The Butt-Covering Chronicles

Simon & Schuster has just published a new 75th anniversary paperback of The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury. This edition includes a short essay by Bradbury detailing his process of drafting and revising the stories that make up the Chronicles and expounding some of the philosophical assumptions behind them. It’s an interesting short introduction to the book—especially for anyone interested in a writer’s process and craft—but even more interesting is the “Editor’s Note” that precedes it.

The note begins with some information about the provenance of the essay, which was written shortly after Bradbury submitted the manuscript for The Martian Chronicles in the fall of 1950 and was rediscovered in his papers in the 2000s, but concludes with this, where the real purpose of the note becomes clear:

“How I Wrote My Book” refers to cultural touchstones (e.g., authors, books, music, politics) that may not resonate with today’s reader. Perhaps more disturbing will be some of the words and phrases Bradbury uses. Simply put, the language of the 1950s was not politically correct. Yet “How I Wrote My Book” offers fascinating insight into Bradbury’s creative process and is, at the same time, a powerful, at times urgent, commentary on Bradbury’s beliefs, thoughts, and fears about humanity and our world. And while expressions used by Bradbury in this essay may be anachronistic, his message is timeless and rings as true today as it did seventy-five years ago.

After reading it with mounting contempt I told my wife about it. Had I misunderstood? she wondered. Maybe the note was referring to the stories, not Bradbury’s essay. So I checked again today and, no, the note is very specifically getting defensive about Bradbury’s introductory essay.

And what shocking material in Bradbury’s essay prompted this note? Having gone through the essay twice, I’m still not actually sure. One reads a note like this expecting to run into racial slurs, but there is nothing obviously offensive in anything Bradbury writes. He even goes out of his way to condemn fascism, Stalinism, and Joe McCarthy and to praise imaginative freedom in the kind of stirring, well-intentioned liberal peroration formerly beloved of English teachers.

My best guess is that Bradbury’s frequent use of “man” and “mankind” in discussing human exploration of space, the use of “his” as a generic pronoun (as opposed to now, when every imaginary writer or student is always pointedly “she”), a hypothetical “Mr and Mrs Joe Smith from Ashtabula,” and one sympathetic comparison of his Martians to Indians are the “disturbing” language the editor wants to prepare us for.

(Also, how can expressions you use in your own time be “anachronistic”? Bradbury didn’t slip into Old English or some future Anglo-Martian creole. This is just silly.)

At least the publisher didn’t censor or rewrite Bradbury’s essay. The irony of past attempts to censor Fahrenheit 451 probably ruled that out. But I was left wondering what kind of mealy-mouthed weenie wrote this, or even thought using up a whole page for it was a good idea in the first place. Notably, while an “editor’s note,” there is no editor named anywhere in the book. No one wanted to put his name on this—or, more likely, hers.

Last year I looked at some publisher’s notes and copyright page notices in recent reprints of Agatha Christie as a way to chart the hopeful trend away from “updates” and the “removal of offensive terms” toward their unexpurgated publication. Such notes are an improvement over stealth edits and censorship, but as long as this butt-covering instinct remains the work of authors who are no longer here to defend themselves will be in danger.

I ran across this new copy of The Martian Chronicles in Walmart. Just around the corner on an endcap were boxes of those cheap, faux-leather reprints of public domain classics. (Curiously, these are also published under the Simon & Schuster umbrella.) After reading this note I picked up a few of those that were likely suspects for censorship—Treasure Island, a fat volume of Lovecraft—and saw this in 8-point type at the bottom of the copyright page:

These works have been published in their original form to preserve the author’s intent and style.

Exactly right. Simple, to the point, and all the explanation necessary. More of this, and less of the editor’s note above.

Signs of life?

The scene of the crime

Yesterday and today I got to make my first visits to a brick-and-mortar bookstore in a while, the two Barnes & Noble stores just north of me in Greenville. After Thursday’s post I visited them with the concept of censorship—real censorship which, per Alan Jacobs, most properly “refer[s] to the removal, by some legal or commercial authority, of certain portions of a text or film or recording”—nibbling at the back of my mind.

As I’ve written before, there is a trend of deleting or altering portions of the work of both living and long-dead authors either to meet the demands of social media mobs or to forestall future such mobs. In a post about Agatha Christie and the diluting effect of the reign of Content, I mentioned looking at a copy of one of her books a few years ago and seeing a content warning and an admission that the publisher had changed the book. As I noted then, “I didn’t buy that book. It wasn’t the one Christie wrote.” Since I was back in the bookstore where that anecdote took place, I decided to look into this problem again.

