I hope you all don’t mind a bit of a digression.
I have to suspect that, for others as well as for me, watching the debate about VS Naipaul and the latest go-round of the Wagner question on the Internet the past week has been tiring and lame. It’s a little like watching someone discover death way too publicly and way too late in life. It’s not that you lack sympathy for what the person is going through, not at all. It’s just that the public airing of those growing pains, by adults, can’t help but appear vulgar and crass. Yes, it’s true. Naipaul’s an asshole. Gauguin was a monster. The guy who wrote Ender’s Game is a lunatic and Phil Spector shot a woman in the face. Film at eleven.
And now Alex Carnavale is making the case against Roald Dahl, not a genius, but indeed something of a monster. I don’t much care for Roald Dahl. I find the playfulness of his writing mannered and I find the darkness that attends his work, however better than the sunny bullshit that animates most children’s literature, to be dishonest in its unearned prurience. But I do believe that there was an admirable precision in when and where that darkness was deployed. Despite what Carnavale says, many children’s authors employ cruelty and perverse sexuality in their work, however obliquely. Few recognize just when to do so with the consistency of Dahl.
It’s not every day I read an essay that provokes me to say of an anti-Semite and woman hater “this guy deserved better.” Carnavale “accuses” Dahl and his work of being macabre, unpleasant, and filled with unhealthy sexuality, which is a little like accusing Hemingway of being terse. Carnavale knows that this is the point of Roald Dahl, but can’t let anything get in the way of his argument Or perhaps I should say, get in the way of his observations. The post is researched the way a junior high school student researches a report about the tides: the act is accumulation, not construction.
It’s not Carnavale’s failure of imagination that animates his post, so much as the limpness of his conviction. He’s prosecuting the case against Dahl the person, and doing it as much with showy innuendo as with the plain, lamentable facts of Dahl’s misogyny and anti-Semitism. Carnavale claims that Dahl “began giving money away in earnest to hospitals in order to increase the likelihood of [being knighted] – indeed, he always had a selfish reason for doing anything benevolent.” Don’t ask how he could possibly know this; Carnavale Knows. The record of Dahl’s bad behavior and noxious attitudes is widely available and fairly well known, despite the breathless, “look at the truths I’m showing you” tone with which the post is written. Why muddy the waters with this kind of supposition? Carnavale, writing about Dahl’s distaste for Salman Rushdie, says that Dahl’s “real jealousy likely oriented around the fact that Rushdie had won a Booker Prize and he hadn’t.” Clairvoyance is unnecessary when the target is as obviously flawed as Dahl. Stuff like this only makes Carnavale seem grasping.
The problem is that he’s at once willing to pull Dahl’s work into his critique whenever it suits him, but fails to assess the writing in any kind of responsible way. We’re supposed to believe that Dahl’s work was made much better, or at least much more palatable, by editors who ruthlessly cut Dahl’s racist and misogynist passages, but there’s very little in the way of evidence to back up this conviction. I don’t doubt that the cuts took place, but to assert their importance to Dahl’s reputation requires so much more of a consideration of the work itself. Perhaps the obvious connection– that Dahl’s writing was given its strangeness and power by the same forces that made Dahl such an asshole– is a little too obvious. Perhaps it’s a little too cute. But I can’t give Carnavale credit for resisting the idea because he so clearly needs it, the implication of it, to give his essay a backbone. As it stands, the piece is a long litany of insults about a long-dead man, interspersed by the occasional tiptoe towards the line of a thesis and quick retreat. This isn’t an essay; it is a catalog mixed with commentary that can’t quite decide to articulate itself.
Character assassination, particularly when undertaken against people who are dead, should be concise, almost parenthetical; Carnavale achieves only a grind. The essay reads as nothing more than someone’s attempt to be praised as thorough. And if you’re seeking a particular reaction online, especially in a venue as meticulously curated for a particular (and particularly sympathetic) audience as This Recording, you’re going to get it, so you might aim higher than “you’ve really done your homework here, son.” If you’re in the mood for hearing advice: if you can name precisely what kind of reactions you’d like a piece you’re thinking of writing to engender, don’t write it. Carnavale is trying his hand at a sort of blank vindictiveness, and I suppose he imagines that his criticism is magnified by its monotonous and willfully disinterested voice. To me, it sounds like a teenager trying very hard to speak in an affected monotone.
I’ll tell you, friends, that I had no particular ill feelings towards this essay, beyond the familiar feeling that someone on the Internet is punching above his weight, until the very end. That’s where Carnavale inevitably drops the other shoe. The twist, such as it is, is that Carnavale has some regard for Dahl’s work and what it once meant for him:
I still remember squinting against the glare of a flashlight at my copy of Danny the Champion of the World, feeling the first true wonder of a story whose outcome I could not possibly anticipate. Dahl’s books teach us that the world is a horrible, bigoted place, full of those who wish us ill. It is precisely because he attempted themes that other children’s authors never even touched that his fantasies stand out so much in a crowded room.
The cumulative effect of these horror stories on me was unpleasant. Dahl’s oeuvre, which I consumed with great fervor, illuminated a terrible side of my childhood, one I might rather have been indoctrinated in later on. The fact that the world is full of such misery is not a consoling idea at that age. But so what? To be so gifted and yet so full of disdain for others was Dahl’s problem, not my own. His creations reflect that self-hatred, but if they did not, they would not be honest explications of a cruel and merciless world.
