No Substance #189: The Author and The Work
This morning, I read about an essay by Andrea Robin Skinner, Alice Munro’s daughter. She published an essay earlier about the sexual abuse she experienced as a child at the hands of her stepfather, and her mother’s refusal to leave him. “She said that she had been ‘told too late,’ … she loved him too much, and that our misogynistic culture was to blame if I expected her to deny her own needs, sacrifice for her children and make up for the failings of men,” she wrote. “She was adamant that whatever had happened was between me and my stepfather. It had nothing to do with her.”
I read The Love of a Good Woman about a month or so ago, shortly after Munro died in May. I’d never read anything by her before, but I’d heard good things. I picked up The Love of a Good Woman because we already had a copy in the house and I worked my way through it. I enjoyed it quite a bit. I won’t lie to you. It had some great pieces in it. It has some so so pieces as well, but the great ones, especially the title piece, were excellent. Munro had a lot of nice structural choices in it that I admired as a writer and I thought the work was complex and interesting. I told myself that I should read some more after I finished. I still will, even after this news from her daughter, which is awful.
A lot of people are reluctant to support the work of terrible people. I’m not like that, but I understand it. You won’t eat at the restaurant owned by someone who is a racist, or who rapes children, or who tells you homosexuals are a sin and refuses to serve then, so why should you read a book by an author who does one or all those things? You’re a consumer and it’s your money and you’ve got a choice. If I was standing beside you in the restaurant situation, I can’t even tell you that I’d do differently. In fact, I know I wouldn’t.
But with artists, I’m different. Sometimes it’s easy to shrug and say I never gave a shit and just go on with my life. I never liked JK Rowling, for example, so when she started with her bigotry against trans people and spouting various hateful, terrible things, it was easy for me to dismiss her. Likewise, I never liked Ender’s Game, and so when I found out that Orson Scott Card was not just a terrible bigot but actually funded political parties who campaign against homosexuals, I just moved on. I thought the revelation by Marion Zimmer Bradley’s daughter that Bradley and her husband abused her for years was awful, but also, I admit, I never liked Bradley’s work. I could go on, but there’s really no need. There’s a lot of authors who have been revealed to have done terrible things, or who push hateful ideas and are awful people, and I think the work is terrible so I don’t read more of it and am happy not to own it.
This isn’t always the case, however. William S. Burroughs shot his wife, Joan Vollmer, dead. It was said to be by accident, that the two of them were drunk and going through withdrawals and fighting with each other, but still, he shot her. He fled Mexico and was convicted in absentia. I love the Nova Trilogy regardless. Patricia Highsmith was reportedly a terrible person, so hateful and unpleasant that, after her death, one of her publishers described her as ‘a mean, cruel, hard, unlovable, unloving human being’, but she wrote some great novels. George Orwell kept a blacklist of people he suspected were communist sympathisers and sent that list to the British Secret Service. I’ve no idea if they paid attention to it, but doing so was nothing but a dirtbag move and fuck him, right. His books? Still great. I always loved him as an essayist.
I don’t know why I’m not bothered by it. I am not the kind of person who cuts the author and their work apart and believes they live separately like some (misguided) people do. Patricia Highsmith’s books might not be filled with her various opinions, but her difficult characters, especially the amoral Tom Ripley, can be said to arise out of them. Likewise, with Orwell, is it really surprising that the man who wrote Animal Farm and 1984 was someone who could keep a secret list of communist sympathisers and rat on them? Not really, no. For other authors these connections between their personal life and their work is not so easily made, but it doesn’t matter. I don’t divorce the two anyway. Sometimes I even think their personal life with all its failings and the like make their work more interesting.
I don’t justify my continual purchase, or enjoyment of this work, but then, I don’t need to. We all make our choices and just as someone says no to any or all those authors, I say yes to some, and that’s that. I suppose I grew up knowing that artists could be and were sometimes awful people. Maybe it’s simply that I was taught about Ezra Pound too early, or maybe I just accept that all people are neither good or bad, but somewhere outside those concepts, and if a work is meaningful to me, then my relationship with it is what is important to me, not my relationship with the author. I’ve never thought my relationship with art was between me and the artist, but rather I’ve always viewed it as between me and the work, and to that degree, I guess I have always been able to absorb the behaviour of the artist as part of a larger whole no matter if it is good or bad.
At any rate, like I said before, I don’t begrudge anyone who decides they can’t read the work of a bad artist, or support them anymore. There’s lots of work out there. There’s lots of artists. Ultimately, I don’t think it really matters which side you fall on. You’ll never read it all, so make your choices as you see fit, and let no one judge you well or poorly for them.
Ben
(Ben Peek is the author The Godless, Twenty-Six Lies/One Truth, and Dead Americans and Other Stories, amongst others. His next book will be The Red Labyrinth. His short fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, Nightmare, Polyphony, and Overland, as well as various Year’s Best Books. He’s the creator of the psychogeography ‘zine The Urban Sprawl Project. He also wrote an autobiographical comic called Nowhere Near Savannah, illustrated by Anna Brown. He lives in Sydney, Australia.)