Claire Dederer is a journalist from Seattle and the author of two memoirs, the most well known of which is Poser: My Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses. In 2017, she wrote a piece for the Paris Review entitled What Do We Do With the Art of Monstrous Men? in which she described the experience of rewatching the early films of Woody Allen (Annie Hall, Manhattan) in the context of the allegations of abuse made against him by his adopted daughter, Dylan. The #MeToo movement was then just beginning and this piece, according to her publisher, went viral. Six years on, and it has now also been incorporated into Dederer’s new book, Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, where it loiters alongside her thoughts on several other bad (or badly behaved) men who have made good art, among them Picasso, Roman Polanski and Richard Wagner.
This is a good subject, and a perennial one – it long predates cancel culture: anyone who read English at university in the 80s, when literary theory was enjoying its crazy, ascetic heyday, will have spent at least some of the past 30 years arguing about the degree to which life and art can or should be separated – and Dederer certainly talks a big game as she begins. Her approach will be nuanced, she suggests, paraphrasing the poet William Empson, who believed all of us must somehow exist between contradictions that can’t be solved by analysis. She will, she suggests, inevitably end up saying things some readers may find uncomfortable. For instance: having spent many hours in her cosy, book-lined, “humanist” house watching the films of Polanski, who in 1977 drugged and raped a 13-year-old girl, Dederer’s verdict on his work is (rightly, I think) unchanged: Chinatown is still a masterpiece.
