Pedestals

…in particular, the idolization of creatives (writers, artists, people in the movie industry) who then in one way or another “fall from grace” and then take their entire body of work with them. John Scalzi recently wrote eloquently about it here but it might be a good time to to weigh in.

In the literary world, three names spring to mind immediately of people who were idolized by fans and who then came out publicly as having said or done or thought or believed or practiced something that many of those fans could not stomach… and the entire contribution to the world of letters of people whose footprints were HUGE then went into the deep waters. A little while ago, it was Orson Scott Card, whose stated views on certain cultural and psycho-sexual matters buried him when they became common knowledge. There were some people for whom this was deeply personal and very deeply felt, and they (and their allies) stood up and roared. The man who wrote “Ender’s Game” – a novel almost as iconic as things like “Dune”, in its day – was practically anathema overnight. People might not have chucked their copies of “ENder’s Game” in protest but certainly they did not buy anything new from his pen. Readers are spoiled for choice – they can vote with their purchasing power and if they did not wish to support an author’s problematic views there was an easy way to do that – do not buy their books. For myself, where things stood here was an interesting place. I mean, in a very “sixth sense” kind of way (remember? “I see dead people”?) for me the idea that the entire story was twisted around a child who commits genocide was fairly obvious from the start and it was interesting to see people clutching pearls in the aftermath of Card’s fall and being shocked, SHOCKED, that a genocide had taken place in that book. But be that as it may – I remember reading the first part of Card’s “Songmaster” in a SF magazine of its day and loving it. WHen I bought the book and discovered that there was more to it than just that fraction of the story that I was familiar with… I was a little disappointed. But OK. That bit I loved was still luminous in its way. But what turned me off Card was not specifically the revealed bigotry of the man, it was the preachiness of the writer, and some of his later works were SO damned preachy that… well… let me put it this way. If I wanted to listen to somebody screaming misguided indoctrination at me I could go down to the nearest public speakers corner and watch someone mounted on his soapbox, for free. I didn’t feel like paying for the privilege. And so I simply stopped reading Orson Scott Card.

Just in case you thought this was a boy’s club, our next candidate for The Fall was a woman – Joanne, better known as J K – Rowling. Yah. You’ve all heard of Harry Potter. Now THERE was an idealization. The midnight lines at bookstores the night before the day of a new Potter release. The hundreds of thousands of kids milling about everywhere wearing House Colors and robes and waving their wands.The movies. The theme parks. The MERCHANDISE. The way that YA literature, for a long time, was Harry Potter and then twenty empty places until the next thing on the list. Jesus, the woman had it all. Had EVERYTHING. And then she knocked herself on the head with a toxic hammer, and her name became ashes. Instead of remaining the Great White Goddess and the Patron Saint of anything kidlit related, she became a name to conjure with… in the worst way. Even her own creatures, the young actors who had played the iconic Potter roles in the movie version of the franchise, broke with her. And then there was the fact that what had been carefully not talked about then came tumbling center stage. Harry Potter and all that world was the classic “coup de foudre”, something precisely at the right place at the right time to create a sensation and iit DID – but Rowling was in fact not that hot a writer (she had a great imagination, she had a good idea of Story, but her prose was pretty pedestrian, there was the Adverb Problem (underline them in one of her books you’ll see what i mean) and essentially  there was the simple fact that the Potter books were classic British Boarding School stories sprinkled with a bit of fairy dust and a smattering of perks that belonged more to the halls of colleges like Oxford or Cambridge than a boarding school – that banquet hall, for instance. (Having attended a British Boarding School I can attest from personal experience that nobody eats like that in one.) When she tried to spread the franchise into North America she ran into a brick wall (she didn’t have the requisite background knowledge or sensitivity and it showed HARD) and the Potterverse simply didn’t scale up that high. When she published non-Potter books under a pseudonym… well… they sold once it became known that it was her under a pseudonym. Under its own steam, that particular venture didn’t exactly soar. I remember finding no less than THREE copies of her “other” book in a second hand bookshop. People didn’t hold onto these things. Rowling is simply, at best, a decent journeyman writer who happened to be standing where the pot of gold hit the ground when it fell from the sky. When called upon to prove her chops, she never quite rose to the mark. But then came her TERFery and her unacceptable stance on matters of sexual identification, something she did and was called out on and then instead of apologising she doubled down on things and then doubled down again. The idolized creator of Harry Potter became persona non grata. Her Potter books were credited with “Getting an entire generation to READ again”  – but many such readers read THE HARRY POTTER BOOKS and then stopped again. The HP books were a phenomenon and a generation was swept up in it – but were they so completely life-changing in terms of reading habits? The jury is still out on that one. And in fact the people who read Tolkien young were much more likely to “stay readers” in their adult lives than the people who cut their teeth on Harry Potter. But anyway, there she is, joining Orson Scott Card in the Shunning Corner.

Most recently, there’s been the Neil Gaiman  revelations which have rocked the literary world, and rarely has a more gargantuan or a more beloved writer fallen from grace so hard or so fast. You can find all the salacious details elsewhere I won’t get into it here but suffice it to say that it involves using considerable social and cultural capital for appalingly nefarious ends. Many readers have responded with saying that everything that Gaiman has touched is now irreparably “tainted” for them and they certainly have a right to that reaction given the nature of the things that Gaiman has been accused of having done – but as I said in a recent Bluesky post (which immediately became one of my most “liked” posts on that platform, ever)  – when someone writes a story that etches itself into your brain it’s hard to stop loving it because its author is a fatally flawed human being (I am speaking of “The Price”, a story that has always made me cry, and always will)  I first crossed paths with Gaiman’s work not with Sandman but with Neverwhere, and I loved that. I read a lot of his stuff since then. I actually remember following my husband around the house with a copy of “American Gods” and reading bits of it out loud to him as I was reading it. I loved “Good Omens” but then (1) Terry Pratchett was involved there too and (2) put David Tennant’s face to one of those characters and there’s no going back for me there… But on the other handI can’t say I was particularly fond of “Coraline” – and one of his most recent successes, “Ocean at the end of the Lane”, left me pretty cold and is one of the few books of his that I do not own. I felt he was phoning it in, the whole thing felt OFF to me, hollow, somehow, I don’t know. I just didn’t connect with it at all. Maybe I was beginning to see the bloom off the rose, I don’t know, but there you have it. That was the last “new” thing of his that I read and I haven’t picked up a Gaiman since. Am I going to throw out all of his books which are on my shelves? No. But it is probably safe to say that there will be no more to join those, and also that a considerable number of his erstwhile fans are feeling the same way. I think there’s a lot of smoke and dust about just now but what they’re hiding is an enormous crater where Gaiman’s career used to be.

So – how closely is a writer’s work tied to their person, to their personality? If you adored the person and then stopped adoring them do you then instantly stop liking their prose? Or are the two not that closely tied? I don’t know and I think the answers will vary according to the person, the prose, and the reader concerned.  But the dangers of idolatry are fully on display here. All I can say is, never ever expect the real person behind the portrait you may have painted of them in your head to live up to your impossible standards. Every single one of them is a literal real person, and if they haven’t fucked up in the past or are still waiting for their fuckup to happen they are probably doing their fucking up right now as we speak and you just haven’t found out about it yet. There may be things that they will do or say that you might find unforgivable. It’s up to you, then, to decide what to do with what they have already given you, to balance the joy you had of them with the grief they now bring. Your call.