OPINION:
In 1960, a young novelist named Harper Lee published “To Kill a Mockingbird,” a story of racial injustice narrated by a female participant in the drama and set in the early-20th-century South. The timing of “Mockingbird” was fortuitous: It came along just as the modern civil rights movement was gaining momentum, and became a giant bestseller. It won the Pulitzer Prize and, three years later, was translated into a popular film.
A quarter-century later, another young novelist named Alice Walker published “The Color Purple” (1982), an epistolary story narrated by a female participant in the drama and set in the early-20th-century South. The timing of “Purple” was equally fortuitous: Its combination of racial and feminist themes resonated in the immediate post-Civil Rights era, and it became a giant bestseller. It won the Pulitzer Prize and, three years later, was translated into a popular film.
In the subsequent lives of Ms. Walker and Ms. Lee, however, their second acts are studies in contrast. Admiration for “Mockingbird” was always stronger in the general public than in literary circles and Ms. Lee never produced another novel.
In subsequent decades, however, Ms. Lee had the good sense to maintain a resolute silence about her life and work as she was showered with honors and official recognition. Ms. Walker, by contrast, has never ceased writing and talking. She has published innumerable novels and short stories, volumes of poetry, and essay collections; but none have met with anything like critical acclaim or approached the success of “The Color Purple.”
As with Ms. Lee, this has scarcely affected her celebrity ranking. A cynic might argue that Ms. Walker’s resume tells us more about cultural politics in our time than about literature. As a black woman who once published a popular novel about race and sex in America, she benefits from the cultural/political passion of our times. This is especially pertinent since, in contrast to the discreet, enigmatic Ms. Lee, Ms. Walker has revealed herself as personally peculiar and politically provocative, neither of which seem to have affected her celebrity status.
That, presumably, explains why The New York Times Book Review interviewed Ms. Walker last week and asked, “What books are on your nightstand?” She responded with four titles, one of which was “And the Truth Shall Set You Free” (1995) by David Icke, which contains “the whole of existence, on this planet and several others, to think about. A curious person’s dream come true.”
It should be explained that Mr. Icke is a British ex-footballer who has published a series of accounts of his belief in the occult and extraterrestrial origins of life, warning of a race of reptilian creatures who have infiltrated Earth from outer space.
It should also be explained, of course, that Ms. Walker is scarcely the first writer to hold eccentric views about the invisible world — W.B. Yeats believed in the faeries and spirits of Celtic mythology — yet it should come as no surprise that, in Mr. Icke’s cosmology, special emphasis is placed on the malevolence of the Jews. He maintains that plans for world domination are spelled out in the pages of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” — the Czarist forgery much admired by anti-Semites — and has written that the Holocaust may never have occurred.
Either way, by any measure, Mr. Icke was a curious choice for Ms. Walker to extol. Or maybe not. In the guise of advocacy for Palestinians living under Israeli occupation, Ms. Walker has frequently complained about the disproportionate influence of Jews in American life, and in her poetry, repeats anti-Semitic tropes while tracing injustice to the teachings of the Talmud.
All this passed without comment in The Times interview until readers took note — in explosive terms. That, in turn, prompted Pamela Paul, the Book Review editor, to submit to an interview of her own with a Times reporter who delicately noted that “many readers expressed concern” about Ms. Walker’s endorsement of anti-Semitism.
Ms. Paul is nothing if not a pro. She spent the bulk of the interview explaining The Times’ adherence to fact-checking and scholarly objectivity, and complimented readers as “intelligent and discerning We trust them to sift through something that someone says in an interview, whether it’s the president or a musician or a person accused of sexual harassment, and to judge for themselves: Do I agree with this person?”
Which left one obvious question unasked and unanswered. Since, as Ms. Paul says, Alice Walker is “known to be very political,” and since her politics, conspiracy theorizing, and anti-Semitism are equally well known, what prompted The Times to solicit her advice? And if The Times had interviewed a “president or a musician” — even a writer — whose political views are known but uncongenial to The Times, would she have allowed such an outrage to pass, and left readers to “judge for themselves: Do I agree with this person?”
• Philip Terzian, who was literary editor of The Weekly Standard, is the author of “Architects of Power: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and the American Century.”
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