a gallimaufry

on Kate Clanchy

The unfortunate Kate Clanchy has been in the news again this week. Clanchy’s publisher, Picador, announced they would no longer be publishing or distributing her work. They had ‘parted company by mutual agreement’. I haven’t seen any comment from Clanchy about this and without any further information, it is hard to know the reasoning behind it. This has not stopped people assuming that it is a cowardly dumping of the writer as cover for Picador’s failures to address its own shortcomings in the saga, which it may well be. The result is that not only will Clanchy’s memoir be ‘cancelled’, so too will a forthcoming collection of poetry written by the pupils at her school that she was editing. Everyone loses.

‘Being cancelled’ is a term that is used to cover a wide range of actions, from losing your job to simply having someone dare to disagree with you. Pressure to ‘cancel’ someone in the most serious interpretation of its meaning – to silence them by removing their ability to speak publicly, or to take away their job or position – is often used in an aggressive manner by people who lack power, and sometimes in a disingenuous manner by powerful people to shore up their power and shut down criticism. While the people who make the ultimate decision to ‘cancel’ someone are those in a more powerful position – the employer, Twitter, etc.

The Kate Clanchy story, painful as it must be to many of those who are or were involved in it, is worth rehashing because it is such an interesting example of how ‘cancelling’ is framed. The topic is so emotive it is hard to be dispassionate about it. It is important because if we all carry on like this, we will end in a culture where many people will no longer dare to speak out and it is minorities and vulnerable groups who may well most suffer in that situation.

The trouble started innocuously enough, with a review on GoodReads. Someone read Clanchy’s Orwell-Prizewinning book Some Kids I Taught and What they Taught Me and criticised passages within it as containing anti-Semitic and racist tropes, which were quoted. Clanchy reacted by Tweeting to her followers that the review contained made-up quotes and urging them to flag it. This they did, and many people expressed outrage on Twitter and support for Clanchy, including prominent writers such as Philip Pullman.

So far so fair, until someone, a journalist named Monisha Rajesh, actually read the book. The GoodReads quotes were sloppy but pretty much what Clanchy had written. Clanchy conceded the point, but argued her words were taken out of context. Rajesh, plus Professor Sunny Singh and Chimene Suleyman, two other women who criticised Clanchy, were then subjected to a deluge of racist abuse on Twitter. You can read Rajesh’s account of the affair in the Guardian. Clanchy herself also came in for a lot of nasty Tweets, including some I saw suggesting that she was a terrible and even abusive teacher (based on no evidence whatsoever).

Clanchy then apologised fully. I cannot link to her Tweets because – unsurprisingly – she has protected them, but you can read the Guardian article about her apology here. Picador waded in and announced they would work with Clanchy to revise the book and remove the offensive passages. And now, for one reason or another, that work has broken down and Clanchy’s contract has ended.

What to make of all this? The first point is that it was Clanchy who demanded a ‘cancellation’ in the form of censoring a review she disliked and whipping up support on Twitter to have it flagged. Worse, she denied she had written passages that she demonstrably had. Her critics had taken issue with her language and been entirely within their rights to do so; instead they were abused and shouted down. In this exchange, Clanchy, with her 40,000 supporters, many of them famous, was the more powerful and used her power.

But it was Picador, not Clanchy or her critics, who in the end actually did the ‘cancelling’. They chose to revise Clanchy’s work, with her, an unnecessary overreaction for most of the people involved in the controversy. Yet they had allowed the problematic language to slip through their editorial filters. As Rajesh rightly pointed out in her piece for the Guardian, publishing lacks diversity, being overwhelmingly white and middle class. A more diverse publisher might not have missed this, and then, when faced with criticism, might have reacted more moderately.

Because everyone has strong views on racism and on freedom of speech, this story has tended to be flattened out and trimmed to fit the preconceptions of the person discussing it. Clanchy made a mistake, a bad one, but she apologised for it and tried to make amends. That should count for something and should be respected. In notable contrast, the Jewish community forgave and supported the cricketer Azim Rafeeq, after he apologised for his anti-Semitic comments and committed to learning about the discrimination Jews face.

Unfortunately, some people are unforgiving. If you rootle about on Twitter, you can find people who have decided on no other evidence that Clanchy is a dreadful person, and unfit to teach or publish. (There is certainly evidence that she inspired and is regarded with affection by many of her pupils.)

More widely, the story has frequently been reported not as a news article but to bolster an opinion piece, with the bits sheared off that do not fit with the writer’s argument. These have tended to present Clanchy as a martyr to the woke mob in order to present free speech as under threat from people who complain about racist or sexist language and demand disproportionate punishment.

Debates about free speech are very emotive; using a distorted version of this story as handy ammunition for your position on it only stokes the anger and denies the complexities. If you look down to the comments on the Unherd article, you will see that already people are unfairly blaming Rajesh and Clanchy’s critics for Picador’s actions. The anger against people complaining about racism is stoked, and it becomes that much harder for people of colour to dare speak up and criticise texts. At the same time, if like Picador you don’t engage with criticism but just wipe out anything that anyone might consider offensive, it will become more attractive to stick with ‘safe’ books that won’t attract any controversy. On this occasion, we may well have lost out on Clanchy’s anthology of her students’ poetry. In the long term, we may lose out on so much more.

