By Douglas Murray
Thursday, April 13, 2023
The republic of letters has been providing the world with some characteristic examples of courage in recent years. In 2020, we had the sight of junior staffers staging a walkout over the plan of their employer, Hachette, to publish a memoir by Woody Allen. The book was duly canceled, because what major publisher would ever want to go against the whims of a few twentysomething graduates in their first job?
Later that year, emboldened staff at the publishing house threatened a walkout because Hachette was planning to bring out The Ickabog, a new book by J. K. Rowling, intended for readers ages seven to nine. But many of the alleged adults at Hachette would not stand for it. They pointed to comments that Rowling had made defending women and claimed that they were transphobic (proving, among other things, that they could not read). On that occasion, the publishers held firm, though nobody from the junior staff was told that if they couldn’t cope with The Ickabog, then this profession — and life — was probably not for them. They lived to whine another day.
But since then, a new trend has slid in: that of retroactively editing the long-published works of dead authors. In recent months, we have learned that the works of Ian Fleming, Roald Dahl, and Agatha Christie, among others, have been singled out for re-editing.
The initiative appears to come from the new bane of publishing houses — the fabled “sensitivity readers.” This is a new class of professional encumbrances, employed by almost every major publishing house, whose job it is to read the manuscript of a book and look at it through the eyes of some infinitely fragile person: someone who, for instance, might mistake literature for a “safe space.”
Some of us have a more rigorous view of these things. Indeed, I have lately become fond of Franz Kafka’s comments in a letter to his friend Oskar Pollak in January 1904.
I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? We need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.
Today’s sensitivity readers disagree with Kafka. They believe that a book must be a sensitive thing. Living authors are — for now — allowed to listen to or ignore the suggestions of the sensitivity reader, though I suspect that many first-time and otherwise vulnerable authors do not feel they can do the latter. The interesting intrusion comes with the decision of sensitivity readers to rifle through the back catalogues of the dead.
According to recent reports, the new reissues of Fleming’s James Bond series being published this month include a disclaimer that reads: “This book was written at a time when terms and attitudes which might be considered offensive by modern readers were commonplace. [We’ve made a] number of updates . . . in this edition, while keeping as close as possible to the original text and the period in which it is set.” Inevitably, the edits to the text apply to passages such as the one in Live and Let Die (1954) in which Bond describes Africans in the gold and diamond trades as “pretty law-abiding chaps I should have thought, except when they’ve drunk too much.” The new version removes the phrase “except when they’ve drunk too much.” Elsewhere, perhaps more inevitably, the N-word is replaced each time with “Black person” or “Black man.”
Some people will say “So what?” to this. The removal of that one clause in the sentence above strikes me as a shame, though. It makes the sentence dull, something that most authors — Fleming notable among them — try not to be. The removal also erases a note of cynicism that is an aspect of the character’s personality. Part of the point of writing (and this fact will evade sensitivity readers so long as they are with us) is to arrest readers, amuse them, and even on occasion shock them. Here a sentence with a humorous payoff is turned into a sentence that is banal.
As for the removal of the N-word: This has of course become a stock-in-trade for the sensitivity-reader business. And for now, the edit appears to be settled. Except then what are we to do with titles such as Joseph Conrad’s The Nigger of the “Narcissus”? The last time I was in the main bookshop in Portland, Ore., several copies of this book sat on the shelves (not to give anyone any ideas). Should it be renamed? Must Ronald Firbank’s once-acclaimed masterpiece Prancing Nigger? And what of the arresting opening line of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American?
To ask the question leads inevitably to the question of Agatha Christie. And to be fair, Christie has been slightly edited for some decades now. The novel presently known as And Then There Were None (made into an execrable television series in 2015) was first published in 1939 as Ten Little Niggers. In my own childhood, it was known by its already-changed title Ten Little Indians, but that was soon deemed to be not much better. So Christie is no newcomer to edits. But the latest splurge of publicity over rewriting relates to changes within the texts.
