The recent furore around Kate Clanchy's Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me (Picador, 2019) brings up some pressing questions about what has come to be called "cancel culture" and its impact on writers. Clanchy, of course, started out as a poet, winning the Forward for Best First for Slattern in 1995, one of the plethora of talented female poets celebrated in Roddie Lumsden's Identity Parade anthology. She developed her career as a poet alongside her career as an English teacher, with a particular interest in using poetry and creative writing to allow children from under-privileged and ethnic backgrounds (additionally with a focus on girls) to tell their stories. This lead to her being awarded an MBE for 'services to literature' in 2018 - the memoir about some of her teaching experiences Some Kids I Taught came out in 2019 and won the Orwell Prize for Political Writing 2020 apparently because it tackled issues around class in education.
So it seems bizarre that this experienced, lauded writer and long-standing teacher used to working in multi-cultural classrooms would not have picked up on the fact that she was using language associated with racial stereotypes such as "chocolate skin" or "Ashkenazi nose" or that she was negativising some autistic children as "unaccountably odd" and "jarring company".* Equally, it seems remarkable that neither an editor at Picador nor one of the judges on the Orwell Prize panel would have picked up on these breaches in politically-correct discourse; nor did any of the book's early reviewers - uniformly positive as far as I can tell - identify these snagging-points.
What happened this year seems a demonstration of how social media can seize hold of a cultural phenomenon and amplify aspects of its character to the point of distortion, inciting hordes of onlookers to contribute their voices to the clamour of outrage and moral opprobrium. On GoodReads and Twitter a growing number of posts started not only to call out these problematic aspects of the book but also to see them as symptomatic of a text that was soon widely reinterpreted and in effect demonised as an adumbration of patronising, middle-class "white saviour complex", full of misguided stereotypes and prejudicial, "othering" perspectives on Clanchy's multicultural pupils. Clanchy herself made matters worse by initially denying and then overreacting to the criticisms, while some of the accusers (including authors of colour Chimene Suleyman, Monisha Rajesh and Sunny Singh) went on to receive racist abuse from social media users themselves.
It's not my place to defend the book; I'm in the process of reading it and would like to make my own assessment as to its qualities and flaws. The danger is we lose sight of the text itself in this kind of trial by social media (often pitched at a heightened tone of angry, censorious disapproval), where blame rapidly migrates to the personal and simplistic lines are drawn between the words of a literary artefact and the author's subjectivity - I suppose with an autobiographical memoir the presumption that these lines are straightforward is greater than with a poem or novel but there is still a parallax effect operating in the space between writerly intention and reader reception. No doubt it was appropriate for Clanchy to apologise for what some saw as offensive passages or phrases in her book, but it was saddening to see her almost internalise the accusations of transgression by saying "I'm not a good person" and promising to rewrite parts of the book "more lovingly". This sounds like a critique of some undoubtedly ill-judged, questionable elements of a text she has written have morphed into a moral critique of herself as a person, apparently devaluing decades of practice as a teacher and writer who seems to have tried hard to validate the voices of marginalised, non-white female students.
It's informative to compare this incident (which I'm sure also has implications for how publishers and awarding bodies vet and assess both language and representation in texts they are considering) with the trend for outing/'canceling' earlier literary figures for historical indiscretions or un-PC behaviours. I recently discovered, for example, that Virginia Woolf had a half-sister who had a learning disability and was perhaps on the autistic spectrum. Laura Makepeace Stephen was shut away in institutions and never visited by the family throughout her adult life although I believe she outlived Virginia - no doubt fairly typical attitudes for the time (and later - look at the Royals similar treatment of the "special needs cousins" Katherine and Nerissa Bowes-Lyon in the 1970s). But in 1915 Woolf wrote in her diary about a walk she took in Sussex during which she came across "a long line of imbeciles". She went on to say: "everyone in that long line was a miserable ineffective shuffling idiotic creature, with no forehead or no chin & and an imbecile grin, or a wild, suspicious stare. It was perfectly horrible. They should certainly be killed."
Perhaps because this kind of extreme ableist/eugenicist perspective is read as historically determined or because of her status as an icon of 20th century feminism (or perhaps because this is a diary-passage never intended to be published rather than an excerpt from her literary writings), but I have never read any calls for Woolf's work to be "cancelled". It's all the more disconcerting to read this knowing as we do about her own mental health condition and the compelling exploration of post-traumatic breakdown she makes in Mrs Dalloway (which I re-read with great pleasure over the summer) through the character of Septimus Warren Smith, as well as the scathing attack on the psychiatric provision and treatment available to him, which tellingly is implied to be the motive behind Smith's brutal suicide rather than his delusional condition itself.
It's true to say that a century ago a learning disability and a mental health illness were seen as two very different things, whereas one of the huge steps forward we have made in comparatively recent years is in believing that they should both be perceived within a spectrum of neurodiversity, a spectrum which certainly reaches far enough to include all of us. In the same spirit, if we examine the life and work of any writer - contemporary or historical - , it will no doubt become apparent that they were or are at best (as Auden wrote of Yeats) "silly like us" ie. flawed, muddled, frequently wrong-headed human beings just as all readers are. This is not to excuse elements of serious prejudice within the works we read (and it seems that examples of questionable ideation and articulation can be upturned in the works of so many acclaimed writers, particularly of the Modernist period) but just an inkling that we should be prepared to make up our own minds about the books we choose to give time to and enter into dialogue with, rather than allowing the blunt, mutable instrument of social media to police our thoughts and dictate what we are allowed to read.
*As a teacher of students with autism and other complex needs myself, I would suggest these kind of comments are pretty commonplace even among less experienced staff within SEND departments and certainly when mainstream teachers like Clanchy are asked to work with our students - perception of "oddness" is a measure of non-conformity to neurotypical behavioural norms