It’s true: life is irredeemably tragic. To treat this fact or an artist’s relationship to it as a mere opportunity to drop a zinger is inexcusable. The insult of Carnavale’s piece is that he lacks the courage to indict himself in his relationship with Dahl. If Carnavale wanted to write a piece about his difficult relationship with a difficult author, it would be one thing. Such an essay might be commonplace but I would read it with interest. But to twist the knife so late, to drop the takeaway so casually, gives the lie to the whole damn show. Talk about the man, or talk about his work, or talk about how he has influenced you, but when you indict him don’t seek cover in a last minute reversion to “but I’m a fan.” Timidity in criticism is rarely good, though restraint always is. But to be tentative in conclusion after being ruthless in commission, and in the service of preciousness, is unforgivable. Even for all of it, Dahl’s work deserves better.
arguingwithsignposts
lol. I would have thought so had I known or cared such a debate existed.
Did Naipaul send a tweet with his junk in it?
Freddie deBoer
He said that there are no good women writers. Being a dick is kind of his shtick.
cleek
@arguingwithsignposts:
then you missed a fun one!
Linda Featheringill
Yes! It’s been too long since I read Dahl. I guess I should go read some more soon.
I always suspected that Dahl was macabre, unpleasant, and filled with unhealthy sexuality. So?
Dahl probably did have faults and sins. But as you pointed out, so did Gauguin. Hemmingway and Motzart were not angels, either.
birthmarker
As a childrens’ educator, I love Dahl’s writings, as did my own children, particularly the younger one.
Dahl’s daughter works with Partners in Health, as chronicled in Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains. A great book, BTW.
Aren’t the themes of the Harry Potter books quite similar to Dahl’s themes? Would one say any of this about Rowling?
arguingwithsignposts
There was a Twitter controversy earlier this week about something some dumbass WSJ columnist said wrt Young Adult literature these days (a sort of “Get off my lawn” screed). Here’s an NPR summary. You can look at the #yasaves hashtag to follow it.
kerFuFFler
Talk about twisting the knife!
meh
I really enjoyed Ender’s Game (prior to knowing what a complete douchebag the author was). Wrestled with the decision whether or not to buy the additional books in the series and in the end opted not to. I simply couldn’t abide furthering that guys career with my purchases. Free markets at work baby!
Dan
Ohhhh, don’t link to that prick and his prick website.
R-Jud
@birthmarker:
I wouldn’t say the themes are all that similar. Rowling is a lot “safer” than Dahl, more wish fulfillment and less real peril as a tradeoff. I know people made much of the “darkness” of the latter books, but it was really superficial darkness, to me, in spite of the vast numbers of supporting characters who got the axe. And it all gets wrapped up happily at the end of book 7 with a gooey epilogue.
The main problem with HP is that Voldemort is simply not a very effective villain in the way that Dahl’s antagonists were. I’m still more freaked out by George’s grandmother in George’s Marvelous Medicine, or the evil giants in The BFG than I ever was by Voldemort.
Barbara
Dahl is not my favorite children’s author but I see him as an early prototype (and largely much better) of the fantasy fiction that now pervades the children’s and young adult sections of bookstores. I get a little annoyed at my children for reading not much more than that for a variety of reasons, but whatever. Dahl really has adult literature counterparts in magical realism (Marquez, etc.) and, unlike much of the rest of the fantasy authors, the world he creates is somehow both simple and complex in just the way children are.
Having said that, I found movie versions of some of his works (Matilda) to be terrifying to one of my children. Yes, he was a cad to his wife although he also probably saved her life and forced her back to health. A complicated person.
V.S. Naipaul in my view is overrated and his work will not endure for the ages. Wagner’s has and that’s just a fact. You don’t have to love these people to understand their talent. Those who demand moral purity in genius are just wasting their time, in my view.
eemom
Dahl wrote for grownups too. I have a great book of his short stories.
I read an interesting article yesterday about Charles Dickens. He was a total asshole to his wife. Like, REALLY an asshole.
For that matter, Dahl stuck by his wife, Patricia Neal, while she recovered from a stroke. Later he ended up dumping her for another woman.
As a renowned psychiatrist once told me, people are messy things.
And it is just plain bullshit to judge any artist’s work on the basis of his/her personal life. OTOH, there’s nothing wrong with observing any parallels that exist.
taylormattd
This post has convinced me to never vote for that assassinator, Obama.
Shinobi
I always felt Dahl’s books were fairly lighthearted. Which I guess is in comparison to the other things I read, many of my favorite books growing up were even darker, even some we read in school. In fact a lot of books I was encouraged to read ended with a tragedy, bridge to terebithia, My girl, are the ones I remember most, I think there were a couple about dogs. Black beauty, one of my favorites is 300 pages about animal abuse from the perspective of the animal. Talk about depressing. At least Dahl had some whimsey
Perhaps children should read only novels about intrepid groups of baby sitters, boys who get into trouble or adorable baby unicorns who frolic in pastures and then go home to their loving mommies and daddies?
There is another conversation that has been happening lately about what kind of topics are appropriate for young adult novels, whether things like rape or child abuse should be addressed. I can’t find a link, I will keep looking. But apparently adults think that if kids can read they only read age appropriate stuff. I read stranger in a strange land at 13, this assumption is not accurate.
Duckest Fuckingway: Ask not for whom the Duck Fucks. . .
And yet I still say that Orwell’s greatest personal flaw was his appreciation of Henry Miller’s writing.
Joel
… Jim Watson is a racist jerk and Francis Crock believed that life on Earth was seeded by aliens.
R-Jud
@eemom:
Is there one where a pregnant lady kills her cheating husband with a frozen leg of lamb in it? A great little story.
His autobiographies are worth reading, too, and he was also a decent editor. I have a book of short ghost stories he edited that is just fantastic. And, FWIW, most of the authors in that anthology are women.
