Trick or Treat Part 6

In which the novelist Lionel Shriver puts on a sombrero, and brings down hell on her head.

1

None of these things occurred to those who now, with some ferocity, laid into Shriver’s column – though she must have known the drill second time around. You could expect your attackers to pick and choose, and to misrepresent you as much as they could get away with.

“Lionel Shriver may not realise it, but greatness can come from anywhere,” preached a straw-manning headline in the Guardian. The surname-less “Neil” on change-effect.com condemned Shriver as “woefully out of touch,“ and her article as “shambolic and intellectually inarticulate… to suggest in any way [inclusion] is dumbing down is insulting, ill-informed and naïve”.

Peter Gordon [Guardian] made a more thoughtful point: “Given that writing ability is presumably evenly distributed across the socio-economic and ethnic spectrum – why would it not be? – one would expect, statistically, the company’s output to reflect the wider society… without diversity the English literary world would not have Homer, Dostoevsky or García Marquez.”

Well yes indeed, one might argue, but the point was that none of those three had been discovered by installing quotas. Rather less thoughtfully, Hanif Kureishi waded into the argument (yet again the Guardian), denouncing Shriver and her ilk as “knuckle-dragging, semi-blind” whose “stupidity and… pathetic whining would be funny if it weren’t so tragic for Britain.”

He went on: “Before, with their sense of superiority and lofty arrogance, they could intimidate everyone around them. No more… It is good news that the master race is becoming anxious… The attempt of reactionaries to shut people down shows both fear and stupidity. But it’s too late: they will be hearing from us.”

Thus spoke Hanif Kureishi CBE – the much-adapted, Faber published, best-selling, Oscar-nominated, Whitbread-winning novelist and screenwriter.

Maybe now, with the “master race” becoming anxious, he’d finally get his bite of the literary cake.

2

And then there was Twitter, always the keening chorus in the series of Greek mini-tragedies we saw enacted week after week.

RJ Barker - but a ghost. Woo@dedbutdrmng - Jun 12, 2018

The subtext of Lionel Shriver's article complaining about Penguin's diversity policy is 'only white people write good books.' This is, of course, ridiculous and does not deserve your time.

Pádraig Ó Séaġḋa @poshea - Jun 13, 2018

I guess this signals her retirement.

Liam Carson@Liam220262 - Jun 11, 2018

Lionel is shit-stirring again. We need to talk about Lionel.

Miss Veg Ⓥ @misstypecast - Jun 11, 2018

Having worked in publishing for nearly 2 decades I am fucking appalled at her reaction. Absolutely fucking appalled.

Nina Purcell @NinaPinOD - Jun 10, 2018

Inclusion IS quality - not separate to. Lionel Shriver attacks Penguin publisher's inclusion policy http://bbc.co.uk/news/uk-44424803

York Centre for Writing @YSJWriting - Jun 16, 2018

Lionel Shriver is wrong. Penguin’s push for diversity will translate into better books https://theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jun/12/lionel-shriver-penguin-diversity-books-random-house?CMP=share_btn_tw…

Samantha Walton @samlwalton - Jun 13, 2018

The question I want answered is why does Lionel Shriver care whether Penguin employees have degrees & how many BAME/marginalised writers get published? If publishers are willing to take a 'risk' on candidates w/o degrees & back books from diverse writers, why does she gaf?

Trudi Bishop @TrudiBishop007 - Jun 10, 2018

Lionel Shriver attacks Penguin publisher's inclusion policy. How disappointing to read an intelligent woman have such short sighted views saying it’s “alarming that new starters don’t have to have degrees”. A degree is no proof of being right for the job. http://bbc.co.uk/news/uk-44424803

Lee VIVA RONALDO Rourke @LeeRourke - Jun 9, 2018

She's a racist, curmudgeonly snob. A complete right-wing reactionary, insecure, antediluvian no mark!

Chirag Wakaskar @chiragwakaskar - Jun 10, 2018

For people like Shriver one can only have talent if they are white. Colonialist mentality runs thick.

Actually, comments like this were in a minority – most people know a shaky idea when they see one, and there were an equal if not greater number of comments supporting Shriver on Twitter. But there was enough pushback of this flavour to see one last shabby episode take place in its wake.

