Mick Hartley

Hadley Freeman in the Sunday Times weighs in on the craven Royal Society of Literature [me yesterday]:

In 2021 I interviewed the most courageous man I’ve ever met: Salman Rushdie. We talked about his books, and we also talked about the fatwa, when he had to live in hiding for almost a decade because the Ayatollah Khomeini called for his death over perceived blasphemy in his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses.

Everyone likes to imagine that they’d have been on the right side of history then, defending Rushdie’s freedom of expression. But many weren’t. John le Carré, of all people, said of The Satanic Verses, “There is no law in life or nature that says great religions may be insulted with impunity.” I asked Rushdie if he thought people would react better now: “Put it like this: the kinds of people who stood up for me in the bad years,” he said, meaning people in the liberal arts, “might not do so now. The idea that being offended is a valid critique has gained a lot of traction.”

Just over a year later, Rushdie was very nearly murdered on stage at an event in New York. And once again, some who should have known better sat on their hands. The Royal Society of Literature (RSL) discussed putting out a statement of support for him, but this, according to reports “was closed down by the leadership”. Dame Marina Warner, former president of the society, said, “Regarding Salman Rushdie, the official reason given was that speaking up for the rights of a writer to free expression would offend some of our members and fellows and that the RSL is not a political body. This attitude produces the odd situation that one of the few places in the UK where a writer can’t express their views is in their own society.”

This obscene ludicrousness bubbled over last week when Bernardine Evaristo, president of the RSL since 2022, defended many of the recent changes that have sparked concerns among the society’s august members, such as relaxing the famously tough membership requirements to diversify the fellows. Evaristo insisted the RSL believed in freedom of speech. But, she added, “it cannot take sides in writers’ controversies … but must remain impartial”. Rushdie retweeted this and added: “Just wondering if the Royal Society of Literature is ‘impartial’ about attempted murder @BernardineEvari? (Asking for a friend.)”

To be fair to the RSL, its was not the worst response to the attack. Twenty-four hours after Rushdie’s stabbing, the chairwoman of the Society of Authors (SOA) at the time, the novelist Joanne Harris, felt compelled to tweet a poll asking if authors had ever received a death threat, with the possible answers being “Yes”, “Hell, yes”, “No, never” and “Show me, dammit”. Harris later rewrote the answers, saying she got the tone wrong (unfortunate from someone whose literal job is writing). But, really, who cares, given Rushdie (author of some of the greatest British novels of all time) versus Harris (author of Chocolat) is giant against pygmy stuff.

Now, in Harris’s defence, most people did not think she was mocking Rushdie. No, they thought she was mocking JK Rowling, who had tweeted her support for Rushdie and was rewarded — as she often is — with death threats because of her scepticism about gender ideology. Under Harris’s aegis, the SOA showed strong antipathy to any author who dared to question identity politics. When Kate Clanchy was accused in 2021 of using racist tropes in her memoir Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me — largely by people who hadn’t read her book — Harris did not defend her, and when the then president of the SOA, Sir Philip Pullman, did, he ended up having to resign.

Harris, whose pronouns are listed as “she/they”, is a big fan of gender ideology, and so while leading the SOA she repeatedly failed to defend writers such as Rowling, Rachel Rooney, Onjali Rauf, Julie Bindel and others who lost work and received death threats because they understand biology. And where is Harris now? Well, at the end of last month the RSL announced she would judge its new UK-France young adult literary prize. Let’s hope no YA author dares to suggest anything wacky like that a woman doesn’t have a penis.

But this isn’t another story about the “wokification” of an organisation — it’s about fear. At the end of every year, the RSL publishes a large magazine, but this year the society suddenly announced it had been pushed back to spring and, according to Private Eye, the editor had been fired by Molly Rosenberg, who now heads what the RSL describes as a “queer/female-led team dedicated to building an open, diverse and inclusive workplace”.

Sounds lovely.

“Horseshoe theory” sums up how the far left and far right are actually so close they almost touch, and identity politics perfectly illustrates that. In the RSL and SOA’s attempts to be inclusive, they have shown themselves to be as exclusive as the old way of thinking, if not more so. Worse, they are cowards, scared of backlashes on social media, though apparently fine with Rushdie being stabbed.

But when a literary society is more interested in the diversity of its writers than the quality of their writing, and is more worried about causing offence than the physical safety of novelists, it has ceased to have any reason to exist.