Bad men can make great art. Get over it

Telegraph

a day ago

Here we are again. Another week, another cancelled author – and this time it is the late Sir VS Naipaul who is in the firing line. At the Edinburgh International Book Festival, the Nobel literature laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah remarked that he could no longer read the works of fellow laureate Naipaul. Why? Because he considers some of Naipaul's views to be racist. This in itself is hardly a shock. The Trinidad-born Naipaul has been widely condemned for his views on Africa, a continent which he saw as primitive and hidebound by superstition. The author Robert Harris, when reviewing Naipaul's travelogue The Masque of Africa, said that certain passages 'reminded me chiefly of Oswald Mosley standing for election in Notting Hill in 1959 and accusing black African men of eating dog food and keeping white women locked in basements'.
We also know that Naipaul was a Bad Man for other reasons. It has been reported that he was psychologically abusive to his first wife, Patricia Hale, while his views on child abuse make you draw a sharp intake of breath. Abused by a male relative when young, Naipaul later stated that such molestation was common. 'All girls are molested at some stage,' he once said. 'It's almost like a rite of passage.'
Distasteful, yes, but Gurnah's current condemnation of Naipaul is in danger of erasing a writer who was one of the greats of 20th-century literature. I confess that I have only read one of his novels, his 1961 breakthrough A House for Mr Biswas, and while it is, to put it mildly, out of step with current sensibilities, it is also undoubtedly a great novel. Naipaul knew that narrative drive comes out of conflict, and he is capable of moving you to tears with the hotly felt alienation of his title character.
I also think Gurnah, who was born in Zanzibar, is being extremely ungenerous. For every time you criticise a fellow writer, you endanger their future sales and thus their future prosperity (or in this case, the future prosperity of the writer's surviving relatives). I suspect that Naipaul isn't that widely read anyway these days, but I can also imagine those universities that do still feature him on their syllabuses are now having hasty conversations about what to do with him. Because we don't know what to do with Bad Men (and it is mostly men), so we tie ourselves in knots.
But we need to get over it. I have written about cancel culture a lot – particularly in the heady days of Covid-19 when the internet went mad and many were looking to start a fight over a 200-year-old corpse who may or may not have been a wife beater. Start separating the art from the artist, I screeched. As did many others. Great art cannot be created in a culture of fear, I wailed. Actually, that isn't strictly true, given that throughout history, great artists, from Paul Klee to Josephine Baker, have been persecuted. But you get the idea.
I still feel the same, of course, but what I have now realised is that cancellation is utterly pointless. For one thing, it is clear that most people are uncancellable no matter how heinous the crime. Last weekend, I noticed crowds outside the Prince Edward Theatre in the West End, where MJ the Musical is still doing brisk business despite allegations of child sex abuse against the late Michael Jackson. JK Rowling 's sales have barely been dented despite the best efforts of those actors (among many others) who made huge financial gains due to her creations.
My main issue with the cancellation of artists is that those who are campaigning with their metaphorical nooses often appear to be unfamiliar with the work of those they would like to see hung, drawn and quartered. The disrespect for culture, and the obsession with biography over art is, frankly, depressing, and while I can't blame those fragile little students at Rada for not wanting to sit through the interminable Arms and the Man by Nazi-loving eugenicist George Bernard Shaw, (whose name they wanted eradicated from one of their theatres), they should at least respect Shaw's clever, socially and politically minded body of work, not to mention his surprising sense of humour.
Another bad Victorian, Charles Dickens, proves the futility of bleating about someone's misdeeds. We have known for a long time that Dickens was a total s--t, that his domestic tyranny involved trying to send his wife off to an asylum, and having a mistress, the actress Nelly Ternan, whom he kept hidden away in a Peckham purdah. But the fact is that Dickens's life was that of your typically entitled 19th-century patriarch, and that to shut yourself off to his expansive, heartbreaking canvases of Victorian society is to revel in a certain ignorance; to refuse to see the bigger picture. Not that the works of Charles Dickens seem to be in any danger of being forgotten (well, apart from Barnaby Rudge) – only last year, Radio 4 dramatised three of his novels, while it was recently announced that Robert Eggers (The Lighthouse) is to direct A Christmas Carol.
Artists go in and out of fashion, and it has nothing to do with whether they have fallen from grace. Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson aren't much read these days, while the films of Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd and Laurel and Hardy seem to be largely ignored by current cinephiles. But they will return: because the elevation of great art is cyclical, and it is often when a current artist chances upon the ideas of a long dead one that the latter's work gets resurrected. Because we humans are always seeking connections, and nothing does that like great art. What CS Lewis thought about women is for the birds; what The Chronicles of Narnia did to advance children's literature is for the ages.