I spent most of two weeks with LeGuin in 1985. She was a Visiting Writer at Kenyon College, where I had just started teaching. Whoever had originally invited her, this whole visiting-dignitary thing fell into my (awestruck and intimidated) lap, and if it hadn't been for the significant help of the Kenyon students we wouldn't have pulled it off.
My mom admired LeGuin so much that she made the six hour drive down from Chicago to meet her. This was like a case of Oedipal fission: LeGuin was clearly the artist-as-decent-person Mom that my own Mom (a brilliant artist and wholly selfish narcissist) had never been. If only someone had been filming all of it for a documentary about female artists.
I know one can fake "decent" even for two weeks. I don't believe LeGuin was faking. My childhood taught me much about art and more about the untrustworthiness of adults, especially the ones we venerate most.
They took away the Tiptree award? WTF. I hate everything. "Her Smoke Rose Up Forever" was brilliant, and "The Screwfly Solution" alone should immortalize her.
yeah—I think it was a mistake to do so. If it had involved something nobody had known about coming to light that would be one thing and maybe changing the award name would have made sense. But as it was… everybody knew! Tiptree is a dark and complicated writer who produced works of genius. An award doesn't imply otherwise… it's not the "Perfect Baby Angel Award."
I was commenting on another substack about how weird it is that Neil Gaiman was able to write the kind of works he did and still get to wear the public persona of "eccentric British uncle." I guess because he mixed up his writings about sexual sadism and capricious eldritch gods with the occasional young adult book (although even those young adult books are much weirder and more off-putting than people generally acknowledge). I'm not saying he couldn't have turned out to be a decent guy, but anyone whose writing a thinkpiece in 2024 with lines like "it turns out, there were hidden themes in his writing that suggested Gaiman might be interested in the darker facets of control and dominance" needs to have their credentials checked.
I haven't read any think pieces like you've mentioned, but my understanding of why he was able to present himself as "eccentric British uncle" was because he put himself very intentionally in the public eye as that. Gaiman did a lot of public appearances and had a lot of contact with fans, and he made himself very available for networking and mentoring other writers. He presented himself to some degree as someone who could write very dark disturbing stories, but who was a normal, good-hearted person in his day-to-day life.
More than how the general public processes the Gaiman story, it's going to matter how the fan communities around comics, horror, and fantasy process it. A lot of people felt that they knew him quite well, and they did not see that side of him at all. Ideally he would have some friendships with people who can help him see the mess he's made, and help him get to a place where he does something to actually fix things. I have no idea what that looks like, FWIW.
yeah, I don’t want to really get into his work because it is actually true that outside of coraline I’m not a fan but… his anti-Narnia short story is amazing in that it is like… an attempt to show up CSL for being weird about women and sex that is 400% weirder on both those fronts than anything Lewis could hope to wrote lol.
Your first piece about her self criticism is what really what got me reading her I think. So consider it better promotion for her work than the anonymous endorsements of greatness I've also seen everywhere online already.
Great distillation of the truth that great artists can have less than admirable personal lives. It seems to me that the avoidance of "problematic artists" often conflates two distinct issues -
(a) the concern that by supporting a living artist one has been supporting a person engaged in an on-going criminal enterprise
(b) the belief that the pleasure induced by great art is something divine that is refuted by the discovery that the channel for that divinity (the artist) was somehow evil
I hope I haven't expressed (b) in a way that seems too dismissive. I actually have a fair amount of sympathy for it, but find that modern adherents have forgotten that it is fundamentally a pagan idea. The God of monotheistic religion, who poses as the metaphysical ground of all morality, is largely antagonistic to art - there is a constant tension in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as to whether art that glorifies God has elevated the created (the human artist, the material world the artwork belongs to) over the Creator.
