Books

Dear George, I met you first in 1965. You had just given a lecture at the Royal Society of Literature’s premises. You were outspoken in declaring the merits of reticence. Ardent for cool, you insisted that, when writing about sex, the explicit, licensed by the verdict in the Lady Chatterley trial, was the enemy of art. Never mind Sir Robert Walpole’s ‘Let us talk bawdy, then all may join in’: obscenity was one thing, literature another. The naming of parts, in your view, belonged only in the kind of book which Jean-Jacques Rousseau held to be read with one hand.

The false sense of complacency in Washington DC, now restored as the imperial capital of the world, is only matched by a tone of utter bafflement. History has apparently renewed its march toward a progressive utopia, and the American cabinet seems as epidermally diverse as it is ideologically totalitarian. But there remains a sense of unease. The imperium suffered a systemic shock in 2016, one that needed and still lacks explanation. The shock was not limited to America. The Guardian struggles to comprehend that British Indians tended to support Brexit, and that members of their community such as Rishi Sunak and Priti Patel have risen to influence in the Conservative party and high office in the government.

John Dollard (1900-80), trained in sociology at the University of Chicago and in psychoanalysis at the Berlin Institute, brought the sensibility of a novelist to a five-month study in Indianola, Mississippi, which he wrote up as Caste and Class in a Southern Town (1937). Dollard went south, but what he found applied in the other direction: The ‘caste line is drawn in the North as effectively, if not as formally, as in the South,’ which meant ‘We are still deliberately or unwittingly profiting by, defending, concealing or ignoring the caste system.’ Caste, Dollard argued, had far-reaching implications: ‘Our social system has come under world inspection and is literally being looked at by several billion people or their competent agents.

We should save ourselves some time and ban all books. They’re too much trouble. For example, Elin Hilderbrand, author of Golden Girl, hates Anne Frank. We know this because a teenager in the novel quips that hiding in a friend’s attic for the summer would make her 'like Anne Frank’. Didn’t Hilderbrand get the memo? Teenagers are not allowed to make jokes (or mistakes). One presumed reader wrote to the book’s publisher, 'As a Jewish woman, one who lost 18 members of her family in the Holocaust I'm disgusted in you as a publisher that you allowed that line to be published. It's inexcusable.’ Good for her! Hilderbrand was clearly insulting Anne Frank’s legacy, making excuses for the Holocaust and pledging her allegiance to Hitler.

Since the racial riots last summer, Flannery O’Connor has been scrutinized by literary critics and activists for reasons wholly unrelated to her literary artistry and her formidable oeuvre, whose size, though not large, is remarkable for a writer who died at the age of 39 after having been diagnosed in her mid-20s with lupus. The abruptly renewed interest in Miss O’Connor could be said almost to amount to an O’Connor revival were it not focused on a single question: ‘Was Flannery O’Connor a racist, or was she not?’ Attempts to answer it have involved an evaluation of her character based on her novels, stories and voluminous correspondence, and led in one instance to the critical conclusion that she was ‘not a saint’.