Culture of Truth
For an entirely different story about Dahl, check The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington.
birthmarker
@R-Jud: And fed the lamb to the police investigators?
DaddyJ
It’s hard not to be fascinated/repelled by the details of an artist’s personal life. But at the end of the day, it’s the work, stupid!
Except for writers like, say, Ayn Rand, where the personality disorder is the work.
BGinCHI
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I heard some musicians (esp those who play that new rock and roll) stayed up late, smoked things, and did things to women (and men) that involved nudity.
Shudder.
We really need to get rid of art. It may very well show us that human beings are complicated and are often not what they seem.
wonkie
Hmmm….I guess wether or not I decide to stop reading an author because of his/her personal life would depend on how much that personal life offended me and how much I liked the books. I would not like a book that was a vehicle for someone’s assholry. Ender’s Game is a terrific read and has none of the author’s bigotry in it. If it was a vehicle for the author’s bigotry it would be, in my view, a lousy book. That said, I have no desire to give that author any more financial support and have not purchased any of his other books. There are lots ad lots of good books in the world so I don’t lose much by avoiding those that I know were written by bigots who use their profits to make the world a worse place than it already is.
Please don’t tell me if the author of the Game of Thrones series is a hyoerconservative asshole because I’m part wya through the second book ad want to keep on reading.
BGinCHI
@DaddyJ: It’s worse for Rand.
There is no work. Only words in the wrong order.
MBunge
@Barbara: V.S. Naipaul in my view is overrated and his work will not endure for the ages. Wagner’s has and that’s just a fact. You don’t have to love these people to understand their talent.
Very few folks ever stand the test of time, even among those who were big deals in their own lifetimes. For those who do, I think it’s appropriate to understand their crappy behavior in the context of their contributions to the world. When dealing with reknowned assholes of the moment, I feel like the asshole stuff should probably be given more weight than it is.
Mike
aimai
One of the problems with that essay on Dahl is that its horribly written and edited. Words are used that sound like the right one, but aren’t. There are major grammatical errors and as Freddie says there are lots of bald assertions.
That being said Dahl was a horrible person, and behaved horribly to lots of people (women and jews) all around him not only when it was convenient–a class thing–but when it was inconvenient, as when Bob Gottleib et al essentially fired him.
I liked some of Dahl’s work–the short stories, CACF and JATGP. I guess I’m not surprised that the dark tip of the iceberg, that makes those stories great, hid a huge ugly real iceberg of anti semitism and anti woman (and anti black and anti union) reality that only editing removed. Creative people are not nice. Nice people, like Rowling (as R Jud and others have said upthread) can only offer us pablum and wish fulfilment.
On the subject of Rowling I want to say that she can’t communicate true suffering for one sentence. Harry’s sleeping under the stairs produces nothing in a real reader but a sense of disbelief and even contempt for the writer. There’s more real pathos in half a scene of A Little Princess or The Secret Garden, for all their sentiment and absurdity, than in the whole of Harry Potter. Similarly, there’s a lot of power in Dahl’s writing *because* of his fear and hatred and contempt for other people. To make it palatable to children, to offer child readers some kind of catharsis and resolution, it would of course need an editor with a heavy marking pen since Dahl was too self indulgent and angry to do any self editing.
aimai
Culture of Truth
I read the story about the leg of lamb as a kid and thought it was hilarious.
Guster
@aimai: Jesus fuck, aimai, that was beautiful.
daveNYC
@birthmarker:
Not even close. The core in Potter seems to be that love will save the day (or at least off the big bad), and that you can always count on your friends.
Card might be a batshit nutjob these days, but Speaker for the Dead is still worth picking up. Or at least getting from the library.
Dahl was an asshole, Hemmingway was a drunk, and Lovecraft was a xenophobe. All this and the direction the sun will be setting in at 11.
birthmarker
Ran across this quote from Mark Twain upon the censorship of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by the Brooklyn Library in 1905 (from Wiki)
Duckest Fuckingway: Ask not for whom the Duck Fucks. . .
And Ender’s Game ages terribly, irregardless of how idiotic OSC is.
WereBear
The work is really good. The person isn’t.
And what else is new?
The work stands alone; as it should.
The Education of Little Tree
prufrock
@wonkie:
George R.R. Martin is about as liberal as they come.
Culture of Truth
After avoiding them for years, I finally broke down and read the Potter books. I did not come away with contempt for Rowling, rather I found them quite readable, breezy, decent kids books. On the other hand, I read The Da Vinci Code last month and found it laughably bad.
TheMightyTrowel
@Shinobi: wrt Stranger in a Strange Land… i read it aged 12. I also read all of clive barker around the same time. I was reading my mom’s spy thrillers (dodgy sex scenes and all) under my desk in catholic school aged 8. I also became my HS valedictorian, went to an Ivy League university, ended up doing a doctorate at another prestigious university and now i’m one of the c. 30% of people with advanced degrees in my field who is employed in the area I did my phd in. I don’t think it hurt me any.
birthmarker
@WereBear: Great little book by one of George Wallace’s speechwriters…
BDeevDad
Coming from my first grader’s point of view both Dahl and Rowling are great writers as he’s been tearing through both of their books this year.
Tarly
@wonkie:
GRRM is a good dude. Unfortunately, he is a Jet’s fan.
Marc
@meh: You chose wisely. Even purely on the level of aesthetics, you chose wisely.
WereBear
@birthmarker: Yes; it’s one of those “false memoirs” by a Klan member who got Native Americans riled with his simplistic& racist portrayal.
Yet many people remember it fondly and took away good lessons!