The books in question are recent reprints of Agatha Christie mysteries from Vintage Books, which feature beautiful cover art and type design. The new Vintage edition of Poirot Investigates, a short story collection, was published in 2021 and includes the following special note on the first page, before the reader even reaches the table of contents:

This book was first published in 1925. Like many books of its era, it contains some offensive cultural representations and language that detract—and distract—from the value of the work. Accordingly, editorial changes have been made in a handful of places to remove racist language and depictions, but for the most part this classic work is reproduced as originally published.

This is the note to which I responded, in that blog post, that “For the most part is doing a lot of work there.”

But in the 2023 Vintage edition of Christie’s Poirot novel The Big Four this note has migrated to the smaller print of the copyright page and reads like this:

A Note on the Text: This book was published in 1927 and reflects the attitudes of its time, including outdated cultural representation and language. Minor editorial changes have been made in a few places to remove offensive terms, but for the most part this classic work is reproduced as originally published.

Note the lack of any attempt to make artistic claims regarding allegedly offensive words “detract[ing] and distract[ing]” from “the value of the work,” a crass utilitarian turn of phrase that has rightly disappeared. And the remaining verbiage hedges a bit more: “minor editorial changes” still “have been made,” passively, but there is no charge of “racist language,” just “outdated” and “offensive” terms. But these are tiny improvements. Outdated is the language of chronological snobbery de rigueur, and I think offense should be in the eye of the beholder—and of course Christie’s work has still been altered.

But a note of hope creeps in with the new year. In the brand new 2024 Vintage edition of The Mystery of the Blue Train, the copyright page includes this:

A Note on the Text: This book was published in 1928 and reflects the attitudes of its time. The publisher’s decision to present it as it was originally published is not intended as endorsement of cultural representations or language contained herein.

That’s more like it. While I’d still prefer publishers to leave the texts of dead authors alone and just expect their readers to read like grownups, I greatly appreciate Vintage deciding to publish Christie unexpurgated and owning the decision to do so. No “minor editorial changes” are being made (by whom?) here; the publisher decided. A good strong statement, and one that I hope sets a pattern going forward.

Relatedly, this afternoon I happened upon a Vintage reprint of Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely, part of its Black Lizard crime novel series. Vintage has published Chandler for some time, but this was a newish reprint with a foreword by James Ellroy copyrighted 2022. This edition had the following Publisher’s Note facing the copyright page:

Dear Reader,
Thirty years ago Vintage Books acquired Black Lizard, adding some of the greatest crime fiction from the postwar era to a list that already boasted the best noir fiction. The new imprint, Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, published the foremost in crime and noir—books that epitomized the genre as well as those that reshaped it and pushed it in new directions. These are the novels that have been an inspiration to subsequent writers, and modern crime remains in dialogue with them.
While these books are outstanding works in the genre, they are also firmly of the time and place in which they were written. These novels may contain outdated cultural representations and language. We present the works as originally published. We hope that you enjoy discovering, or rediscovering, these classics.
Sincerely,
The Publisher

At first I thought that this was a bit much, with a cringing protest-too-much tone that I didn’t care for, but upon reflection I appreciated the subtle appeal to tradition and continuity within a genre and the firm acknowledgement that every genre has masterworks that deserve to be read and admired. And the ownership of publishing a book as written, even more directly here than in The Mystery of the Blue Train owing to the use of the first person, is most welcome.

So I’m hopeful. A bit, at any rate. All of these examples come from just one publisher, after all.

And, looking elsewhere, there is still much work to be done. William Morrow has just reissued the entire corpus of Ian Fleming Bond novels in rather bland-looking paperbacks with the following at the top of their copyright pages:

This book was written at a time when terms and attitudes which might be considered offensive by modern readers were commonplace. A number of updates have been made in this edition, while keeping as close as possible to the original text and the period in which it is set.

Good: placing the onus of offense on the modern reader. Bad: “updates,” as if Fleming’s carefully crafted stories are a glitchy app from a tech startup run by twenty-year olds. As it happens, whoever bowdlerized the books did a comically unthorough job of it.

I don’t know if this is the start of a reversal or just a lonely temporary reprieve from the madness affecting the publishing industry over the last few years, but I pray it’s the former. It’s worth keeping an eye on and, of course, hoping.