Serendipity continues to be one of my best guides to neglected books. While access to libraries and bookstores is restricted due to the pandemic, I’ve been turning to strolls through the Internet Archive as an alternative. I’ll either use the text search feature to see what titles pop up in response to a phrase like “he hailed a cab” or “she sipped her cocktail” or do a search using one of the metadata fields. Catch a Brass Canary came up when I went looking to see what books were published by J. B. Lippincott between 1950 and 1980.
Something about the dustjacket illustration and its description of the story, set in an aging upper West Side branch of the New York Public Library, made me want to keep reading. Catch a Brass Canary was Donna Hill’s first novel and I soon saw that neither her prose style nor her characterizations were of particular note. But Hill, who’d earned a Masters in library science from Columbia and spent eight years working for the NYPL before moving to Hunter College, knew her subject, the day-to-day running of a library and the variety of personalities among its patrons and staff, and the story doesn’t lack for authenticity.
The branch in Catch a Brass Canary is aging and changing along with its neighborhood:
… when the neighborhood had been prosperous not long ago, the branch had served genteel readers of Thackeray, Browning and Scott. Now it was hard-working and practical. Along with Dante, Shakespeare, and the Greek philosophers, it offered books on child rearing, home economics and other skills to help with daily life and stacks of mysteries and Westerns for escape from it.
Having grown up as a regular denizen of the Seattle Public Library — both its fine Carnegie-era Greenlake branch and the Central library in the days when the chairs in the ground floor fiction section were usually filled by dozing homeless men — I felt some pangs of nostalgia to read of a card catalog, load slips, and newspapers on wooden rods.
Hill’s fictional formula is pretty simple: take an unstable mix of people and insert a catalyst. In this case, the catalyst is Miguel, a Puerto Rican teenager looking to earn some money and put himself on the right track after a taste of gang membership and an unhappy stay in juvenile detention. Some of the staff welcome Miguel as new blood, a fresh connection with the community. Some see him with the same narrowed eyes as the Jets saw the Sharks in West Side Story. Like old Mrs. Ethelbald: “Completely unreliable. I knew it the minute I laid eyes on him. He’s one of those hoodlums, horsehide jacket and all the rest of it….”
If this were all there was to Catch a Brass Canary, it would simply be a predictable novel on the borderline between young adult and adult fiction. What spices things up in the insertion of a second disruptor: a mad patron with a mission. Rupert, a disturbed young man, is surreptitiously trying to excise racism from the library shelves.
When he first surfaces, it’s in search of an old children’s book “Epaminondas?” he asks the Reference librarian. “Theban general,” the librarian snaps. “I mean the little Negro boy, you know, who steps in pies,” Rupert replies, referring to Epaminondas and His Auntie, by Sara Cone Bryant and Inez Hogan.
I was interested to follow Hill’s handling of Rupert and his quest. On the surface, he is the sole of liberal compassion. “How beautiful they are, the heterogeneous children of this neighborhood,” he says to the librarian:
“Dark and fair, Asiatic, Puerto Rican, Negro. Did you ever watch them in the children’s room? How well they’ve started out in life together; no racial malice, no envy, no fear. They’re charming, I allow, but they spread evil attitudes like a disease. Among the children it’s most insidious, you know. Especially in a neighborhood like this.”
Having grown up in the South, Rupert stings from the memory of his family being ostracized and driven from their town after his father invited a black man to have dinner at their home. Now, having dropped out of college, he is squatting in a basement and trolling the shelves of the public library to find, borrow, and cut out the offending pages from books he considers racist.
He sees himself as a modern-day knight and peoples his world with medieval characters: “… that sturdy little abbess who works by the window, that young squire who shelves books with such verve, always smiling.” They are all fine-featured, chivalrous, and pure as in a romance. His is a mission to cleanse the world. “I’m devoting my life to racial empathy, to justice for the racially oppressed,” he asserts.
Rupert defends his actions by quoting Milton (“he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself”) — implying, by corollary, that he is justified in destroying bad books. And he demonstrates commitment to his principles when he rescues Miguel from a savage beating by members of his former gang.
But Miguel himself responds to Rupert’s argument by referring something he’s learned from working at the library: “All points of view should be in libraries for people to learn about and choose. Nobody should decide for other people what to read and think.” (Miguel refers to Article II of the American Library Association’s Library Bill of Rights: “Libraries should provide materials and information presenting all points of view on current and historical issues. Materials should not be proscribed or removed because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval.”)
In a way, Hill was anticipating later debates about how libraries should deal with materials that are clearly offensive to some or all patrons. In the article about Epaminondas and His Auntie linked to above, David Pilgrim, the curator of the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia at Ferris State University, writes “In January 1971 the City Council of San Jose, California voted to remove Epaminondas and His Auntie from general circulation in the city’s libraries and to place the book on reserve.” A few months later, however, the Council reconsidered and removed restrictions on the book. Pilgrim argues that there is value in “having racially offensive objects in the public so the objects can be used as tools to facilitate healthy, sometimes painful, dialogue.”
If Hill’s narrative construction is somewhat obvious, her sincerity in trying to tell her story honestly and in fairness to all her characters is genuine and gives Catch a Brass Canary the kind of simple decency that readers find in To Kill a Mockingbird.
After Catch a Brass Canary Donna Hill set adult fiction aside for over 20 years. She wrote a manual on managing visual materials in libraries titled The Picture File that was updated in the 1970s, and then a doorstopper biography of Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon Church, in 1978. She retired from Hunter College in 1984, wrote several children’s books and young adult novels, then produced Murder Uptown (1992), a mystery set at a women’s college in Manhattan (roman-à-clef?).