Since Christie is famously the biggest-selling author since God, you would have thought that her works might be treated with care by those in whose care they sit. But it transpires that the new editions of her novels have, like Fleming’s, been gently “updated.” These changes fit the new pattern. The N-word has been removed, while “natives” has become “locals,” and HarperCollins has also decided to disappear the antisemitism of which there was reportedly a whiff in her company as well as in her books. In The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), a line has been cut in which someone is passingly described as “a Jew, of course.” In general, it seems to be references to people’s physical characteristics — in particular, potentially racial physical characteristics — that have been removed.
It is a different situation in the case of Roald Dahl. The best-selling children’s author of his day has been loved for several generations not least because of his joy in describing his characters’ repellent physical appearances. What would works such as The Twits (1979) be without these? But the sensitivity readers have also decided that references to people’s being “ugly” or “fat” should be cut while nonsensically leaving in words that are comparable in meaning or offensiveness. For instance, Mrs. Twit is described in Dahl’s original as “ugly and beastly” and is now merely “beastly.” Augustus Gloop in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964) is described in the original as “fat.” Now he is described as “enormous.” Elsewhere, gender neutrality appears to be the order of the day. That most put-upon group, the Oompa-Loompas, have been turned from “small men” into “small people,” while the “Cloud-Men” in James and the Giant Peach (1961) are now “Cloud-People.”
Naturally there has been some outcry about all this in the media. Many people have said that the rewriting of a dead author’s works has an Orwellian ring to it. This is true, but it fails to take into account that this is nothing new. Works, including greater works than any of those mentioned so far, have often been rewritten. Most famously, after Shakespeare’s death, his plays were often adapted, added to, or rewritten to suit the trends of the day. John Dryden participated in a 1660s rewrite of The Tempest that rounded off what he clearly saw as some of the rougher edges of Shakespeare’s last play. Today this seems inconceivable. But it was conceivable enough then, and in time the text reverted to Shakespeare’s version rather than Dryden’s.
But while the latest hullabaloo is not about something new, it is still revealing. For today’s re-edits of these authors do two notable things. The first is that they reveal the obsessions of our day. They emphasize our current belief that we must not be offended — or at least that we must not be offended by certain things. Those things are (sing it, you know the refrain) anything that runs contrary to our current era’s particular views on race, gender, and, to a lesser extent, “appearance-shaming.”
Of course the second thing that such posthumous re-editing does is to rob us of an appreciation of what the past was actually like — and of how it was different from the present. People held different views then. One of the joys of the Bond books, as opposed to the films, is that Bond is a much more unpleasant character in them: far more Flashman than Pierce Brosnan. So it is with various rather surprising references to race in works such as the novels of Agatha Christie. Some years ago, I was on a London Underground train reading one of the rip-roaring John Buchan novels starring Richard Hannay. Suddenly, I stumbled upon a line so racist that I actually gasped and shut the book for a second, fearing (I suppose) that someone might be reading over my shoulder and wonder what type of person would be reading such a thing. I came to my senses of course and finished the rip-roaring work.
The point is that literature contains all manner of surprises. But the best of them — found in books ranging from relative potboilers to cast-iron masterpieces — is that people in the past thought and behaved differently from the way we do. Not necessarily in fundamental respects, but always in interesting, often fascinating ways.
Television and film dramas today are intent on reconfiguring all of the past so that it looks precisely like the present and reflects ourselves. So we have “color-blind” casting and a great many female role models endowed with implausible physical strength. Here the obsessions of our age are simply transplanted onto the past. To my taste, they make much if not most of what is produced for our screens unwatchable.
Quietly editing books to fit the same mold does not viciously harm anyone, and it may indeed protect a few feelings. But it robs us all of one of the central facts that Kafka touched on. Books are there not only for solace. They are there also to challenge. That includes to challenge and offend the presumptions of the present. To walk against crowds that seem certain about their direction of travel. And to remain true to the words as their author wrote them. Not only because it is worth being true to the author, but because it is worth at least attempting to be honest with ourselves.
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