Blacklisting Writers
Also: The Prince documentary we may never see, the real J. Gresham Machen, a new director (and direction) for the British Museum, and more.
Good morning! On Monday, I wrote briefly about Alexander Manshel’s claim in The Nation that what ails fiction today is its backward glance. He’s wrong, I argued. The problem with fiction today is its politics.
Two former fiction editors for Crab Creek Review agree. In Persuasion, they write about how a story they had accepted for publication was nixed by the editor-in-chief because of how it presented a Native American character. What is crazy about this is that the story apparently expressed today’s officially approved view of race relations, but this wasn’t enough. The article highlights how even if your politics are right, you still must express them in the right way or risk getting blacklisted:
Today’s culture of censorship and censure in literary magazines is stifling writers’ careers at their most vulnerable stage. Our experience at Crab Creek Review offers a case in point and a warning.
We knew from others in the lit mag community that our experience wasn’t uncommon. Eventually, we interviewed over a dozen writers whose work had been retracted for a variety of offenses—personal, political, perceived, and fabricated whole-cloth. Their editors, unable to countenance online outrage, alternately chose to A) rewrite the offending language, or B) “unpublish” the piece, with either minimal commentary or extravagant, self-flagellating apologies.
Some of the most egregious examples include, in 2018, The Journal removing NEA winner Rachel Custer’s poetry after behind-the-scenes allegations of racism and homophobia. The dossier included hand-wringing letters from Custer’s accusers with screenshots of her Internet wrongdoings. The first accusation: a Twitter post in which Custer declared her support for Chick-Fil-A. When Custer pressured Ohio State University to conduct an internal review, the editors were forced to reinstate the poem and the English Department apologized in a private email. In 2020, POETRY removed, and apologized for publishing, Michael Dickman’s “Scholls Ferry Rd.,” a “persona poem” that used the word “negress,” and the editor resigned. In 2022, citing complaints from readers about social media posts, Wigleaf removed the trans writer Danielle Rose’s short story in order to show “full support for non-binary people.” (Wigleaf never clarified what, exactly, they meant by this justification.) In March of this year, Guernica retracted the Israeli translator Joanna Chen’s essay about ferrying Palestinian children to a hospital during war, and the editor resigned. Today the University of Tennessee’s Grist openly states, “If an author behaves or speaks publicly—or is revealed or accused to have behaved or spoken, even in private—in ways that contradict these expressed values of the journal, then we reserve the right to … remove their work from our archives.”
Public censorship creates a culture of self-censorship. Today most editors simply choose—quietly—to avoid publishing controversial but high-quality work. If pressed, they might say, All writing is political. By now most writers in this sphere know where the boundaries are.
Fear of reputational damage and public censure are ample motivations for writers to embrace the lit community’s talking points and denounce those who don’t. This is a culture in which the Director of Creative Writing Curricula and Managing Editor for Georgia Tech’s lit mag, the Atlanta Review, breezily solicits a “solidarity doc” on Twitter. This “solidarity doc” is one of six blacklists we discovered; it is certainly the most ironically named. Some comrades are particularly eager to dole out punishment, chasing their marks around the Internet to ensure they cannot publish ever again. During a Zoom interview Rattle’s editor Tim Green said, “These literary firebugs have become addicted to the dopamine of outrage. They tell themselves they’re working for social justice, but really they’re just searching for that dopamine hit that makes them feel good.”
More: “Coordinated attacks on magazines and writers that decline to take a stand or take the ‘wrong’ stand or the not-strong-enough stand make it clear that many believe literature’s primary obligation is to political purity, rather than literary quality.”
In other news, Sasha Weiss writes about the Prince documentary we may never see:
It’s 1984, and Prince is about to release “Purple Rain,” the album that will make him a superstar and push pop music into distant realms we had no idea we were ready for. The sound engineer Peggy McCreary, one of many female engineers he worked with, describes witnessing a flash of genius during the creation of his song “When Doves Cry.” Over a two-day marathon recording session, she and Prince filled the studio with sound — wailing guitars, thrumming keyboards, an overdubbed choir of harmonizing Princes. It was the sort of maximalist stew possible only when someone is (as Prince was) a master of just about every musical instrument ever invented. But something wasn’t right. So at 5 or 6 in the morning, Prince found the solution: He started subtracting. He took out the guitar solo; he took out the keyboard. And then his boldest, most heterodox move: He took out the bass. McCreary remembers him saying, with satisfaction, “Ain’t nobody gonna believe I did that.” He knew what he had. The song became an anthem, a platinum megahit.
The next sequence starts to probe the origins of Prince’s genius, how it grew alongside a gnawing desire for recognition. His sister, Tyka Nelson, a woman with owlish eyes and pink and purple streaks in her hair, appears onscreen. She describes the violence in their household growing up. How their musician father’s face changed when he hit their mother. The ire he directed at his son, on whom he bestowed his former stage name, Prince — a gift, but also a burden, a reminder that the demands of supporting his children had caused him to abandon his own musical career. Prince would risk lashings by sneaking over to the piano and plinking away at it — the son already embarked on his life’s work of besting his father, the father giving and withdrawing love, the son doing the same.