Mind you, I’m not immune; I can’t listen to Bing Crosby (especially at Christmas,) or watch a Wallace Beery movie. But it’s not like I was such a fan in the first place.
Tarly
@daveNYC:
Originally saw this on tumblr, wish I could find it to give proper credit.
“The Harry Potter series, as seen by Hermione Granger:
Book One: Hermione Granger, And the Time I Saved the World All By Myself, Then Rescued Harry and Ron From Their Raft of Terrible Choices
Book Two: Hermione Granger, And the Time I Saved the World All By Myself, Then Rescued Harry and Ron From Their Raft of Terrible Choices
Book Three: Hermione Granger, And the Time I Saved the World All By Myself, Then Rescued Harry and Ron From Their Raft of Terrible Choices
Book Four: Hermione Granger, And the Time I Saved the World All By Myself, Then Rescued Harry and Ron From Their Raft of Terrible Choices
Book Five: Hermione Granger, And the Time I Saved the World All By Myself, Then Rescued Harry and Ron From Their Raft of Terrible Choices
Book Six: Hermione Granger, And the Time I Saved the World All By Myself, Then Rescued Harry and Ron From Their Raft of Terrible Choices
Book Seven: Hermione Granger, And the Time I Saved the World All By Myself, Then Rescued Harry and Ron From Their Raft of Terrible Choices“
Shinobi
@TheMightyTrowel: It’s like you’re me but smarter!
Did your classmates in catholic school try to get you in trouble for reading all the time too? It was like reading was some kind of crime, they’d tell on me and then the teacher would ask me a question and I’d go back to my book. It’s not my fault that we learned the same crap every year for 6 years and I was the only one who remembered it.
birthmarker
@BDeevDad: Now that’s a precocious reader!
Dan
@aimai: Harry Potter is not about a boy that sleeps under the stairs.
R-Jud
@aimai:
Hear, hear.
@wonkie:
This is a sensible rule for judging work by personally nasty writers. It’s why I am okay with preferring Dahl to, say, C.S. Lewis.
I read Lewis when very young. The Christian allegories went over my head, in spite of the fact that I was a Catholic schoolgirl, but the distasteful sense of having a story told at me rather than to me came through loud and clear.
Elliecat
Yet Dahl provided protagonists whose (appropriate) rage about those terrible things was allowed its full expression, and in most cases empowered children to fight back and triumph against it. Believe me, I am one who objects to children being inappropriately exposed to horrible things at too young an age. But I think usually Dahl’s horrors were things many children already experience and feel rage about: parents who fail to value them properly or neglect them, teachers and other authority figures who treat them unfairly or nastily, other children who are really horrible to them…. So to me, they are not “horror stories” but wonderful fantasies in which children get to express the full range of their anger and triumph over the bullies and thugs and injustice.
Then again, I had a childhood filled with bullies and punishing teachers and principals. My children have much less of that (I love anti-bullying programs!) yet they cheer as they hear about Mathilda getting her own back on her mean father and driving away the Trunchbull. And they love the one (The Magic Finger?) in which the little girl turns the obnoxious hunter family into geese and geese into hunters.
Amid all this, Dahl also evokes loving relationships. The relationship between Miss Honey and Mathilda, for instance, provides the two of them the valuing and love they have been denied by those who raised them, and what I remember particularly from Danny, Champion of the World, is the very loving relationship between father and son.
There is some general nastiness in the work here and there that I don’t care for, but more good stuff, IMHO. My oldest child’s school has teachers reading lots of Dahl to students in second grade, and I never hesitate to read his books (or give them) to my children.
As for Dahl being a sh*tty person…. yeah, that’s always a problem. What makes a good artist a good artist is often at odds with what makes a good person.
SectarianSofa
I can’t bring myself to read the piece in question. I know that when I discovered Roald Dahl in the library at my elementary school, it was a great thing — I loved the books. They were creative and perverse, as I tended to be. And a bit anti-authoritarian. (A model for Lemony-Snicket?) I and the wife read James and the Giant Peach and Charlie and the ChocoFac to the kids not many months ago. We are now reading the Hermione Granger Saves Harry and Ron series mentioned by @Tarly.
birthmarker
@WereBear:I just thought the relationship between the grandfather and the boy was funny, with the grandfather cursing and saying, “Don’t tell your grandmother!” I wasn’t aware of the controversy til later.
I guess I fall into the “read it and get what you get out of it” school, without giving too much weight to the personal life of the writer. These are works of fiction we are talking about. Not political diatribes or books of philosophy.
The Other Chuck
@wonkie:
GRR Martin is a raving liberal. He is also fat however, and therefore not to be taken seriously.
One thing I notice about the HBO series is that it just can’t communicate his love of food the way the books do…
SectarianSofa
@R-Jud:
Well-said. I was also ignorant of CS Lewis’s evangelism when I read the books as a kid. It apparently had no stealth effect, either. I remember thinking the death of Aslan scene being disturbing. Skyghost Aslan didn’t really help much. (Christian-allegory Fail?)
TheMightyTrowel
@Shinobi: Oh my goodness yes! They also told on me for ‘sitting on my knees’ which was unladylike and for which i was frequently punished.
Culture of Truth
That could be read the wrong way
SectarianSofa
@daveNYC:
Wasn’t it a bit worse with Lovecraft, in that his racism and sexism were obviously present in his fiction?
The newest wikipedia article doesn’t have the examples I had seen, but they are in an older version here:
http://www.bookrags.com/wiki/H._P._Lovecraft
Larv
Yeah, I read that Carnavale article yesterday, and came away thinking it was just a hit piece. I’m perfectly willing to believe that Roald Dahl was kind of a dick, but Carnavale throws all sorts of vaguely worded insinuations around (without much of anything concrete to back it up) and hopes it sticks.
