Dead and Alive, Zadie Smith, Hamish Hamilton, £22

There is a particular type of progressive who wonders what happened to Zadie Smith. Her bona fides are solid enough. She is anxious about climate change. She loathes Brexit. She recently wrote an article in The Guardian about why we need to protect the arts from cuts. Her hatred of Donald Trump is comprehensive. And yet.

Something, it seems, has gone amiss with our Zadie. This is clearest not in her fiction – ranging from White Teeth 25 years ago to The Fraud in 2023 – but in her non-fiction work. Her essays, in particular, provoke the greatest animosity. Some of those included in her most recent collection, Dead and Alive, have attracted a great deal of criticism.

In many of these essays, published in outlets from the New Yorker to the New York Review of Books, Smith strays dangerously close to ideological heresy. She expresses, the argument goes, a kind of pseudo-humanist thinking that is at worst naïve and at best complicit with the reactionary politics that is poisoning the West.

After an article in the New Yorker in 2024, in which Smith was deemed by many to be insufficiently anti-Israel, the Cambridge professor Priyamvada Gopal argued that Smith’s writing on this subject was no surprise: ‘This is the price of admission into elite white literary and institutional circles.’

A more sustained criticism of Smith comes from the American writer Andrea Long Chu, who wrote, in an essay for Vulture: ‘a very consistent feature of Smith’s career as a public intellectual’ is ‘her almost involuntary tendency to reframe all political questions as “human” ones’. The problem with this ‘humanist impulse’ is that it leads to ‘perennial wrongheadedness’.

What this criticism of Smith boils down to is that she needs to pick a side, and she has an irritating habit of not doing so. The time for glib liberalism is over. Invoking nuance to explore contentious issues is merely a fig-leaf to excuse morally objectionable values. This is, ultimately, fence-sitting of the worst type – especially at a time when ‘fascism’ is ascendant across the world.

Let us, however, consider the Israel essay in finer detail. It should be remembered, amid the accusation of proximity to evil, that Smith argued in support of the ‘brave’ pro-Palestinian students who protested Columbia University and demanded that Israel should end its military attacks on Gaza.

She also wrote that to ‘send the police in to arrest young people peacefully insisting upon a ceasefire represents a moral injury to us all’. And she proclaimed ‘a ceasefire is not just politically wise’, it is also an ‘ethical necessity’.

These views are not consistent with someone who is reactionary on the question of the Gaza war. The problem, though, was that in the same essay she also argued that Jewish students should not be made to feel unsafe on university campuses. And the term ‘Zionist’ should not be used as an insult.

What explains this particular disjuncture between an article that is very clearly not an endorsement of Israeli military actions – in fact, a piece that condemns it – and the view that the author is an accomplice of right-wing propaganda?

Because what is at stake is not simply Smith’s particular aesthetic and ideological vision. It is whether the kind of humanist thinker that distinguished Anglo-American letters in the 20th century has much purchase today. For, despite being a Londoner, Smith reminds me of a New York Intellectual: the group of novelists and essayists who were avowedly left-wing, but eschewed ideological dogmatism; who believed fiction should not be subordinated to politics.

Many of them, like Irving Howe, were Jewish. Others were Protestant and Catholic. Some, like James Baldwin, were African-American. To say they were apolitical or not interested in politics would be absurd. But they recognised something that Smith also recognises: culture should be defended on its own terms and not as a subset of politics.

Two New York intellectuals illustrate what Smith, in her own way, is trying to get at in her essay: Baldwin and Lionel Trilling.

Baldwin once hated the work of William Shakespeare; he saw it as the personification of a culture that was denied to him on the basis of his race. But he grew to love the Bard for being able to, as Baldwin once wrote in an essay, ‘defeat all labels and complicate all battles by insisting on the human riddle’.

Trilling, the author of the classic text The Liberal Imagination, also came from what we would now call a ‘marginalised background’. When he was growing up, Jews were barred from many institutions in American society; he became the first tenured Professor of English at Columbia University in 1938. But, like Baldwin, he felt the best expression of literature was not as an articulation of ideological agitprop. Rather, it ‘is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity and difficulty’.

The sensibility of Baldwin and Trilling is evident in Dead and Alive. In one essay, titled ‘Presumed to Know: In defence of Fiction’, she argues that ‘fiction’s business was with the people, all the people, all the time’. She adds that fiction ‘was full of doubt, self-doubt above all. It had grave doubts about the nature of the self’. This explanation recalls John Keats’ notion of ‘negative capability’, which, as he described in an 1817 letter, is characterised by ‘being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’.

Negative capability is evident throughout Smith’s non-fictional oeuvre. It is especially present in her latest collection. It is there, for instance, in her assessment of the American artist Kara Walker, who stands ‘up for the subconscious, for the unsaid and unsayable, for the historically and personally indigestible, for the unprettified, for the autonomy of an imagination’.

It is there, too, in her ambivalent assessment of black British history. In her essay, entitled ‘Black England’, she writes with a particular fondness of the people who led ‘less perfected lives’. She is moved by ‘half-baked pressure groups and misguided ladies’ societies. By sanitised “slave narratives”, calculated to move sentiment in a progressive direction’. And, most strikingly, by the ‘nationwide sugar boycotts – even if the poor women refusing to eat that sugar would not have let a person like me into their kitchens’.

The temptation to castigate Smith for such broad-mindedness is understandable. Arguing in favour of what seems ‘both sides’ of an issue can, in some instances, sound like muddled thinking.

But give me Smith over writers who engage in mindless sanctimony, who believe with an unearned confidence that they are ‘on the Right Side of History’, who condescend to those who don’t already share their moral and political assumptions. Give me curiosity over dogmatism.

The canonical essayist, Michel de Montaigne, epitomised the relentless spirit that Smith displays in her work. In episode six of Kenneth Clark’s television series Civilisation – ‘Protest and Communication’ – Clark draws a direct link between Montaigne’s genius for doubt and the plays of Shakespeare. Both the essayist and the Bard grappled head on with the contingencies and strangeness of human existence: ‘on the highest throne in the world’, wrote Montaigne, ‘we still sit only on our own bottom’.

The hostility to Smith in some quarters shows a hardening against this affinity with the peculiar; a growing hostility to humanist thought. Her tendency to sometimes deviate from received wisdom, though, should be seen as her greatest strength. That it is all too often seen as a weakness says more about our stultifying civilisation than it does about her qualities as a writer and thinker.