TRICK OR TREAT Part 5
In which the novelist Lionel Shriver puts on a sombrero, and brings down hell on her head.
1
“Tell his own story”, “Tell her own story”, “Tell their own stories”. Again and again in the Cultural Appropriation debate, you heard these phrases, and they went more or less unchallenged. But their central assumption was that everyone was naturally gifted, everyone was a writer. Authors like Shriver came and went like visitors to a McDonald’s toilet, and you only had to shine a light on any given individual to see their inner Maxim Gorky emerge.
The people most apt to pontificate about literature seemed to know least about it – least about the awesome grind, hard graft, and long-term commitment to joy and bitter despair that bringing a book into the world entailed. They seemed to know even less about the literary skills, often learned painfully over decades, that made it worth reading. For those of us who found talent in others – the divine giving or withholding of it – one of the supreme mysteries of life, it was disconcerting.
But the Brisbane Writers’ Festival was, we were to discover, only Part One in the hounding of Lionel Shriver. The sequel was to come two years’ later, much closer to home.
2
In Spring 2018, a colleague of Shriver’s forwarded an email to her, from Penguin Random House. It was a circular that had done the rounds of literary agents in the UK, and which spelt out its plans for a radical shift in editorial and employment policy, with huge implications for writers.
Its aim, it said, was for “both our new hires and the authors we acquire to reflect UK society by 2025”.
“This means,” the email went on, “we want our authors and new colleagues to reflect the UK population taking into account ethnicity, gender, sexuality, social mobility and disability.” Affirmative action – which Shriver once said she’d been against since her mid-teens – had therefore now reached the field of literature. Penguin Books, hitherto nominally dedicated to excellence in literature, was putting us on notice that it was henceforth serving another god. It was in the attempt to deny that this was happening, and to claim that the two gods were one and the same, that the bitterest invective would now ensue.
From nearly all their in-house jobs, they added for good measure, they had removed “the need for a university degree”.
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For many of us, this was jaw-dropping stuff. Not just the last bit – because if you were going to spend a lifetime working in literature, having a degree in it seemed some sign that you were taking it seriously – but because it represented a radical rethinking of the values Penguin was based on. In an established publishing house at the forefront of literature, literary quality (and that alone) would, you might assume, be an unassailable value. It might indeed have been so blindingly obvious that it didn’t need saying. But now social engineering had leaked into that system of values: indeed, it had trumped them. And nothing was to be assumed about anything anymore. Nothing went without saying.
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What did this social engineering consist of? The Penguin shift in editorial policy suggested that, if you introduced what amounted to a quota system for published writers, there would be no fall-off in quality. You would, the decision implied, also create a fairer publishing landscape, in which there were more opportunities for all and a greater variety of stories would be told.
Yet to suggest this variety didn’t already exist seemed shaky at best. There were already numerous LGBT writers in the UK whose work had made it into print, and writers from non-white backgrounds formed a long list too: Ben Okri, V.S.Naipaul, Michael Ondatjee, Salman Rushdie, Monica Ali, Shiva Naipaul, Anita Desai, Vikram Seth, Chinua Achebe, Kazuo Ishiguro, Caryl Phillips, Romesh Gunesekera, Rohinton Mistry, Arundhati Roy, Ahdaf Soueif, Aravind Adiga, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Zadie Smith, Kiran Desai, Mohsin Hamid, Amitav Ghosh, Esi Edugyan, Hanif Kureishi, Tariq Ali, Ruth Ozeki, Neil Mukherjee, Chigozie Obioma, Bonnie Greer, Avni Doshi, Bernardine Evaristo, Nadifa Mohamed, Shehan Karunatilaka. Most of these writers of colour had been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and, in the prize’s 54 years, eleven of them had won it. They had not needed Penguin Random House’s new editorial policy to break through.
Yet the new policy seemed to lay down a challenge to all its detractors, to prove that talent wasn’t distributed equally across social or ethnic groups. This of course was a minefield few would attempt to cross, and more or less untestable: there were surely years in which one or other group would produce a greater number of publishable works, and these would presumably be spotted by a good publisher. But to insist on exact quotas of published books each year, reflecting the exact make-up of the UK population, was something altogether different.
The idea looked super-virtuous, and proved Penguin Random House were willing to join the new national game enthusiastically: publishing would be made a tool of Social Justice. Penguin Random House were up for it and virtuously willingly to play their part in advancing the Holy Trinity of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion. And perhaps, where Penguin Random House led, other publishers would follow.
Yet it raised all sorts of practical questions. Weren’t Penguin Random House setting a terrible trap for themselves? What would happen in a year when one group were under-represented and another over-represented in terms of quality manuscripts submitted? Would ghost-writers have to be employed, with all the extra expense that entailed? If one of the currently less fashionable and ‘victimised’ groups were under-represented, would they too be able to complain and demand their quota? And, in line with their aims and as proof of good faith, would Penguin Random House be publishing an exact breakdown of published works at the end of the year, for readers to check they had kept their word?
It seemed in fact, far from empowering the publishers, to remove editorial control and fatally to hem them in. Was it a quixotic, irresponsible decision taken for short term reasons, to appease the new, urgently demanding gods who had so quickly usurped the old ones? Would it work, or become one of those ideas secretly shelved, one they would ultimately hope the public had forgotten?
