Until recently, legitimate reasons to suppress books had been diminishing: obscenity or blasphemy had disappeared. They appear to be increasing again, and expanding out of the realm of the law. I don’t think we should worry about books that are withdrawn because they cross, or prove to have crossed, some legal barrier. When, this year, Alice Sebold’s rape memoir Lucky was withdrawn, it was because the man she accused, and who was convicted on the testimony she then adapted for publication, was shown to have been innocent. That would always have happened, long before the phrase “cancel culture” was coined.

But a more ominous loss was Blake Bailey’s life of the novelist Philip Roth. The American moralising critics had been gunning for Roth himself for some time, on the grounds of supposed misogyny, both in his books and in his real-life relationships with women. Fortunately, the greatest American novelist of the last 60 years is, as yet, out of their reach. Bailey himself was an easier target. He was the author of magnificent lives of John Cheever and Richard Yates, and the Roth biography was magisterial — but too forgiving in tone. And so allegations of sexual harassment, assault and even rape against the biographer were hauled up. Although not yet proved, and apparently not the subject of legal proceedings, they were enough for Bailey to be dropped by his agent and American publisher.

Is it ever acceptable for a legally unobjectionable book to be cancelled, simply because an influential group dislikes its ideas or its author? This is a question that has plagued the publishing industry this year, and will continue to plague it.

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Alice Sebold's empty apology

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A temporarily successful cancellation was of the journalist Julie Burchill’s polemic on wokeness. It is fair to say that if you agree to publish Julie Burchill, you should know what you’re signing up to. The ride will be exhilarating, but sometimes bumpy. This apparently came as news to Little, Brown. Burchill got into an argument on Twitter with a younger, Muslim journalist. During the exchange, Burchill raised a historically verified fact about the age of one of the Prophet Muhammad’s wives, and made energetically tactless descriptions about the man the religion venerates. In March, she had to pay damages for defamation. Although this had no bearing on the contents of the book Little, Brown had signed up, they said that she had “crossed the line” and they would not publish it.

Like many writers, I’ve had to admit defamation in the past. 20 years ago, you would have been considered dangerously insane to have suggested that Harper Collins drop my next novel because I’d been rude about a lady artist in the Spectator. Fortunately, there are still some who think this way. Burchill’s book was picked up by a small press, and those who agree with her, or indeed those who, like me, very much enjoy disagreeing with her, can buy her book on the Woke Trials from Academica Press for £24.95.

If you can find a bookshop stocking it, that is — one underrated feature of cancel culture is that quite ordinary booksellers took to announcing in principled tones that they would not sell work they disagreed with. Two reasonable but sceptical books on trans issues by Helen Joyce and Kathleen Stock were, it was suggested, having difficulty being displayed or even stocked by shops. I doubt it did the authors any harm. Amazon was not to be budged.

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What is behind these attempts to remove individual books from circulation? And why does publishing, even for a moment, indulge the protesters who want to make the memoirs of, say, a senior member of a conservative US administration like Mike Pence unpublishable? Why are they, or the accusers of Blake Bailey, not told to go away or, if they are within the publishing industry, to find another area to work in?

Some of the scenes that have taken place are unarguably risible. The Canadian polemicist Jordan Peterson has a devoted following for his conservative hard-work-and-self-respect talks and essays. Robust prescriptions of Canadian Protestantism aren’t to everybody’s taste. The New York Times amusingly described him as the “custodian of the patriarchy”, not reflecting that the patriarchy might not need one. When Penguin Random House announced plans to publish his new book, protesters within the Canadian office forced them to hold what was described as an “emotional” meeting. One junior employee explained that publishing the book would “negatively affect their non-binary friend”. PRH went ahead, perhaps foreseeing the difficulties in consulting all the non-binary friends of junior employees about proposed signings and publications.

There are, then, reasons to be hopeful. There has been little attempt to cancel, rather than criticise, writers of the past. VS Naipaul, Joseph Conrad and Philip Roth are still in print; Dickens, widely arraigned for his treatment of his wife, remains a stalwart of the classics lists. The revelation that people who have voted for the Conservative Party have, in the past, written good novels is not yet the universal object of horror. Even the dropping of very controversial current day authors has created opportunities: the American publisher Skyhorse snapped up Bailey’s book, as it had the Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, and the hitherto blameless comic writers Garrison Keillor and Woody Allen, after similar campaigns against their supposed inappropriate behaviour.

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The direction of travel, however, is clear. We may be living in an age of transition, like the 1840s, when the liberal and relaxed means of expression of the previous age were snuffed out by a fervent and self-righteous rigidity. Mozart’s Così fan Tutte was dropped because it failed to draw an acceptable moral conclusion about marriage. Philip Roth’s novels may suffer the same fate. Will we who came to intellectual maturity in the Eighties and Nineties come to be stared at in the street, like the aged Thomas De Quincey, still off his face in staid 1850s Edinburgh? Well, we shall find out.

