True Crime

Does writing about monsters make us bad people? Or, in fact, do we have to be bad people to some extent to write about monsters?

In Claire' Dederer’s Monsters, she asks the particularly timely question: What do we do with art by bad people? Timely in part because in a pre-social media age, little was known or at least publicly known about the lives of artists unless they were notorious or written about later in biographies or memoirs.

In a social media age, the democratisation of publishing is such that in principle, pretty much anybody can jump online and speak out. There is the rise of Cancel or Accountability Culture (depending on your preference) and a cultural shift away from tolerating what many people would consider to be bad or monstrous behaviour, especially by those in positions of power and privilege.

In some sense, it’s quite easy to disavow the work of bad people. The indiscretions of Roman Polanski have been well known for some time and it’s put me off watching his films. (At least knowingly, I watched Chinatown by accident once). Where Dederer’s book is more interesting is on the artists where we’ve created an intense personal connection, the figurative art relationship is a key part of our own self-identification and they’re work, to some extent, has become a part of us.

How we assuage this guilt? How do we rid ourselves of what we’ve taken from them? To some extent, it can feel too late to abandon them now. Once you’ve become a cannibal and digested the flesh, it has become a part of you. Almost all of my favourite authors are or were bad people.

Sylvia Plath claimed Ted Hughes domestically abused her and he was certainly a philanderer. Saul Bellow was bad-tempered, known to treat his (many) wives badly and whose last words were, was I a man or a jerk?

Norman Mailer stabbed his ex-wife. Virginia Woolf was a classist snob. Doris Lessing abandoned her children. On seeing a five-year-old on acid, Joan Didion’s response was to consider it ‘gold’. ‘You live for moments like that if you're doing a piece.’

A sad and timely reminder is the case of Cormac McCarthy. A couple weeks okay when I was surveying my mind for great authors who weren’t dickheads, McCarthy’s name was on the list. Then, a Vanity Fair article was published claiming that McCarthy had basically groomed an underage girl and then conducted an extra-martial affair with her.

It is, a moral degeneration that leads some writers to find ‘gold’ like this, or does working on such stories disfigure the moral perceptions of a person? Is it that many writers are just bad people? Or are we all bad people but writer’s private lives are more open to scrutiny? The thought of committing moral transgressions in order to repent and cleanse the soul through transcendent art has a Rasputin-like feel about it. Kant believed that engaging in immoral practices would ‘coarsen’ the soul. One thought-experiment is to imagine AI child pornography in which no actual children are harmed. Kant’s response would be that the person harmed is the observer themselves.

The moral quandary Truman Capote found himself in when writing the ‘non-fiction book of the decade’ and pioneering the genre of True Crime as we know it is brilliantly dramatised in the film Capote (2005) which includes an academy-award winning turn from the late Philip Seymour Hoffman as the diminutive author with a giant reputation.

Having seen a New York Times article on the cold-blooded murder of a farming family in Arkansas, Capote took it upon himself to put his gossipy, socialite wits to good use and immerse himself in the local community as well as befriend the murderers as they waited on death row. Capote offered gifts and compliments to one of the killers–Perry Smith–and formed a close relationship but offered no legal support or help with the legal defence. He knew the book he had on his hands was a sensation but that without the execution of the murderers, he wouldn’t have an ending. Some of the more disturbing questions are elucidated here.

In the end, Capote got what he wanted. The book had been hailed as a classic and sold more than 100 million copies worldwide. Beyond a few brief articles and an abortive screenplay, Capote never wrote again and died of alcoholism some years later. Staring into the abyss for so long had obviously taken it’s toll on the author. In Kantian terms, he had coarsened his soul.

In his memoir, Experience, Martin Amis claimed, ‘Style is morality: morality detailed, configured, intensified.’ In the sense that Nabokov’s Lolita is a great work. In lesser hands, the premise of a high-minded, predatory paedophile’s confession could be lurid, licentious and even pornographic. Given Nabokov’s style–and by this I mean his style of writing in the round–not just on a sentence level, but the composition as a whole and the sensibility of the author, the work becomes something profoundly moral.

Yet, as Nabokov’s powers began to wane, his other explorations of paedophilia lack the same skill and distance of Lolita. The recurrence of what seems like an obsession poses questions as to whether Nabokov was hiding in plain site, or trying to enact some kind of fantasy in public, or simply returning to a subject that had brought him his greatest success. It is undeniable, though, that as the style wanes, the work seems more immoral.

One of the most interesting suggestions in Monsters when the author worries, if she’s monstrous enough to be an artist? Dederer cites selfishness as a necessary ingredient. But also that sharing some of the darker sides of human conduct that leads to a ‘sneaking suspicion of our own badness. It lies at the heart of our fascination with people who do awful things.’ There can be something that ‘chimes’ with our ‘awfulness’, something we recognise in ourselves that’s also ‘horrified’ by that recognition before denouncing it.

Art that treads this moral tightrope is often the most daring, exciting, provocative and dangerous. It teaches us the most about ourselves, beyond the polite fictions of everyday social life and approved narratives. This, is perhaps why some writers with a bad side have an edge: they have a dark territory to explore and the monstrous selfishness to execute the work.

As the Los Angeles Times book critic David L. Ulin has argued, ‘Art is most effective when it surprises us, leading to affinities, empathies, we might not otherwise allow,’

He went on to say:

Perhaps the most famous contemporary example of this is Humbert Humbert, the pedophilic narrator of Vladimir Nabokov’s ‘Lolita,’ who literally seduces us with his voice. It is only when we look up from the page that we realize with whom we’ve identified — and the shock is in our recognition of his terrible humanity, which renders him as (yes) a lot like us.

Is Nabokov’s novel morally offensive? Patently, it is not. We live in a universe of treacherous choices, of corruption and degradation on both the individual and the collective level. To pretend otherwise is the true moral offense, to write as if it were possible to reduce the nuance, the ambiguity, of experience to stark shades of black and white.

At its best, this is what the genre of True Crime does. It examines some of the most extreme moral indiscretions of humanity and finds some kind of recognition in the terrible humanity. These monsters are not safely and evilly extant from the rest of us, they are us to some degree, just more broken, more fallible, more human.

Often, like the word of Gordon Burn, the tabloid narratives of a salacious or evil individual is shattered to reveal the cultural antecedents to some despicable crimes. Yes, Peter Sutcliffe did barbaric things and was mentally ill, but his sickness was fostered in a culture of misogyny that Burn painstakingly reveals.

Many works, especially from the feminist sub-canon of the genre, aim to restore a sense of agency and dignity the victims of crime. The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper by Hallie Rubenhold examines the lives of five women believed to have been killed by Jack The Ripper. Savage Appetites by Rachel Monroe critiques women’s fascination with true crime whilst simultaneously exploring four crimes by female criminals. While Somebody's Mother, Somebody's Daughter redresses the imbalance of Gordon Burn’s book on Peter Sutcliffe by privileging the stories of the victims of the man’s crimes.

In Cold Blood (an apt title, given that it was also written in cold blood) is a great work, but rather like scientific knowledge gained via Nazi science or the more lax research standards of early psychology, it’s methods wouldn’t stand by today. The best of today’s true crime avoids the lurid prurience of some of the more gleefully pornographic examples of the genre where failures of style become failures of morality.

But there is something, I think, in being aware of your inner monster in knowing and honest and courageous enough to explore your own failings and not believe that you’re some kind of exemplary human being, even if you are a lauded artist–possibly especially if you’re a lauded artist. Conversely, I think that kind of self-delusion is often what leads people to make mistakes and believe in their own superiority.