opinion
Brian White lives in south Indre with his wife, too many moles and not enough guitars undesirable stakes - a Nazi before there were Nazis. How about the art world? Caravaggio was the most famous painter of his time, his skill in contrasting light and shade is still studied today. But the guy himself was a thug. Caravaggio was a violent drunk who viciously attacked numerous people and killed at least one in a fight. (His paintings do feature a disturbing number of beheadings – the clues were there, people). So, genius or sociopath?
Chapter and Worse F
or me, understanding other people’s circumstances before judging them putting oneself in their shoes – is a lesson best taught by great fiction. When a novel drops us into the push-and-pull of another life, we ponder our own response. What would I have done? This can - and should – be unsettling. Among my long list of favourites, two “American Pastoral” and “The Human Stain” - are the work of Philip Roth. Despite admiring his awesome power on the page, I knew little about Mr Roth himself. However, a new biography of the author, who died in 2018, examines his shocking misogyny and ‘predatory’ behaviour. The man was a nightmare to live with. The revelations prompted one British tabloid (have a guess) to wonder if, in the age of the #MeToo movement, his work should be ‘cancelled’. I took this to mean some kind of posthumous blacklist an absurd suggestion, floated simply to provoke a response. Nonetheless it prompts the question: Should it matter when an artist is shown to be less attractive than the work they create? A couple of years ago I wittered on in these pages about Frank Sinatra, having read an enthralling profile by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan. It wasn’t pretty. The singer’s entanglement with, let’s call them ‘family guys’, was far more extensive than I had imagined and his
scarily vindictive nature was laid bare. True, he could be heroically generous, but not if you crossed him.
Philip Roth aside, the literary Hall of Fame is a cavalcade of weirdos: fascists, serial philanderers, blackmailers etc. I grant you, not many can match Mary Shelley, (whose ‘Frankenstein’ was less bizarre than her private life), or Norman Mailer, who rather scuppered his effort to become the mayor of New York City when he stabbed his wife at a fundraising dinner. But there are plenty more not far behind. We humans are contrary, shot through with high ideals and low skulduggery. Complex lives of impressive achievement will inevitably feature a level of contradiction and cannot be reduced to mere caricature: hero or villain? Tick one box only.
Now, I’m not naïve enough to expect probity in the famous; talent and integrity are infrequent bedfellows, only one of Our opinion of an artist is often bruised them being when we look beneath the required for lasting carefully contrived image I’m not naïve enough to fame. However, the but it’s normally their reality was in such expect probity in the families who are the real violent conflict with famous; talent and integrity collateral damage. Back in the hip, ‘Ol’ Blue the 1940s, when Henry are infrequent bedfellows Eyes’ image that Mr Fonda was an A-list Sinatra projected, it Hollywood star - and hence was some time before I could listen to him rarely at home - his young daughter Jane breezing through “April In Paris” again. A watched him on TV playing the head of a talented guy, no question, but still.... loving household. “It must be wonderful to Maybe I’m being inconsistent. I’ve been have a Daddy like that”, she told devoted to music all my life, much of it her mother. created by as cheerful a bunch of I recall a long-ago BBC documentary degenerates as ever blinked. The most about Groucho Marx in which his son exhilarating concert performances I ever described the great comedian as a ‘cold witnessed, especially back in the 70s fish’. In poignant contrast to the muchwere they pharmaceutically assisted? Like a small branch of Boots the chemist, loved public persona, he portrayed his probably. Did that bother me? Not a jot. father as a detached and remote man who Because unlike Mr Sinatra, what I knew of struggled to show emotion with his those bands led me to expect nothing else. children. Reviewing the programme, TV Seeing Led Zeppelin at glorious full tilt in critic Herbert Kretzmer eloquently 1972 didn’t bring to my mind terms like assessed Groucho in a way equally ‘abstinence’ and ‘self-denial’. applicable to so many. “A cold fish he may have been,” wrote Mr Kretzmer, adding, Even the rarefied realm of classical music “but what ripples he made when has its share of lowlifes, although few surpassed Richard Wagner in the he swam”.
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