Wednesday, December 05, 2012
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Janus, the writer
I thought I’d offer you a debate to be held
after Christmas with your arty friends. It’s one that can get very passionate
and it’s as old as paintings on cave walls.
“Can you be totally captivated, informed
and elevated by the work of an artist who, you discover, is an appalling human
being?”
There have been many writers who have led
disreputable, even loathsome lives but whose work still grace the shelves of
the great and the good. I happened to see an old edition of QI the other night
and Edgar Allen Poe was featured at one point. Illegally marrying his 13 year
old cousin and an alcoholic, he was also the founder of detective fiction,
science fiction and came up with the Big Bang theory eighty years before
science could catch up with him. At the extreme end, Eric Gill, a Catholic
multi-skilled artist, sexually abused his children and his dog as well as
having a sexual relationship with his sister. Hitler loved Wagner’s work. At a
dinner with friends in France last year a close friend said he detested Woody
Allen and would not watch his films because of his social behaviour (including his
current and long time sexual relationship with his one time adopted child).
Another friend said he’d never watch a Stephen Fry programme, given what he did
to Simon Gray. The fact that he is bipolar was not, for my friend, an excuse.
So, can we divorce the biography from the work? There
is no doubt that many artefacts that we currently consider to be exquisite
works of art may have been fashioned by people we would have liked to have imprisoned
for life for their inhumanity.
A lot of you, reading this, will be
writers. It is possible that you divorce who you are in the day to day, from
whom you prefer to be as an artist. On the one hand you may lead a blameless
life and create works of disgusting sadism and on the other you may be a
sadist to all who cross your path and create wondrous works of beauty.
What are we to do with you?
Labels: #Writing: Art and morality. Love not me, love my work.
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