Reading Writing

written by: SAH

Not being able to place the article that inspired this is going to haunt me for a long time. But here it goes anyway...

I've often skipped or set aside writing from authors I disliked as people; disregarding their work as unworthy of my time because they were poor examples of humanity. I recently read an article that set me on a path of reconsidering this opinion.

A reader (of whatever publication I'm now unable to remember) wrote in saying that he'd recently discovered that one of his favorite authors was a raging homophobe. He was wondering if he should stop reading that author. His instinct, and mine, was yes. The responder said no.

The answer was fairly reasoned. If we discarded the work of every author who turned out to be a jackass, we'd be losing a lot of great work. A list of famous authors and their particular offenses followed. I've heard the argument before. I frequently counter this argument with something like, There are so many great works in literature, so many good writers, that if we dump the more offensive authors among them we'd still have a huge pile of great work to choose from. That argument still stands. However, the exchange festered. And it was soon poked at by an unrelated occurrence.

I was reading something about "Indian Camp," one of the first stories published by Ernest Hemingway, who I've long avoided (outside of mandatory reading) for being, generally, a jackass.

The story revolves, in short, around a boy who witnesses a suicide. I found it interesting that one of Hemmingway's first stories was about suicide given that he killed himself. I'd just read "The Planet Trillaphon as It stands In Relation to the Bad Thing" by David Foster Wallace. That was his first published work. It's about suicide. He killed himself a couple years ago.

Since I tend to get to most of my reading via such random connection, I set aside my dislike for Hemmingway as a man and read "Indian Camp." It was good. (Well, duh, you might say, it's HEMMINGWAY.) I decided to pick up a collection of his short stories. We'll see how that goes. If I like more of them it may help open the door to me ignoring author's as people (or at least trying not to let those opinions taint the works too much). The whole topic is worth debate. There must clearly be a line at some point. Some people really are loathsome enough to deserve inattention. It's a debate I've been having in my head since college. It's a debate that makes me miss school (even though I'm more than a decade removed from that experience). After all, I don't think the reverse if often true: An author being an all around nice person is not generally a good reason to read their work. In fact, it probably wouldn't be too hard to make the argument that the writing of nice people is generally boring and the writing of a-holes is interesting. It's clearly possible to go 'round and 'round, but I'm only mentioning it because this one random Q&A sparked at least a reconsidering of my general stance. (Perhaps the lives of authors are better left anonymous.)

I believe the closing piece of advice from the article was that if you truly don't like the author and don't want to contribute to their success, but like the author's work, buy their books used or borrow them from a library. That seems like a fine line. You can also wait until they're dead. But hey, if some of your favorite authors are hypocrites and bastards, I guess you can afford to be one too when choosing whether or not to read them. Hopefully no one will judge your reading by it.

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