When I started working on this, Cormac McCarthy was the latest author under fire for a…let’s say “dalliance” with a much younger woman. By the time I finished it, Neil Gaiman was public enemy number one.
That’s how fast these things move.
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We’re not going into too much detail, but the girl was 16, McCarthy in his early 40s, and the general consensus today about grooming and so on run up against the girl’s accounts (now herself a middle-aged woman) and claims that McCarthy didn’t do anything wrong, and that she didn’t feel abused by him.
It puts readers in a weird position. When the woman involved is saying the she doesn’t feel, looking back as an adult, groomed, our only real choices are to believe her or not, and if not, to assume she was so broken in some way that she couldn’t see the truth of a situation that she was in and that we’re observing from the outside.
Judgment on the characters involved is not my place here.
What I’m interested in is whether or not it’s okay to continue reading the works of writers who did bad things, and also to talk a bit about the library’s place in these sorts of things.
Why I Don’t Read Much ABOUT Writers
I don’t pass on reading about writers because I want to be able to read them guilt-free. I’m just fairly disinterested in most of what passes for news about authors.
Because authors, with something like 3 exceptions (Stephen King, JK Rowling, and I’ll just leave a floating third in there that SHOULD be John Swartzwelder but isn’t) are ONLY going to be written about in mainstream media if they did something pretty awful. That’s really the only scenario where this happens today.
“Chuck Klosterman working on new book about breakfast cereal” is just not a headline you’re going to read. “Chuck Palahniuk currently tackling cozy mysteries in a very Chuck Palahniuk way” isn’t something that passes for news today. It’s pretty rare to see authors (who are known for being authors) on latenight unless they’ve written a zeitgeist-y non-fiction or memoir, and they’re not necessarily appearing because of their book, but because they are a subject matter expert in a high-interest area.
McCarthy perhaps occupied a different place because he was so unlikely to do interviews of any kind. He was of a group of artists who recognized that they had nothing to gain by doing interviews, which was a very common idea up to pretty recent history (this is why a lot of rock bands didn’t really DO media, they had nothing to gain from it. They were already rock stars, and in-depth coverage could only really hurt their careers in that it would either depict them as A) Normal, meaning not all that special, or B) Bad).
I mean, when Prince was alive, he was worth well over $150 million dollars. There was no obligation to hustle for another 10,000 album sales, even another 100 album sales, it just didn’t really matter.
When it comes to writers, I think the chance that I’m going to read an article about a writer I find interesting is very low. Because most any article I find is going to be about their personal life, not about their writing or their books. And, for the most part, I’m interested in their work, not who they’re dating, not what their kids are wearing.
I don’t really care what different writers think about Donald Trump, or, perhaps more accurately, I’m not interested in the answer they’ve constructed to keep book sales flowing.
I’m not interested in those things when it comes to celebrities of any type, by the way. It’s just that you are likely to see the occasional piece about a celebrity that’s not super salacious, whereas writers are minor enough figures that something fairly big or controversial has to happen in order for there to be any mainstream interest.
I think about this interview with author Patrick DeWitt a lot, where he talks about how he doesn’t have internet at home:
I know a lot of people who use the internet really wisely. It enriches their lives in some way…That’s just not how it works out for me. I have an impulse to wallow in bullshit. It’s a real perversion of mine. It’s easier to take myself out of the game.
I just want to briefly point out that this was a Buzzfeed interview. 10 years ago, Buzzfeed would interview an author like Patrick DeWitt.
I guess, to an extent, ignoring the bad news about authors is ignoring the suffering of other human beings.
But it’s ignoring suffering that I can do absolutely nothing about. It’s another input in a sea of STUFF that we’re bombarded with, and for me, it makes me feel like there’s no escape.
Closing off books as a potential escape from reality is just not something I’m up for.
What This Means
I’m often vaguely aware when a writer has done something bad, but typically I’m not aware of the severity or what have you unless it breaks into a pretty large-scale, unavoidable thing. Like, Bill Cosby, I’m aware.
It usually means that I can experience their work without thinking much about what’s outside the work, which is, for me, how I like to read, especially fiction. I prefer to read a book that I find really captivating, almost makes the outside world disappear.
Again, this is true of both positive and negative news. It’s not just about ignoring wrongdoing.
Try it sometime: Listen to your favorite author on a podcast or watch them on YouTube. If you do it enough, it becomes impossible to read their work without hearing their voice and picturing them as you read.
I kind of think of the real world as an obstruction, an obstacle that prevents a closer relationship with the work. Yes, that’s artsy and, hey, it’s me, so also VERY fartsy.
This is also, I understand, a very Gen X attitude. Which isn’t to say that Gen Xers all feel this way today, but I think it was a prevailing attitude during their heyday that some have kept and some have abandoned.
In the 90s, someone doing music criticism, for example, would be encouraged to review an album by someone like Rob Zombie without being influenced by Zombie’s appearance, the rumors about who he was dating, all that bullshit, and to try and focus on the sonic qualities of an album, whether it was pleasing, and whether or not it achieved the goals, and maybe some of how the album came together, what was different about the songwriting or recording process.
