Bad men do what good men dream

Thoughts on the Gaiman controversy

[I wrote this for the Australian Book Review’s Calibre Essay prize. It wasn’t shortlisted. Therefore, I post it here.]

This is not the piece I wanted to write. I wanted to write something quirky on animal law, or legal history. It’s clichéd, I know, but the only way I can explain this is to say that the muse would not let me. She wanted me to explore the stories we tell ourselves, about creativity, abuse and redemption, uncomfortable as that may be.

I’m used to this, now, but it took a while. I was a highly creative child, but when I was about fourteen, my stories dried up. I only began to be able to write fiction again ten years ago. My style became strange, flat, and matter-of-fact. I think I know why, although knowing oneself back then can be difficult.

Photo by Pascal Bernardon on Unsplash

The muse is quixotic. I’m a law professor. I should be finishing an article on contract damages, or a textbook on equitable remedies: sometimes, a story or a short article pops into my head. I can’t continue with the academic work until I jot down the basics at the very least.

The story or article I’m given is not always one I expected, nor do I always know how it ends. Nonetheless, I am the conduit, the imperfect vessel. I wonder if the muse should have chosen JK Rowling, so the story would have a huge audience, but I accept the bounty of the muse. It seems churlish to do otherwise.

Sometimes, in my fiction, characters appear. I’m not alone in experiencing this phenomenon. My favourite author, JRR Tolkien, wrote to his son Christopher about the character Faramir, in The Lord of the Rings: “…I am sure I did not invent him, I did not even want him, though I like him, but there he came walking into the woods of Ithilien…”.

At times, my characters won’t “let” me write the story I’d planned. If I try to force the characters, they won’t comply and become wooden. Sometimes, it takes a few drafts before I find out what really happened, or why characters behaved as they did. They can be coy about their motivations.

The genes for creativity, mental illness, and linguistic ability seem to be linked. No, I don’t hear voices, and I can distinguish between reality and fiction. Nonetheless, I can understand how these traits might be linked. Perhaps, subconsciously, my mind has protected me, holding back the more florid aspects of my personality until I could manage them.

The stories we tell ourselves about our own lives are highly culturally inflected. A recent article in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology considered the different stories told by American, Danish, Israeli and Japanese subjects about difficult times in their lives, and linked this to their cultures and broader well-being.

Culturally, Americans were most likely to tell redemptive stories (where they had a hard experience, but overcame it and worked towards a positive end) and to find meaning in the stories they told about their lives.

Japanese were least likely to tell redemptive stories or to find meaning in the stories they told about their lives. Moreover, Japanese subjects saw both positive and negative aspects of life as coexisting and complementing each other and did not necessarily have a conclusion or draw a moral from their stories.

The Danes were more likely to recognise realise that the scars of bad things remain, but to still accept a redemptive narrative, and to tie this in with their place in their community.

I was fascinated to realise that American and Japanese filmography reflects the stories they tell about themselves. I don’t like Hollywood movies. “And they all lived happily ever after,” has always seemed unrealistic to me. Maybe Tolkien had similar thoughts. The words of Samwise Gamgee about “happily ever after endings” come to mind: “Ah, and where will they live? That’s what I often wonder.”

This is not the only observation Sam makes about stories in The Lord of the Rings. As he sits in the darkness of Cirith Ungol with Frodo Baggins, wondering whether Gollum will betray them, they have a lengthy discussion about their own tale:

“The brave things in the old tales and song, Mr. Frodo: adventures, as I used to call them. I used to think that they were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for, because they wanted them, because they were exciting and life was a bit dull, a kind of sport, as you might say. But that’s not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind. Folk seem to have been just landed in them, usually – their paths were laid that way, as you put it. But I expect they had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, only they didn’t. And if they had, we shouldn’t know, because they’d have been forgotten. We here about those as just went on – and not all to a good end, mind you; at least not to what the folk inside a story and not outside it call a good end. You know, coming home, and finding things all right, though not quite the same – like old Mr Bilbo. But those aren’t always the best tales to hear, though they may be the best tales to get landed in!”

Frodo goes on to observe that the great tales never end; people just come and go within them. Perhaps I’ve taken Sam’s explanation into my own psyche. The tales I tell myself seem more Danish than American, with a lashing of Japanese fatalism, an acceptance that the negative and the positive coexist and complement each other, and a feeling that there is no clear end, and no happily ever after. The muse may visit me, but the way the tale is told is filtered through my culture.

The stereotype of the tortured artist exists in part because creativity can be spurred by pain and suffering, and a desire to retreat from the world. Anaïs Nin wrote in her diary:

“I could not live in any of the world offered to me — the world of my parents, the world of war, the world of politics. I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign, and recreate myself when destroyed by living. That I believe is the reason for every work of art.”

