Perverse Separation

Should the lives of writers influence the reception of their work?

- Mukul Kesavan

ANYONE who argues that an artist’s life is relevant to the appreciation of their art, has a mountain to climb because in most fields of work, the morals and life choices of the worker have no obvious connection to the quality of their work.

Our assessment of a surgeon who specialises in knee replacements will depend on his success rate in getting people to walk easily again. Should it come to light that he is a wife beater, it won’t materially affect his professional rating as a knee surgeon. The infamy that comes with such a reputation might persuade some patients to look elsewhere for their surgeries, but they would concede that their choice was based on personal revulsion, not because they felt his history of domestic violence compromised his surgical skill.

As a rule, then, the work of a peasant, a pilot, a delivery man, a civil engineer and a rocket scientist, will be unaffected by, say, unorthodox or even criminal sexual preferences. A diamond cutter’s skill in faceting rough diamonds will not be retrospectively revised when his nocturnal vocation as a serial killer comes to light.

Why, then, should an artist’s work be retrospectively compromised by revelations about his or her personal life? The current example of such a devaluation is Alice Munro. Her daughter, Andrea Skinner, published an article after Munro’s death, detailing her mother’s tolerance for her second husband’s paedophilia even after it was brought to her notice that he had raped Skinner at the age of nine. This scandalised her admirers and the literary world.