{"id":118348,"date":"2017-11-20T11:00:55","date_gmt":"2017-11-20T16:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=118348"},"modified":"2025-05-07T17:48:54","modified_gmt":"2025-05-07T21:48:54","slug":"art-monstrous-men","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/11\/20\/art-monstrous-men\/","title":{"rendered":"What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Still from Woody Allen’s Manhattan <\/em><\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, William Burroughs, Richard Wagner, Sid Vicious, V. S. Naipaul, John Galliano, Norman Mailer, Ezra Pound, Caravaggio, Floyd Mayweather, though if we start listing athletes we\u2019ll never stop. And what about the women? The list immediately becomes much more difficult and tentative: Anne Sexton? Joan Crawford? Sylvia Plath? Does self-harm count? Okay, well, it\u2019s back to\u00a0the men I guess: Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst, Lead Belly, Miles Davis, Phil Spector.<\/p>\n

They did or said something awful, and made something great. The awful thing disrupts the great work; we can\u2019t watch or listen to or read the great work without remembering the awful thing. Flooded with knowledge of the maker\u2019s monstrousness, we turn away, overcome by disgust. Or \u2026 we don\u2019t. We continue watching, separating or trying to separate the artist from the art. Either way: disruption. They are monster geniuses, and I don\u2019t know what to do about them.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve all been thinking about monsters in the Trump era. For me, it began a few years ago. I was researching Roman Polanski for a book I was writing and found myself awed<\/em> by his monstrousness. It was monumental, like the Grand Canyon. And yet. When I watched his movies, their beauty was another kind of monument, impervious to my knowledge of his iniquities. I had exhaustively read about his rape of thirteen-year-old Samantha Gailey; I feel sure no detail on record remained unfamiliar to me. Despite this knowledge, I was still able to consume his work. Eager to. The more I researched Polanski, the more I became drawn to his films, and I watched them again and again\u2014especially the major ones: Repulsion<\/em>,\u00a0<\/em>Rosemary<\/em>\u2019<\/em>s Baby<\/em>,\u00a0Chinatown<\/em>. Like all works of genius, they invited repetition. I ate them. They became part of me, the way something loved does.<\/p>\n

I wasn\u2019t supposed to love this work, or this man. He\u2019s the object of boycotts and lawsuits and outrage. In the public\u2019s mind, man and work seem to be the same thing. But are they? Ought we try to separate the art from the artist, the maker from the made? Do we undergo a willful forgetting when we want to listen to, say, Wagner\u2019s Ring<\/em> cycle? (Forgetting is easier for some than others; Wagner\u2019s work\u00a0has rarely been performed in Israel.) Or do we believe genius gets special dispensation, a behavioral hall pass?<\/p>\n

And how does our answer change from situation to situation? Certain pieces of art seem to have been rendered inconsumable by their maker\u2019s transgressions\u2014how can one watch The Cosby Show<\/em> after the rape allegations against Bill Cosby? I mean, obviously it\u2019s technically doable, <\/em>but are we even watching the show? Or are we taking in the spectacle of our own lost innocence?<\/p>\n

And is it simply a matter of pragmatics? Do we withhold our support if the person is alive and therefore might benefit financially from our consumption of their work? Do we vote with our wallets? If so, is it okay to stream, say, a Roman Polanski movie for free? Can we, um, watch it at a friend\u2019s house?<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

But hold up for a minute: Who is this \u201cwe\u201d that\u2019s always turning up in critical writing anyway? We<\/em> is an escape hatch. We<\/em> is cheap. We <\/em>is a way of simultaneously sloughing off personal responsibility and taking on the mantle of easy authority. It\u2019s the voice of the middle-brow male critic, the one who truly believes he knows how everyone else should think. We<\/em> is corrupt. We<\/em> is make-believe. The real question is this: can I<\/em> love the art but hate the artist? Can you? When I say we, I mean I. I mean you.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

I know Polanski is worse, whatever that means, and Cosby is more current. But for me the ur-monster is Woody Allen.<\/p>\n