For instance, in trying to claim that Dahl was an antisemite, he cites the fact that Dahl visited Berchtesgaden (the former Nazi resort town in the Bavarian Alps) in 1951. Now I suppose it’s possible that Dahl was there on some sort of pro-Nazi pilgrimage, but I’d like to see some support for that. Most of Berchtesgaden was a US military zone in 1951, and the former Nazi facilities were repurposed as a vacation resort for US military personnel (and remained so until about 1990). I’ve been there several times, and I’m not an antisemite.
The whole article is full of crap like that. Carnavale interprets everything in the worst possible light – Dahl donating to charities is portrayed as a craven attempt to buy a knighthood. It reads like Carnavale knew he could sell a story of the type “beloved children’s article actually horrible monster” and then went searching for evidence to support that premise.
AAA Bonds
I’m not sure why you would want to stick up for any of these figures. I, too, enjoy their work to some degree, but that doesn’t make facts about the author less true.
Nor does your disagreement with the critic’s reasoning make these facts any less relevant.
I’m not even sure what your piece here is saying other than that you feel uncomfortable with these sorts of essays for some reason you find difficult to define.
The “punching above his weight” comment is really silly to me. Since when do critics need to attain a certain standing in society to be correct? This attitude is elitist and ridiculous.
Personally, I have no problem reading essays such as those criticized here and still getting meaning from the work of these flawed authors.
I just don’t feel the emotional uneasiness that this piece expresses when my favorite artists, authors, etc. are rightly criticized. I don’t feel any obligation to defend them if they are racists, sexists, or the like – just to accept this and use it as a way to read their work.
Liz
Diana Athill, his long-time editor, has a whole section in her memoir, Stet, about what a dick Naipaul is …
alwhite
I have grown to the point where the less I know about the people who entertain me the happier I am. I have had the misfortune to meet some authors and actors who’s work I admire only to find I really do not admire the person at all.
As an example I think most people could relate to. Did you enjoy Mel Gibson before you knew what an asshole he was? How about after he made his gigantic assholeishness public?
So keep it to yourself! :)
OTOH, I have not read any Dahl, but it sounds like I am missing something worthwhile. Any suggestions for a good place to start his stuff?
Alexander
@aimai:
Do you really think that there have never been any nice creative people, aimai?
prufrock
@The Other Chuck:
He describes roasted whole pig like he’s writing to Penthouse Letters.
I kid. Martin’s stuff is amazing.
Frank W.
I don’t say this just to be contrary or step on anyone’s toes, but while I found Ender’s Game to be entertaining, I do also think it is somewhat over-rated. Creative, cruel (in an intriguing way) but a bit too much space opera for my tastes.
I’ve long thought that Heinlein had a streak of pedophilia going on. Farmhan’s Freehold and a couple others feature very sexual fifteen-year-old girls who have a relationship with much older men.
Now, Dune I thought was quite extraordinary!
I think we want our writers and actors and rock stars to live up to our fantasies… And yet I would loathe to have people be aware of my every foible, dark thought, and ill-uttered word….
daveNYC
@SectarianSofa: Oh hell yeah, his entire body of work was based on his xenophobia. It’s just he managed to make it enjoyable by making the xenos actually alien, and not just shifty eyed foreigners or swarthy ill-bred degerates. The guy had some serious issues, it’s like he was born in the wrong time. And being in the wrong time/location/body is another theme in his work, not to mention the pure escapism of the dreaming world.
@Tarly: Ha! I remember, in the way-back machine, there was a discussion about what was going to happen in the soon-to-be-released last book. My contribution to the thread was to bring up just how useless both Ron and Harry were. Granger knew all the spells and potions, and was the go-to person for getting anything done. Harry could summon his happy totem and was well liked, while Ron could potentially serve as a blood or organ donor. Which basically explains why Rowling went with the cop-out mechanism she ended up using (he wins because he cares!). The fact that people hold the series up against the LOTR grinds my gears.
Shinobi
@SectarianSofa: I actually hated CS Lewis because his evangelism was so obvious for me it completely ruined the book. (I went to catholic school, and anytime anyone mentioned Jesus I sortof felt the whole thing was ruined.)
@TheMightyTrowel: Ugh, thank god they never expected me to be ladylike. I would have never had a moment’s peace.
Cheryl from Maryland
@prufrock: I thought he was Giants fan.
As others have said, what is important is what work means to the viewer/reader. Great works continue to resonate with an audience. Poor works sink into obscurity. Assigning Literary, music or art value based entirely on the artist’s biography is lazy and lame.
jake the snake
@eemom:
I think it is more the case that she dumped him after she found out about the other woman.
You can enjoy a writer’s work, but don’t expect them not to have feet of clay.
Elliecat
@alwhite:
“The Magic Finger” and “George’s Marvelous Medicine” are quite short, so they might be a good introduction. In reading to children, I’ve found Mathilda a lot easier to get into quickly than some of the other longer ones.
Duckest Fuckingway: Ask not for whom the Duck Fucks. . .