The same is true for readers, too. Books allowed me to escape temporarily into a different reality. I have had cerebral palsy since birth and suffered health problems. I was teased badly as a child. I was drawn to fantasy and science fiction stories, where the rules are different, and magic or new technology often gives rise to other abilities. While other children aged six or seven wanted to become a firefighter or a doctor, my life’s ambition was to be a hobbit or a fairy with wings.

I wonder if science fiction and fantasy attracts a higher number of “broken” people than the average, because of that desire to escape reality. Anecdotally, I’ve been told that Tumblr, Reddit and other online fantasy and science fiction groups are filled with the broken. I didn’t participate in these groups; I dipped my toe into a listserv in the late 90s and beat a hasty retreat.

However, at times, I too have been broken.

The broken nature of the fantasy and science fiction fan scene has been brought to the fore by allegations that Neil Gaiman, the author of many books, comics and screenplays, has sexually assaulted several women. For many years, Gaiman has been put on a pedestal by a phalanx of adoring fans and authors who loved the worlds he created. In Terry Pratchett’s and Gaiman’s 1990 book Good Omens—a book I have always loved—the angel Crowley “did not so much Fall as Saunter Vaguely Downwards” into Hell.

If Gaiman ends up falling, by contrast, it could be meteoric.

Gaiman’s lofty perch began to wobble when a young woman, Scarlett Pavlovich, alleged that she had been raped and repeatedly sexually assaulted by him, after she had been hired as a nanny for Gaiman’s son.

When Pavlovich’s allegations about Gaiman became public, other women came forward. They alleged that they had experienced similar conduct to Pavlovich, and that Gaiman had used his fame and fan base to recruit women to participate in sadomasochistic sexual practices. These included making women behave like slaves, alleged non-consensual sex, and coercing them to do degrading and vile acts. These claims have been given comprehensive airing in Vulture, a section in New York magazine. Gaiman has categorically denied the allegations of rape and sexual assault and stated that any sexual interactions with these women were consensual.

I can’t judge the truth of the criminal allegations. It’s for a court of law to determine guilt. A friend observed to me that “Gaiman’s books were dark. In some ways, it’s not surprising that he was into sadistic acts, whether they were criminal or not.”

This gave me pause. My own fiction is dark too. My former PhD supervisor said, “I thought you were a sunny, upbeat person, until I read your fiction.” As his surprise indicates, my behaviour in real life is not in keeping with my fiction.

I have a mug which quotes Agatha Christie: “Don’t annoy the author. She’ll put you in a book and kill you.” Writing is a form of catharsis for me, of exploring why people do things, and considering how people may see the same events in different ways. I may kill off characters—they may even be murdered viciously—but this doesn’t I’m a murderer. It simply means that I have a very vivid imagination—verging on morbid—and have thought deeply about why people do terrible things.

Everyone has moments where they have terrible thoughts. Acta non verba: acts not words. It is what people do with their thoughts that matters. The bad man does what the good man dreams.

Photo by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash

Sometimes, however, the dreaming good man and the doing bad man are one and the same person. Gaiman is not the only fantasy author to be accused of serious abuse. Two other famous fantasy authors were found to have engaged in abuse after their deaths. Marion Zimmer Bradley, who wrote The Mists of Avalon, was accused of egregious child sexual abuse of both her own children and other children. David Eddings—who wrote The Belgariad—had local authorities remove his adopted children from him because he and his wife had physically abused and beaten their adopted son and locked him in a basement.

Does this mean all fantasy authors are abusive? Of course not. However, this does show that it’s dangerous to put the creators of beloved worlds on marble plinths. The fact that someone creates compelling and beautiful worlds, or entertaining and insightful stories, does not mean they are without sin or flaw. Angels live in fantasy worlds, not in reality. I do wonder if Gaiman’s appeal lies in his dangerous edge. He seems like the kind to make a pact with a demon at the crossroads if offered it.

I’ve always found extreme fandom disturbing, where a creator is venerated, and the characters he or she created are treated as real. Maybe that’s why I kept away from fan chat groups. I’d prefer to know less about authors and creators, not more. I’ve never understood the worship of creators, or the desire of fans to make creators comply with their own fantasies of what authors should be like or should believe.

I was struck, however, when reading the allegations regarding Gaiman, of the yarn which potentially knits together Gaiman, his ex-wife Amanda Palmer, and Pavlovich. At least two of those involved, if not all three, were victims of serious abuse when they were young.

Pavlovich has alleged that on the first day she went to Gaiman’s house to look after Gaiman’s child, he encouraged her to get into the bath. She alleges that he turned up naked, got into the bath, and then asked him to sit on his lap, but she tried to explain why she did not want to do this. The New York magazine article states that Pavlovich said, “She was gay, she’d never had sex, she had been sexually abused by a 45-year-old man when she was 15.”

