Western Morning News (Saturday)
Shocking cleansing of our finest literature
I’VE just finished reading a book of Somerset Maugham’s short stories. His work is classic and many of them have been turned into films or written as plays. They are atmospheric, many of them set in colonial regions of the world – plantations in the Far East and so on. They’re of their time, written before the last war and are a vignette of life – often a bit near the bone. As a consequence his stories, probably based on the people he met, upset them.
Although often depressing, I think his style is simple, lucid, atmospheric and fluent. His words paint a picture with great clarity. The terms used for some of the characters are of their time, and we wouldn’t use them now. If Maugham had written the stories today, they’d have to be bland, obliterating much of the culture of the time.
Many authors today are having their work re-written, so I’m waiting for the woke pen of correctness to swipe through Maugham’s books, pull them off the bookshelves because someone has been described as having “parchment coloured skin” or something similarly innocuous.
Agatha Christie is the latest to fall foul of the narrow-minded censors who are, apparently protecting “sensitive” readers by their decision to obliterate certain lines. No more will you find the word “native” in her books. It’s been changed to “local”. You won’t read about an oriental either. Can someone explain why it’s so offensive to describe someone as an oriental native? I’m a native of Britain and I’m not offended if someone uses the term. If I came from the Orient then that’s a fact and isn’t, in my book, something to be sensitive about.
One phrase, which I’m sure will have you all reaching for the whisky was in A Caribbean Mystery when there was a reference to a hotel worker’s “lovely white teeth”. Thank heavens that was removed – I can’t imagine the shock waves such a description would cause. And censors are being paid for this nonsense.
Now I’m a white woman. I wonder if I’m allowed to describe myself as thus. If I was black or Jewish I wouldn’t be described as that in the latest round of nonsense. In Death on the Nile, the boatman, who was of Nubian descent, has been reduced to “a boatman” rather than “a Nubian boatman”. Nubian people are extremely handsome, striking people indigenous to the region of southern Egypt and northern Sudan. By describing where they come from you can get an idea of the person. Not now though. A boatman could be anyone, the richness of the passage lost at a stroke. A Chinese person is at risk of losing their cultural identity, a person wearing a kilt will never be Scottish, someone wearing a sari will never spark our imagination as to their heritage.
Roald Dahl’s work fell foul of the censors and now has to include “gender inclusive” terminology. Puffin
publishers tried to remove the description of Miss Trunchball in Matilda as having a horsey face, and Augustas Gloop in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory as being fat.
Fortunately the publishers have announced that they will publish the original Dahl as well as updated versions following an outcry branded as “absurd censorship”.
Expunging such descriptive words makes for very dull reading. The colourful descriptions are part of a writer’s arsenal, part of the art of writing. Sadly the role of sensitivity readers is increasing. There’s even an agency called ‘Writing Diversely’ that will provide ‘sensitivity readers’ to check copy. Originally hired to go over new copy, they’ve now set their wokey little eyes on classics of the past, trying to unearth words that might offend them.
When you read how one such sensitivity reader describes them/him/ her/itself, it’s enough to chuck your library tickets out of the window. Them/him/her/itself is apparently described as a “bisexual, genderfluid, light-skinned brown Mexican, self-diagnosed autistic, as well as with EDS (Ehlers-Danlos syndromes) depression and anxiety. What in God’s name has this got to do with book reviewing? I can’t imagine what the job description for the position was like.
So where will this bonkers attitude end? Cleansing some of the finest literature we have is shocking. Books are written of their time and should take their part in history. How is it this censorship brigade has crept up on us? I’m just waiting for them to get their pudgy (sorry, not allowed a description) hands on the Bible, which must upset all its readers with tales of smoting and stoning and more. Once the censors start going through that it will end up about 10 pages long. Meanwhile, if one of the other sensitivity readers, one described as “a disabled, nonbinary Jewish queer person with ADHD” gets hold of Somerset Maugham or any other classic authors, I’m going to write a very uncensored letter signed from a normal person suggesting that they would be better off using their creative skills editing telephone directories.
‘They’ve now set their wokey little eyes on classics of the past, trying to unearth words that might offend them’