Fahrenheit 451 downstairs with us. Julie took off the oven mitt and showed the book. The woman reached for it, but the old man, whose caterpillar-like eyebrows had been working up and down with alarm, suddenly looked enlightened.

“Ahh,” he said. He turned to his companion. “She’s making art.”

“SHE’S BURNING BOOKS!”

He nodded. “I’ve read that book. It’s says that burning books is a terrible thing. She’s making art to show that.” He smiled at Julie. “Go ahead, sweetheart.” And he looped his arm through his companion’s and continued onward toward Amsterdam Avenue.

They weren’t the only ones to comment negatively on Julie’s project. By the time she had crisped the seven or eight books she required, four or five more people had come by and viewed with alarm. Each time she got a little better at explaining what she was doing, leading with “I’m doing an art project to demonstrate that burning books is bad.” She got into some interesting discussions. By the end of the hour or so it took her to get done, she was exhausted and a little annoyed at having had to explain what she was doing over and over again. From their accents, I think that the first couple were from somewhere in Eastern Europe, and likely immigrants from a formerly Communist country. The others who stopped were old and young, black and white. All were at least dismayed by what they saw happening. The protest I liked best came from a little kid who was out with his dad. “Don’t you like books?”

“I love them so much I don’t want anyone to do this. Ever. Plus, it’s for school.”

The little boy nodded and they went on. They’ll ask you to do anything if it’s for school.

When I was a kid we lived in New York City, but every weekend we commuted to our Barn in southern Massachusetts. This was a three hour drive (plus, on the trip north, a stop for dinner), and my brother and I were kids, which is to say, not always patient. We did not indulge in “are we there yet” because I think we had a sense of just how well (or poorly) that would have gone over. But we did get antsy. The radio was a distraction, but at some point the signal from NY would get too weak, and we clamored for something else. My parents would consent to play games–Geography mostly. But best of all was when my father told stories.

Some of his stories were autobiographical. Or pretended to be: I am pretty sure that the story he used to tell us about having been mistakenly rolled in a rug one year during spring cleaning and forgotten until the rug was unrolled months later was, shall we say, a metaphor for what it was like being the second youngest in a family with eight children.

And then there was “Breakfast in Space.” This was a story told in many parts, from one week to the next (it was a serial, thus the punny title). It chronicled the adventures of a pair of siblings named Madeleine and Clem who went to Little Red Space School (my brother and I went to a Greenwich Village school called Little Red School House). I don’t, at this remove, remember a whole lot of details except for a long sequence where the students were out in their spacesuits playing some variation on tag, when my brother discovered that he could cheat by farting, the afflatus being expelled through the exhaust ports and… (hey, this story was pitched to a 9- and a 7-year-old, and this detail delighted us).

The other tale was Little Red Riding Hood. In my father’s telling, Grandma was a famed courtesan (the sort who would have fit in nicely with Desiree Arnfeldt in A Little Night Music) named Rosamond Gemutlich. Rosamond spent all her time in a glass bathtub, drinking champagne and dictating her scandalous memoirs about her time with a Graustarkian Princeling with a long Germanic name which my father pronounced with relish exactly one time before explaining “but he was known as “Franzu.” Rosamond’s granddaughter, also named Rosamond but called Little Red, would come to visit. Little Red had a bit of a smart mouth, and occasionally Grannie would smack her in the chops with a frying pan. If Grannie got too enthusiastic this would require a trip to the  ER to enlist the services of Robert M. Clydesdale, M.D. (aka Young Doctor Bob)*. I don’t recall much in the way of plot for this story, but the details were outrageous, and doubtless pleased my parents as much as they did my brother and me. And yes, we were raised on Warner Bros. cartoons, so the notion of a grandparent hitting her kid with a skillet–often!–did not phase us.

The fact that my father would come back to one of these stories, week after week, both amazes and exhausts me. I’ve told innumerable stories to kids, many of them made up on the fly (when I chaperoned school field trips my kids would offer me up as sacrificial entertainment). I may have placed more importance on plot and an ending than my father did. But it’s a serious effort and takes a nimble mind. Oddly, as my mother was acknowledged within the family to be “the writer,” it never occurred to me to wonder why she was never the storyteller. As an adult, I realized that there’s a difference between being a storyteller and being a writer. My father was the former, my mother the latter.

It’s probable that those storytelling sessions didn’t last more than half an hour (but that’s a long time to keep leaping from story point to story point, wisecracking all the way). Replete with my father’s invention, my brother would fall asleep for the rest of the drive, and I would stare out the window, committing it all to memory so I could relate the story to a couple of friends at school who demanded I report back each week.

__________

*A few years later my father had to get some No Trespassing signs made up for our property, because in winter hunters–some of them neither bright nor respectful of property rights–would crawl all over the mountain looking for deer, and there was a very real danger of a shot hitting an unintended target. As a joke, he had some of the signs made up in the name of Robert M. Clydesdale, M.D. (Young Doctor Bob). My father was always his own best audience.