Accidental Blogger

Once again an e-mail exchange with my co-bloggers has resulted in a post. I sent the link to this article in the UK Telegraph to all the A.B. authors (link via 3QD). The question was whether we should care about the less than exemplary private lives of public figures, in this particular case, famous authors. Should the knowledge of the nasty details of their personal behavior influence how we view their literary output? Or can we separate their talents from their moral failings?

If William Golding tried, aged 18, to rape a girl of 15, as John Carey claims in his new biography, how should that change our view of his novels?

It's not as if Golding pretended to a rosy view of human nature. The account by the author of Lord of the Flies of his bungled teenage sex attack, we learn, formed part of an explanation for his wife of his own monstrousness. Elsewhere he went as far as to say that if he had been around in Germany at the right time, he'd have become a Nazi.

As it happened, his intended rape victim ran away, and he was busy at Oxford when Hitler was recruiting. But Golding habitually surfeited on the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. If he'd been a caveman he'd have joined in the extermination of the gentle Neanderthals, as his novel The Inheritors suggests.

Real rape, though, is different from imagined genocide, for it makes us hate the perpetrator. If the guilty man has set himself up as a moral arbiter it undermines his credibility. That happened to Arthur Koestler. By the 1950s he had become the "universal voice of the twentieth century", wrote one biographer. In the same decade, another biographer discovered, he'd also become a serial rapist. Jill Craigie, the late wife of Michael Foot, confirmed that she was among his victims.

So Koestler was a nasty bit of work, and he ended his life in a double suicide with his wife. But nasty bits of work can make interesting reading and Koestler's despicable violence towards women does not retrospectively make any duller a novel like Darkness at Noon, which focuses on betrayal of a different kind.

I heard back at some length from Dean and Joe.  Here is what they had to say.:

Dean: Yes, in a way. The matter is more complex than the story depicts. Larkin ranks highly until we learn he used a bad word in a private correspondence? Having read all of Larkin's poetry, I'm not at all surprised he was mean and cold and unflinching in private communication. Nor is his poetry uncontroversially admired. Stephen Greenblatt, using Shakespeare as an example, naturally, once went on about how the accumulation of biographical details to aid literary insights so easily derails the study of the author's work. I think that's going on in this article.

I recently read John Fowles' Daniel Martin. I loved it, but I'm ambivalent about the vein of sexism running through it. Was Fowles himself extraordinarily sexist? Or was he creating a protagonist, Martin, whose sexism taints his otherwise enlightened, educated, charismatic character? Where is the irony? (In a box, in the corner, for those of you who are Monty Python fans.) More biographical information about Fowles might help to answer these questions…or might not. So when Christopher Howse writes, "We readers…," I'm thinking, "Who 'we,' Chris?"

Joe: I agree with Dean that the article isn't complex enough.  It feels too much like a handful of anecdotes; I'm still not clear on what the question is.  But, as is my wont, I'm inclined toward the "I don't care" position.

On literary terms, I don't think the author generally matters.  Beowulf is one of the great early works of English literature, and we don't know anything about the Beowulf poet.  What could knowing his identity — or that he had done terrible things or was a bad person — add to the poem?  Full disclosure: my English professors at Emory were all members of the "authorial intent is irrelevant" school; I could be biased.  I recently read a biography of Edgar Allan Poe , and I count Poe as both a fascinating person and one of the great American writers, but the parts where the biographer tried to combine the two with some sort of psychoanalysis struck me as weak, unpersuasive, and uninteresting.  And if Poe were uninteresting, that would not change my estimation of his work.

If it's true that the author of Lord of the Flies attempted a rape in his youth, so what?  I've already weighed in against taking instruction about the world from works of fiction (see the Atticus Finch discussion), so this can't negate or alter any message we take out of the book.  It might be an interesting fact about William Golding, and if we combine that with the novel's text, that might suggest interesting insights about Golding — but it's largely not relevant to the book, it's completely irrelevant to the world, and it only "matters" to the extent we're interested in Golding the person (which I am not).

The only place I can immediately think of where I "care" is with respect to current authors and commercially supporting them.  If David Mitchell were a monster (he's not), at minimum it would be distasteful to continue buying his books; at most, I would be morally obligated not to continue supporting (perhaps indirectly) his monstrosities by buying his books.  Sarah Palin sort of fits in here: for political reasons, we have a reason not to purchase her book (although I wouldn't, anyway, for aesthetic reasons).  But Shakespeare?  He's dead.  People interested in Shakespeare the person (historians, etc.) should care if someone uncovers evidence that he enjoyed boiling cats alive.  I don't see, however, what bearing that fact could possibly have on Hamlet or Lear.

I also think it's stupid to expect good authors to be good people (although it's a nice thing when this is apparently true, e.g., Margaret Atwood).  If anything, there's reason to think them more likely to have what we'd consider personal failings than normal people.  The same holds true for politicians.  But predictions (and skepticism) about human nature aside, one is simply irrelevant to the other.  To take a politics example, Clinton's signing of the Defense of Marriage Act was a failure in his role as a president; his affair with Monica Lewinsky was not.

Dean: I mostly agree with Joe's agreement with me, but I think it's a bit too categorical. I don't think authorial intent is irrelevant. Put another way, I think it can be made relevant, just as meter, rhyme, allusion, allegory, etc., can be made more or less relevant to the reading of a poem. On the other hand, I'm no Hirschian proponent of rigid standards of "validity in interpretation." But notice that the question of whether Golding attempted a rape doesn't necessarily get to the question of authorial intent. It could, though. And the teasing out of its relevance could be executed well or badly. Joe's account of the Poe biography exactly captures Greenblatt's complaint about psychoanalysis based on shards of literary and biographical evidence.

I am frustrated that Paul de Man was not alive to participate in the "scandal" that emerged following the discovery of his wartime journalism. So much of the discussion revolved around the relevance of his "youthful" writing to his later scholarship and its vogue. Smart literary theorists and historians were quick to condemn a "school" for which they likely already held professional disdain on the basis of the single degree of separation afforded by de Man's morbid past. Derrida wrote one of the most ridiculous instances of logorrhea of his career (no mean feat) in his weird apologia for his demonized dead buddy. But, hey, he wasn't gunning for tenure by then, and he had already begun to insinuate his personal life into his "philosophical" tracts. If you are interested in so-called deconstruction, or in the Yale School of literary theory, or in the history of literary theory and criticism in America, you will not find a correspondent interest in de Man's biographical details unrewarding. But de Man=Nazi does not entail Yale School=National Socialism.

Better example for Joe's argument, albeit from a non-textual arena: Jim Gordon, drummer for Derek & the Dominoes et al., murders his mother in 1983 and now sits in prison for the crime. His weapon? A hammer. What does this biographical detail tell us about his musical propensities?