The men want to know why Woody Allen makes us so mad. Woody Allen slept with Soon-Yi Previn, the child of his life partner Mia Farrow. Soon-Yi was a very young adult the first time they slept together, and he the most famous film director in the world.<\/p>\n

I took the fucking of Soon-Yi as a terrible betrayal of me personally. When I was young, I felt like<\/em> Woody Allen. I intuited or believed he represented me on-screen. He was me. This is one of the peculiar aspects of his genius\u2014this ability to stand in for the audience. The identification was exacerbated by the seeming powerlessness of his usual on-screen persona: skinny as a kid, short as a kid, confused by an uncaring, incomprehensible world. (Like Chaplin before him.) I felt closer to him than seems reasonable for a little girl to feel about a grown-up male filmmaker. In some mad way, I felt he belonged<\/em> to me. I had always seen him as one of us, the powerless. Post-Soon-Yi, I saw him as a predator.<\/p>\n

My response wasn\u2019t logical; it was emotional.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

One rainy afternoon, in the spring of 2017, I flopped down on the living-room couch and committed an act of transgression. No, not that one. What I did was, I on-demanded Annie Hall<\/em>. It was easy. I just clicked the OK<\/small> button on my massive universal remote and then rummaged around in a bag of cookies while the opening credits rolled. As acts of transgression go, it was pretty undramatic.<\/p>\n

I had watched the movie at least a dozen times before, but even so, it charmed me all over again. Annie Hall<\/em> is a jeu d\u2019esprit, an Astaire soft shoe, a helium balloon straining at its ribbon. It\u2019s a love story for people who don\u2019t believe in love: Annie and Alvy come together, pull apart, come together, and then break up for good. Their relationship was pointless all along, and entirely worthwhile. Annie\u2019s refrain of \u201cla di da” is the governing spirit of the enterprise, the collection of nonsense syllables that give joyous expression to Allen\u2019s dime-store existentialism. \u201cLa di da\u201d means, Nothing matters. It means, Let\u2019s have fun while we crash and burn. It means, Our hearts are going to break, isn\u2019t it a lark?<\/p>\n

Annie Hall<\/em> is the greatest comic film of the twentieth\u00a0century\u2014better than Bringing Up Baby<\/em>, better even than Caddyshack<\/em>\u2014because it acknowledges the irrepressible nihilism that lurks at the center of all comedy. Also, it\u2019s really funny. To watch Annie Hall<\/em> is to feel, for just a moment, that one belongs to humanity. Watching, you feel almost mugged by that sense of belonging. That fabricated connection can be more beautiful than love itself. And that\u2019s what we call great art. In case you were wondering.<\/p>\n

Look, I don\u2019t get to go around feeling connected to humanity all the time. It\u2019s a rare pleasure. And I\u2019m supposed to give it up just because Woody Allen misbehaved? It hardly seems fair.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

When I mentioned in passing I was writing about Allen, my friend Sara reported that she\u2019d seen a Little Free Library in her neighborhood absolutely crammed to its tiny rafters with books by and about Allen. It made us both laugh\u2014the mental image of some furious, probably female, fan who just couldn\u2019t bear the sight of those books any longer and stuffed them all in the cute little house.<\/p>\n

Then Sara grew wistful: \u201cI don\u2019t know where to put all my feelings about Woody Allen,\u201d she said. Well, exactly.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

I told another smart friend that I was writing about Woody Allen. \u201cI have very many thoughts about Woody Allen!\u201d she said, all excited to share. We were drinking wine on her porch and she settled in, the late afternoon light illuminating her face. \u201cI\u2019m so mad at him! I was already pissed at him over the Soon-Yi thing, and then came the\u2014what\u2019s the kid\u2019s name\u2014Dylan? Then came the Dylan allegations, and the horrible dismissive statements he made about that. And I hate the way he talks about Soon-Yi, always going on about how he\u2019s enriched her life.\u201d<\/p>\n

