Should great art excuse monstrous artists? Orwell didn't think so
Helen Lewis revisits "Benefit of Clergy"
Hello, Orwell News subscribers—it’s here, dropping by to talk about an Orwell essay I discovered while researching my new book, The Genius Myth. Enjoy!
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The one infallible rule of political writing is that whatever you want to say, George Orwell said it first – and said it better. When I was researching The Genius Myth, I knew that I wanted to explore the role of “monsters” in art and science, the kind of people whose CV comes with an asterisk pointing to their personal failings. And sure enough, Orwell was considering that exact phenomenon in 1944, long before the Michael Jackson trial, the #MeToo movement and the rise of the word “problematic”.
The patron saint of troublesome geniuses might well be Pablo Picasso, an undeniably gifted artist whose loved ones saw him as a “vampire”. He produced great art, but only by gorging on the attention, devotion and suffering of his family and friends. His granddaughter Marina told a story of him making paper animals for her as a child, before snatching them back: “They’re the work of Picasso.”
But how much should an artist’s personal failings cloud our view of their art? Orwell asked a similar question in his 1944 essay “Benefit of Clergy,” taking Salvador Dalí as his inspiration. Orwell really hated Dalí’s paintings, with a pungency that is now quite startling. (That said, having slogged around the Dalí museum in St Petersburg, Florida, it’s a distaste that I now share. So kitsch.) More than that, though, Orwell was unafraid to make a moral judgement on the artist—without needing to “cancel” him. He framed the question of monstrous geniuses in a way that many writers would find too brutal, too stark: how many rapes are worth it for a masterpiece?
Orwell called the impulse to excuse artists from the moral demands of everyday society the “benefit of clergy”, after a medieval practice where priests and nuns were spared the death penalty because they claimed that civil courts could not judge them. He described Dalí’s art as an insistent confession, full of symbolic objects such as high heels, images of death and putrefaction, and even flirtations with coprophilia. Because he was writing in the 1940s, Orwell felt able to offer a moral conclusion: Dalí was “a symptom of the world’s illness. The important thing is not to denounce him as a cad who ought to be horse-whipped, or to defend him as a genius who ought not to be questioned, but to find out why he exhibits that particular set of aberrations.”
To Orwell, being an artist – being a special person – was no excuse for abusive behaviour. “If Shakespeare returned to the earth tomorrow, and if it were found that his favourite recreation was raping little girls in railway carriages, we should not tell him to go ahead with it on the ground that he might write another King Lear.”
In theory, most of us would agree with this sentiment. But in practice, it’s different. The film producer Harvey Weinstein’s predatory behaviour was well known enough to be the subject of jokes on a mainstream sitcom, 30 Rock, years before his trial. Money-grabbing mercenaries turned a blind eye, because his films made money. But so did sensitive left-wing types who wanted to be good people. For them, the appeal of Weinstein was that he could raise the funds for beautiful, intelligent independent films.
This debate over the personal ethics of geniuses began long before the #MeToo movement of the late 2010s, but that feminist reckoning gave it extra ferocity. In a viral essay in 2017, the critic Claire Dederer asked: “What do we do with the art of monstrous men?’ The question was unavoidable, she said, because of the sheer number of abusers, racists and even murderers among the ranks of the mega-talented – and because their art often implicitly made the case for their particular perversion. “They did or said something awful, and made something great,” she wrote. “They are monster geniuses, and I don’t know what to do about them.” (As a parallel question, Dederer wonders if she is not monstrous enough to achieve something wonderful. “A book is made out of small selfishnesses,” she writes. “If I were more selfish, would my work be better? Should I aspire to greater selfishness?”)
These conversations have left us in a cultural bind. We implicitly accept that geniuses are not like us – that’s the point of the label – but does that mean they should get the “benefit of clergy”? If you claim that you will never condone or ignore abuse, violence and discrimination, then either half the canon is closed to you . . . or you must make yourself a hypocrite.
For decades, if Hollywood were pressed about Orwell’s question about King Lear being worth the rape of a few little girls, the answer would have been a shamefaced ‘yes’.
The Genius Myth is published on June 19. Order it here.
Helen Lewis will be in conversation with Nathan Waddell, author of A Bright Cold Day, at The Orwell Festival, London, on June 23. Tickets here. Friends go free.
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@helen - excited to see this book from you! Looking forward to it.
_A Clockwork Orange_ poses this question vividly. Alex and the Droogs' acts of "the old ultra-violence" obviously pose a problem for the society they live in (and are probably the result of a deep and pervasive sickness in that society), but high-tech behaviorist techniques that extirpate those tendencies seem also to eliminate creativity and the ability to experience beauty. This leads the authorities to forbid using those techniques to fix people like Alex.
The incorporation of the other Droogs into the Metropolitan Police seems not to raise the same principled objections.
The alternative of keeping Alex imprisoned and therefore unable to inflict harm on the public doesn't seem to have been considered, or maybe I overlooked it.
There is a difference between criminalizing actions that harm other people, and criminalizing thoughts that exist in a person's subjective interior. Of course the two are not unrelated, but the distinction has to be made.
Weinstein seems to have been a complete bastard, I wouldn't want him for a neighbor, and I'm glad that apparently there are several degrees of separation between us. I don't know that it makes sense to refuse to watch any of the movies he profited from though.
Cosby's acts were quite despicable and creepy, but I think the harm was not as extensive, in the same way that second-degree murder still involves a wrongful death but is not considered as serious as first-degree. I wouldn't want him for a neighbor either, and, in case I was unclear, I don't think his actions were excusable, or just boys being boys.
As for his creative artifacts, I never cared much one way or another about his TV shows, and was never tempted to eat Jello pudding. But the standup was really very funny, and I think it still is, even though it's hard to watch it without thinking of what the man did when he was able to get away with it.
Norm Macdonald was a big Cosby fan, and admired him both as a performer and as a man, he said. When the truth about Cosby came out, Norm of course changed his perspective. The post-Cosby comment of his that I remember is, "People say, 'You know, the worst thing about Cosby is that he's a hypocrite,' and I don't agree with that. " Pause for a beat. "I think the worst thing was the raping."
Many people have a shadow side that nobody sees. These two had huge, malignant shadows. How many "normal" people that we see every day are criminally-minded under the surface? In _Chinatown_, John Huston's character Noah Cross comments, "You see, Mr. Gittes, most people never have to face the fact that at the right time and the right place, they're capable of ANYTHING."