You know, shit that music people care about and nobody else does, so you can’t get print space for it anymore.
This sometimes didn’t work, and sometimes it did. Hair metal was just too uncool in the 90s to get serious attention, and super poppy stuff was also so chronically uncool that it couldn’t be viewed this way, but we have seen a revision of this and I do think the attitude of trying to ignore the glossy finish has benefitted the legacy of artists like Britney Spears and Lady Gaga.
I do think this is a more interesting way to talk and write about music.
I also think this is a more useful way to think about any art. If an album isn’t that fun to listen to, but it holds an important place in the culture, that doesn’t necessarily help me out when I’m at my desk, plowing through some super boring work, headphones on, looking for something to ease the misery of this existence.
Are People Obligated To Follow The Personal Lives of Artists?
I think this is a very optional activity.
I suppose the most relevant argument against ignoring the personal lives of artists is that folks don’t want money to go in the pockets of abhorrent people, and there’s nothing wrong with that way of thinking.
For one, though, I think the economics and power structure at play in the world of writers is…well, pretty different. We’re not talking about a multi-billion dollar company that’s trying to keep their Chinese workers in factories where they are killing themselves. We’re talking about a single, old man making maybe a middle-class income, if they’re SUPER successful.
The average author advance is $59,000, but the average isn’t really useful, that would include something like the Obamas getting a $60 million advance for two books, which is nowhere near what a normal person gets. The median, probably a far more useful number, is $25,000. Which is not a small amount of money, but consider, even a fairly prolific author might put out a book every few years. So an annual income of about $8,000 when you break it down.
If the book does really well, the author will make something below a 10% royalty. So maybe in the neighborhood of a dollar or two for every copy sold.
It’s not nothing, but with 90% of authors, it’s a far cry from bankrolling anyone’s lifestyle.
The other thing is, I’m a cynic. I don’t think it’s really possible to view media without money going into the pocket of someone horrible. Kevin Smith, by all accounts, seems like a very nice guy who really took his friends along for the ride, and I love that. To my knowledge, NO accusations, no accounts of wrongdoing, and it seems like most people who worked with him liked working with him.
And Kevin Smith’s movies up to 2008, with the exception of Mallrats, are all Miramax, Weinstein-produced films.
We can read authors who are good guys, but we know nothing about their agents, their publishing houses, and so on, and I guess part of being a cynic is believing that someone, somewhere in these lines, is up to something nefarious. If there’s a chain of 10 people, the chances of one of them being a total asshole are pretty decent.
I mean, when you walk through the art museum, and everything is on loan from so-and-so’s private collection, am I to believe that everyone who owns a super expensive piece of classic art is a good person? Does viewing that art, with that placard attached, mean somehow endorsing the owner of the art?
And we can take this much further. I have no idea what the personal lives of the people who fix my car are like. I haven’t a clue whether the person who assembled my Wendy’s order is a jerkoff who is dodging child support payments.
I think what I’m getting at here is that lots of us are applying a moral standard to books that we’re not applying to anything else.
The Case for Bad Guys
Sherman Alexie’s books have been great for a lot of people. He’s a unique voice, speaking to an audience that doesn’t really get to hear themselves a lot.
Junot Diaz writes really good books, that, again, speak to and about people who don’t get written about a lot.
These guys have both been in trouble, perhaps deserved and perhaps not (I never really delved in).
But I daresay removing their books from circulation does make the landscape of available reads worse. Blander, less-pleasing.
And I know someone will say, “But you could always find someone else to fill that void,” and that’s hypothetically true. But I would counter that and say, “If Junot Diaz had NOT done anything bad, and I suggested that removing his books would not affect the literary landscape, I think you’d have a problem with that.”
The Road is a book that I feel can be read by stereotypical guy’s guys. It’s very literary, but I think those kinds of dudes can hang with it and really, really get something out of it.
McCarthy occupies a very rare space, which is that of someone I’d easily put in “literary fiction” who also appeals to masculine readers.
The landscape is more desolate, more The-Road-like, without him there.
Is It Forbidden to Look into Authors’ Personal Lives?
Of course not. If you want to do that, you do you. If you’d prefer to look up an author before reading their books, skip to the Controversies in their Wikipedia entry, that’s definitely something you can do.
Look, for me, it just doesn’t work. It’s not productive, it’s not helpful. But for you, things might be different.
I Have My Times
Booking a trip abroad, we booked a hotel and then found out the owner stuffs the hotel with propaganda. Which I was honestly a little intrigued by: I wanted to know what other countries think about conspiratorially! If America is obsessed with the Moon landing, what are they into?
Well, turns out it’s Holocaust denial kinda stuff.
Now, this bummed me out, not my favorite thing, but we were going to stay there anyway because we’d already made the booking without having any idea. It’s a bit like…I wouldn’t expect someone visiting the U.S. from Japan to understand the complexity of our national relationship with Wal-Mart.