This, I think, is what happens to so many of us when we consider the work of the monster geniuses\u2014we tell ourselves we\u2019re having ethical thoughts<\/em> when really what we\u2019re having is moral feelings<\/em>. We put words around these feelings and call them opinions: \u201cWhat Woody Allen did was very wrong.\u201d And feelings come from someplace more elemental than thought. The fact was this: I felt upset by the story of Woody and Soon-Yi. I wasn\u2019t thinking; I was feeling. I was affronted, personally somehow.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s how to have some complicated emotions: watch Manhattan<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Like many\u2014many what? many women? many mothers? many former girls? many moral feelers?\u2014I have been unable to watch Manhattan<\/em> for years. A few months back, when I started thinking about Woody Allen qua<\/em> monster, I watched nearly every other movie he\u2019s ever made before I faced the fact that I would, at some point, have to watch Manhattan<\/em>.<\/p>\n

And finally the day came. As I settled in on my nice couch in my comfortable living room, the Cosby trial was taking place. It was June of 2017. My husband, who has a Nordic flair for quiet drama, suggested I toggle between watching the Cosby trials and Manhattan<\/em> so as to construct a kind of meta-narrative of monstrousness. But my husband\u2019s austere Northern European sense of showmanship came to naught, for the Cosby trial wasn\u2019t in fact televised.<\/p>\n

Even so, it was out there happening.<\/p>\n

The mood that summer was one of extreme discomfort. Just a general feeling of not-quite-rightness. People, and by people I mean women, were unsettled and unhappy. They met on the streets and looked at one another and shook their heads and walked away wordlessly. The women had had it<\/em>. The women went on a giant fed-up march. The women were Facebooking and Tweeting, going for long furious walks, giving money to the ACLU, wondering why their partners and children didn\u2019t do the dishes more. The women were realizing the invidiousness of the dishwashing paradigm. The women were becoming radicalized, even though the women really didn\u2019t have the time to be radicalized. Arlie Russell Hochschild first published The Second Shift<\/em> in 1989, and in 2017 the women were discovering that shit was truer than ever. In a couple of months would come the Harvey Weinstein accusations, and then the free-fall pig-pile of the #MeToo campaign.<\/p>\n

As I wrote in my diary when I was a teen, \u201cI don\u2019t feel great about men right now.\u201d I still didn\u2019t feel great about men in the summer of 2017, and a lot of other women didn\u2019t feel great about men either. A lot of men<\/em> didn\u2019t feel great about men. Even the patriarchs were sick of patriarchy.<\/p>\n

Despite this bolus of opinion, of feeling, of rage, I was determined to at least try to come to Manhattan<\/em> with an open mind. After all, lots of people think of it as Allen\u2019s masterpiece, and I was ready to be swept away. And I was<\/em> swept away during the opening credits\u2014black and white, with jump-cuts timed perfectly, almost comically, to the triumphal strains of \u201cRhapsody in Blue.\u201d Moments later, we cut to Isaac (Allen\u2019s character), out to dinner with his friends Yale (are you fucking kidding me\u2014Yale<\/em>?) and Yale\u2019s wife, Emily. With them is Allen\u2019s date, seventeen-year-old high-school student Tracy, played by Mariel Hemingway.<\/p>\n

The really astonishing thing about watching this scene is its nonchalance. NBD, I\u2019m fucking a high schooler. Sure, he knows the relationship can\u2019t last, but he seems only casually troubled by its moral implications. Woody Allen\u2019s character Isaac is fucking that high schooler with what my mother would call a hey-nonny-nonny. Allen is fascinated with moral shading, except when it comes to this particular issue\u2014the issue of middle-aged men fucking teenage girls. In the face of this particular issue, one of our greatest observers of contemporary ethics\u2014someone whose mid-career work can approach the Flaubertian\u2014suddenly becomes a dummy (I always hear this word in Fred Sanford\u2019s voice: \u201cdummeh<\/em>!\u201d)<\/p>\n

\u201cIn high school, even the ugly girls are beautiful.\u201d A (male) high-school teacher once said this to me.<\/p>\n

