I've never read his stuff, but now think I never can. It boils down to the question in the article title: Can life and art be separated?

This is always a trick, whether it be musicians, filmmakers, or ... well, I was going to write "politicians," but they don't do art.

When it comes to the artists I most admire, I'd rather not know about their personal lives. But when those details come to light, I can't entirely remove them from my future view of the artist's work.

Knowing the things I now know about Naipaul, I don't think I could ever appreciate his books strictly on their literary merits -- which are many, if you go by prizes and critical adulation. The stuff in this article is just sickening to me. What a creep this guy is.

Anyone want to defend him, or tackle the broader question in the Topic Description? It's a kettle of fish.

Ever read Victor Hugo? Or Patrick O'Brian?

I made the mistake of reading the recent Peter Sellers biography, but I still like his films.

In terms of the broader question, I wrote about this on my blog a while back. Although it focuses primarily on musicians, and not authors, I think I'd still hold to the broader opinions expressed here.

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In a recent conversation a friend mentioned that she had difficulty listening to a particular musician (someone whose music she liked and admired) because of the violence and generally destructive behavior that characterized his life. And I thought about that. It's hardly a new phenomenon. And while I understand the reaction to some extent, I don't think I agree with it.

It's a bit of a cliche, but artists are known for being selfish, self-destructive (and other-destructive) assholes. I don't know if I would go quite so far, but I suspect that some would even argue that selfishness and a massive ego are necessary preconditions to producing great art. And although they exist, it's unusual to find great artists who are also models of Christian grace and charity. And so the bottom line for me is that I can appreciate the art made by the asshole geniuses while recognizing that I wouldn't necessarily want to spend a lot of time with the artists.

Not that horrid behavior is ever justified, but I also find that I have great sympathy for artists who were fairly miserable human beings. The jazz pianist Bill Evans was a heroin addict who lied and cheated to keep his habit alive. He used to inject his wife, for God's sake, and not surprisingly she developed her own habit, which led to her suicide at a young age. At one point in the late '50s Evans was strung out, broke, and his wife had left him. The electricity and heat had been turned off in his apartment because he was unable to pay his bills. He was at rock bottom. And he went into the studio with no greater motivation than to earn some cash to keep his habit alive, sat down at the piano, and improvised for seven minutes while the tape rolled and ended up with something called "Peace Piece," one of the most moving, hymnlike, and transparently beautiful pieces of music I've ever heard. And I love him for that.

Who can understand this? Where does that come from? The nice, neat theological explanation is that it's common grace, and that God bestows his gifts on the righteous and the unrighteous alike. But the explanation that I prefer is that it's a miracle, a little shard of God's goodness and beauty that shines forth all the more starkly when surrounded by the muck and the mire.

I don't think I would have liked Bill Evans. I surely wouldn't have liked Miles Davis. Or Mozart. Or Gauguin. I don't excuse their often horrendous behavior. But they created great art. And I've never reached the point where the weight of their personal sins offsets the glory of their art. I might have felt differently if I was married to one of them. But it's all a matter of degrees anyway. Some are more broken than others, but we're all broken. The miracle is that incredible beauty shines forth from the cracks.

Good points all around, but I come back to the question of timing: Did you know about these artists' personal lives before you read/listened to/developed an appreciation for their work, or did that come after you were already hooked?

That interplay is rarely so clear cut. Maybe the answer isn't as important as I think it is.

Andy, if your idea of Mozart's personal life comes from Amadeus, please give him a fair shake and try a good biography. I like the one by Maynard Solomon, but there are probably some others. Mozart certainly possessed a bawdy sense of humor, but he was hardly the self-absorbed sot portrayed in the film.

I think it's perfectly legitimate to declare that you're not interested in an artist's work because you don't care for the kind of person he was. You might miss out on some great art that way, but that's your choice. On the other hand, I think it's common for many people -- not just artists -- to be able to bring a measure of discipline and beauty to our work that we have trouble attaining in other areas of our lives. Art might be the one place where the artist succeeds in being the person he aspires to be.

I don't think this can be answered in a definitive matter. It depends. I think it's rarely clearcut, either from the timing standpoint or from the heinous behavior standpoint. And the weaknesses/propensities toward sin of the individual appreciators/consumers of art have to be considered as well.

Your question is a variation on Francis Schaeffer's magic four quadrants: good art and good message, bad art and good message, good art and bad message, and bad art and bad message. Aside from the fact that "bad" and "good" art beg the question (this is precisely what those magic quadrants are supposed to help us figure out), "bad" and "good" messages (and "bad" and "good" creators/messengers) are rarely so starkly identifiable.

I only know two things. People are complex. And they sin. Identifying a hierarchy of heinousness may be a matter of great concern for God, and may in fact be a matter of great concern to me if I have to personally interact with particular artists, but such concepts have little to no bearing on my appreciation of their work. The only time when I think such concerns might be relevant are when I'm asked to spend money on a work of art created by a Certified Jerk™, and when I may legitimately decide that I don't want my hard-earned bucks to support said CJ. There's no law that says we have to support people we genuinely dislike. However, I think it's also important to realize that we support sin, and sinners, everytime we spend a buck, whether that buck goes toward a V.S. Naipaul book or to fill our gas tank. Where do you draw the line? Do we presume that the sins of artists, about which we may actually know something, are more heinous than those of the more anonymous CEO of Exxon? I doubt it.

