Art, Artists, And Separation

So, yeah, that Never Let Me Down Again thing is rattling in my brain.

For the three people who've been reading this for a long time, they'll know I've been a long time David Eddings fan.

A lot more people know that it seems super likely that Eddings and his wife served a year in jail for serious physical and emotional abuse of their adopted children, who were unsurprisingly removed from their care afterwards. I don't know for absolute sure, Eddings never talked about it, but there are newspaper reports and there can't be many people with their exact names who lived where they did at the particular time they did.

Which is why more recent readers won't hear me mention him.

The separation of art from artist, and how much we're willing to support people who did foul things, is a confused topic in my experience. Few people seem able to set down a consistent line of what they'll support and not. Hardly anybody agrees entirely with each other. That's okay, it's a confusing topic, but it is occasionally one we have to confront.

Am I consistent? No. I've stopped talking about Eddings. I do however occasionally talk about Marion Zimmer Bradley, accused of standing by while her children were sexually abused, albeit rarely and always with the caveat attached of "please check this before going ahead". I dislike being in the business of making people's choices for them but I do like to try and provide pertinent information.

I'm also a huge metalhead, which may have leaked through here every now and again. The metal scene, while home to many a cool dude, is also rife with just about every form of dickheadery. Some of the bands that have proven this aren't particularly relevant to me and ignoring them is easy. Some of them have produced music that I really, really love. Dissection made some fantastic music. Jon Nodtveidt was, uh, something else. Certainly not someone I'd really want to support. Yet...

For me, there is a dividing line in that metal is about alienation and aggression. Nobody is pretending to represent commonly virtuous views here. For many of us it's just about letting off some steam before we go back to being positive people but it's not exactly a surprise that some people aren't like that. Which means, crucially, I've never had to try and reconcile what I thought with what I knew. I mean, I didn't sit down and listen to Dissection or Emperor knowing they had musicians who killed gay men, but I sure as hell knew I wasn't going to agree with everything about what they did.

Which brings me back to Eddings. I've never entirely agreed with Eddings. I'd have always been interested to hear him talk candidly about race, a subject on which his characters made some rather interesting announcements. I think he was trying to portray what he saw as realistic (like Lackey did with sexual violence) and made some attempts to lampshade them as being wrong... but many people see many different things as realistic when it comes to race. They why of their particular view is fascinating. The happy-go-lucky nature of his violence was by turns, a fun Boys Own read and a bit odd. And so on.

But I never thought the couple who spent so much time looking at families would have been people who never had their own because they locked kids in cages. Maybe they severely regretted that and lived out the fantasy of not having made that mistake in their books. Maybe they didn't. I've no idea. It's weird. I guess I don't have to reconcile it but not being able to do so doesn't endear them to me. Seeing a lie behind a part of their books I enjoyed doesn't endear them to me. Hypocrisy bugs me.

In any case, having some idea of why I'm inconsistent comforts me. I wish I could look at these artist revelations, whenever they happened, with a clear and swift moral judgment. I can't and probably never will.

What I can say though is that for authors like Eddings and Bradley, and to an extent the likes of Lovecraft and so on, is I can still have a degree of separation in enjoying their work (although thank gods Eddings was beginning to wear on me on the last readthrough). I can't make a separation in terms of their reputation and discussing them. They earned their place in shaping this genre fair and square, and sometimes talking about it will involved talking about them with praise. But I won't be recommending them, not without big caveats. They didn't earn that as people. That separation matters, to at least some degree, to me.

And that is my truth, tell me yours.