Tracy\u2019s face, Mariel\u2019s face, is made of open flat planes that recall pioneers and plains of wheat and sunshine (it\u2019s an Idaho face, after all). Allen sees Tracy as good and pure in a way that the grown women in the film never can be. Tracy is wise, the way Allen has written her, but unlike the adults in the film she\u2019s entirely, miraculously untroubled by neurosis.<\/p>\n

Heidegger has this notion of dasein<\/em> and vorhandensein<\/em>. Dasein<\/em> means conscious presence, an entity aware of its own mortality\u2014e.g., almost every character in every Woody Allen movie ever except Tracy. Vorhandensein<\/em>, on the other hand, is a being that exists in itself; it just is\u2014like an object, or an animal. Or Tracy. She\u2019s glorious simply by being: inert, object-like, vorhandensein<\/em>. Like the great movie stars of old, she\u2019s a face, as Isaac so famously states in his litany of reasons to go on living: \u201cGroucho Marx and Willie Mays; those incredible apples and pears by C\u00e9zanne; the crabs at Sam Wo\u2019s; uh, Tracy\u2019s face.\u201d (Watching the film for the first time in decades, I was struck by how much Isaac\u2019s list sounded like a Facebook gratitude post.)<\/p>\n

Allen\/Isaac can get closer to that ideal world, a world that has forgotten its knowledge of death, by fucking Tracy. Because he\u2019s Woody Allen\u2014a great filmmaker\u2014Tracy is allowed her say; she\u2019s not a nitwit. \u201cYour concerns are my concerns,\u201d she says. \u201cWe have great sex.\u201d This works out well for Isaac: he gets to hoover up her beautiful embodied simplicity and he\u2019s absolved of guilt. The women in the film don\u2019t have that advantage.<\/p>\n

The grown women in Manhattan<\/em> are brittle and all too aware of death; they\u2019re aware of every goddamn thing. A thinking woman is stuck\u2014distanced from the body, from beauty, from life itself.<\/p>\n

For me, the most telling moment in the film is a throwaway line delivered in a high whine by a chic woman at a cocktail party: \u201cI finally had an orgasm and my doctor told me it was the wrong kind.\u201d Isaac\u2019s (very funny) response: \u201cYou had the wrong kind? I\u2019ve never had the wrong kind, ever. My worst one was right on the money.\u201d<\/p>\n

Every woman watching the movie knows that it\u2019s the doctor who\u2019s an asshole, not the woman. But that\u2019s not how Woody\/Isaac sees it.<\/p>\n

If a woman can think, she can\u2019t come; if she can come, she can\u2019t think.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Just as Manhattan <\/em>never authentically or fully examines the complexities of an old dude nailing a high schooler, Allen himself\u2014an extremely well-spoken guy\u2014becomes weirdly inarticulate when discussing Soon-Yi. In a 1992 interview with Walter Isaacson of Time<\/em>, Allen delivered the line that became famous for its fatuous dismissal of his moral shortcomings:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe heart wants what it wants.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was one of those phrases that never leaves\u00a0your head once you’ve heard it: we all immediately memorized it whether we wanted to our not. Its monstrous disregard for anything but the self. Its proud irrationality. Woody goes on: \u201cThere’s no logic to those things. You meet someone and you fall in love and that’s that.\u201d<\/p>\n

I moved on her like a bitch.<\/em><\/p>\n

Things being what they were that summer, I had a difficult time getting through Manhattan<\/em>\u2014it took me a couple of sittings. I mentioned this difficulty on social media, this problem of watching Manhattan<\/em> in the Trump moment. (I fervently hoped it was a moment). \u201cManhattan<\/em> is a work of genius! I am done with you, Claire!\u201d responded a writer guy I didn\u2019t know personally. This was a guy who had withstood many of my more outrageous social media pronouncements, some of which involved my desire to execute and chop up the male half of the species, Valerie-Solanas-like. But the minute I confessed to having a funny feeling when I watched Manhattan<\/em>\u2014I believe I said the film was making me \u201ca little urpy\u201d\u2014this man stormed off my page, declaring himself done with me forevermore.<\/p>\n