In general I still believe that works of art have to stand alone, as their own entities. But rather than looking at the sins of the artists, I'm more interested in looking at how sin affects my own life. I need to acknowledge my own weaknesses and propensities toward sin. If I have struggled with substance abuse issues in my life, then maybe I should avoid works of art that celebrate or glorify substance abuse. If I have struggled to remain sexually faithful to my spouse, then maybe I shouldn't watch Unfaithful, or read John Updike's Rabbit novels. These are just common-sense practices that I would hope we would all adopt as Christians. But I don't think we can or should make hard and fast rules about these things. Artists are jerks, to a greater or lesser degree. Appreciators of art are jerks, to a greater or lesser degree. Let him who is without sin boycott the bookstore. But let him who knows he is a sinner also be careful about the influences he allows into his life. I'd rather approach it from that standpoint rather than trying to arbitrarily fix some sort of sin threshhold for artists that I will not pass beyond.

What Andy said....

NB.....If we kill the messenger, I think we miss the message. That said; if the message doesn't resonate with me, I don't feel obligated to spend time with it. I very much want people, especially artists to be good, kind, enlightened, spiritual, often they are not.

The more an artists work resonates with me. The less likely I am to spend time on their personal short comings.

So do you all disagree with Bottum's conclusion to his article?

Here's the arrogance: It's a grand literary joke on all his readers, for we gave Naipaul our admiration, and he turns out to have been someone we wouldn't have touched with a barge pole. And here's the insecurity: He authorized Patrick French's biography in a desperate concluding bid to make himself memorable by turning his life into something with the shape of a novel.

Unfortunately, this novelistic life injures the actual novels from which we get any desire to remember the man. Surely he sees that, after having all this forced down our throats, we can no longer read A Bend in the River or A House for Mr. Biswas in the way we used to? Surely he understands that his semi-autobiographical stories--The Enigma of Arrival, for instance, and Miguel Street--are now ruined for us? Surely he knows that it has become much harder to laugh at the jokes in such comic works as The Mystic Masseur and The Suffrage of Elvira?

Perhaps, in some abstract sense, a novel is an independent thing, with the person who wrote it utterly beside the point. But in the real world of reading, when we know certain facts about a writer, we read them into the story and find them buried there. Books are responsible for their authors; in a kind of child labor, they carry their fathers on their backs. And the works of V. S. Naipaul are now so weighted down they feel like blocks of lead.

I'm not familiar enough with Naipaul's works to follow the connections that Bottum is making in his review, but again, in my opinion, whatever high crimes Naipaul has or has not committed would not be relevant in my evaluation of the literary merits of his novels. We don't judge the construction of a house to be shoddy because the construction workers might have been drug-addicted pedophiles. We judge the house to be shoddy if it is made of inferior materials. And a novel should be judged on its literary merits, an album on its musical merits, etc., and not because the person who created it was a bottom-feeding carp that, as Bottom notes, "we wouldn't touch with a barge pole." The number of great artists who have been genuinely lousy human beings is almost beyond counting, and I don't particularly want to try. Just for starters, the sheer number of adulterers is enough to discount two-thirds of the authors who are foisted off in the Great Books classes. That's too bad for them, and I pray that they repented, and that God had mercy on them. They still wrote great books. So no, I don't buy Bottum's conclusion at all.

I think this is well put. We spiral our way into texts, their meanings shift over time and experience. But I would add that it is not just the author that is shifting, as my own moral location is constantly moving. I am always in a kind of dance with an author - I change over time and so do they. I just think of the "Naipaul encounter" as a kind of tradition history. Yes, now the books are weighted, but that doesn't mean I shouldn't make the effort to pick them up if there is something of value to be discerned among them.

I hate the sadness that comes from finding out something beautiful was created by someone very ugly. But there is something instructive in that possibility. The child labor metaphor is very apt.

I've appreciated everyone's feedback and don't mean to perpetuate this thread just for the sake of ... perpetuating it, but I received a portion of the Sunday Washington Post today and came across Michael Dirda's review of the Naipul biography, which I thought might be of interest:

Certainly, Naipaul deserves his acclaim -- as a writer. His prose is rightly esteemed for its simplicity, beauty and power; his vision of the world duly praised (or vilified) for its fierce honesty. But what of the private man? That's another matter.

As Patrick French's nuanced and generous but often dispiriting biography shows, there's not much to like or praise about V.S. Naipaul as a human being. He starts life as a twerp, then fairly quickly becomes a jerk and ends up an old sourpuss. The best overall epithet for him is infantile -- though one shouldn't neglect the claims of such adjectives as whiney, narcissistic, insulting, needy, callous, impolite, cruel, vengeful, indecisive, miserly, exploitative, snobbish, sadistic, self-pitying and ungrateful. Of course, his is, to some extent, the modern artistic sensibility writ very, very large. But even our favorite monsters and divas -- Picasso, Waugh, Callas, Brando -- are never as smarmy and nasty as Naipaul. He can make a spoiled 3-year-old look mature.

Chris Orr discusses a Times review of the biography:

As reviewer Dwight Garner concludes, "You will finish The World Is What It Is wishing to reread Mr. Naipaul’s best books immediately. You will also be glad he is not your friend, neighbor, sibling, landlord or barista."

The NY Times has selected the Naipul biography as one of the 10 best books of the year.