Larv: Dahl is considered an anti-semite because in criticizing Israel/Zionism, he repeatedly failed to distinguish between Israel/Zionism as a sociopolitical entity and ‘teh Joos’ as a monolithic group.
aimai
@Alexander:
Well, I do actually know lots of really nice creative people, since my mother is a poet and painter and my father has become a photographer. And of course you can be an absolutely terrible person and not be creative or artistic in the slightest. But I do think that what makes a great piece of literature great/challenging/emotionally moving is going to requre writing that is a little bit unsettling, that pushes the reader into places they haven’t gone, or are frightened of going. Children’s literature, if its not going to be Strewelpeter, is going to then have the problem (at least from society and the parents point of view) of needing to help the child back off the ledge after rousing or expressing strong, painful, emotions. Someone who is sexist, racist, anti semitic or inappropriately sexualizing of children is going to have a hard time offering his readers some socially approved way of getting back off the ledge-that’s what I meant about achieving catharsis (or synthesis) or a happy ending. I’m not surprised that Dahl may have needed a lot of editorial help to tone down his books, or to help them end in a more palatable way. But we might just as well argue that well meaning goo goos (among whom I put myself) sometimes need the manic, cruel, child’s eye view to put the body into the text we are so eager to tie up happilly.
aimai
eemom
@alwhite:
There’s a novella called “Royal Jelly” which is wacked out creepy Dahl at his best. You should look for a short story collection that includes it, which would also have a lot of other good stuff.
@SectarianSofa:
OMG, I LOVE the Lemony Snicket books.
eemom
we need more threads like this! I love this stuff.
Politics sucks.
Another fascinating subject is the darkness underlying most classic children’s fairy tales before they got Disneyized.
C.S.
@aimai:
Certainly true. Not only that, but the inherent assumption of the essay seems to be that if Dahl were really worthwhile, he wouldn’t have needed an editor. Which makes me wonder if Carnavale knows anything about publishing, or ever heard of – for instance – Ezra Pound or Max Perkins. A good editor is often — usually, in fact — the difference between a good book and a great one. Although he probably doesn’t realize this because (as you point out) his essay is itself horribly edited.
Although, as
jake the snake
Re Lovecraft: His xenophobia is very obvious, but he seems to have moderated some later in life. Living in penury, extensive, if frugal, travel and wide ranging correspondence can do that to a reflective person.
If you read much of Lovecraft, the xenophobia actually contributed to the atmosphere of dread and loathing that
makes his such an effective writer.
Like the old Heraclitus quote about not stepping in the same river twice, I don’t think anyone ever reads the same book twice. And two people never read the same book.
ShadeTail
@alwhite:
There are so many good ones it is hard to know where to start. ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’ is something of a classic (it’s sequel, ‘Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator’ always felt kind of tacked on to me). My fourth grade teacher actually read ‘The Fantastic Mr. Fox’ out loud to us, and we all really liked it. ‘James and the Giant Peach’ is one of the more surreal ones he’s written (and for him, that’s saying something).
On a completely unrelated note, some of my favorites back in grade school were the ‘Freddie the Pig’ series. There were dozens of them, and they were just plain fun to read. I don’t know if they’re even still in print.
WereBear
@jake the snake: Lovecraft married a Jewish bookstore owner. I believe it didn’t last very long, for whatever reason; but he couldn’t have been THAT anti-Semitic, methinks.
aimai
@C.S.:
I’m reading a lot about Manet, just now, because I am going to get to go to the big exhibit in Paris and my mother is a huge fan and I don’t know nothing about Art and so I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes a writer, or an artist, good (or great) when it seems as though what makes them truly great is often the unfinished or partial quality of what they are doing. What makes them enjoyable to one, or enjoyable to many is still another thing.
Not to get too longwinded about it but there is a huge difference in looking at an entire body of work, a single painting (or story), or even down to the granular details of brushstroke and of line. Some people need to love the entire package to love the artist’s work, some (especially practitioners) can more easily understand the beauty in the struggle to get something down on paper. They see what isn’t there as much as what is.
Some artists powerfully affect us for just one work out of hundreds. Sometimes one work out of hundreds can spoil an entire experience of the artist. Its neither wrong nor right–it just is. Perhaps I can look at a painting and love its beauty or its technical mastery despite knowing that the painter was a rapist but I would have a very hard time reading a novel that purported to be a tender love story that evaded or elided the fact that the writer himself was a rapist. There’s a lot of manipulation and seduction of the viewer/audience by writers and artists and if you can’t bear the thought of the writer/artist as he or she is the seduction process can become revolting as you feel complict with the writer’s crimes (such as they are).
aimai
ShadeTail
I haven’t read much Orson Scott Card, but his Ender series was always kind of ‘meh’ to me. The first one just felt…wrong, somehow. And when I started using the internet, I finally understood why. Seriously, a pair of teens take over the world by starting message board flame wars?
And the character of Ender himself is so incredibly unrealistic. With everything he’d been through, he should have been either a withdrawn, emotionless shell or a seething ball of rage, not the mostly normal boy he started as. My suspension of disbelief can stretch only so far.
mpbruss
I know this is really late to the party, but I have to ask: this douchebag Naipaul is presumably aware of the existence of both Flannery O’Connor and Marilynne Robinson, and yet still persists in asserting that women can’t write? And anybody in the world takes him seriously on this point?
dan
I’ve read Dahl and enjoyed the books I’ve read. I’ve read LOTR and Harry Potter. I’ve enjoyed both of them. Harry is darker than you give it credit for and while love is a bit of the answer, it isn’t all of it. While I think that LOTR was better in some ways, certainly in the writing, Harry Potter was better at being darker. In LOTR there is no sacrifice, everyone lives or comes back from death, nobody has to really suffer that we like. All the really good guys get to go away and live forever in a paradise. The bad guys are black, the good guys are white. In Harry there are shades of grey in most characters and sacrifice. Even Voldemort isn’t all black.
Jack Crow
I think a considerable part of the problem are “literature” and the Canon, themselves.
