DW - really as racist as people say?

The place to post anything DW-related
Locked
Alan
Level5
Level5
Posts: 155
Joined: Thu 23 Jun, 2005 07:50:18
Location: Australia

DW - really as racist as people say?

Post by Alan »

It strikes me I haven't been as active on this forum as I used to be, of late - RL and other hobbies seem to have intervened. So to try and make up for it, I'm going to try to post a topic that might get everyone thinking and writing.

So here we go: Modern critics of DW who call him old-fashioned tend to cite racism/nationalism as one of his worst features. However, while I abhor some of our hero's racist generalisms, (I think "Gateway to Hell" with its dismissal of African-descended people the worst offender in this regard) I wonder if he was as bad as people think.

Take, for example, DW's best known series - the "Modern Musketeers" and the Gregory Sallust books. Now, the former is about a group made up of:

A Franco/Russian aristocrat
A Russian princess
A Sephardic (Spanish) Jew (Who married a South American)
An American (Who married a disabled person) (And later married someone who had returned from the dead!)
and just one Britisher - who married a Russian, so DW could hardly have been said to be down on miscegenation!

Similarly, the Gregory Sallust books have a Russian who displays every quality one could look for in a hero (Stefan Kuperovitch), a German who shows totally admirable Qualities (Erika, Countess Von Epp), a Hungarian, ditto (Sabine Tzulto), while there are also plenty of minor characters who also show qualities that many would envy. One thing DW obviously didn't believe was that "Wogs begin at Calais", or "One Englishman equals ten Frogs, equals twenty Krauts, equals fifty wogs" etc...

OK, so there's a bit of a dearth of sympathetic African or Asian characters in his oeuvre (though I seem to remember a certain Buddhist priest in "Dangerous Inheritance), but I really think one has to consider the times in which he was writing. Reading popular literature of the times, I can think of few examples of "foreign" heroes... not too many of them in Sapper, Dornford Yates, W E Johns or other popular writers of the times. In short, every writer has to cater to his/her audience... and since the prevailing attitude of the bulk of his readership was Anglocentric (or at least WASP-centric) naturally he would cater to this if he wanted people to buy his books! Perhaps DW's misfortune, reputation-wise, is that he survived to be still read in the modern era, when other writers of his time are now forgotten. After all, Homer and Shakespeare could hardly be said to be free of the taint of ethnocentrism!

Anyway, that's my two-pennyworth for now :)
Garry Holmes
Level5
Level5
Posts: 155
Joined: Sat 23 Jul, 2005 12:17:18

Post by Garry Holmes »

One of the things that I felt when I first encountered DW's books was that he was a very cosmopolitan author. Like you say, the Modern Musketeers are far more ethnically diverse than the heroes of Sapper or the other thriller writers of the time. Although he obviously has enormous affection for Richard Eaton, DW does enjoy making fun of his rather blinkered 'country squire' attitudes. Sallust, Brook and other of his heroes are well travelled and multilingual types, with a great knowledge of Western history and culture. He did think that Africa was more primitive than Western or Oriental cultures, but he was hardly alone in this at the time. By modern standards he is very racist, and his language can hardly be called Politically Correct, but by the standards of his time he was quite enlightened. He seemed to broadly believe in the principle of the 'The White Man's Burden'-that is, the idea that the civilised West had an obligation to spread that civilisation to the rest of the world. But in WHITE WITCH OF THE SOUTH SEAS, he has the South Seas Rajah Ratu Omboluku as one of the heroes of the book. Ratu is educated and intelligent, and wants to improve the lot of his people. With Wheatley it was never a case of 'White Anglo-Saxon Protestants are good and everyone else is evil'. The average modern reader might well find themselves flinching occasionally when they read a Wheatley thriller, but the truth is that in a century or so it is quite possible that the most enlightened modern writer is going to cause their fair share of flinches amongst the readers of the time.
Jim
Level5
Level5
Posts: 362
Joined: Wed 22 Jun, 2005 03:25:05
Location: NYC

Post by Jim »

I don't think it's so much that DW wrote as other people wrote in the 1930s, but that he continued to write that way till the end of his career. I am currently in the second volume of the memoirs (mid-1970s), and he still refers to "a Jewish nose," and "those little Jappy bastards."
Garry Holmes
Level5
Level5
Posts: 155
Joined: Sat 23 Jul, 2005 12:17:18

Post by Garry Holmes »

It's worth remembering that in the 70s it was still deemed okay for white actors to 'black up' to play ethnic roles on film and TV. There was a sitcom on British TV called MIND YOUR LANGUAGE that portrayed foreigners in extremely stereotyped ways, and it was only at the end of the decade that it was cancelled for being offensive. As for the stuff about the Japanese, it should also be remembered that War comics were enormously popular in the UK during that decade. Japanese soldiers were referred to in a way that would probably get the writer in trouble with the law if they were expressed nowadays. There were an enormous number of middle-aged men who had fought in Burma during WWII, and their experiences had left them with a hatred of the Japanese (read George MacDonald Fraser's QUARTERED SAFE OUT HERE to see what I mean). The sorts of things that DW was saying in the mid 70s would be unacceptable nowadays, but you've got to remember that he died 36 years ago. Had he lived and wrote up until the 90s he would probably have been forced to go along with the move to political correctness, but in the 70s some of his opinions would have passed without comment.
Jim
Level5
Level5
Posts: 362
Joined: Wed 22 Jun, 2005 03:25:05
Location: NYC

Post by Jim »

Garry Holmes wrote: The sorts of things that DW was saying in the mid 70s would be unacceptable nowadays, but you've got to remember that he died 36 years ago. Had he lived and wrote up until the 90s he would probably have been forced to go along with the move to political correctness, but in the 70s some of his opinions would have passed without comment.

We also need to consider, I guess, that attitudes are/were often a little different on my side of The Pond...
Locked

Return to “General Topics”