Cut to Jill Jones, one in a long line of girlfriend-muses whom Prince anointed, styled, encouraged and criticized. Hers is one of the most anguished testimonies in the film, revealing a side of Prince many of his fans would rather not see. Late one night in 1984, she and a friend visited Prince at a hotel. He started kissing the friend, and in a fit of jealousy, Jones slapped him. She says he then looked at her and said, “Bitch, this ain’t no [expletive] movie.” They tussled, and he began to punch her in the face over and over. She wanted to press charges, but his manager told her it would ruin his career.
In The Walrus, Brett Popplewell writes about “the strange theft of a priceless Churchill portrait”: “As art capers go, the theft of Karsh’s Churchill seemed to be missing the Hollywood hallmarks that helped sear other heists into the public consciousness. Compare it, say, to the three men in balaclavas who rappelled from the roof of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in 1972 to steal an estimated $2 million worth of jewellery and art before tripping an alarm. ‘What’s interesting about this case is that the theft probably occurred eight months before they actually discovered it,’ Wittman explained, referring to The Roaring Lion. ‘It was a planned-out operation; it wasn’t a smash and grab.’ Such an execution buys time for the thief, who faces a bigger and more complex challenge: turning a stolen masterpiece into cash. ‘The real trick in art crime,” said Wittman, “is not in the stealing; it’s in the selling.’”
In the latest issue of First Things, Molly Worthen reviews Machen’s Hope: The Transformation of a Modernist in the New Princeton: “Machen defied caricature. A product of Johns Hopkins University and graduate study in Germany who contributed to the New York Times, he was ‘not simply another Fundamentalist on the order of William Jennings Bryan and the simian faithful of Appalachia,’ wrote his grudging admirer H. L. Mencken. Richard Burnett’s deeply researched biography, Machen’s Hope, goes further than previous studies in challenging everything that readers think they know about what makes a fundamentalist.”
The new director of the British Museum, Nicholas Cullinan, tells The Times that he won’t “conform to political agendas” and will “lead the biggest transformation of any museum in the world”: “Physically, our masterplan is a huge project. But intellectually, too, it’s an enormous challenge. Yes, fixing the roof is urgent. But if you’re going to address those physical problems you should also do something really exciting with the collections and the way we present them to the public.” Cullinan grew up in a poor family and was homeschooled: “‘We had very little money, but we were fortunate in that my parents, who were extraordinary in overcoming social and economic barriers and broadening their horizons, exposed us to reading, music, visiting museums and the theatre from a young age.’ That, Cullinan feels, explains why he is passionate about offering access to culture to as many people as possible, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds. ‘It can and does change lives,’ he says.”
Matt Osborne reads Ryan Wesley Routh’s book: “Today, there are calls for Democrats to rein in their rhetoric. This is a fine discussion to have, and overdue, yet it is a mistake to simply blame the anti-Trump speech of other people for Routh’s actions. He was his own best source of anti-Trump rhetoric, getting high on his own supply. In his own mind, he was an iconoclast who disdained both Democrats and Republicans, ‘as I refuse to be put in a category and I must always answer independent and I think that most intelligent people judge every situation case by case and vote solely on the merit of the candidate and not about parties or groups.’ He is of course wrong — partisanship is a built-in heuristic of democracy — but more to the point, he believes his own self-image to be universal, and that it should govern.”
Robin DiAngelo has been cleared of plagiarism charges by the University of Washington: “A plagiarism complaint filed last month against Robin DiAngelo, the author of a number of books on racism including White Fragility, has now been dismissed. The complaint – which cited 20 instances of alleged research misconduct in DiAngelo’s 2004 doctoral thesis – was lodged with the University of Washington, where the author completed her PhD and is now an affiliate associate professor of education. In a letter dated 11 September and shared with the Guardian by DiAngelo’s US publisher Beacon Press, the university said that the complaint ‘falls short of a research misconduct allegation that would give rise to an inquiry’ . . . Two members of the UK’s Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education’s (QAA) academic integrity advisory group who reviewed the complaint last month told the Guardian they thought that plagiarism had taken place.”
The short list for the Booker Prize has been announced. Predictably, three of the six novels are about the climate “crisis” and one is about lesbian love. I was glad to see that Percival Everett, the only male novelist on the list, made the cut with James. I haven’t read the novel yet, but it has received some very good reviews.
I’m curious if the culture of writers cancelling writers goes further back than the 1930s (when I understand Hemingway was threatened for not voicing or writing about the oppressed poor in America)? Seems to correlate well with a certain ideology, but my knowledge admittedly is limited.