There are almost innumerable sci-fi, speculative and fantasy women authors of extraordinary caliber and craft (Cherryh, Leguin, Tepper, etc) who are never considered in comparison to the white male dominated world of canon literature.
aimai
@ShadeTail:
I liked Ender’s Game and I just basically ignored the entire “teenagers take over the world with internet” shtick. I think what I liked about Ender’s Game was something about looking at an entire system laterally, trying to imagine new ways of doing things in a rigid school hierarchy. I suppose, in that way, I think Ender’s Game is just another version of the absurdly good chick flick “Stick It” which is all about how a group of repressed, angry, competitive, girl child gymnasts decide to wrest control of their work experience from the parents and judges by deciding for themselves who will “win” a given competition and then each other girl will simply throw the competition until they get to the desired result. I think what I enjoyed about Ender was just that little bit about thinking up, down, and around what was expected of you and subverting a working system.
aimai
aimai
@dan:
That’s very true about LOTR, its elegaic but not tragic and most of the pain is kind of repressed because its already telling us its history and the sufferings, as well as the joys, of the various characters are understood retrospectively.
As for HP I diligently read them, and with some enjoyment, all the way through but I found them very badly edited with long dull parts. I also thought they were extremely illogical and almost random in their depiction of the rules. I admire Rowling for doing what she did, and for so effectively capturing the imaginations of millions of people. But I stand by my feelings about the books basic lack of pathetic imagination. I did and do more crying over the death of Buffy’s mother than over Harry’s tribulations (though she did wring a tear or two from me at times). But I basically found much of the Harry Torments she put him through to be unbeievable and in that I think we can see that she is not as good a writer as, say, Dahl because even when he’s unbelievable, as in James and the Giant Peach or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the pain of his characters is always incredibly real.
YMMV. AS someone said upthread no two people read the same book.
aimai
Shinobi
@mpbruss: Did you hear he called Jane Austen sentimental? JANE AUSTEN! He is either willfully obtuse or doesn’t understand satire.
quaint irene
I remember reading to my nephew when his bedtime book of choice was The Big Friendly Giant and I started to feel that If I had to say ‘BFG’ one time I’d scream.
Larv
@Duckest Fuckingway: Ask not for whom the Duck Fucks. . .:
That’s quite possible, my point is that Carnavale does little to substantiate the charge. He could have made the point you’re making, but instead he just tosses out a smear about visiting Hitler’s former vacation home as if that were meaningful in and of itself.
Josh
Dudes, it’s V.S. Naipaul, who called Tony Blair a Commie and E.M. Forster a talentless hack whose sojourn in India was only for sex tourism. Who gave a talk at a high school in his native country and, asked why he was ignoring the kids’ questions, said “Literature is not for children.”
As for Dahl, I think “There is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity; maybe it’s a kind of lack of generosity towards non-Jews. I mean there is always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere; even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason” settles the issue of his anti-Semitism.
ShadeTail
@aimai:
I can see where you’re coming from with this, but it really didn’t work for me. The whole thing felt rather Randian (or objectivist, if you prefer) to me, seeing as how it revolved around a select group of super-people who had to exert their personal power against the lesser folk who tried to hold them back. Ender was particularly blatant in that regard; he starts as a five-year-old boy who knows full well that he can’t trust or depend on any of the adults in his life, and who is constantly bullied and abused, but he still really cares and wants to do good. But he has to keep fighting and even kill, or else the bad people would see him as weak and eat him up. It’s just too far over the top for me to take seriously.
ideasinca
I must chime in to recommend Dahl’s two memoirs, Boy and Going Solo. Boy in particular is a compelling read, laugh out loud funny in places, heartbreaking in others. It details, among other things, his experiences at a very harsh English boarding school, where he was sent at a very early age.
Our family’s very favorite Dahl is the BFG (Big Friendly Giant), which I haven’t seen mentioned. My kids’ second favorite is James and the Giant Peach. My second is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. If you think about it, those and many of his books are about achingly vulnerable children, at the mercy of cruel circumstances and idiotic grownups, who somehow muster great bravery and persevere while maintaining their purity of heart. For all the surrealism of the stories’ settings and situations, the kids themselves mostly succeed through nothing more than steadfastness and good judgment — no superpowers, no magic spells, no rage, no defiance, not even brilliance of intellect. It is his portrayals of these kid’s vulnerability that are at the core of my admiration for Dahl’s children’s books.
And of course his adult short stories are just deliciously perverse!
C.S.
@Alexander:
Oh, hell yeah. But I also think that the assholes get more attention because we’ve propagated this myth of the self-absorbed artist for more than a century now, and not just in literature. The requirement of artistic assholery has become a case of selective perception combined with a healthy heap of correllation/causation fallacy. Every time a moderately good artist is an asshole, his/her artistic gifts are ascribed to the assholery, but whenever a nice artist comes along, there is no discussion about how their decency feuls their work. Or else certain incidents are overblown so as to make the case that they’re really, despite all appearances, an asshole. When you’ve already got the idea that artists should be assholes, then everything has a tendency to feed that preconception.
Actually, what would be the dividing line between asshole/not asshole for an artist? If you’re a demonstrably better person than, say, Martin Amis or Billy Joe Shaver, should you be counted among the decent folks? Or should the bar be set a bit higher — at, say, Frank Lloyd Wright (still well below the Norman Mailer/Gauguin high water mark)? What personal failings are not necessarily indicative of assholery? If you’re a sober, faithful asshole, aren’t you still an asshole? Just as the thrice-married, recovering alcoholic (say, Kristofferson) might not be an asshole? Do sexist depictions of women count against the artist if it takes a thorough critical essay to point them out (Kurosawa), and even then there’s room for debate?