Would I book that hotel again? Probably not.
But you know what really sold me on moving to a different hotel? The chain we were staying in was cited for several safety violations. Pretty major stuff. And this is in a city with goddamn earthquakes, so staying on the 22nd floor of a building that is incorrectly earthquake-proofed seems like a profoundly bad idea.
I think what I’m saying in this section is that we are all going to read and love something here and there by someone who does something shitty, and oftentimes we’ll have read and loved that author long before we had any idea about what was going on.
And that’s okay. You shouldn’t feel guilt about that, and if possible, you don’t need to let it taint your experience with the book. You don’t owe it to someone else to retroactively dislike the book. If you read The Road every year and connect with it, I don’t think you need to feel bad about that. You established that connection, it had nothing to do with McCarthy the man, and it can continue to be that way if that’s your thing.
The Library
The library should not remove the materials of people who have committed heinous acts, even criminal acts. Even pretty bigtime stuff.
One of the most important aspects of intellectual freedom is that we afford it to everyone, and it should not be a right you lose (I do believe in the work prison librarians do to try and get relevant, interesting materials to prisoners, even though “tough on crime” folks think either that good books will rile them up, or that prison should be punishing, and good books lessen that punishment. Listen, dummies: You’re talking about how prisoners shouldn’t read BOOKS about acts they may have already committed, in real life? Do you really think books are going to help them pull off crimes in the future, more than now being plugged in with other criminals? And, let’s be real, punishment guys, how’s that working out for you? Ask a corrections officer whether it’s better for the prisoners to be bored as hell all the time, whether that keeps things cool).
I’m not talking as much about the intellectual freedom of those authors and their ability to express, though, I’m talking about the intellectual freedom that law-abiding citizens who have done nothing wrong should hold when it comes to materials availability.
Bookstores can stop shelving books by whoever they want, they’re private entities. Amazon can stop selling books by anyone they want, it’s a private company, and this is one of the many reasons Amazon should not take over library services, which is something that gets suggested in a Forbes op-ed like once every 4 or 5 years.
Libraries are the one place that does need to stand fast on this one.
Cormac
Blood Meridian is a banger. The Road is a banger. No Country for Old Men is a banger.
I am going to go so far as to say that John Wayne Gacy’s paintings are not, in fact, bangers:
Gacy’s paintings are not art that changes people. It’s not something that informs future artists. It’s Sip N’ Paint quality shit that you’d hang in your baby’s nursery because the baby’s weird uncle painted it, and you really wish he hadn’t.
I don’t usually like to get into quality-based arguments about these sorts of things, and this isn’t one. In Cormac’s case, I’m arguing for the books, not their author. I’m arguing that if we viewed all art that way, Gacy’s paintings couldn’t be sold, couldn’t be given away on the curb.
Nobody is reading Cormac McCarthy novels because he did something bad. They are reading him in spite of that. Whereas the only reason someone paid $8,000 dollars for the above painting is because it was painted by Gacy.
Trusting the art and not the artist isn’t always about ignoring the bad behavior of someone. Sometimes, it helps us avoid putting up a painting by a serial killer in our homes because that’s cool or something.
Let’s be real, nobody has a bookshelf that’s like, “Hey, here’s all my sex pest author books!”
But some asshole absolutely has a home gallery that’s like, “This is a Gacy, and this is a Richard Ramirez, here’s a Manson.”
What Are The Decisions?
I broke down and read the Cormac McCarthy piece. It’s long. It’s in-depth. It’s complicated. It’s the kind of piece you used to see all the time in Rolling Stone, something that spools out a story without building the conclusion for you. It gives you the information, complicates the information, and then leaves you to make a decision for yourself.
The decisions are these:
Do I make a determination about whether what McCarthy did is bad, and if so, how bad?
Do I decline to read future McCarthy books based on this information (well, books of his I haven’t gotten around to yet)?
Do I redact positive reviews or other media relating to McCarthy that I’ve created in the past?
Do I no longer recommend McCarthy’s books to people?
Do I feel that reading and loving McCarthy’s books is an endorsement of his behaviors?
Are my feelings complicated by the fact that McCarthy is dead, therefore he cannot directly benefit from me purchasing his work (and, based on his complicated family situation, my dollars are probably not really going to anyone who even really knew about what McCarthy was doing)?
And these are all personal decisions, but I will point out that if you look at these decisions, they are all about things external to the books.
The one decision that is off the table:
Should the library remove McCarthy’s works?
The answer is No.
I’m against book banning of any kind, and I’m against book banning for any reason. Many a forward-thinking institution or retailer may look at someone like McCarthy (or Gaiman) and make a morally-based decision about whether or not to stock their books. And what you need to recognize is that is EXACTLY what other book banners are doing, making a morally-based decision about whether or not a book belongs on the shelves.
Which means you’re not really disagreeing with the act of banning books, you’re disagreeing with the reasoning behind it. It means you are, in fact, okay with banning books, provided it’s done for reasons that agree with your morals.
For me, that’s too close to endorsing book bans to abide.