Art And The Artist: A Perverse Separation

Our assessment of a surgeon who specialises in knee replacements will depend on his success rate in getting people to walk easily again. Should it come to light that he is a wife beater, it won’t materially affect his professional rating as a knee surgeon. The infamy that comes with such a reputation might persuade some patients to look elsewhere for their surgeries, but they would concede that their choice was based on personal revulsion, not because they felt his history of domestic violence compromised his surgical skill.

As a rule, then, the work of a peasant, a pilot, a delivery man, a civil engineer and a rocket scientist, will be unaffected by, say, unorthodox or even criminal sexual preferences. A diamond cutter’s skill in faceting rough diamonds will not be retrospectively revised when his nocturnal vocation as a serial killer comes to light.

Why, then, should an artist’s work be retrospectively compromised by revelations about his or her personal life? The current example of such a devaluation is Alice Munro. Her daughter, Andrea Skinner, published an article after Munro’s death, detailing her mother’s tolerance for her second husband’s paedophilia even after it was brought to her notice that he had raped Skinner at the age of nine. This scandalised her admirers and the literary world.

Munro’s champions point to the number of great artists who have been flawed, even wicked, human beings. Simone de Beauvoir pimped for Jean-Paul Sartre, Pablo Picasso treated the women he had relationships with cruelly, Ezra Pound was a fascist fellow traveller, T S Eliot was anti-Semitic and Philip Larkin’s letters are shot through with misogyny and racism. Despite this, these writers are part of the modern canon. Is the scandal about Munro, just that, tabloid sensationalism designed to entertain the middle-brow reader and destined to be forgotten, outlived by her genius and her canonisation in English Literature syllabuses?

Or is the writer’s trade an exception to the rule? Can we argue, for example, that there is an implicit contract between the reader and the text he is reading, that the author of that novel or poem or play isn’t an unspeakable bastard? This question begs the prior question: why subject a literary text to a test you wouldn’t impose on any other sort of work?

There is, after all, a literal, physical way in which all art is separate from the artist except for live performances. Books, records, films, and their digital versions online are freed of their human provenance the moment they are published and with the passage of time, the distance between the art object and the artist’s life widens, the connection between the two grows more tenuous.

Some of the most widely read texts in the world are essentially anonymous because they have been made and remade by many hands. The idea that there is someone responsible for the Iliad or the Mahabharata, that the author(s)’ long-extinguished lives could have a bearing on our experience of reading or watching it, becomes more and more absurd.

And yet, there is a case for treating our experience of fiction as fundamentally different from our experience of mobile phones or cars or planes. There are objective parameters by which these beautifully made objects can be assessed and compared. There are websites like wirecutter.com dedicated to ranking them according to defined criteria. Novels aren’t like that.

Reading fiction is a personal communion between you and the author of an imagined world who might be dead, but who can, through the unglamorous medium of print, make you a riveted bystander. This is, and this can’t be stressed enough, a subjective communion, immune to professional, canon-making opinion. By way of example, I disliked V S Naipaul’s A Bend in the River. I found it racist and repellent. I disliked, in much the same way, J M Coetzee’s Disgrace. I’ve never been able to get past the first 40 pages of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. The New York Times’ list of the 100 greatest novels of the 21st century has The Corrections close to the top and Richard Powers’ Overstory lower down. Overstory is one of the two or three best novels I’ve read for many years while The Corrections is, for me, a dud.

Over several books, this subjective communion with a writer becomes a relationship of trust. I read everything by Hilary Mantel. Ever since I read Beyond Black, her novel about a touring medium who talks to ghosts, I’ve been addicted to her writing. I’ve nearly finished her Thomas Cromwell trilogy and a large part of my summer reading is going to be her massive novel about the French Revolution, A Place of Greater Safety.

If it suddenly came to light that Mantel was a sex trafficker, would it affect my communion with her work? That’s the wrong question: how could it not? Empathy and imagination are the stock-in-trade of the literary novelist. If you suddenly discover that your favourite novelist is a sadist (Naipaul) or complicit in protecting a paedophile (Munro), it is reasonable to use that information as context for the text. You could, of course, hold the news at arm’s length and take the Olympian view that the text is hermetically complete, that the author’s life has no bearing on the work, but to ask everyone to subscribe to this heroic separation is perverse.

If plantation slavery in the West Indies is relevant to understanding Jane Austen’s fiction, it’s reasonable for Naipaul’s readers to reckon with his sadism while reading his books. To insist that his sadism isn’t relevant to his work, is to take a religious view of fiction, to see it as immaculately conceived. An author’s life is part of the hinterland of his work. The literary publishing industry understands that; it’s why bookshops are stocked with biographies of authors from Leo Tolstoy to Sylvia Plath. It’s why there is a market for the diaries of Franz Kafka and the collected letters of Philip Larkin.

Understandably, some of Munro’s readers have been engaged in a salvage operation since her daughter’s revelations. One exculpatory essay argued that the revelations weren’t revelations at all since her stories were full of lives pockmarked by silences and deceptions. Munro had been hiding in plain sight all along. “There will be talk of whether Alice’s statue should remain up, metaphorically, in the face of all this. I think it can—what I’ve been trying to tell you is I think I know these stories better now than I did before because of this revelation.” In this view, Munro’s real life triangle with her paedophile husband and her abused daughter becomes the Ur-story that clarifies and glosses her work. This is an apologia rather than a reckoning, but in its willingness to relate the life to the work, it is, at least, a beginning.

(Views expressed are personal)

(This appeared in the print as 'Perverse Separation')

Mukul Kesavan is a writer and columnist