3

MsLexia was a little known literary magazine based in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, for which Shriver had agreed to be one of the judges in a writing competition. As her remarks about Penguin were publicised, one Debbie Taylor (MsLexia’s editorial director and founder), issued a statement.

 Shriver’s comments, Taylor said, “were not consistent with MsLexia’s ethos and mission” and would “alienate the very women we are trying to support”. They quickly – and very publicly – dropped Shriver from the judging panel.

The Mslexia writing competition was hardly the Booker Prize and when Shriver later said she’d only agreed to judge out of kindness and was grateful now for the sudden release on her time, it was all too believable.

Such contortions, however, were typical of the decade. An unknown editor at an almost unknown magazine was preaching to and dismissing an established novelist – who was doing her a favour - for perceived moral failings. That was about as good a snapshot of the era as you got.

4

The two were to appear by phone on the Today programme a few days later, hosted by Misha Husain. The piece began – provocatively enough – with that line about the “gay transgender Caribbean” on the mobility scooter being read out, like a charge in court.

“Do you stand by what you said there?” demanded Husain.

Shriver said that of course she did, but that it was intended to make fun of diversity goals, not the writers themselves. It was the media misrepresentation of her words as implying that diversity automatically led to lower quality work that she took issue with: “That would be tantamount to saying white people are better writers so we shouldn't publish anybody else. And who in their right mind would take that position?”

“Where are the quotas?” Husain asked.

Shriver replied: “If Penguin Random House is aiming to mirror the makeup of the UK population in gender, race, ethnicity and class by 2025, that is an arithmetic goal. Those are quantifiable numbers, so that’s a quota system. Now I know that Penguin Random House denies that that's a quota, but those are quotas. That's what a quota is.”

But it was when MsLexia’s Debbie Taylor spoke up a minute later that things got revealing.

Her issue with Shriver, she said, was “Lionel’s aggressive and mocking language about diversity goals”. And she repeated it later: “the piece itself is mocking of diversity goals.”

It was clearly the main point she’d come onto the programme to make. No Mullah taking issue with a cartoon of the Prophet could have said it more blankly. When the words ‘diversity’, ‘equity’ or ‘inclusion’ were mentioned, you were expected to adopt a Sunday school face and realise you were in the presence of the Sacred. It was just a novelty to hear it spelt out by anyone so baldly – and artlessly.

9

Debbie Taylor had one more very telling thing to say about Lionel Shriver’s article.  They had invited Shriver to be a judge, she said, “because of the quality of your writing and because we actually like the way you stir up debate on all of these issues.” But, she added, she felt Shriver’s column would “be very discouraging for particular groups of women writers” that they didn’t wish to exclude. She admitted to Shriver that “it’s probably, well definitely, not your intention to do that…”

“No, it is not!” agreed Shriver.

“Of course it isn’t,” said Taylor. “But the storm itself has had that effect, and that’s why we’ve taken this stance.

10

There were various points to be made about this. One of them – unsayable – was that if a group of women writers (or indeed any group) decided not to put pen to paper, the Gods of Literature probably wouldn’t have a collective embolism.  It was actually becoming possible to envisage a world in which, in future, there would be more writers than readers for them.

The second was that if said writers were going to be deterred from their life-path by a one-line joke from a Spectator columnist, they almost certainly didn’t have what it took in any case to see a book through to its end and get it published. Or, indeed, to deal with the review process (ouch!) at the end of it. None of these things, clearly, were part of Debbie Taylor’s thinking, nor was the thought that if Lionel Shriver had been the kind of person not to mock diversity goals, she would probably never have written a single one of her novels to begin with, and neither Debbie Taylor nor MsLexia would ever have heard of her.

But it wasn’t the central fact in all of this. Lionel Shriver, her voice audibly shaking during the conversation, had gone out on a limb once more to defend literature from certain values she and many others perceived as hostile to it. For her pains, she had been – once again – widely pilloried by her profession. Which, as she pointed out repeatedly, depended on freedom of speech in order to write. It was just another thing to be pondered in this strange, perverse decade, where institutions (and individuals) were beginning to say and do the very opposite of what one might reasonably expect them to.