Katie Razzall begins Anatomy of a Cancellation, her fine new BBC podcast about a still-bubbling literary controversy, with a meditation on Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon. This was the famous 1950 film that had four witnesses to a rape tell stories that sharply contradicted one another. The viewer is, before a revealing denouement, invited to assemble their own truth from clashing testimonies.
This is an apt analogy. The title of the podcast will alone cause some feathers to ruffle.
Anatomy of a Cancellation concerns the debate around Kate Clanchy’s memoir, Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, from 2019. The book, which details the writer’s experiences teaching poetry at a comprehensive school in Oxford, was published to largely positive reviews and decent sales. A “superb reflection on 30 years in the classroom”, Carl O’Brien wrote in this newspaper.
Her students, some of whom went on to be published in Clanchy’s anthology England: Poems from a School, cherished her insights into their varied verse. Reservations about the author’s position as a middle-class white woman interacting with pupils from diverse racial backgrounds were initially expressed in reasoned terms.
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Clanchy herself worried about being “a posh do-gooder, a Victorian lady on a mission who has not noticed that her message is obscured by her person”. Lara Feigel, in her review for the Guardian newspaper, acknowledged the honesty of that qualified self-own. “I worried about this too,” she wrote, “but I remained convinced that her efforts are worthwhile.”
All very civilised. All very grown up. The book won an Orwell Prize for political writing. Clanchy seemed set fair.
The crash occurred during the febrile, shut-in aftermath of Covid. Clanchy came across a review on the Goodreads website that, she said, “made up a racist quote and said it was in my book”. She posted her objections on Twitter (as it then still was) and watched aghast as the subsequent conversation escalated in righteous intensity.
The Goodreads review proved inaccurate, but the author did use terms such as “fine Ashkenazi nose” and “almond eyes” to describe her students. “Reading Clanchy’s book, I was angered by the dehumanising language and felt a protective instinct towards the children,” the journalist Monisha Rajesh, one of her more vigorous critics, wrote in 2021.
As the attacks swelled on social media, the novelist Philip Pullman, then president of the Society of Authors, came to Clanchy’s defence. Meanwhile, she felt she was getting insufficient support from her publisher. “Macmillan and Picador three times apologised for her and successfully put pressure on her to withdraw an article she was writing in her defence,” the Times reported. In January 2022, she and Pan Macmillan, owner of Picador, which published Some Kids, parted “by mutual consent”.
The headlines alone justify Razzall’s gesture towards Rashomon. “The hounding of author Kate Clanchy has been a witch-hunt without mercy,” we learned above a Guardian article by Sonia Sodha. “Pointing out racism in books is not an ‘attack’ – it’s a call for industry reform,” the header on Rajesh’s piece in the same publication argues. Far worse was, of course, being said by both sides on social media.
So back to that title. Not every contributor to Anatomy of a Cancellation agreed that Clanchy had, indeed, been cancelled.
“Of course not,” Rajesh told Razzall. “Everybody’s still talking about her now. You’re not cancelled when your books are still being published.”
Clanchy’s books are, indeed, currently with Swift Press, the independent publisher that recently launched Woody Allen’s first novel in the UK. But there is little question that the controversy has caused her enormous discomfort. “I can’t imagine feeling happy again,” she says on the podcast.
Earlier this month, Clanchy’s former publisher put some sort of punctuation point on the furore. Not a full stop. Not a colon. But maybe a semi-colon. “This was clearly a regrettable series of events in Pan Macmillan’s past,” Joanna Prior, its chief executive, told the Times. “I’m sorry for the hurt that was caused to Kate Clanchy and many others.”
There are no easy or comforting conclusions to be drawn from all this. But the hope is that we have moved past the stage where any sort of mass objection, particularly one emanating from social media, to a book, film, play or TV series is taken as unquestionable evidence of widespread popular concern.
It is more important to do the right thing than it is to be seen doing what you guess, on that afternoon’s evidence, the loudest body on the internet believes might be the right thing.
Gatekeepers should listen to objections about potentially offensive content. They should also understand that it’s vital to sometimes stand by work that makes you feel a tad uncomfortable.
Now watch Rashomon.