The Romantics who elevated the work of art to the level of the divine appreciated that they were, at the very least, heretical Christians, asserting that some of the power of creation that properly belonged to the divine could be taken up by fundamentally flawed human beings. By the late 19th and early 20th c. you get writers like Nietzsche and Robert Graves asserting that successful art can't be produced by Christians at all. This viewpoint has the virtue of recognizing that the best Christians, those given to self-sacrifice on behalf of their neighbors, are going to be way too busy to produce great art.
It seems like asking an unnecessary sacrifice from the good to demand from them that not only should they make the world a better place, but that they should also deny themselves access to works of art that help them view the better world they are seeking, just because the artists who made it were imperfect vessels. Art gives us something more vivid, more direct, than the confused flow of experience alone offers us. This clarity can do a lot to exercise our moral sentiments, but it is the product of skill and inspiration working on materials without an inherent moral orientation. For any number of reasons, an artist with a severe incapacity for moral behavior can produce art that clarifies moral vision.
Again the etymology of "hypocrite" (Greek for "actor") seems relevant here. Treating one's true moral commitments as merely a performance makes one an immoral person. Neglecting one's moral commitments in order to perfect a dramatic performance makes one a great artist.
None of this, however, addresses issue (a), which is whether a consumer of the work of a contemporary artist should transfer their hard-earned income to an artist who is violating the norms of our community. The fact that Neil Gaiman is more likely to have a nanny or housekeeper sign an NDA than an employment contract is a clear sign that he is not using his wealth properly - no one should be criticized for refusing to contribute to the increase of that wealth.
I agree very much that people are conflating a practical moral question with a more abstract one—I basically have a rule around certain people (like Polanski) that I'll watch their movies after they're dead. It's not just money but also contributing to the person's living reputation. (Of course, the cold fact is that withholding my attention from Polanski does zero to affect him.)
Though I've never really had to deal with this with a living author whose work I really loved already—it's always been dead people whose flaws (or crimes) I generally knew going in. So I have a lot of sympathy for people for whom Gaiman was a very important artist who are trying to figure out what they want to do, even if I was never really big on him myself.
I also think sometimes you find something out about an artist that disgusts you in a way that makes it impossible to read them, and when that happens I think it's important to respect your own sense of disgust but… it's often idiosyncratic rather than clearly principled. But that's OK—sometimes you are just going to be inconsistent. (I think trying to force yourself to be consistent almost always makes people act consistently worse.)
I'm probably too Christian myself to endorse (b) but as an avid reader of biography I think the relationship between people's personal qualities and their art is real but never straightforward. As you say, sometimes people who seem unable to be good in their lives can access that part of themselves in their work. Sometimes their work is part of a whole noxious ideological program that also shapes their behavior and yet it survives somehow—that's how I feel about Eric Gill.
Referring to "noxious ideological programs" makes me think of H.P. Lovecraft, where there's this patent racism and phobia of sex operating in his work, but he was also a very active and loyal friend to other writers, and was foundational for a lot of horror and fantasy writing today, both his writing and his support of writers and fans.
Art and artists are very complicated, and their relationship to morality is no simple thing either.
Do you think the people who declare an artist to be someone who has never said or thought or done anything wrong see themselves as a person who has never said or thought or done anything wrong?
Adding my two cents, I think that many people who enjoy literature and think about it a lot put a lot of thought into matters of morality in their lives. For most people with a professional career, it matters a lot what people think about your behavior, and many jobs have codes of conduct.
I went from academia into the law in my professional life, and that was a big shift. Academia is relatively lax about morality, and the legal profession is not lax at all. My sense is that publishing, the music business, and the art world are all significantly more tolerant of immoral behavior than academia is.
No but partly because I sort of can't imagine a person who has never experienced shame lol. But in general, no.
I think SFF has always had a porousness between the fans and the professionals that makes loving an author's work much more intimate and thus people want to think superlatively well of people they admire. I think Marion Zimmer Bradley is a good case in point—there were lots of reasons not to think she was a great person _before_ the big bombshell dropped. But she meant a lot to people, she boosted a lot of careers, and she was extremely active in fandom. So until it became unavoidable, people just kind of didn't notice the other things.
