On Censorious Criticism
Also: Derek Parfit’s good life, a strange and lovely book about Albrecht Dürer, the politics of Alexis de Tocqueville, and more.
In the November “Secret Author” column of The Critic, the Secret Author complains about other authors who constantly lament their “subject’s failure to match up to the exacting standards of the modern age”:
Take, for example, Russian Roulette (2019), Richard Greene’s biography of Graham Greene. Mr Greene . . . knows his onions — the Wall Street Journal acclaimed it as “astute and sympathetic” — but here again is a kind of masterclass in censoriousness. It begins as early as the fourth page, when Greene discovers that one of his namesake’s forebears owned slaves on St Kitts. He goes on to criticise his subject’s father for undertaking “cautious and paternalistic” charitable work before setting happily to work on his son.
What are Graham Greene’s crimes? Well, when visiting post-Great War Europe, he makes the fatal mistake of “accepting uncritically the complaint that the presence of black soldiers failed to respect the sensitivities of the Germans”.
As an undergraduate, he lampoons his fellow undergrad Harold Acton’s homosexuality. He writes a book about his time in Liberia that calls the local porters “boys”. He also publishes a novel in which the central character is referred to as “the Jew”, rather than by his given name.
None of which, to be sure, are points in Greene’s favour. On the other hand, each is entirely representative of the social attitudes of the time. Orwell and J.B. Priestley, to name only two of Greene’s contemporaries, talk about “the Jew”. It’s quite probable that Mr Greene’s grandfather (and Charlotte Lydia Riley’s) did so as well.
The spark for the Secret Author’s fire was Dominic Sandbrook’s review of Charlotte Lydia Riley’s Imperial Island: A History of Empire in Modern Britain in which, Sandbrook writes, she shows “a remarkable enthusiasm for telling people off”—specifically people who failed in one way or another to denounce Britain’s “imperial past.”
No mention of T. S. Eliot is complete today without a reference to his supposed anti-Semitism. If you are going to write about Saul Bellow or Philip Roth, you must note how horribly they treated women. Even Shakespeare, about whom we know almost nothing, must suffer the unsparing investigations of modern censoriousness. In The New Oxford Shakespeare (2016), for example, the editor feels the need to treat at length the question of whether Shakespeare was a racist:
Just as there were no real women on Shakespeare’s stage, there were no Jews, Africans, Muslims, or Hispanics either. Even Harold Bloom, who praises Shakespeare as ‘the greatest Western poet’ in The Western Canon, and who rages against academic political correctness, regards The Merchant of Venice as antisemitic. In 2014 the satirist Jon Stewart responded to Shakespeare’s ‘stereotypically, grotesquely greedy Jewish money lender’ more bluntly: ‘Fuck you, Shakespeare! Fuck you!’ (The Daily Show, 2014).
Reactions to Shakespeare’s portrayal of black men have been just as visceral. In 1969 the African-American political activist H. Rap Brown recorded that, as early as high school, he ‘saw no sense in reading Shakespeare’. Why? Because ‘After I read Othello, it was obvious that Shakespeare was a racist.’ (Brown, H. Rap, Die, Nigger, Die! A Political Autobiography of Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin).
The editor responds that lots of black people have also found Shakespeare’s work inspiring, so he can’t be all that bad.
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