This is not a development proved or disproved by individual cases, and when campaigns of cancellation are waged against the million-selling Jordan Peterson, publishers have good reasons not to give way. Junior staff of publishers have been upset about working on J.K. Rowling’s books — she has committed the crime, among other things, of defending lesbians who have said that they don’t want to have sex with anyone with a penis. There are other junior staff to be hired, if that’s how they feel. For the moment.

Rather, we will know the truth of the development in years to come, when we can only guess at the careers that didn’t take place, and the opinions in society which, however widespread and ordinary, were deemed unpublishable. Even now, it is impossible to imagine that a novel, however brilliantly witty, could now be published by a good publisher if it made any jokes at the expense of a minority. And it may be that publishers, in a state of anxiety about offending, are pre-emptively walking away from very large parts of society.

I spoke to a couple of British editors recently who said, to their mild surprise, that they had no immediate plans to publish any novel by a man; to confirm this possible tendency, I am currently judging a new prize for novels of any sort, in which 49 out of the submitted 56 are by women. Whether publishers are turning away from half the human race, or that half of the human race is abandoning a way of life there’s no money in and nothing but disapproval to be expected, is arguable. The final result of an undeniable culture of cancellation is a terrible impoverishment of diversity, of fruitful debate, of the exploration and expression of different lives, different points of view, different ways of living in the world. That matters.

But in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd, Trump seems to have missed some moment of ritual repentance that American leaders are expected to perform whenever the American original sin of slavery rears its head. They may just be mantras about unity and guilt, but by not repeating them with enough conviction, Trump seems to have desecrated something essential in the American Religion. His support is bleeding. He’s even losing evangelicals.

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Trump’s relationship with Truth and Justice and Taboo has always reminded me of the final scenes in Don Giovanni (AKA Don Juan or The Trickster of Seville). Never more so than at the moment. By the end of the story, the serial seducer has run out of lies and lines. The graveyard statue of a dead judge, the Commandatore — who the Don has killed and whose grave he desecrated — comes to life and approaches with steps as steady as a death march to deliver justice. “I have come”, bellows the statue in a bass from beyond the grave, “Are you prepared?”

Over the past week, Glyndebourne has been showing online performances of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. I found myself switching between the protests in America, with their mix of the horrifying and heart warming, and the opera, which flips between terror and farce. You never know how you are meant to feel with each new scene. And just as the protests are reaching their crescendo with the pulling down of statues, so the opera finishes with the statue leaving its plinth to take revenge on Don Giovanni.

Trump’s opponents have long wanted a Commandatore to turn up and deliver some truth and justice. One hope was Robert Mueller, of the Mueller Investigation. Remember those heroic, macho photos of the former FBI chief in military uniform that circulated around Facebook feeds? Here was the ‘real man’ who would take down Don Trump by uncovering his covert collusion with the Kremlin to seduce the American electorate.

But when he arrived, he fell apart. Watching Mueller’s Congressional testimony was painful: instead of a fearful bass, he had a high-pitched, weedy voice; his grasp of the facts was not an icy death-grip but clammy and nervous; his conclusions uncertain.

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Then came the Virus. The Virus brings death, the only thing that is ever certain: reality becomes undeniable at the point of our obliteration. But Trump even tried to find a way to avoid that reality. His supporters questioned the numbers of those killed by the Virus: even these cold, hard facts, they claimed, are ambiguous. It’s an ambiguity amplified by the fractured American media landscape, where there’s one, demonic Donald Trump on CNN and MSNBC, and another, heroic one, on FOX, and a myriad more on social media.

Here, too, Trump mirrors the Don. There are some who see the operatic Don as a sociopath who uses the excuse of ‘freedom’ to run amok, manipulating his victims by first promising them the instant gratification of all their desires, and especially those of poor peasant wenches, then heartlessly tossing them aside to satisfy his own. He invites guests to his Mar a Lago-like palace, where he sings toasts to ‘freedom’ while planning to take a bride’s virginity, just for the sake, it seems, of getting one over on her groom. He is obsessed not so much with love, but with the numbers he has seduced; his eroticism is quantative, not qualitiative. In the ‘catalogue aria’ his servant Laporello produces a black book where he lists the women his master has seduced (640 in Italy, 1003 in Spain!), adding that:

“He seduces the old ones
For the pleasure of adding to the list”

Trump is just as obsessed with ratings and retweets (and boasts of the women he has bedded), but with no attention paid to the quality of that engagement.