 

'The School Friend', by Robert Aickman

What better way to welcome in the new year than with creepy stories of ghosts and doom?

Robert Aickman’s is a name I’ve often come across as a writer of the uncanny but his stories were scattered across anthologies and I had no real picture of him. In 2014, the centenary of his birth, Faber republished many of his story collections and his novel, and after only a seven-year wait I finally persuaded Father Christmas to give me his first solo book, Dark Entries. ‘The School Friend’ is the first story in that collection and it is very, very strange and horrible.

The epigraph to the story is a quote: ‘To be taken advantage of is every woman’s secret wish’, attributed to Princess Elizabeth Bibesco, née Asquith, a writer and coiner of aphorisms who married a much older man and died young. (She seems a fascinating person and I’d like to read her work!) This epigraph acquires resonance as the story progresses; it implies rape fantasy, submission, perhaps consenting to becoming a victim in order to gain what you want.

The central figure in the story is Sally Tessler, whom the narrator Mel first meets at school. Sally is precociously clever and her mathematical ability is ‘almost magical’; she dresses in a distinctive way and is beautiful. The narrator is reminded of Tessa in The Constant Nymph – a novel, play and film in which the child Tessa falls in love with an older man and dies as a teenager, unrequited. Virginity and purity are associated with Sally by the narrator. Yet Sally gives Mel a strangely illustrated copy of Petronius’s Satyricon, a Roman novel packed with sexual adventures, and surprises her by being very knowledgeable about all the activities depicted in it.

Sally lives alone with her father, Dr Tessler, ‘the victim of some serious injustice’ and very mysterious. He never leaves the house, but brings Sally up very strictly according to a ‘threefold’ regimen: ‘reading, domestic drudgery, and obedience’.  There is no mother. At the very least, this seems a very unhealthy atmosphere for a child to grow up in.

Sally gives Mel another book: an elderly copy of Faust in German. It turns out later to be a first edition. Faust memorably sells his soul to the devil for unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasure. Sally wins a university scholarship, moves away and becomes a scholar in the Classics.

The death of Dr Tessler and his weirdly old-fashioned funeral (of what did he die?) brings Sally back to her old home town, to which Mel has also moved back, under a cloud. Sally moves into her father’s house and sends Mel a postcard, inviting her to tea. The postcard shows a photograph of Mitylene, the capital of the island of Lesbos, home of Sappho. Sally does not receive her own post at home but goes to collect it every day.

The tea and the house are dismal and Sally is changing; she is dirty and badly dressed; later, when she meets Mel at the supermarket, she aggressively rejects her. After Sally is seriously injured in an accident, Mel has to visit the house to ‘keep an eye on it’ at the (odd?) insistence of the ward matron. Of course she explores the house...

The house itself is weirdly suggestive of Sally’s body and Mel feels like an invader. It is unkempt and slatternly, as Sally has become, stained and hostile. It contains – what does it contain? Mutilated toys, a prison-like refuge stuffed with occult books, signs of bestial violence. Sally seems to have been trying to protect herself from something. Mel sees a horribly white-faced man in a black frock-coat who instantly vanishes: ‘I thought at first that dead or alive, it was Dr Tessler; but immediately afterwards I thought not.’

The matron tells Mel that Sally is pregnant and in a terrifying scene back at the house the two women confront each other, while upstairs Sally’s ‘baby’ grunts and snuffles like a pig. ‘Let me tell you, Mel, [...] that it’s possible for a child to be born in a manner you’d never dream of.’

‘Will you be godmother? Come and see your godchild, Mel.’
The noise was coming from the library. Distraught as I was, I now realised that the scrabbling noise was connected with the tearing to pieces of Dr Tessler’s books. But it was the wheezing, throaty cry of the creature which most turned my heart and sinews to water.

And at the end of the story, Sally and Mel meet as if nothing has happened. Sally’s appearance is as it has always been, ‘with that strange imperishable untended prettiness of hers, and her sweet absent smile. She wore a white dress.’ She has sold the house and is moving to the Cyclades; she invites Mel to join her since Mel is not happy.

Mel gives away little information about herself. A writer, she has returned to her parents’ house after an unnamed ‘catastrophe’ which she refuses ever to enumerate. She has a distant relationship with her own father, and she says that she went ‘swiftly to the bad’ but in what way we do not know. She is knowing, almost certainly not telling us everything, and what she does tell us seems both portentous and banal.

The story coalesces around the two women’s sexuality and allies it with knowledge and creativity. It is hard not to see Dr Tessler as oppressive and incestuous. Perhaps he has made a Faust-like pact; perhaps Sally has. Returning to the house as an adult, Sally does not clean it as she did as a child but instead becomes like it, dresses herself in it. She seems to be terrorised by some supernatural creature which may even be raping her, but does not flee. Is it that same creature she calls her child? Does she have to undergo an appalling test of her courage to expurgate a traumatic past?

The working of the story is subtle. It is told slantwise and partially, so that we have the sense of a meaning but not the meaning itself, and nothing is ever explained. The surface events are unsettling but they become very much more disturbing when you try to piece them together. And because we can’t explain it, we cannot close the book feeling that we are safe from it.

Happy New Year!

(The illustrations are by Charles Keeping: for an edition of Beowulf translated by Kevin Crossley-Holland, picture found here; and for The Wedding Ghost by Leon Garfield, found here)