Putting faith in novelists is a mug’s game

I have never read any of Philip Roth’s novels. He is, admittedly – along with most of American literature – one of my literary blind spots. When his name is called up in passing, I reflect both on my many friends who adore his novels and that they tend to see him as a “problematic fave”, in the modern parlance, because his treatment of women was appalling by most reasonable standards. So when a new biography of Philip Roth was trailed in the papers recently, with headlines that included “Phillip Roth could get CANCELLED after his biographers posthumously reveal his ‘misogyny and sexual depravity’”, I didn’t really take any notice.

I dimly recalled that it’s a relatively uncontroversial claim that portions of Roth’s novels bear the rather sticky pawprint of the sex-obsessed, in the same way that DH Lawrence’s violence towards women very obviously shapes his dark vision of the warring sexes in a perpetual fight to the death. Many of the great novels which defy simple judgements and interpretation via biography are produced by novelists who, at other points in their career, create work that merely reflects and indulges their unexamined prejudices and inherited traits. The very best novelists are capable of moving beyond their conditioning.  

It is some irony then that Blake Bailey, author of Philip Roth: The Biography, has himself been accused of multiple sexual assaults and harassment. Copies of the book are set to be pulped. Was this a case of the universe delivering a kind of rough poetic justice? It’s a nice parable for the dangers of making the “definitive” judgement about another’s life: let the biographer who is without sin cast the first stone…

To get a hold on these scenarios, we tend to fall back on tired debates: can you separate the art from the artist? We all have a stock answer ready to hand. A common contemporary assumption is that great novels are similar to the idea of a public school education, i.e. you might not enjoy bits of it, and it might be extremely unpleasant, but you will definitely leave a more “well-rounded” human being.

And yet the history of the novel tends to elude cliché – attempting to inhabit fiction’s “larger than life” protagonists can prove a risky business. In the early 19th century, Goethe’s novel Die Leiden des jungen Werthers was banned in Leipzig after scores of youths were found to be committing suicide in imitation of its protagonist Young Werther, who comes to grief over a love affair. They even dressed the same as Werther, complete with an identikit pistol and yellow stockings.

If you can reduce art to its didactic qualities, you can just as easily go off in the other direction and fret about its perils, principally its capacity to contaminate the mind with its vivid impressions. After seeing Wagner’s opera Tristan and Isolde, a paean to world-rejecting eroticism and love, Nietzsche said that he would be afraid to touch the score without gloves on.

There are further complications in the debate about whether bad people can make great art: a little historical distance tends to absolve artists from the very worst of sins. Does anyone think that choirs should stop recording Carlo Gesualdo’s music on the basis that he was a murderer? If anything, the notoriety of his life fascinates modern audiences just as keenly as his highly unusual and innovative music-making. In attempting to tease out what makes Gesualdo such a beguiling figure, the New Yorker’s music critic Alex Ross had to conclude rather blandly that “if Gesualdo had not committed such shocking acts, we might not pay such close attention to his music. But if he had not written such shocking music we would not care so much about his deeds.” The painter Caravaggio’s antics (also a murderer) lend a certain “true crime” glamour to his paintings.

Genre matters too. Why do writers of books for children tend to be quite extraordinarily unpleasant? Arthur Ransome, author of tranquil boating novels, was a Stalinist shill. Roald Dahl was irredeemably anti-Semitic, long after it had ceased to be a fashionable attitude for men of his class. In the 80s, he wrote in the New Statesman: “Even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them [the Jews] for no reason.” Enid Blyton was loved by children all over the world for her novels and yet as a mother she was pitied and despised by her own neglected offspring. Philip Pullman routinely shows himself up as a complete prig on social media. Every adult recognises the uncanniness of children: they are both like us and unlike us. Perhaps it takes a special kind of big person to write convincingly for little people.

The modern debates over cancel culture should remind us that the history of the novel is a short chapter in a far richer and deeper story of ideological struggle and religious intolerance in the West. Pulping, burning, exile – all have played their role in our bitter relationship with the written word and its practitioners. The novel emerged in the 18th century, an era of vast transformation and renewal, when new ideologies took root and old religious certainties were shaken off for good. In the process, old views about representation and its worth – inherited from an era of bitter struggle over the Word and its truth value – subsisted alongside innovations that promoted personal, literary and stylistic freedom.

In our fashionable expectation that novelists should not only pursue the truth in their creative activities but also manifest a model of right conduct in their personal life, we are reproducing that inheritance in all its light and shade. Despite all evidence to the contrary, we like to think that writing well and living well are one and the same thing. We look to novelists to lend beauty and glory to our redemption song, only to find that they’ve joined in the wrong key, come in at the wrong time, and to cap it all elope with the choirmaster’s wife.