I had failed in what he saw as my task: the ability to overcome my own moralizing and pettifoggery\u2014my own emotions<\/em>\u2014<\/em>and do the work of appreciating genius. But who was in fact the more emotional person in this situation? He was the one storming from the virtual room.<\/p>\n

I would have a repeat of this conversation with many men, smart and dumb, young and old, over the next months: \u201cYou must judge Manhattan<\/em> on its aesthetics!\u201d they said.<\/p>\n

Another male writer and I discussed it over dinner one night. It was like a little play:<\/p>\n

Female writer: \u201cUm, it doesn\u2019t really hold up.\u201d<\/p>\n

Male writer, sharply: \u201cWhat do you mean?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWell, it all seems a tad blas\u00e9. I mean, Isaac doesn\u2019t really seem too worried she\u2019s in high school.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNo no no, he feels terrible about it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHe cracks jokes about it, but he certainly does not<\/em> feel terrible.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019re just thinking about Soon-Yi\u2014you\u2019re letting that color the movie. I thought you were better than that.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI think it\u2019s creepy on its own merits, even without knowing about Soon-Yi.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cGet over it. You really need to judge it strictly on aesthetics.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSo what makes it objectively aesthetically good?\u201d<\/p>\n

Male writer says something smart-sounding about \u201cbalance and elegance.\u201d<\/p>\n

I wish the female writer had delivered a coup de gr\u00e2ce here, but she did not. She doubted herself.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Which of us is seeing more clearly? The one who had the ability\u2014some might say the privilege\u2014to remain untroubled by the filmmaker\u2019s attitudes toward females and history with girls? Who had the ability to watch the art without committing the biographical fallacy? Or the one who couldn\u2019t help but notice the antipathies and urges that seemed to animate the project?<\/p>\n

I\u2019m really asking.<\/p>\n

And were these proudly objective viewers really being as objective as they thought? Woody Allen\u2019s usual genius is one of self-indictment, and here is his one film where that self-indictment falters, and also he fucks a teenager, and that<\/em>\u2019<\/em>s<\/em> the film that gets called a masterpiece?<\/p>\n

What exactly are these guys defending? Is it the film? Or something else?<\/p>\n

I think Manhattan<\/em> and its pro-girl anti-woman story would be upsetting even if Hurricane Soon-Yi had never made landfall, but we can\u2019t know, and there lies the very heart of the matter. Louis C.K.\u2019s I Love You, Daddy<\/em>\u2014a tale of a father struggling to prevent his teenage daughter from hooking up with an older man\u2014will meet a similar fate. It will be impossible to view outside the knowledge of Louis C.K.\u2019s sexual misconduct\u2014if it even gets seen. For now, distribution has been dropped and the film is not going to be released.<\/p>\n

A great work of art brings us a feeling. And yet when I say Manhattan makes me feel urpy, a man says,\u00a0No, not that feeling. You<\/em>\u2019<\/em>re having the wrong feeling<\/em>. He speaks with authority: Manhattan is a work of genius<\/em>. But who gets to say? Authority says the work shall remain untouched by the life. Authority says biography is fallacy. Authority believes the work exists in an ideal state (ahistorical, alpine, snowy, pure). Authority ignores the natural feeling that arises from biographical knowledge of a subject. Authority gets snippy about stuff like that. Authority claims it is able to appreciate the work free of biography, of history. Authority sides with the (male) maker, against the audience.<\/p>\n

Me, I\u2019m not ahistorical or immune to biography. That\u2019s for the winners of history (men) (so far).<\/p>\n

The thing is, I\u2019m not saying I\u2019m right or wrong. But I\u2019m the audience. And I\u2019m just acknowledging the realities of the situation: the film Manhattan<\/em> is disrupted by our knowledge of Soon-Yi; but it\u2019s also kinda gross in its own right; and it\u2019s also got a lot of things about it that are pretty great. All these things can be true at once. Simply being told by men that Allen\u2019s history shouldn\u2019t matter doesn\u2019t achieve the objective of making it not matter<\/em>.<\/p>\n