I don’t think so either, but sometimes I wonder. Part of the thing that drew me to Christian saints were how bad they often were. That if they had any real goodness, it was often due to repenting via supernatural means. That changing was something that could render one saint worthy. Not really going anywhere with that, I guess, but it is something I think about.
There's a similar thing with Ancient Greek heroes, who were objects of religious worship as much as they were stories. In order to be worthy of worship, they needed to be truly outstanding people, doing great deeds that were worthy of public respect, but then they did something that brought them a deserved bad end. Their religious power came from the fact that they didn't receive the respect they deserved during their lifetime, and thus could demand honor from the people who had (rightfully) punished them during their lifetime.
As with the saints, the power of the story is that it depicts the tremendous spiritual power that is at stake. For the saints, it's that God can forgive a total degenerate and turn them into a channel of divine power for believers. This is still a draw in many Christian churches, where believers will emphasize their wrong-doing prior to being "born again" as proof of God's power.
In the case of the Greek heroes, the religious principle involved is that the best people get the best stuff. This may not look like a religious principle from our point of view, but the Greeks took it seriously enough, and it's the ultimate motivation of the plot of the Iliad. It makes the dynamics of Greek tragedies particularly strange - the protagonists are always established as being great men (or women) who, through a series of bad events that they have no real responsibility for, come to a terrible end. It's a tricky needle to thread, but the effect on a Greek audience seems to have been quite disturbing.
In many of the plays the religious dimension got an added kick from what special effects they had available, namely a crane from which an actor dressed as a god could set things right by setting up cult worship of whatever figure had been wronged. The "deus ex machina" has gotten a bad reputation as a second-rate means for tying up a plot, but my sense is that the impression on the original audience would have been more like the end of "Raiders of the Lost Ark" - the powers that be aren't going to let the forces of religion operate contrary to the best order of the universe. The main difference is that God is inherently good, while the forces of Greek religion could get out of hand more easily.
I spent most of two weeks with LeGuin in 1985. She was a Visiting Writer at Kenyon College, where I had just started teaching. Whoever had originally invited her, this whole visiting-dignitary thing fell into my (awestruck and intimidated) lap, and if it hadn't been for the significant help of the Kenyon students we wouldn't have pulled it off.
My mom admired LeGuin so much that she made the six hour drive down from Chicago to meet her. This was like a case of Oedipal fission: LeGuin was clearly the artist-as-decent-person Mom that my own Mom (a brilliant artist and wholly selfish narcissist) had never been. If only someone had been filming all of it for a documentary about female artists.
I know one can fake "decent" even for two weeks. I don't believe LeGuin was faking. My childhood taught me much about art and more about the untrustworthiness of adults, especially the ones we venerate most.
They took away the Tiptree award? WTF. I hate everything. "Her Smoke Rose Up Forever" was brilliant, and "The Screwfly Solution" alone should immortalize her.
yeah—I think it was a mistake to do so. If it had involved something nobody had known about coming to light that would be one thing and maybe changing the award name would have made sense. But as it was… everybody knew! Tiptree is a dark and complicated writer who produced works of genius. An award doesn't imply otherwise… it's not the "Perfect Baby Angel Award."
Exactly.
I was commenting on another substack about how weird it is that Neil Gaiman was able to write the kind of works he did and still get to wear the public persona of "eccentric British uncle." I guess because he mixed up his writings about sexual sadism and capricious eldritch gods with the occasional young adult book (although even those young adult books are much weirder and more off-putting than people generally acknowledge). I'm not saying he couldn't have turned out to be a decent guy, but anyone whose writing a thinkpiece in 2024 with lines like "it turns out, there were hidden themes in his writing that suggested Gaiman might be interested in the darker facets of control and dominance" needs to have their credentials checked.
I haven't read any think pieces like you've mentioned, but my understanding of why he was able to present himself as "eccentric British uncle" was because he put himself very intentionally in the public eye as that. Gaiman did a lot of public appearances and had a lot of contact with fans, and he made himself very available for networking and mentoring other writers. He presented himself to some degree as someone who could write very dark disturbing stories, but who was a normal, good-hearted person in his day-to-day life.