5
Shriver, at any rate, took considerable issue with it. In a Spectator column from June 9th 2018, she discussed Penguin Random House’s new policy in withering terms. She had, she said, “been suffering under the misguided illusion that the purpose of mainstream publishers like Penguin Random House was to sell and promote fine writing”, but the forwarded email setting out the new publication policies had set her straight. Penguin, she said, like “many of our institutions”, had “ceased to understand what they are for”. They were clearly “drunk on virtue”. Of the publisher’s non-graduate policy, she pointed out how dispiriting it might be to have your work copy-edited and proof-read by people without a degree. Even their university-educated predecessors at such institutions often “already exhibited horrifyingly weak grammar and punctuation”.
But it was her comments on Penguin’s racial and sexual-orientation box-ticking that were, once again, to get her into trouble; there was one particular sentence that her critics would keep coming back to. The diversity drive, she said, implied only one thing. “If,” she wrote, “an agent submits a manuscript written by a gay transgender Caribbean who dropped out of school at seven and powers around town on a mobility scooter, it will be published, whether or not said manuscript is an incoherent, tedious, meandering and insensible pile of mixed-paper recycling.” [italics mine].
This was not a particular new or shocking thing to say – both the writers Dennis Potter and John Osborne had, among others, made similar jokes about Arts Council and state theatre policy decades before. Yet the ethos they were grappling with had since then moved from the fringes of the left to the mainstream, where it had hardened into the dogma of a new religion.
It wasn’t so much Shriver’s disagreement with it – though it was that too – as the fact that she’d chosen to make a joke about one of shibboleths of our time. Taken out of context – with the words “whether or not” ignored by hostile readers – her reductio ad absurdum now opened Shriver up to every charge they could throw at her.
It would be two weeks before, on 23rd June, Spectator editor Fraser Nelson announced on Twitter that he’d for once taken down the website paywall, so that readers could judge for themselves where Shriver was coming from. In the fortnight before then, the onslaught got underway.
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Meanwhile, what did one mean by “literary standards”? As someone with a training in literature, I’d suggest it meant a number of things. Prose style certainly – the glide, flow, rhythm and vigour of a line of writing. The architecture of a book, the way it seemed that content was brought forth in the most fitting technical way and that sometimes, in the marriage of the two, miracles could happen. The originality of themes, the music of a phrase, storytelling ability, humour, uniqueness of voice, an ability to handle poetic symbol, the sense a writer had something to say that had never been said before. The ability to break rules and galvanise you into life at seeing them broken. To tell you what you didn’t know, or – in the words of Dennis Potter – what you didn’t know you already knew. That mysterious spark that some writers had and some didn’t – and that you might as well, for want of a better word, call ‘divine’. Things that could not be taught.
Writing is a lifetime’s apprenticeship and a religious commitment: and if at the beginning writers don’t know the risks involved, life and the market soon teach them. People see (or don’t see, normally) the finished product, but they never know the thousands of hours of slow learning and occasional bitter despair behind them. They don’t see the pages of text you’ve photocopied and blown up to accommodate all the notes you scrawl on them. They don’t see the comments in the margins of your books, the underlinings sometimes made so vehemently they threaten to go through the page.
They don’t see your files of quotes and typed out chapter beginnings and endings by other writers, or the yards of books about writing read in your teens and twenties – Cyril Connolly’s Enemies of Promise, Keith Waterhouse’s English, your English and How She is Sung, Dorothea Brande’s Becoming a Writer – that clutter up your shelves. They don’t see the huge amount of literary biographies and autobiographies you once read, searching for insights and role models, the vast amount of literary trivia you accumulate as you study writers and their practices – that Hemingway always wrote standing up; that Graham Greene got out his 500 words per day before breakfast – sometimes breaking off in the middle of a sentence when the requisite number had been done; that Noel Coward sat at his desk from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. each day, willing a miracle to happen; that Muriel Spark, writing longhand, simply had to use the same James Thin notebooks, or she wouldn’t be able to see one through to its end.
There are plenty of other things they don’t see as well. The paucity of your monthly paycheque, as you’re forced to work fewer hours to find uncluttered time to write in. The dodgy flats you’re forced to live in with even dodgier flatmates. The time-consuming friendships you’re forced to reject, the corners you’re forced to cut, sometimes dishonourably, when you feel you’re about to betray your chosen god. The girlfriends’ or boyfriends’ growing irritation at being asked to come “just half an hour later” as you’ve got to “get something finished” – the only thing you’re definitely finishing being, unwittingly, your love affair with them.
They don’t see the hours of self-contempt and lethargy each day, when you know you should be writing and aren’t, and the absolving sense of peace, fulfilment and suddenly self-granted freedom to enjoy yourself when you’ve finally knuckled under and that day’s work is done. Above all, they don’t see the sense of chastened, holy wonder you feel when you come across one of literature’s miracle workers, who seem to reach that pinnacle of mastery that’s the true North on your literary compass.
Perhaps such things were safe in the hands of Penguin’s new model army of non-graduate school-leavers. Perhaps social justice and literary excellence were not mutually exclusive. Yet they were very different value systems and, as the Sermon on the Mount puts it, “No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one and love the other; or else he will hold to the one and despise the other.” It wasn’t enough to say, as some did, that the market would take care of it. Penguin had vast advertising resources and friends in the press at its disposal; a publisher could puff any book it chose, and you could no longer rely on the value-system of a literary reviewer – for the press in Britain was displaying signs of caving in to the New Orthodoxy right across the board. They, too, might be trying to serve two masters – and you could only serve one.