Contrary to what the Greek philosophers established, and the romantic poets perversely exalted, love is not only related to the admiration we feel for beautiful and candid things (and people). On the contrary, we often discover or turn to love when we become attached to abject and sordid beings who represent the furthest thing from our upright morals. Lately, I have read two books that address this apparent flaw with varying success: Monsters, a fan's dilemma, by writer Claire Dederer (Sceptre), and The Best Minds: a story of friendship, madness, and the tragedy of good intentions (Penguin), by the great chronicler Jonathan Rosen. The first focuses on the perennial question of how to value the works of notoriously abusive male artists, while the second explains the author's own friendship with a famous schizophrenic who ended up murdering his wife.
The grace of Dederer's book is that it never fully answers the original question, starting with the fact that the very question it addresses is philosophically absurd; namely, we can separate (of course!) the work from its author, for the simple reason that they are already separate entities. It is because of this fundamental split that we can calmly admire a Polanski film despite knowing that the Yankee director slept with a thirteen-year-old girl. The book is graceful, however, because in wanting to reinterpret the work of Picasso or Woody Allen in the shadow of #Metoo, Dederer reflects quite well on our unhealthy tendency to look for flaws in the biographies of others to discredit them in toto and thus save our conscience. In turn, despite defining herself as a feminist, she ends up admitting that our way of loving is always somewhat imperfect and, therefore, necessarily clumsy.
Monsters is a book where art is analyzed in a rather banal way, but it gains weight in a present where, contrary to the cliché of liquid morality, most new religions demand us to have an immaculate conduct since we are babies, often denying us the only way to improve morality: namely, screwing up. Evidently, there is an enormous distance between morally hurting someone you love and treating women as Richard Wagner did, but it's funny that Dederer ends a book that wants to be critical of men by flagellating herself in a dreadful and purist way, simply because she is a white, middle-class feminist (a slave morality that, by the way, is a perfect entry point to machismo). Fortunately, I was able to overcome the book by reading The Best Minds, a text happily opposed by its sense of journalistic rigor that has a major philosophical interest.
Most new religions demand us to have an immaculate conduct since we are babies, often denying us the only way to improve morality: namely, screwing up.Rosen, one of the top chroniclers of his generation, explains the life of Michael B. Laudor, a schizophrenia patient who –in the mid-nineties– became famous for having graduated from Yale Law School in just three years, a fact for which he became one of the first activists in the United States for the inclusion of the mentally ill in working and daily life. His work was cut short when a few years later, in a fit of madness, he stabbed his fiancée (pregnant) Caroline Costello. These are the known facts: Rosen pokes his nose into the matter, first and foremost, to remember how he grew up alongside his friend, one of the brightest minds he has known, and also how the culture of his time (postmodernism, psychoanalysis, and the institutionalization of the sick in hospital prisons, mainly) unsuccessfully tried to incorporate schizophrenics into life.
Aside from a historical and journalistic work of the first order, Rosen also tells us the story of one of his best friends, of a lost intellect who –to survive himself– needed much less theory and much more psychological-medical care. The author does not exempt Laudor from having committed a crime; he simply explains the path that led him to cause harm and focuses on a society that ignored (and still disparages) madness as an equivalent of violence. The final chapters of the book, when the author sees his friend again twenty-five years after the crime, are first-rate prose. The two colleagues, abstracted from everything that happened (Laudor believed his fiancée was still alive, because he was convinced he had killed her alien incarnation), dedicate themselves to recalling anecdotes from their youth, memories of their neighborhood and, despite all the blood spilled, they say goodbye embracing.
It would be appropriate for one of our most distinguished publishing houses to translate this splendid book into Catalan, not only for the greatness of the chronicler in question, but above all because it is a fundamental essay where it is remembered that, very occasionally, we also have reasons to love the monster.