More than how the general public processes the Gaiman story, it's going to matter how the fan communities around comics, horror, and fantasy process it. A lot of people felt that they knew him quite well, and they did not see that side of him at all. Ideally he would have some friendships with people who can help him see the mess he's made, and help him get to a place where he does something to actually fix things. I have no idea what that looks like, FWIW.
(but to be clear… I wasn’t not a fan because his work seemed morally suspect, I was not a fan because I found it glib and annoying lol)
yeah, I don’t want to really get into his work because it is actually true that outside of coraline I’m not a fan but… his anti-Narnia short story is amazing in that it is like… an attempt to show up CSL for being weird about women and sex that is 400% weirder on both those fronts than anything Lewis could hope to wrote lol.
Your first piece about her self criticism is what really what got me reading her I think. So consider it better promotion for her work than the anonymous endorsements of greatness I've also seen everywhere online already.
thank you!!
Great distillation of the truth that great artists can have less than admirable personal lives. It seems to me that the avoidance of "problematic artists" often conflates two distinct issues -
(a) the concern that by supporting a living artist one has been supporting a person engaged in an on-going criminal enterprise
(b) the belief that the pleasure induced by great art is something divine that is refuted by the discovery that the channel for that divinity (the artist) was somehow evil
I hope I haven't expressed (b) in a way that seems too dismissive. I actually have a fair amount of sympathy for it, but find that modern adherents have forgotten that it is fundamentally a pagan idea. The God of monotheistic religion, who poses as the metaphysical ground of all morality, is largely antagonistic to art - there is a constant tension in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as to whether art that glorifies God has elevated the created (the human artist, the material world the artwork belongs to) over the Creator.
The Romantics who elevated the work of art to the level of the divine appreciated that they were, at the very least, heretical Christians, asserting that some of the power of creation that properly belonged to the divine could be taken up by fundamentally flawed human beings. By the late 19th and early 20th c. you get writers like Nietzsche and Robert Graves asserting that successful art can't be produced by Christians at all. This viewpoint has the virtue of recognizing that the best Christians, those given to self-sacrifice on behalf of their neighbors, are going to be way too busy to produce great art.
It seems like asking an unnecessary sacrifice from the good to demand from them that not only should they make the world a better place, but that they should also deny themselves access to works of art that help them view the better world they are seeking, just because the artists who made it were imperfect vessels. Art gives us something more vivid, more direct, than the confused flow of experience alone offers us. This clarity can do a lot to exercise our moral sentiments, but it is the product of skill and inspiration working on materials without an inherent moral orientation. For any number of reasons, an artist with a severe incapacity for moral behavior can produce art that clarifies moral vision.
Again the etymology of "hypocrite" (Greek for "actor") seems relevant here. Treating one's true moral commitments as merely a performance makes one an immoral person. Neglecting one's moral commitments in order to perfect a dramatic performance makes one a great artist.
None of this, however, addresses issue (a), which is whether a consumer of the work of a contemporary artist should transfer their hard-earned income to an artist who is violating the norms of our community. The fact that Neil Gaiman is more likely to have a nanny or housekeeper sign an NDA than an employment contract is a clear sign that he is not using his wealth properly - no one should be criticized for refusing to contribute to the increase of that wealth.
I agree very much that people are conflating a practical moral question with a more abstract one—I basically have a rule around certain people (like Polanski) that I'll watch their movies after they're dead. It's not just money but also contributing to the person's living reputation. (Of course, the cold fact is that withholding my attention from Polanski does zero to affect him.)
Though I've never really had to deal with this with a living author whose work I really loved already—it's always been dead people whose flaws (or crimes) I generally knew going in. So I have a lot of sympathy for people for whom Gaiman was a very important artist who are trying to figure out what they want to do, even if I was never really big on him myself.
