fpb

Loathsome greatness

Feb 17, 2012 17:39

To me, the existence of great geniuses - great artists - who are also wholly despicable human beings is a real problem. Ernest Hemingway, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Berthold Brecht, Richard Wagner, Benvenuto Cellini - despicable, exploitative, self-satisfied creatures, each of them, born to bring ruin to those who were wrong-headed enough to trust them, born to use and abandon - people any one of us would cross the road to avoid. I am not speaking merely of doubtful or damaged people, or people who occasionally did something wrong, but people who were consistently, unacceptably wrong. Shelley's monstrous selfishness caused at least one suicide, and would probably have cost more lives had he not been lost at sea. Reading Hemingway's life leaves one somewhat queasy - what with the deliberate drunkenness, the constant nastiness even towards people who were supposed to be friends and allies, and the chain of wives, there is a sense of being blown along a wind of mingled contempt and inebriation, and in the end there is nothing surprising about the sentence he himself passed on his life with a shotgun. The odiousness of Berthold Brecht is by now so well known that one has to remind oneself that he is remembered not for being a monster, but for being a truly great poet and playwright. Benvenuto Cellini, the author of some of the finest statuary and gold and silver-smithing in the Renaissance, wrote a book of memoirs that might well be subtitled: "The self-invention of a vicious, mendacious, woman-beating braggart." Richard Wagner managed to find a woman who sublimated her own cruelty and power-thirst into a masochistic abasement before his genius, and left his first wife for her; which is why he did not leave quite such a path of ruined lives as Hemingway or Shelley. The only problem with this is that, as in the other cases I mentioned, his genius was real. Even those who hate Wagner will admit that we are not the poorer for the Prelude to the Master Singers, the Entrance of the Gods into Walhalla, or Wotan's farewell to Bruenhilde. And we would not be without Shelley's verses, Satanistic though they are; or without "Mother Courage and her Children"; or without "The Old Man and the Sea". Even Cellini's memoirs, whose attitude and truthfulness I described above, are nonetheless a classic of the Italian language; as for his proper work, even Florence, beautiful though she is, is improved by the presence of his Perseus.

This is a problem for me because in my view great art cannot exist without imaginative generosity, without a real understanding and liking for people. Where does one find these things in the lives of the men I mentioned?

unanswered question, morality, thoughts

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