Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, by Claire Dederer (Knopf, 273 pages)
In 2017, the year that the world learned about the sexual predation of Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, Claire Dederer published an essay in The Paris Review in which she tried to work out her feelings about bad men and good art.
Dederer came to the topic not through Weinstein, but through another filmmaker, Roman Polanski, who repulsed her because he had been accused of raping a 13-year-old girl. Polanski’s monstrousness, Dederer wrote then, 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.”
Dederer is not the first to squirm uncomfortably in this particular space. The question of what we should do with the art of problematic people has come up regularly in recent years, and nobody seems to have a good answer. Dederer didn’t in her Paris Review essay, but she attempts to craft one in Monsters, A Fan’s Dilemma, an elaboration of the ideas put forth in that essay.
You could read just the essay and have a good grasp of the book, but then you’d miss out on the delightful interior wrestling match in which Dederer engages as she tries to reconcile her desire to be “a virtuous consumer” and “a demonstrably good feminist” while consuming the work of troublesome artists. These are mostly men — Polanski, and Woody Allen, and Bill Cosby, and Michael Jackson, and numerous others, dead and alive, who either have been exposed for beastly behavior in recent years, or who have had old behavior newly scrutinized in the light of new standards of conduct. (Polarization alert: She also paints former President Donald Trump and Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh with the broad brush of monsters.)
After Weinstein, the floodgates opened, Dederer writes: “A rock had been turned over and revealed a bunch of sex pests, scuttling around in the newly bright light.” The men “did or said something awful, and made something great. The awful thing disrupts the great work; we can’t watch or listen to the great work without remembering the awful thing.”
Dederer turns over a few rocks of her own; unless you’ve paid close attention to the personal lives of some of these men, you may know their names and their contributions to art but nothing of their personal behavior. Be prepared for the pedestals of Pablo Picasso, the Italian painter Caravaggio, composer Richard Wagner, jazz trumpeter Miles Davis and many others to crash down, as Dederer, who lives on a houseboat in Seattle, muses about her existential dilemma.
In the hands of a less capable writer this could get sort of tiresome after a few chapters. But Dederer is like a dinner guest you don’t want to stop talking because she’s so well-read and interesting (you will likely, like me, come away with a list of other books you want to read) and her writing is delightful and fresh. (She describes one person as looking like “a character from a children’s book about plucky pioneers caught in a blizzard.”)
Dederer’s challenge in Monsters was not in the prose or the thinking, but in stretching an essay to book length, and she does this in part by means of a dubious analogy — whether we are all monsters in our own way. This was how she ended the Paris Review piece: “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?]”
Her principal analogy to the everyday monster is that of the female artist who abandons her children to pursue her calling … not necessarily literally, although that has certainly been done.
“The idea of what constitutes abandonment exists on a continuum,” she writes. That continuum includes shutting the studio door to a child, letting another parent do all the child care, putting a child in day care, going out of town for work for days, weeks or months at a time, and so forth. “Please note that none of these behaviors count as abandonment if practiced by men,” she says. “This is extra-true if the men in question are artists.”
Society excused men-monsters for a long time if they were artists and even more so if they were geniuses, Dederer says. In particular, we’ve given a pass to abusive geniuses like Hemingway or Picasso by giving them the ultimate creative license: license to have demons.
Big monsters have equally big demons; the consumers of art have their own, smaller devils that emerge when we sit in judgment on others. For instance, “When you’re 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. … The transmission of our virtue feels extremely important and strangely exciting.”
The difference between Roman Polanski’s sins and Dederer’s (she confesses to worrying whether she’d made the right decisions about child care even now that her children are grown) is vast, and to tenuously connect them Dederer follows a chaotic path. Her conclusions are likewise unkempt, but still ultimately satisfying.
“The heart wants what it wants,” Woody Allen famously said in excusing his relationship with Soon-Yi Previn. Put another way, the heart loves what it loves, and this also applies to art, Dederer says.
“Critical thought must bow its knee to love of the work — if something moves us, whoever we are, we must give that something at least a small degree of fealty.” That is, after all, what we do with our families, which are the “unchosen monsters” that we love. A
