I knew when I submitted my last book review to The National Post that it might not be published. What I didn’t expect was that the Post would publish it, and then unpublish it.

The review was of a book of essays, What the Furies Bring, by Canadian poet Kenneth Sherman. Doesn’t sound like hot-button material, you say? Well, Sherman has pegged his book to 9/11, and that, of course, remains combustible — especially if you are of the opinion that the official explanation for the events of that day remains, er, incomplete.

The Post put my review on its website at 7:30 pm on December 18th. Of course, it might have been something less sensitive that caused them to remove it sometime the next day. Sherman’s book is mostly about literature, and hence my review was too. Maybe some Mallermé-lover on staff didn’t like the fact that the book is cool towards the poet and thought, “I’m not putting up with this aesthete-bashing any longer!” But somehow I don’t think so.

No, I expect what caused someone to press the delete button were these two paragraphs:

His reading of 9/11 itself, however, is thoroughly conventional. In “Amis’s Atta” he deals with the British writer’s collection of short stories and essays The Second Plane: September 11: Terror and Boredom. Amis portrays Muhammad Atta, who, we are told, flew American Airlines Flight 11 into the North Tower of the World Trade Centre, as a death-bent fanatic, and Sherman is happy to echo him. “After all,” Sherman writes, “those sons of militant Islam who crashed the twin towers were operating from a skewed sense of manhood, and their morality was topsy-turvy: Death is good; Life (World/Manhattan) is evil.”

The problem with received wisdom, though, is that it is sometimes wrong, or premature, or incomplete. Psychoanalyzing the hijackers without also assaying those who had sufficient foreknowledge of the attacks to profit from them on the stock market is to miss half the meaning of the event. But they don’t appear in Sherman’s reading, and so they don’t appear in his essays. He writes that John Updike’s novel Terrorist “addresses the essential questions that thinking Americans posed after 9/11. Is there truth in the fundamentalist’s assertion that materialist America has poisoned itself with trivia? Has America justly incurred the wrath of the globe’s unfortunate by becoming an exploitive, soulless nation?” But this is a sentimental explanation for 9/11, handed down by the Bush administration at the time – “They hate our freedoms” – and it doesn’t sit on Sherman’s book any better than it did on Updike’s.

The Post might have been able to tolerate that note of doubt about Atta — after all, we are told he piloted Flight 11, right? Nothing wrong with saying so, right? They might even have gritted their teeth and put up with my bit of Bush-bashing. After all, he’s gone now, right? No need to keep defending him, right?

But that bit about the stock trades? Not so much.

Now, I was quite careful about what I wrote. There’s an immense amount of speculation around 9/11, and most of it remains just that — speculation. But the fact that there was extraordinary trading on the stocks of American and United Airlines in the weeks prior to the attacks — up to 100 times the usual volume — is acknowledged even in the 9/11 Commission Report. The trading was in the form of “put options,” which are taken in anticipation of a stock’s price dropping. The more it drops, the more money is made. The Commission adopted a “We checked into it, nothing to see here, move along now” approach to the matter, but a scholarly, peer-reviewed article published in 2006 noted that the chances of such trading happening randomly are 1%. That’s good enough for me. Of course, it might not be good enough for the Post, but the place to deal with that would have been during the editorial process, before publication. Instead, I got a nice note of praise from my editor, and that was that.

It’s a little hard for me to cry censorship because the review did appear that same day in the print edition of the paper. But the Post‘s behaviour suggests that they would have removed it from there, too, were newsprint as ephemeral as the Web. The fate of one little book review may not amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world, but the excision does beg the question: what else is the Post leaving out of its pages? And why?

I’ve told them I won’t be writing for them anymore, which ends a relationship of 11 years, going back to the earliest days of the paper. I’ve enjoyed it, but I don’t do loyalty tests. But I do have some questions for them. (Mark Medley, co-editor of the Post‘s online Books section, told me before Christmas that he was looking into what happened, but the rest has been silence.) They are: Who removed the review? Were they told to do so? If so, by who? And, regardless, why was it removed?

I’ll let you know if they have anything to say. Or, of course, they can always use the Comments section below to reply. I promise not to delete it.

