As artists fall into disgrace, must their art be exiled?

The other day while paging through a collection of George Orwell’s writing, I was startled by his angry dismissal of fellow writers Stephen Spender and W.H. Auden as “fashionable pansies.” I shrugged and kept on reading.

I had a similar reaction about a year ago when leafing through a collection of early Pauline Kael film criticism I happened upon a negative review of the screen version of Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour. Kael complains that “the lesbianism is all in the mind” before making this doozy of a parenthetical quip: “I always thought this was why lesbians needed sympathy – that there isn’t much they can do.”

These little homophobic nuggets didn’t change my thinking about these great writers, who have too much intelligence and flair to be reduced to their worst statements. I don’t expect artists and critics from the past to meet my 21st-century standards, and hope generations to come will look upon this era with some tolerance for our blind spots.

Everyone these days seems to be morally inflamed. There’s certainly no shortage of reasons. A thrilling movement has taken root against sexual harassment and misconduct that is inspiring hope for overdue reform in the entertainment industry and beyond.

The cavalier way men have systemically abused their power over women in and around the workplace warrants little leniency. But a more slippery question has emerged in this moment of cultural reckoning: what to do with the works of artists whose conduct has been abhorrent?

In the growing gallery of alleged predators, there aren’t any I hold dear. James Toback’s films aren’t in my Netflix queue. I never mistook Kevin Spacey for one of the greats.

But inevitably a contemporary artist with whom I feel a special kinship will shatter my illusions. I doubt that I will throw away the books or delete the recordings or swear off the films. I’m sure I’ll be disillusioned and quite possibly disgusted, but I know that an artist is not identical with his or her masterpieces and that few human beings can live up to their greatest achievements.

If a book or play speaks, it does so in a way that transcends the limitations and imperfections of the author, a more elusive figure than the publishing industry (and identity politics hard-liners) would have us believe. I’m not so much of the school of literary critic Roland Barthes, who famously declared the death of the author, as of the school of Proust, who saw that a writer crystallizes the notion of a multiplicity of identities, the way each of us contains numerous selves, not all of them readily categorizable.

ANYONE WHOSE occupation is imagining the lives of others necessarily has a thronging inner world. The artist who creates beauty can contain a fair amount of ugliness. I was reminded of this point recently when attending the Getty exhibit of my favorite Italian painter, Caravaggio, a revolutionary artist with a thuggish reputation who is thought to have murdered a man in a botched castration incited by a dispute over a favored prostitute.

History is the ultimate arbiter. Moral verdicts, the raison d’etre of many biographies, are a secondary layer that can color the reception of an artist’s oeuvre but cannot nullify their work.

Disgraced living artists raise stickier concerns. Should, for example, actors stop performing in Woody Allen’s films after the allegations made by Dylan Farrow? Hollywood consciences (an oxymoron if ever there was one!) have already been tested, though the casting invitations have lost a good deal of their luster after the scandals and string of subpar movies.

But what about Allen’s best work? I can’t imagine watching Manhattan anytime soon. The sight of Allen slobbering over Mariel Hemingway was queasy-making before all the talk of his predilection for young girls. But am I ready to reject Annie Hall, Broadway Danny Rose and Hannah and Her Sisters? Not yet. There are too many indelible performances, including several by Mia Farrow, Dylan’s devoted mother, that would have to be sacrificed.

Working artists who have fouled their reputations will have to fend for themselves. Directors who have taken advantage of the casting couch, actors who have grotesquely exploited their stardom, conductors who have preyed on their young charges deserve to have the rug pulled out from under them. If the work they’ve done lives on, it will do so apart from the memory of their shameful deeds. This will take time.

SOME OF the shock we’re experiencing right now stems from our mythologizing natures. We expect our heroes to be exemplary, yet (as Proust points out) human fallibility may be a necessary ingredient in creativity. Heinous crimes are another matter entirely, but as any reader of biography can attest, genius and pathology aren’t exactly strangers.

I’m as contemptuous as the next hanging judge on Twitter when I read about the inappropriate conduct of the rich and famous in their five-star-hotel bathrobes. The great majority of these men are getting exactly what they deserve. But like many who feel a pang of obligation to due process, I can’t help wondering if in the collective rush to right historical wrongs we aren’t in danger of losing sight of other values.

Justice, as symbolized by the scales, is an art of delicate calibration. But watershed movements aren’t subtle. They can’t afford to be. Any loss of momentum threatens a reversion to an unacceptable status quo. Ambiguity must wait out the revolution. But as the tectonic plates of society shift and a more egalitarian era beckons, we must continue to stand guard against the rigidity of thinking that breeds its own climate of intolerance.

I’m glad Orwell’s use of “pansies” didn’t prevent me from reading on, because in another anthology of his work I came across a letter in which he explains to Spender, with whom he’d struck up a correspondence, that though he has said some unkind things about him in the press, he couldn’t help changing his mind once he met him in person, “because when you meet anyone in the flesh you realise immediately that he is a human being & not a sort of caricature embodying certain ideas.”

As for Kael, after shuddering over her outrageous remarks in her early reviews, I began to see that her fearless candor, while not fully under control at this point, was what made her such a sharp critic. Her political incorrectness hasn’t aged well, but her directness is what has kept her writing compulsively readable.

For those having difficulty drawing distinctions, let me state categorically that I have no interest in furthering the careers of rapists, predators, racists and homophobes. But if evidence turns up that Shakespeare was a sadistic creep, I trust that we will still appreciate Hamlet, King Lear and The Tempest. And the same should hold for the work of our less illustrious contemporary artists, whose virtue may fall egregiously short of the gifts they’ve bestowed. (Los Angeles Times/TNS)