I also think sometimes you find something out about an artist that disgusts you in a way that makes it impossible to read them, and when that happens I think it's important to respect your own sense of disgust but… it's often idiosyncratic rather than clearly principled. But that's OK—sometimes you are just going to be inconsistent. (I think trying to force yourself to be consistent almost always makes people act consistently worse.)
I'm probably too Christian myself to endorse (b) but as an avid reader of biography I think the relationship between people's personal qualities and their art is real but never straightforward. As you say, sometimes people who seem unable to be good in their lives can access that part of themselves in their work. Sometimes their work is part of a whole noxious ideological program that also shapes their behavior and yet it survives somehow—that's how I feel about Eric Gill.
Referring to "noxious ideological programs" makes me think of H.P. Lovecraft, where there's this patent racism and phobia of sex operating in his work, but he was also a very active and loyal friend to other writers, and was foundational for a lot of horror and fantasy writing today, both his writing and his support of writers and fans.
Art and artists are very complicated, and their relationship to morality is no simple thing either.
Do you think the people who declare an artist to be someone who has never said or thought or done anything wrong see themselves as a person who has never said or thought or done anything wrong?
Adding my two cents, I think that many people who enjoy literature and think about it a lot put a lot of thought into matters of morality in their lives. For most people with a professional career, it matters a lot what people think about your behavior, and many jobs have codes of conduct.
I went from academia into the law in my professional life, and that was a big shift. Academia is relatively lax about morality, and the legal profession is not lax at all. My sense is that publishing, the music business, and the art world are all significantly more tolerant of immoral behavior than academia is.
No but partly because I sort of can't imagine a person who has never experienced shame lol. But in general, no.
I think SFF has always had a porousness between the fans and the professionals that makes loving an author's work much more intimate and thus people want to think superlatively well of people they admire. I think Marion Zimmer Bradley is a good case in point—there were lots of reasons not to think she was a great person _before_ the big bombshell dropped. But she meant a lot to people, she boosted a lot of careers, and she was extremely active in fandom. So until it became unavoidable, people just kind of didn't notice the other things.
I don’t think so either, but sometimes I wonder. Part of the thing that drew me to Christian saints were how bad they often were. That if they had any real goodness, it was often due to repenting via supernatural means. That changing was something that could render one saint worthy. Not really going anywhere with that, I guess, but it is something I think about.
There's a similar thing with Ancient Greek heroes, who were objects of religious worship as much as they were stories. In order to be worthy of worship, they needed to be truly outstanding people, doing great deeds that were worthy of public respect, but then they did something that brought them a deserved bad end. Their religious power came from the fact that they didn't receive the respect they deserved during their lifetime, and thus could demand honor from the people who had (rightfully) punished them during their lifetime.
As with the saints, the power of the story is that it depicts the tremendous spiritual power that is at stake. For the saints, it's that God can forgive a total degenerate and turn them into a channel of divine power for believers. This is still a draw in many Christian churches, where believers will emphasize their wrong-doing prior to being "born again" as proof of God's power.
In the case of the Greek heroes, the religious principle involved is that the best people get the best stuff. This may not look like a religious principle from our point of view, but the Greeks took it seriously enough, and it's the ultimate motivation of the plot of the Iliad. It makes the dynamics of Greek tragedies particularly strange - the protagonists are always established as being great men (or women) who, through a series of bad events that they have no real responsibility for, come to a terrible end. It's a tricky needle to thread, but the effect on a Greek audience seems to have been quite disturbing.
In many of the plays the religious dimension got an added kick from what special effects they had available, namely a crane from which an actor dressed as a god could set things right by setting up cult worship of whatever figure had been wronged. The "deus ex machina" has gotten a bad reputation as a second-rate means for tying up a plot, but my sense is that the impression on the original audience would have been more like the end of "Raiders of the Lost Ark" - the powers that be aren't going to let the forces of religion operate contrary to the best order of the universe. The main difference is that God is inherently good, while the forces of Greek religion could get out of hand more easily.