Meantime, I have posted the review in backofthebook’s Arts & Books section. And if you’d like to see the web page that The National Post would rather you didn’t, I’ve posted it here. Because if there’s one thing the Internet has taught us, it’s that if you want to suppress information, you’d better do it before you publish it.

Review by Frank Moher

What does it mean to be an intellectual? Does it simply mean to think a lot, and vigorously, about something other than yourself? If so, some cab drivers I’ve had are among the most impressive intellectuals in my experience. Does it mean to be well-read? Can that possibly be enough? If you’re an idiot, but a well-read idiot, does that make you an intellectual?

In Canada, what we call “intellectuals” are generally academics with some sort public platform — a newspaper, say. This leads to a certain bookishness in our life of the mind. So it is with Kenneth Sherman’s What the Furies Bring, a collection of literary essays written in the wake of 9/11. Sherman, a poet and an instructor at Sheridan College in Oakville, Ontario, whose criticism has appeared in various publications, quotes the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam in his opening essay: “An intellectual needs no memory — it is enough for him to tell of the books he has read, and his biography is done.” Sherman adds: “This is essentially true.”

But if all a writer has to offer is the received wisdom of books, however handily he makes connections between them, he is not engaging his subject; he is refracting it through the lenses of others. That’s too often what happens in this dignified but stolid collection.

Sherman is best when he sticks to his own artistic ground. In “Poetry and Terrorism,” he examines the American poet Wallace Stevens and others whose work makes a determined attempt to engage public events. He sides with them, decorously, against the art-for-art’s-sake crowd, as represented by French poet Stéphane Mallarmé, while noting that Stevens managed to straddle the two. “By claiming that the very sound of words is useful and restorative, Stevens gave us an ingenious defence of poetry, affirming poetry’s public worth, while remaining in the Mallarmé camp.” It’s not surprising that Sherman admires this; his book is a tentative reaching out to the idea of the intellectual as engaged citizen, even while it remains, on the whole, hermetically focused on literature.

In “Lowell, Hughes and Bishop”, about the poets Robert, Ted, and Elizabeth respectively, he parses their work for evidence of artfulness under duress. He finds it readily in the work of Lowell and Hughes, but labours to locate it in Bishop’s. When he does, it is in poems that Bishop considered incomplete, but which Sherman convincingly regards as, in their imperfection, addressing “our growing unease.”

His reading of 9/11 itself, however, is thoroughly conventional. In “Amis’s Atta,” he deals with the British writer’s collection of short stories and essays The Second Plane: September 11: Terror and Boredom. Amis portrays Muhammad Atta, who, we are told, flew American Airlines Flight 11 into the North Tower of the World Trade Centre, as a death-bent fanatic, and Sherman is happy to echo him. “After all,” Sherman writes, “those sons of militant Islam who crashed the twin towers were operating from a skewed sense of manhood, and their morality was topsy-turvy: Death is good; Life (World/Manhattan) is evil.”

The problem with received wisdom, though, is that it is sometimes wrong, or premature, or incomplete. Psychoanalyzing the hijackers without also assaying those who had sufficient foreknowledge of the attacks to profit from them on the stock market is to miss half the meaning of the event. But they don’t appear in Sherman’s reading, and so they don’t appear in his essays. He writes that John Updike’s novel Terrorist “addresses the essential questions that thinking Americans posed after 9/11. Is there truth in the fundamentalist’s assertion that materialist America has poisoned itself with trivia? Has America justly incurred the wrath of the globe’s unfortunate by becoming an exploitive, soulless nation?” But this is a sentimental explanation for 9/11, handed down by the Bush administration at the time — “They hate our freedoms” — and it doesn’t sit on Sherman’s book any better than it did on Updike’s.

In his final essay, “The Angel of Disease,” Sherman springs himself free of his source material and, for the first time, is able to assemble it into something new. Here his subject is illness and writing. “When we write under duress,” he proposes, “our passive suffering becomes active making; the act of composing makes us feel less helpless while facing an implacable reality.” Ironically, the subject of decay prompts Sherman’s freshest insights. This one entry, sharp and, as always, elegantly composed, makes you wonder what he might write if he put away his reading and, like the firefighters in that iconic video footage of the first plane hitting WTC 1, looked up and simply asked himself, “What is happening?”