Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens would have stood up to the protesters trying to silence debate at literary festivals, the historian Simon Schama has said.
As reported by the Telegraph, the Hay Festival and Edinburgh International Book Festival have cut ties with sponsor Baillie Gifford after a campaign led by Fossil Fuel Books, which claimed that the asset manager invests in companies with links to Israel, as well as companies that contribute to the climate crisis.
Invoking his late friends, Schama told a Hay audience: “Book festivals are theatres for listening to each other. I don’t want to see festivals being trapped in some sort of purity test.
“I go back to dear friends. I’m going to the memorial service of my friend Martin Amis. Martin and Christopher Hitchens and Clive James and a lot of my friends who are not with us were absolutely committed never to have the hands of writers tied behind them.
“They were merry pugilists. They absolutely believed that you could disagree spectacularly with each other without requiring the silencing or worse of each other.
“That is the heart and soul of the Hay Festival and the other great festivals that we have in this country, and I don’t want to see them imperilled. All of you, along with me, have to stand up and fight for them.”
Last year Sir Salman Rushdie led the tributes to Martin Amis, who died aged 73 following a battle with cancer. “He used to say that what he wanted to do was leave behind a shelf of books – to be able to say, ‘From here to here, it’s me.’ His voice is silent now. But we have the shelf,” Sir Salman told the New Yorker.
It would be stretching the truth to portray him as a champion of freedom of expression in the mould of, say, Salman Rushdie or Susan Sontag. But he had his moments, and never more so than when it came to defending art from timebound politicised moralising.
There was, for instance, the dinner party contretemps with the then Prince of Wales over the latter’s refusal to support Salman Rushdie after the Ayatollah issued a fatwa against him in 1989. The Satanic Verses had insulted the deepest convictions of those who adhere to the Islamic faith, Charles said, and it followed that the author of such a book deserved very little sympathy. “A novel doesn’t set out to insult anyone,” Amis shot back. “It sets out to give pleasure to its readers. A novel is an essentially playful undertaking, and this is an exceedingly playful novel.”
Amis was also quick to defend Philip Larkin back in the 1990s, when the founding fathers of what we now call cancel culture were hellbent on posthumously cancelling the poet for alleged “racism”, “misogyny”, and “quasi-fascist views”. (The “really rather nasty” Larkin “seems to me more and more minor”, A.N. Wilson observed, in a piece graciously titled: “Larkin: the old friend I never liked.”) “It sometimes seems,” Amis said, “that the basis of the vexation is that Larkin was born in 1922, rather than more recently.”
In 2020, Amis also joined other notable literary figures – including Margaret Attwood, Salman Rushdie and JK Rowling – in signing an open letter published in Harper’s Magazine that defended freedom of expression against the censorious woke mob.
The letter warned of an increasingly “intolerant climate” that was “stifling” the “free exchange of information and ideas” in liberal societies. “The way to defeat bad ideas,” the letter continued, “is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away.”
The heated reaction to the letter among the puritanical commentariat was grimly predictable.
Neatly serving to prove the letter’s point, many rushed to assert that cancel culture didn’t exist, while at the same time implying that the letter’s signatories should now be, er, cancelled, for associating themselves with figures like JK Rowling – or, as Vox journalist Emily VanDerWerff put it, “anti trans voices”.
Would this backlash – or indeed the actions of Hay Festival and Edinburgh International Book Festival – have surprised Martin Amis? It seems unlikely.
“What we eventually run up against,” he told his audience during a 1997 lecture on political correctness, “are the forces of humourlessness, and let me assure you that the humourless as a bunch don’t just not know what’s funny, they don’t know what’s serious. They have no common sense, either, and shouldn’t be trusted with anything.”
