This week is Banned Books Week in the United States, an annual event since 1982 sponsored by, among other organizations, the American Library Association, to draw attention to the informal censorship by "challenges" to published works in the US.

This piece was originally published in the TLS of July 12, 1947.

A NECESSARY NECROMANCY

A. P. Ryan

Theodore F. Koop: Weapon of Silence. University of Chicago Press. London: Cambridge Univer­sity Press. 20s.

Mr. Koop, who was assistant director of the American Office of Censorship during the war, says that civilians employed in that gallery sported little bronze pins in their buttonholes, inscribed “Silentium Victoriam Accelerat.” Our own censors walked abroad in Bloomsbury and elsewhere without taking refuge in the obscurity of a dead language. Had they done so they would, no doubt, have chosen for their motto Nero’s dying words, “qualis artifex pereo.” For they were always aware how swiftly and surely they would perish when peace came and, meanwhile, they took a justifiable pride in their black art. It was a necessary necromancy. Careful spies fiom the enemy’s camp and loyal but careless scribblers among ourselves used the letter and the parcel post. Ninety-nine per cent of what went through those channels was harmless stuff. The odd hundredth—the odd millionth would be nearer to statistical accuracy—might imperil the chances of an expeditionary force or sink a battleship or a convoy. No efficient nation at war could do without the miscellaneous experts in languages and in the chemistry of invisible inks and so on who, sup­ported by crowds of ordinary, hard­working, common-sense folk, searched patiently through the haystacks of the mails for the rare but deadly needle.

Before the Americans began to play a hand in this game, their planners had learnt much, as Mr. Koop explains, from the British censors in London, Bermuda, and Trinidad, and from the Canadians. They adopted an injunction from the British: “What does not concern the war does not concern censorship.” This border-line was, of course, extremely difficult to draw. Mr. Koop shows that, in America as over here, it was a frequent battleground. Stop this columnist. Take that commentator off the air. Suspend that newspaper. Don’t annoy the Russians by letting the Press call them “Reds.” Make public politeness to Franco compulsory. Look for hints to the enemy in the comic strips. Beware of code messages tapped out by treache­rous dance bandsmen in seemingly innocent syncopation on the radio. A barrage of variegated advice roared over the censors as they sweated to raise and lower their distasteful iron curtain.

Serious students of censorship will be rather put off by the concessions that Mr. Koop has made to melo­drama. “As impassive as the priest at his side, Heinz August Luning walked slowly but deliberately through ancient Principe Fortress on a Havana hill-top. Behind him marched a squad of Cuban soldiers, rifles resting on their shoulders.” These opening words of the first chapter and the lurid tale that follows of espionage triumphantly foiled suggest that Mr. Koop had less confidence than he should have had in the intrinsic interest of his main theme. Censorship included, of course, these melodramatic moments, but they were few and far between and Mr. Koop would have written in better perspective if he had kept them in their place. He could have afforded to do so. The sober story is fascinating; he knows it from the inside and, when he abandons technicolour, he draws convincingly in black and white.

So thoroughly was the need for these precautions understood that even President Roosevelt’s telephone connexions were censored at his own request. His oversea calls were vigilantly monitored by a censor, finger on the key to interrupt if security were violated. One would like to know if it ever was in danger of violation and, if so, whether the vigilant monitor dared to take action. An opposite number who performed the same office for Mr. Churchill would have been a bold man indeed.

British censorship, Mr. Koop declares, imparted to Americans something of the philosophy it had acquired in the two war years before Pearl Harbour. This was summed up in advice from a veteran British censor in New York:—– You will open a great many letters which seem to you odd or objectionable from some point of view; there is no such frequent letter-writer as a crank or faddist of any complexion, and you can waste an infinity of your own time and of public money if you fail to remember that what doesn’t concern the war is no business of yours. And even when a letter does contain something of war interest, the writer’s interests have still to be considered if what he says is not harmful. You will be dealing with millions of perfectly innocent letters which the writers have paid to have delivered as quickly as possible. When you first open a letter, you must start by regarding it with the utmost suspicion, but once you are satisfied of its innocence, it is entitled to all the help from you that your duty will allow you to give.

Among Mr. Koop’s many good stories the best is, perhaps, the sad one of the merchant sailor who in the first letter written at sea after his honeymoon communicated to his wife a code to be used in future letters. “If I mention in a letter I saw Mabel, you will know that we docked at Liverpool. If I say I saw Ruth you will know we are at Glasgow. Catherine will mean Iceland and Helen—heaven help us—will mean Murmansk.” This letter was, of course, stopped by the censor. Subsequent letters, unheralded by a code, innocent of port names and freely besprinkled with references to meetings with this and that lady, were, of course, delivered. As hard cases make bad law, so kind-hearted censors might cost lives. But they sometimes went out of their way to maintain security and, at the same time, not to disturb domestic peace. Mr. Koop records how one censor, despairing of being able to pass a letter owing to its rich crop of indiscretions, finally stopped it altogether, but slipped into the envelope the reassuring message: “Your boy friend still loves you, but he talks too much. The Censor.”

Explore The TLS

• TLS Selections

• TLS Archives

• TLS Arguments

• TLS Writers

• TLS Letters

• Poem of the Week

• Then & Now