Fire-Captain Beatty, in my novel Fahrenheit 451, described how the books were burned first by minorities,
each ripping a page or a paragraph from this book, then that, until the day came when the books were empty and
the minds shut and the libraries closed forever.
"Shut the door, they're coming through the window, shut the window, they're coming through the door," are the
words to an old song. They fit my life-style with newly arriving butcher/censors every month. Only six weeks
ago, I discovered that, over the years, some cubby-hole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating the
young, had, bit by bit, censored some 75 separate sections from the novel. Students, reading the novel which,
after all, deals with censorship and book-burning in the future, wrote to tell me of this exquisite irony. Judy-
Lynn Del Rey, one of the new Ballantine editors, is having the entire book reset and republished this summer
with all the damns and hells back in place.
A final test for old Job II here: I sent a play, Leviathan 99, off to a university theatre a month ago. My play is
based on the Moby Dick mythology, dedicated to Melville, and concerns a rocket crew and a blind space
captain who venture forth to encounter a Great White Comet and destroy the destroyer. My drama premiers as
an opera in Paris this autumn. But, for now, the university wrote back that they hardly dared do my play--it had
no women in it! And the ERA ladies on campus would descend with ballbats if the drama department even
tried!
Grinding my bicuspids into powder, I suggested that would mean, from now on, no more productions of Boys in
the Band (no women), or The Women (no men). OR, counting heads, male and female, a good lot of
Shakespeare that would never be seen again, especially if you count lines and find that all the good stuff went to
the males!
I wrote back maybe they should do my play one week, and The Women the next. They probably thought I was
joking, and I'm not sure that I wasn't.
For it is a mad world and it will get madder if we allow the minorities, be they dwarf or giant, orangutan or
dolphin, nuclear-head or water-conversationalist, pro-computerologist or Neo-Luddite, simpleton or sage, to
interfere with aesthetics. The real world is the playing ground for each and every group, to make or unmake
laws. But the tip of the nose of my book or stories or poems is where their rights end and my territorial
imperatives begin, run and rule. If Mormons like not my plays, let them write their own. If the Irish hate my
Dublin stories, let them rent typewriters. If teachers and grammar school editors find my jawbreaker sentences
shatter their mushmilk teeth, let them eat stale cake dunked in weak tea of their own ungodly manufacture. If
the Chicano intellectuals wish to re-cut my "Wonderful Ice Cream Suit" so it shapes "Zoot," may the belt
unravel and the pants fall.
For, let's face it, digression in the soul of wit. Take philosophic asides away from Dante, Milton or Hamlet's
father's ghost and what stays is dry bones. Laurence Sterne said it once: Digressions, incontestably, are the
sunshine, the life, the soul of reading! Take them out and one cold eternal winter would reign in every page.
Restore them to the writer--he steps forth like a bridegroom, bits them all-hail, brings in variety and forbids the
appetite to fail.
In sum, do not insult me with the beheadings, finger-choppings or the lung-deflations you plan for my works. I
need my head to shake or nod, my hand to wave or make into a fist, my lungs to shout or whisper with. I will
not go gently onto a shelf, degutted, to become a non-book.
All you umpires, back to the bleachers. Referees, hit the showers. It's my game. I pitch, I hit, I catch. I run the
bases. At sunset I've won or lost. At sunrise, I'm out again, giving it the old try.
And no one can help me. Not even you.
