Norman Mailer in a rage once tried to kill one of his wives. The painter Caravaggio and the poet and playwright Ben Jonson both killed men in duels or brawls. Genet was a thief, Rimbaud was a smuggler, Byron committed incest, Flaubert paid for sex with boys. So case closed, one is tempted to say, invoking Ms. Cornwells phrase: anti-Semitism, misogyny, racism (I left that out, but there are too many examples to cite), murderousness, theft, sex crimes. Thats not to mention the drunkenness, drug-taking, backstabbing, casual adultery and chronic indebtedness that we know attended (or attends) the lives of so many people who make unquestionably good art. Why should we be surprised or think otherwise? Why should artists be any better than the rest of us?
The reason that question Can bad people create good art? is misleading is that badness and goodness in this formulation dont refer to the same thing. In the case of the artist, badness or goodness is a moral quality or judgment; in the case of his art goodness and badness are terms of aesthetic merit, to which morality does not apply. The conductor Daniel Barenboim, a Jew, is a champion of Wagners music, for example, and has made a point of playing it in Israel, where it is hardly welcome. His defense is that while Wagner may have been reprehensible, his music is not.
Great artists tend to live for their art more than for others. This is why the biographies of so many writers in the 20th century who were otherwise reasonably good people, or not monstrous certainly (think of Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Bellow, Yates, Agee, to take a few almost at random), are strewn with broken marriages and neglected or under-appreciated children.
A more extreme example is Hemingway, whose domestic record is less inspiring than his artistic one: four marriages and at least two screwed-up sons. In November 1952, just after his 21st birthday, Gregory, the youngest (and arguably most talented) of Hemingways three children, wrote to his father: When its all added up, papa, it will be: he wrote a few good stories, had a novel and fresh approach to reality and he destroyed five persons Hadley, Pauline, Marty [Martha Gelhorn, Hemingways third wife], Patrick and possibly myself. Which do you think is the most important, your self-centered ****, the stories or the people? There is no possibly about it: Gregory, the most damaged of all the Hemingway offspring, died, an alcoholic transvestite, in the Miami-Dade Womens Detention Center. Its anger aside, the letter is noteworthy for raising a troubling and probably unanswerable question about the art-life connection: how many stories, however good, are worth the pain and unhappiness of others?
The stories alone are not what wreaked such havoc on the Hemingway family. There was drinking, celebrity, philandering, and two plane crashes that damaged Hemingway physically and possibly mentally. But Hemingway lived for his stories, and they were his justification. Stories or people? Theres no doubt which he thought was more important.
A more complicated case is that of Dickens, an even greater artist than Hemingway and by most conventional measures a better man. Dickens was a reformer, a social improver, a champion of the poor, a man who used his own money to set up a school and shelter for prostitutes (even as, Claire Tomalins new biography suggests, he was himself an enthusiastic customer of streetwalkers). His popularity was such that by the mid-19th century he was probably the most beloved figure in England, more popular even than the queen.
Dickens had a wretched childhood and was determined to do better by his own children. And yet he was at best an indifferent, misguided, and often neglectful parent, and an even worse husband. His marriage to Catherine Hogarth was probably a mistake to begin with, and as she grew fat and sickly (ten pregnancies cant have helped) he became bored and resentful. Divorce was not an option, so he banished her from his household and literally wrote her out of his life, falsely announcing in his magazine, Household Words, that she was a neglectful mother whose children couldnt bear her. Describing this time in their lives, his daughter Katie wrote: Nothing could surpass the misery and unhappiness of our home.
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2012/06/22/opinion/global-agenda-magazine-good-art-bad-people.html
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