What do I do about the monster? Do I have a responsibility either way? To turn away, or to overcome my biographical distaste and watch, or read, or listen?<\/p>\n

And why does the monster make us\u2014make me<\/em>\u2014so mad in the first place?<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

The audience wants something to watch or read or hear. That\u2019s what makes it an audience. At the same time, at this particular historical moment, when we\u2019re awash in bitter revelation, the audience is outraged freshly by new monsters, over and over and over. The audience thrills to the drama of denouncing the monster. The audience turns on its heel and refuses to see another Kevin Spacey film ever again.<\/p>\n

It could be that what the audience feels in its heart is pure and righteous and true. But there might be something else going on here.<\/p>\n

When you\u2019re having a moral feeling, self-congratulation is never far behind. You are setting your emotion in a bed of ethical language, and you are admiring yourself doing it. We are governed by emotion, emotion around which we arrange language. The transmission of our virtue feels extremely important, and weirdly exciting.<\/p>\n

Reminder: not \u201cyou,\u201d not \u201cwe,\u201d but \u201cI.\u201d Stop side-stepping ownership. I<\/em> am the audience. And I can sense there\u2019s something entirely unacceptable<\/em> lurking inside me. Even in the midst of my righteous indignation when I bitch about Woody and Soon-Yi, I know that, on some level, I\u2019m not an entirely upstanding citizen myself. Sure, I\u2019m attuned to my children and thoughtful with my friends; I keep a cozy house, listen to my husband, and am reasonably kind to my parents. In everyday deed and thought, I\u2019m a decent-enough human. But I\u2019m something else as well, something vaguely resembling a, well, monster. The Victorians understood this feeling; it\u2019s why they gave us the stark bifurcations of Dorian Gray, of Jekyll and Hyde. I suppose this is the human condition, this sneaking suspicion of our own badness. It lies at the heart of our fascination with people who do awful things. Something in us\u2014in me\u2014chimes to that awfulness, recognizes it in myself, is horrified by that recognition, and then thrills to the drama of loudly denouncing the monster in question.<\/p>\n

The psychic theater of the public condemnation of monsters can be seen as a kind of elaborate misdirection: nothing to see here. I\u2019m no monster. Meanwhile, hey, you might want to take a closer look at that <\/em>guy over there.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Am I a monster? I\u2019ve never killed anyone. Am I a monster? I\u2019ve never promulgated fascism. Am I monster? I didn\u2019t molest a child. Am I a monster? I haven\u2019t been accused by dozens of women of drugging and raping them. Am I a monster? I don\u2019t beat my children. (YET.) Am I a monster? I\u2019m not noted for my anti-Semitism. Am I a monster? I\u2019ve never presided over a sex cult where I trapped young women in a gilded Atlanta mansion and forced them to do my bidding. Am I a monster? I didn\u2019t anally rape a thirteen-year-old.<\/p>\n

Look at all the awful things I haven\u2019t done. Maybe I\u2019m not a monster.<\/p>\n

But here\u2019s a thing I have done: written a book. Written another book. Written essays and articles and criticism. And maybe that makes me monstrous, in a very specific kind of way.<\/p>\n

The critic Walter Benjamin said: \u201cAt the base of every major work of art is a pile of barbarism.\u201d My own work could hardly be called major, but I do wonder: at the base of every minor work of art, is there a, you know, smaller<\/em> pile of barbarism? A lump of barbarism? A skosh?<\/p>\n

There are many qualities one must possess to be a working writer or artist. Talent, brains, tenacity. Wealthy parents are good. You should definitely try to have those. But first among equals, when it comes to necessary ingredients, is selfishness. A book is made out of small selfishnesses. The selfishness of shutting the door against your family. The selfishness of ignoring the pram in the hall. The selfishness of forgetting the real world to create a new one. The selfishness of stealing stories from real people. The selfishness of saving the best of yourself for that blank-faced anonymous paramour, the reader. The selfishness that comes from simply saying what you have to say.<\/p>\n

