Sarah Harte: Should we discard works of artists accused of unthinkable things?

Last week, a woman filed three civil lawsuits in the States accusing the hugely popular fantasy novelist Neil Gaiman of repeatedly sexually assaulting her. Former nanny to the Gaiman family, Scarlett Pavlovich was 22 and homeless when Amanda Palmer, Gaiman’s estranged wife, befriended her on a beach. Pavlovich has accused Palmer, a writer and singer who appeared to have an intense relationship with her own fans, of “procuring and presenting” Pavlovich to Gaiman for abuse. Over the weekend, Palmer categorically denied the allegations.

In January, an incendiary magazine profile detailed allegations of abuse against Gaiman from eight women, including five fans, one of whom was eighteen. Since then, a ninth woman has reportedly stepped forward.

The 64-year-old Gaiman has sold over 50 million copies of his books, many of which have been adapted for film and television although several of Gaiman’s projects have now been cancelled or paused, including those with Disney and Netflix.

Apparently, many of his fans were women, which is unsurprising given the gender gap in fiction reading with more women reading short stories and novels than men.

In an era of mob justice on the web, we have become too casual about proof. The allegations against Gaiman and Palmer are unproven and, therefore, remain in the realm of accusation. Gaiman has released a statement saying that all his past sexual relationships were consensual and that he is “still learning.” Yet, whatever the outcome of the court cases, it seems likely that Gaiman’s legacy will be permanently tarnished.

Gaiman geeks are in turmoil, and some are wondering whether they can continue to love his art and not him. This might seem silly to people who don’t read fiction, but books can be dear friends to fiction lovers

They clarify something you didn’t understand and help you understand your own story. Sometimes, you feel like you’ve entered into an intimate relationship with an author’s characters and, therefore, the author.

As Robert Thacker, biographer of the late and now controversial writer Alice Munro, said in an interview last month, “arguments about betrayal probably have something to do with how she was sanctified.” 

I was mid-way through one of Nobel laureate Munro’s collections for the umpteenth time when the allegations surrounding her broke, and I immediately set her book aside. It returned to me how I had previously preached that you had to separate the art from the artist. If you didn’t get that, you were a rube. Ah, yes, the certainty of youth. I still, broadly speaking, believe that, but I wasn’t alone in being taken aback. Since the story broke, there are plenty of photos online of Munro’s books being jettisoned in recycling bins.

Munro’s second husband (not the biological father of her children), Gerald Fremlin, a civil servant and paedophile, abused her young daughter Andrea from the age of nine.

It was only at 25 that Andrea confided in her mother about the abuse. Although Munro briefly left her husband, she returned to him, staying with him until he died. Fremlin’s grotesque response was to claim that the child had seduced him. He wrote in a letter, “It is my contention that Andrea invaded my bedroom for sexual adventure. If she were in fact afraid, she could have left at any time.” 

It’s hard to get your head around the horror. Still, how many people in Ireland disclosed abuse and weren’t believed? 

We were adept in this country at pretending things weren’t what they were. In our close-knit communities, we knew about many open secrets, including the sexual abuse of children.

The cost of that silence has been incalculable, as it was in the Munro family, who did what many Irish people did: they limped on, more or less refusing to confront the reality of what had happened. Andrea was left tossing in the wind, ending her relationship with her mother.

Only later, when Munro wrote about how lucky she was to have met Gerald Fremlin in a magazine profile, did Andrea snap and go to the police. When Fremlin was arrested, Munro called her daughter a liar. Nonetheless, Fremlin was ultimately sentenced for indecent assault and sentenced to probation for two years.

However, it was effectively ignored by both the Canadian media and Robert Thacker, Munro’s biographer and a professor of English and Canadian studies, who also said last month that he considered the abuse “a family matter”. 

It wasn’t just in Catholic Ireland that abuse was shoved under the carpet or where the public face of the family was prioritised over the needs of children

It’s less likely to happen now because, culturally, we are more willing now to acknowledge abuse, incest, and rape and to speak more freely about it. The social imperative to keep such things private has waned; by any metric, that’s progress.

I’m sure survivors of sexual abuse must watch this newfound receptiveness to believing victims and feel doubly wronged. Andrea wrote that she “wanted … some record of the truth, some public proof that I hadn’t deserved what had happened to me.” 

Munro’s stories reveal much about the human heart. Troublingly, one of her short stories, Vandals, depicts a woman who knew her partner was a paedophile who had sexually abused a neighbour’s children but refused to act. Some see this as an admission of failure by Munro, but an alternative view is that Munro failed to protect her daughter and cynically mined the experience for her work, profiting from it.

Should the allegations about Gaiman and Palmer be proven, and I’m not saying they will, an obvious link between Palmer and Munro would be how some women act to harm other women in the service of their male partner's toxic desires.

Meanwhile, Munro’s short story collection still winks at me untouched from the side table by my bed. It’s hard to see the stories as just stories, but should we really discard the art of artists who did unthinkable things?

Oscar Wilde, who was effectively cancelled, wrote that art and ethics belonged in “absolutely distinct and separate” spheres, but I guess you could say he had skin in the game.

I’m short of a categorical answer except to say that in the paradox of life, good people do bad things, and bad people make good art. To loop back to Terry Prone’s article, we are left with a question posed by the Stoic philosopher Seneca: “None of those who have been raised to a loftier height by riches and honours is great. Why, then, does he seem great to you?”