Anyway, here’s off-the-cuff list of artists of all persuasions who I don’t really think are/were assholes(although perhaps I haven’t been googling enough, and it should be known that I’m not automatically assuming that divorce = asshole):
Pearl S. Buck
Willa Cather
Charles & Henry Greene
Claude Monet
Satyajit Ray
Harper Lee
Georgia O’Keefe
John Gielgud
Alec Guinness
John Schlesinger
John Le Carre
Willie Nelson
Kris Kristofferson
Scott Turow
Edward Hopper
John Sayles
aimai
@ShadeTail:
Yah. I can totally see that. My mother never read Dune (she’s the wrong generation for sci fi anyway) because she couldn’t get over the absurdity of a character named Duncan Idaho. I also agree with you about the Randian subtext to both Ender’s Game and Ender’s Shadow. I never managed to read anything else by OSC because he’s so incredibly vile and the books just bored me to tears, long, clunky, and unbelievable.
aimai
Alexander
@aimai:
I think I agree. Maybe one (kind of awkward) way of putting it is that because there must be something not-nice in any great piece of writing, there must be something not-nice within any great author, at least insofar as they must think about something in order for it to end up in the work. I was just reluctant to say that, as a result, great authors can’t be nice people. David Foster Wallace comes to mind as a thoroughly nice person whose writing was nevertheless often disturbing and unsettling (and, I think, great.)
Annamal
@aimai:
Can I just step in and recommend Margaret Mahy as a children’s/YA author who is to the best of my knowledge “nice” (she used to go to her author appearances dressed in a penguin suit) and capable of generating some deeply unsettling work (her book “The Changeover” manages the unusual feat of being a non-vomit worthy supernatural romance and it was written in the freaking 80’s).
Frankensteinbeck
Um… as a writer, I look at this guy’s critique and I say ‘Yeah, Roald WAS great, wasn’t he?’ He used his own personal fucked-uppedness to create stories so powerful that this reviewer is still struggling with the way they affected him. He was inventive and compelling and had a very unique flavor.
I have to tell you, I’m an asshole, and I find it tremendously useful. If nothing else, you can’t write a good villain if you don’t understand deeply how people can do very, very bad things and think they’re doing something good.
As for the much-discussed Potter series, I think they’re quite good. I’ve really enjoyed them. Rowling has an easy reading style and the sophistication of the books ages precisely in time with the protagonists, which I think is very clever. But they’re a million miles from perfect (her lack of ability to convey how awful it is to be an abused child WAS a good example), and apparently she’s a serious asshole herself who hates her own fans.
So she’s not perfect, her books are not perfect, but they’re still good and I liked them. Roald Dahl was apparently a mess, and I’m not remotely surprised, because he turned that mess into art.
daveNYC
The books increased in length, not in sophistication.
Comrade Scrutinizer
@daveNYC: This, I think. I enjoyed the Potter books, but Rowling did well in the same way that Chris Carter did well with the X-Files—in spite of their abilities, rather than because of them.
Rowling is a competent author—barely. The Potter series is successful because what Rowling did was retell a popular story adequately, and because, for whatever reason these things happen, the books became the focus of a major marketing/pop culture push. The fact that the Potter books are mostly inoffensive literary pablum probably helped.
Joel
@C.S.: John Steinbeck seems like he was a pretty good guy, too. I don’t know for sure, because I don’t really dig into the biographies of the authors I read.
Ghanima Atreides
@Linda Featheringill:
/yawn
just like Lewis Carroll, but without the drug culture subtext?
Truly, I thought it was impossible for Our Token Libertarian Frontpagers to get any more boring and long-winded and pompous than EDK, but Freddie just stepped up the game. This entire post is a deadly soporific.
@aimai: you can’t enjoy the Harry Potter books because you, personally, cannot get to twelve years old in your head.
Ghanima Atreides
@Frankensteinbeck: Tom Robbins, Still Life With Woodpecker.
Rowlings books are great for those of us that are never going to completely grow up.
maus
I love dark and macabre, but while I still like those books, the author WAS a misogynistic asshole, and that the books turned out as well as they did is a credit to the editors. They apparently reined in his sleaze, woman-hate, and racism just enough that the charm remained, and the darkness wasn’t at the front and center.
He’s not a completely worthless figure, or else they wouldn’t have been able to do anything with the material presented to him. He wasn’t a particularly pleasant figure, and knowing these things about him is interesting, it gives context to why the books are the way they are. Whenever I have kids, perhaps it’ll influence the dialogue I have with them after they finish his books. Not to discuss how much of a shit he is, but to discuss feminism, colonialism, antisemitism, etc.
maus
@Duckest Fuckingway: Ask not for whom the Duck Fucks. . .:
Quotes like this don’t help the “he just dislikes zionists!” crowd. I’d think we could tell the difference between dislike of unchecked Zionism and actual antisemites here on BJ.
lawguy
Well, as far as writers who were assholes, I’ve always thought that Eugene O’Neal was a perfect example. But then given the plays I would have been disappointed if he hadn’t been.
DPirate
Orson Scott Car(d?) is a horrible writer. I travelled up the coast from Florida to South Carolina with my mother for a wedding a few years back, reading aloud from one of his books. It kept us in stitches the whole way.
Decent on story, horrid on craft, void on art.
I think we finally tossed it into a dumpster at a rest stop spmewhere in the Carolina’s.
Freddie deBoer
So everybody knows I’m a socialist, right, and that matoko chan is a batshit obsessive who decided I was libertarian because she got mad that I kicked her out of my blog? I mean I literally believe in communal ownership of the means of production.