But there are others who see the Don in a different light. He is a rebel, standing up to smug elites and a hypocritical establishment. In a 2010 essay on Mozart’s opera, the libertarian author John Kerns weighs up the two interpretations. Kerns initially “conceived of Don Giovanni as a (libertarian) hero… standing up against the church, against convention, against rigid social class…The Don is an operatic archetype representing the appetitive life force, and he is an emblem of liberty and independence of thought.”

Having analysed the Don’s crimes, Kerns does reconsider: “Is he a hero? He is not. His behaviour is so flawed by narcissism, irresponsibility, and dishonesty that he simply fails to qualify.”

Likewise, some of the libertarians who first lauded Trump’s rebellious role have now become deeply disillusioned. But for so many other of his supporters, the President remains a hero, exploding through the limitations of the po-faced establishment. Even his style — his ostentatious, gold-plated, baroque bathrooms with their overspill of ornamentation — challenges order and prim propriety, bursting out from constraint.

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Ambiguity is amplified in Don Giovanni by the fact that there are so many different versions of the ending. The original 1630 tale, the Trickster of Seville by Tirso de Molina, was very much a morality tale, about how a “society that depends on conscience has no defense against a sociopath who has none”. In this tradition the Don, when confronted with the Commandatore, goes down humiliated, begging for mercy.

But in other versions of the story Don Giovanni is more defiant: when the Commandatore tells him to repent, he refuses to renounce his own behaviour. There are even different versions of the opera: the original Mozart one had a chorus at the end delivering the moral of the story; Romantic reinterpretations in the nineteenth century cut the moralising ending. There is a CNN Don Giovanni and a Fox Don Giovanni, just as there is a Breitbart Trump and an MSNBC Trump.

Don Giovanni is a metaphor not only for Trump, though, but also for how chaotic our media and our perception of the truth have become. Throughout the opera the characters are constantly switching identities, pulling on masks and pretending to be someone else, just as in our political life old identities don’t seem to make sense anymore: what on earth is a ‘conservative’ these days, or ‘the West’.

Trump’s talent, and it is a sort of talent, has been to fill that void. His is a world of simple but brutally effective binaries. As old identities are undermined he bundles together disparate anxieties and instincts into ‘Real Americans’ — ‘the people’ who are frustrated in their desires by a conspiracy of the Establishment, the Elite, The Commandatore. Complex clusters of debate are reduced to ‘Fake News’ or ‘Hoax’. Even the way Trump is constantly giving his detractors nicknames (Sleepy Joe and Little Marco) reduces complexity to easily managed signs. He is attractive to his supporters precisely because he can represent a coherent, almost child-like world view. For someone who doesn’t make sense he has so far been effective at generating meaning. He denies facts, but conjurs a way of seeing the world many have found seductive.

In their attempts to compete with Trump, and Trumpian politicians generally, opponents have resorted to two strategies. One is to associate themselves with the desires and frustrations of ‘the people’ even more ardently Trump. This has been the approach of ‘Left-populists’. The problem is that to be effective as a strategy populism has to be agnostic about being ‘Left’ or ‘Right’, it just adopts any seduction that works for any voter. We struggle to find political metaphors for election-winning populists like Trump because they can be libertarians to one audience while showering subsidies on another; embrace a Jewish Modern Orthodox son-in-law while peddling anti-semitic tropes about George Soros. A real populist sleeps with everyone. The Don even dresses in his servants’ clothes when he thinks a more humble look will pull a maid.

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The other strategy has been to take the side of order, the status quo, against Trump — to play the Commandatore to his Don Giovanni. The problem with this is that you are still playing inside the metaphor set up by Trump. You might win one election that way, but you haven’t dealt with the whole logic of thinking. The status quo marks the space in which a Don can flourish. As Mikhail Bakhtin, the great Soviet literary critic, argued in his analysis of Pushkin’s short play about the last days of Don Giovanni, The Stone Guest, Don Giovanni and the Commandatore are actually two sides of the same character, two interrelated poles. And that means Trump can just as easily become the Commandatore too — as he is trying desperately to be now by defining himself as the President of Law and Order standing up to the Mob.

In order to truly undermine Trump, one has to undermine the structure of his metaphors, the seductive binaries through which he has built his world. We are seeing glimmers of this in the protests. Amid their chaos we see inspiring moments where the the divides between police and protesters are broken, spontaneous moments of dialogue, where the opposition between the ‘crowd’ and ‘the establishment’, is dissolved into a greater vision of a more complex public.

Trump’s metaphors are helpless in the face of a communication that jettisons the very structure of his binary thinking. His metaphors, such as blaming all the protests on a plot by Antifa, are for the moment flailing. He can’t embrace the language of reconciliation because his whole world view is based on division. Trump loses when the whole logic of pitching Don Giovanni as the opposite of the Commandatore disappears. It’s a resolution ingrained in the last scene of the story. As the Commandatore grasps the Don’s hand, the floor gives way beneath them, both are pulled together into hell — and the stage is left empty.