I began reading the enormous biography on Virginia Woolf by James King because she is so much applauded and I wanted to find a way of admiring her as much as I admire her friend Katherine Mansfield, or the writer Jane Bowles, two women and also writers, who I am sure could drive people crazy, especially Jane, but about whom I’ve never heard too much in the way of bad things. I’ve felt for a long time that we don’t challenge the status quo enough so we MUST like Jane Austen who wrote the most boring English class stuff on earth, we must like Roald Dahl who I sense might have been a tyrant and has one badly destroyed daughter, we must think Shakespeare is the utter peak of literary genius, who wrote at a time when there was little competition, or Chekov, the greatest short story writer even known ….oh yeah? And so it goes on. One of the questions that interests me about literature and writers, or artists, is if they are brilliant at what they do, should we care if they are also lousy and unkind people. I suspect most of us who consider this question would say no, only the art matters. I say the opposite. I think it matters. I think that getting rid of the awful H.P. Lovecraft as a top symbol of the Sci-fi-horror genre of fiction a year or so back because of his sickening racism was the exact right thing to do.
If all the writers and artists some of us have been taught to admire were the only ones available to us, I wouldn’t be able to have these thoughts, and I’d just knuckle down and accept the ridiculous proposition that Chekov was the blah blah blah, but that’s not how it is. There are a huge number of wonderfully inspired and exciting writers and artists we can appreciate, and my feeling is we should be supporting and talking about terrific writers who have led — not blameless because that’s impossible, and anyway would be boring itself —but ordinarily kind and thoughtful lives while they were producing fabulous art and literature.
So, I’ve reached a point in the Virginia Woolf biography just when I was developing a smidgen of empathy for the woman where James King writes:- ‘Within her circle, Virginia Woolf had the reputation of being a mischief-maker.’ I guess if you both love and hate your friends, you could easily spread mischief, but it certainly makes cry ‘who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf’ come to life.
