Is it OK to love a film, a book or a painting if its maker turns out to be a bad person? Not just lovable aw-shucks everyday bad, the sort who forgets to pick the kids up because he or she is too busy making art, but someone whose behaviour is immoral, illegal or both? A monster, in fact.
This is the dilemma that Claire Dederer addresses in this exhilarating, gnarly inquiry into the business of separating the author’s repugnant life from his or her magnificent work. It is hardly a new topic – in the middle of the last century, the proponents of New Criticism were arguing about what they called the “biographical fallacy” and duly concluding that the critic should set aside an artist’s life and concentrate on their work alone. But then, Dederer points out tartly, they would say that, wouldn’t they? As mostly elite white men, these critics were naturally inclined to hand out free passes to others for the kind of bad behaviour with which they were themselves on intimate terms – parental absence, alcoholic indulgence and that impregnable self-regard that inflicts collateral damage on everyone else.
Seventy years on, and the problem of what to do about great art by horrible people has roared back, taking on slightly different flavours in this age of #MeToo and social media “cancellation”. These days Dederer finds herself wondering if it’s ever OK to enjoy reruns of The Cosby Show and what to do about Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, with its “hot pink bodies and its grimly animal faces”. Can we listen to Michael Jackson if we stick to the stuff he made in his prepubescent Jackson 5 days? Although, wait a moment, wasn’t he being horribly exploited as a child worker at that point? Does that make it better or worse?
And most crucially of all for Dederer, who spent her early career as a film critic, how do we solve a problem like Roman Polanski? When she rewatches Chinatown, his Oscar-winning masterpiece from 1974, is she tacitly condoning his statutory rape of a 13-year-old school girl just three years later? Polanski is a particularly knotty case, says Dederer, because his own biography is the stuff of nightmares. His mother died in Auschwitz and his pregnant wife Sharon Tate was murdered by the Manson “family” in 1969. Trying to weigh Polanski’s trauma against the “stain” of his later criminality makes your head hurt, which is why Dederer finds herself wishing for a moral calculator that would do this kind of thinking for her. She’d punch in all the salient biographic details and, hey presto, the machine would “spit out a verdict” as to whether or not it is OK to carry on looking at Picasso’s bashed-up renditions of his many mistresses or bop along to Michael Jackson when I Want You Back comes on the radio.
The impulse to farm out the decision to an external authority sounds hopelessly naive – but then, asks Dederer, isn’t there something equally ridiculous about thinking that whether we choose to enjoy a particular piece of art or not is going to change anything? That we might be able to ameliorate the harm of Polanski’s violation of a schoolgirl or Picasso burning the face of his “muse” Françoise Gilot with a cigarette?
Far more productive, she suggests, is for us to start being honest about our own monstrosity. Indeed, she believes that until we accept our own capacity for bad behaviour then we are stuck in the worst of all worlds – denying ourselves the satisfaction of consuming art that moves us in ways we don’t quite understand yet failing to get to grips with why we keep returning to it.
To get things going, Dederer offers up her own monstrousness. She is a mother who is also a writer, which means that she has been guilty of negligence on those occasions when she has accepted invitations for residential fellowships which have taken her away from home for weeks at a time. Worse still, she has hugged herself with relieved glee while doing it. On top of this, she spent 10 years as a functioning alcoholic, which is not something that usually combines well with engaged and committed family life.
Dederer doesn’t go into details since this is not a confessional memoir and that is not the point. Instead she shows us her own monstrosity as a way of beginning to breakdown the imaginary cordon sanitaire we habitually draw around artists whose behaviour repels us. We can decide, in a panic of self-righteousness, to cast all their work aside and consign it to a cultural deep freeze. Or we can choose instead to keep it in full view, with gratitude and wonder that such saving beauty is still possible amid the moral grot in which we all live.
• Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma is published by Hodder & Stoughton (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
