Margaret Langstaff writes about books and the book business for several national periodicals.

OverBooked reflects her views on trends in the book industry.

Meddling with the classics

BY MARGARET LANGSTAFF

All new literary works, and any art for that matter, should carry a clear warning: Do not edit, change or mutilate! Will explode in your face if tampered with!

First, we had Woody Allen messing with Madame Bovary by sticking Professor Kugelmass smack in the middle of the novel (in Allen's story, "The Kugelmass Episode") thereby confounding legions of undergraduates reviewing for exams. Then, travesty! Warner Books let Alexandra Ripley poke around with Gone With the Wind and come up with a sequel, Scarlett, that satisfied few except the publisher, who recouped its $5 million advance in 90 days. And recently, Houghton Mifflin let Alice Randall turn the whole plot inside out with The Wind Done Gone, retelling the tale from a black woman's perspective, inflaming purists, delighting parodists and costing the publisher a wad in legal fees to get the book through the court challenges it faced from the Mitchell estate -- which itself is energetically peddling its own sequel to the sequel of the novel.

I mean, really! Is it all just about money?

We are hardly offended when filthy lucre prods some publisher to do a sequel to Valley of the Dolls (Shadow of the Dolls by Rae Lawrence was published by Crown in June). Even Jackie Susann herself would admit she wasn't writing for the ages. But please keep your mitts off the classics, you barbarian hordes!

Now word comes that HarperCollins and the C. S. Lewis estate want to sanitize The Chronicles of Narnia of all references to Christianity, voiding in one fell swoop the raison d'etre of the series. We all know Woody Allen was only kidding with Prof. Kugelmass kidnapping Emma Bovary for a weekend at the Plaza Hotel. And perhaps Margaret Mitchell's pale ghost can tolerate a little post mortem meddling with her masterpiece. But we can expect the righteous wrath of C. S. Lewis to manifest itself any day now on the busy bodies at work on his corpus.

The Lewis estate and the publisher apparently want to ride the phenomenal Harry Potter coattails and reach a larger audience. What, 65 million copies of Narnia isn't large enough? Says heir Rev. Douglas Gresham who lives in Ireland, "What is wrong with trying to get people outside of Christianity to read the Narnian chronicles?" Don't leave any money on the table!

Hey, here's an idea: tone down the 'Jewish-ness" in Isaac Bashevis Singer's oeuvre to make it more palatable to the booming multi-national Arab market!

The meddlers had better watch their backs. Have they forgotten what happened to Dr. Thomas Bowdler (1754-1825) and his scrubbing of Shakespeare for what he imagined was the pious reading market of England? He expunged, along with the bawdy language and allusions to sex and violence, anything that breathed of genius. And what was left? Blandness, signifying nothing. Today, if Bowdler is remembered at all, it is as a ninny. If I'm not mistaken, Shakespeare's reputation survived.

Gentle reader, there is a difference between life and art, and never forget it: Art Lasts, Life Doesn't. Who would dream of altering a syllable of Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn," the immortal poem about the immortality of art? Certainly no one . . . unless . . . there was an unbelievable amount of money to be made in a larger market. May such imbeciles get the oblivion they so richly deserve.

I am reminded of an image from Driving Mr. Albert, as Dr. Harvey and Michael Paterniti travel across the U.S. with pieces of Einstein's brain sloshing around in tupperware. Greatness is envied and coveted, and in mad designs to possess and exploit it, it simply disintegrates, while somewhere down the pike the real thing resurfaces, sparkling new, indestructible by its very nature, proving, once again, the evanescence of silliness and the immutability of truth-telling art.