I have to wonder: maybe I\u2019m not monstrous enough<\/em>. I\u2019m aware of my own failings as a writer\u2014indeed I know the list to a fare-thee-well, and worse are the failures that I know I\u2019m failing to know\u2014 but a little part of me has to ask: if I were more selfish, would my work be better? Should I aspire to greater selfishness?<\/p>\n

Every writer-mother I know has asked herself this question. I mean, none of them says it out loud. But I can hear them thinking it; it\u2019s almost deafening. Does one identity fatally interrupt the other? Is your work making you a less-good mom? That\u2019s the question you ask yourself all the time. But also: Is your motherhood making you a less good writer? That question is a little more uncomfortable.<\/p>\n

Jenny Offill gets at this idea in a passage from her novel Dept. of Speculation<\/em>\u2014a passage much shared among the female writers and artists of my acquaintance: \u201cMy plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabokov didn\u2019t even fold his umbrella. V\u00e9ra licked his stamps for him.\u201d<\/p>\n

I mean, I hate<\/em> licking stamps. An art monster, I thought when I read this. Yes, I\u2019d like to be one of those. My friends felt the same way. Victoria, an artist, went around chanting \u201cart monster\u201d for a few days.<\/p>\n

The female writers I know yearn to be more monstrous. They say it in off-hand, ha-ha-ha ways: \u201cI wish I had a wife.\u201d What does that mean, really? It means you wish to abandon the tasks of nurturing in order to perform the selfish sacraments of being an artist.<\/p>\n

What if I<\/em>\u2019<\/em>m not monster enough<\/em>?<\/p>\n

In a way, I\u2019d been asking this question privately, for years, of a couple male writer friends I believe to be actually great. I write them both charming emails, but really I am always trying to find out: how selfish are you? Or to put it another way: how selfish do I need to be, to become as great as you?<\/p>\n

Plenty selfish, I learned as I observed these men from afar. Lock-the-door-against-your-kid-while-you\u2019re-working selfish. Work-every-day-including-Thanksgiving-and-Christmas selfish. Go-on-book-tour-for-weeks-at-a-time selfish. Sleep-with-other-women-at-conferences selfish. Whatever-it-takes selfish.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

One recent evening, <\/strong>I was sitting in the chaotic, book-strewn living room of a younger writer and her husband, also a writer. Their kids were tucked into bed upstairs; the occasional yawp floated down from above.<\/p>\n

My friend was in the throes of it: Her three kids were in grade school and her husband had a full-time job while she tried to carve out her career freelancing and writing books. A cloud of intense literary ambition hung over the house like a stormy little micro-climate. It was a work night; we all should\u2019ve been in bed. Instead we were drinking wine and talking about work. The husband was charming to me, by which I mean he laughed at all my jokes. He was tightly wound and overly alert, perhaps because he was not having success with his writing. The wife on the other hand was having success\u2014a lot of success\u2014with her writing.<\/p>\n

She mentioned a short story she\u2019d just written and published.<\/p>\n

\u201cOh, you mean the most recent occasion for your abandoning me and the kids?\u201d asked the very smart, very charming husband.<\/p>\n

The wife had been a monster, monster enough to finish the work. The husband had not.<\/p>\n

This is what female monstrousness looks like: abandoning the kids. Always. The female monster is Doris Lessing leaving her children behind to go live the writer\u2019s life in London. The female monster is Sylvia Plath, whose self-crime was bad enough, but worse still: the children whose nursery she taped off beforehand. Never mind the bread and milk she set out for them, a kind of terrible poem unto itself. She dreamed of eating men like air, but what was truly monstrous was simply leaving her children motherless.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Maybe, as a female writer, you don\u2019t kill yourself, or abandon your children. But you abandon something<\/em>, some nurturing part of yourself. When you finish a book, what lies littered on the ground are small broken things: broken dates, broken promises, broken engagements. Also other, more important forgettings and failures: children\u2019s homework left unchecked, parents left untelephoned, spousal sex unhad. Those things have to get broken for the book to get written.<\/p>\n

