Pre-Chewed Classics

In a society that placidly accepts the practice of condensing books for adults, only a doughty purist would object to cutting down literary classics to fit the minds of children. But such an objection came from the monthly Bulletin of the Council for Basic Education, a cranky, flea-sized (16 one-column pages) publication that subsists on what it bites from the hide of fuzzy-thinking educators. Among the pre-chewed classics cited by Editor Mortimer Smith: A Tale of Two Cities, from which, in the Globe Book Co. edition, "nonessential parts of the plot" are excised, and "long descriptive and philosophical passages" are abridged. One of the nonessential parts: Dickens' ringing opening sentence--"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity ..." The Globe Tale begins as simply and unmemorably as a badlands bang-banger: "On a Friday night late in November, 1775, the stagecoach . . . from London to Dover was toiling slowly up Shooter's Hill . . ."

Highly Subjective. The Globe Moby Dick, "adapted" by one high school English teacher and edited by another, begins with an explanation to the student: "Herman Melville, the author, a man of wide learning and sea experience, included in the volume much philosophy, literature, nautical, scientific and other material that few readers can hope to understand well. His vocabulary, in many places, is beyond secondary school experience ..." The adapter continues fair-mindedly: "Neither you nor Melville is to blame for this." In a separate aside to the teacher, the editor advises that "in the original, Moby Dick is shrouded in symbolism and mysticism; [it] became an outlet for the author, who poured into it vituperative venom conditioned by his personal life. Perhaps this shadowy symbolism lends to the greatness of the novel; however, the interpretation of this highly subjective part of Moby Dick is for literary critics and research scholars." The editor adds, sounding as if he thought he were tenderizing a volume from the Chinese: "Consequently, an adaptation of this work for the American reader became a necessity."

Melville's dark, brooding tale has been boiled down to a tasteless mash, and Ahab's ranting Shakespearean soliloquies are gone altogether. The scraps of dialogue that remain are largely Melville's, but they rattle unconvincingly in the mouths of hollowed-out characters. Writes the editor: "The sentence structure and punctuation have been simplified. In some instances, for the sake of clarity, rearrangement of the Moby Dick sequence of events was made. Words of infrequent use and unfamiliar terms were screened; questionable words were checked in Thorndike's The Teacher's Word Book of 20,000 Words."

Clam & Dromedary. Where screening fails, footnotes are added: the reader learns that a clam is "a shellfish similar to an oyster," and a prophet is "one who foresees events." Globe's editors seem to have taken great care to snip out words that might enlarge children's minds--even the slow-learning children at whom such books are aimed. In the cut-down version of one novel, the not-too-difficult word dromedary is thrown out for the easier camel--sparing young readers the trouble of adding a new name to the beasts in their mental menageries.

Globe's business is profitable; the firm sells some 100,000 copies a year, mostly to schools, of its 50-60 condensations. Globe, and half a dozen other firms that make such condensations, will go right on selling them, despite Classics-Crank Smith's outcry at the "preposterously arrogant assumption . . . that the adapter somehow knows how to write the book better than did the original author." And youngsters will go right on believing, quite erroneously, that they have read Two Years Before the Mast or A Tale of Two Cities or Moby Dick.

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