Sure, I possess the ordinary monstrousness of a real-life person, the unknowable depths, the suppressed Hyde. But I also have a more visible, quantifiable kind of monstrousness\u2014that of the artist who completes her work. Finishers are always monsters. Woody Allen doesn\u2019t just try to make a film a year; he tries to put out <\/em>a film a year.<\/p>\n

For me the particular monstrousness of completing my work has always closely resembled loneliness: Leaving behind the family, posting up in\u00a0a borrowed cabin or a cheaply bought motel room. If I can\u2019t detach myself entirely, then I\u2019m hiding in my chilly office, wrapped in scarves and fingerless gloves, a fur hat plopped upon my head, going hell-for-leather, just trying to finish<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Because the finishing is the part that makes the artist. The artist must be monster enough not just to start the work, but to complete it. And to commit all the little savageries that lie in between.<\/p>\n

My friend and I had done nothing more monstrous than expecting someone to mind our children while we finished our work. That\u2019s not as bad as rape or even, say, forcing someone to watch while you jerk off into a potted plant. It might sound as though I\u2019m conflating two things\u2014male predators and female finishers\u2014in a troubling way. And I am. Because when women do what needs to be done in order to write or make art, we sometimes feel monstrous. And others are quick to describe us that way.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Hemingway\u2019s girlfriend, the writer Martha Gellhorn, didn\u2019t think the artist needed to be a monster; she thought the monster needed to make himself into an artist. \u201cA man must be a very great genius to make up for being such a loathsome human being.\u201d (Well, I guess she would know.) She\u2019s saying if you\u2019re a really awful person, you are driven to greatness in order to compensate the world for all the awful shit you are going to do to it. In a way, this is a feminist revision of all of art history; a history she turns with a single acid, brilliant line into a morality tale of compensation.<\/p>\n

Either way, the questions remain:<\/p>\n

What is to be done about monsters? Can and should we love their work? Are all ambitious artists monsters? Tiny voice: [Am I a monster?]<\/p>\n

*An earlier version of this article stated that Soon-Yi was a teenager under Woody Allen’s care<\/em><\/p>\n

\n
Claire Dederer<\/a> is the author of the memoir\u00a0<\/em>Love and Trouble. She’s at work on a book about the relationship between bad behavior and good art. <\/em><\/div>\n
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If you enjoyed this essay, we suggest reading \u201cWe Need the Eggs<\/a>,\u201d a conversation between Sheila Heti, David Heti, Zohar Atkin, Noreen Khawaja, and Nathan Goldman, in which they discuss Woody Allen\u2019s Annie Hall<\/i> and one particularly bemusing joke. You can also subscribe<\/a> to The Paris Review<\/i> and receive one year\u2019s worth of issues and complete access to our seventy-two-year archive.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, William Burroughs, Richard Wagner, Sid Vicious, V. S. Naipaul, John Galliano, Norman Mailer, Ezra Pound, Caravaggio, Floyd Mayweather, though if we start listing athletes we\u2019ll never stop. And what about the women? The list immediately becomes much more difficult and tentative: Anne Sexton? Joan Crawford? Sylvia Plath? Does […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1316,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[1780,31790,13553,31787,9651,3115,31788,12259,10844,31789,4027,11613,6877,1437,4919,876,21119,30915,12179,8778,31786,976,3741,2462],"class_list":["post-118348","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-annie-hall","tag-art-monster","tag-bill-cosby","tag-carravaggio","tag-chinatown","tag-ezra-pound","tag-floyd-mayweather","tag-jenny-offill","tag-john-galliano","tag-lead-belly","tag-manhattan","tag-max-ernst","tag-miles-davis","tag-norman-mailer","tag-pablo-picasso","tag-phil-spector","tag-repulsion","tag-richard-wagner","tag-roman-polanski","tag-rosemarys-baby","tag-sid-vicious","tag-v-s-naipaul","tag-william-burroughs","tag-woody-allen"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nWhat Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"They did or said something awful, and made something great. 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