Palmer, too, has publicly spoken out about her experience of sexual abuse, sexual assault and rape as a teenager and young woman. And Gaiman, it seems, might have suffered abuse of some kind as well. His parents had been deeply involved with the Church of Scientology. In his most recent book, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, the main character, a little boy, is punished in horrendous ways by his parents. Gaiman has said the little boy is him, but he has also denied that these things happened to him.

In Pavlovich’s account, I felt a shock of recognition. A much older man abused me when I was 14. For ten years afterwards, I was unsure about my sexuality: was I straight, was I gay, was I a man in a woman’s body? Was I so broken that I was destined to be alone forever? I was lucky to have the support of my family, and to be protected by friends, even though they did not know about the abuse, and did not understand why I was falling apart.

Had I been faced with a naked man propositioning me in the bath, I likely would have leaped out screaming, and run, such is my absolute horror of such situations, even were I forced to run down the road nude. I have run before, when I was under serious threat, cerebral palsy notwithstanding. However, I have someone to run to; by contrast, Pavlovich came from a broken family and had cut herself off from them when she was in her teens. She was broke and alone. She had nowhere to run.

I’m not going to get into feminist debates about the nature of Pavlovich’s consent, or what the rules should be for vulnerable people. Others have had those debates. I want to focus on the tales we tell ourselves.

In the West today, particularly in the United States, the redemptive narrative has been prominent: the victimised, downtrodden, and abused gain a special wisdom and insight that others do not.

Sometimes this may be true, but often it is not. To say otherwise is a fantasy. Victimhood does not always bring virtue, and to survive abuse, people can adopt maladaptive behaviours. The uncomfortable truth is that statistically, often abusers have been abused when they were younger. One of the maladaptive responses to abuse can be that a victim continues to act out that behaviour upon others.

I must be crystal clear: this does not mean that all abused people become abusive, or even that the vast majority are abusive. Kaufman and Zigler’s 1987 seminal paper on the topic states:

“The rate of abuse among individuals with a history of abuse is approximately six times higher than the base rate for abuse in the general population. Although this suggests that being maltreated as a child is an important risk factor in the etiology of abuse, most maltreated children do not become abusive parents.”

As a teenager and in my early twenties, I turned any abusive tendencies inwards towards myself, instead of outwards at other people. It sounds, at least from the media reports, as if Pavlovich did too; she reportedly suffered from eating disorders and other psychiatric problems and was admitted to hospital.

In my own case, after I was sexually assaulted in my teens, I dissociated. This is like being a passenger in your own body, watching from above or from the back of your head. Sometimes—terrifyingly—you’re not there at all. Others who’ve seen me in this state tell me I am coherent, yet wooden or robotic. I have gaps in my memory during certain periods of my life, particularly during my teens. This is one of many reasons why I never prosecuted the perpetrator of the abuse.

If the allegations against Gaiman are proven by a court of law—or even if they’re not—am I going to throw his books out? The answer is no. I love Good Omens, so won’t be binning it. The only other one of Gaiman’s books I’ve managed to finish is Stardust, which I didn’t enjoy, and gave away to someone else. I started both American Gods and The Graveyard Book and never finished them. They didn’t grab me, but they’re still sitting on my shelf, waiting, in case I feel like going back to them. I still have The Mists of Avalon, and many of Eddings’ books.

I make a distinction between the art and the artist. So often, a creator can be a dreadful person in some ways and nonetheless produce wonderful art, stories, music or films. We should be wary of venerating creators in the way fandoms do.

Moreover, people are complex. Was the person who abused me wholly evil? No. He did many good things too. That’s what makes this complex. The abuse I suffered was wrong, but the person himself was not wholly evil. I still wonder if it were a temporary episode of madness in that man’s life, later brought under control. Does that mean I excuse him? No. It simply means that people are neither angels nor demons, unlike in fiction. Someone can do both good things and terrible things (whether criminal or not).

How do we get through this? I have two suggestions for the reading public. First, do not presume that people who are victims are better than others. Secondly, do not worship authors or creators (or anyone else) as superior human beings, or project your fantasises on to them. They have flaws like the rest of us and should not be idealised. Yes, I realise saying this in a literary magazine is almost perverse.

You can’t pretend the past didn’t happen, or erase it, and you can’t forget it. There will be days when it is hard. Perhaps I was compelled to write about Gaiman because the allegations stirred up the muck at the bottom of my mind-pond; I try to avoid disturbing it too much, while still recognising that it’s there. It seems to me important, however, not to make past abuse or pain the main feature of your identity.

There’s a Japanese method or repair known as kintsugi, where cracked bowls are glued back together with lacquer mixed with precious metal. The repair becomes a feature, a thing of beauty, not a shameful breakage to be hidden or denied. Perhaps this reflects the Japanese notion that positive and negative aspects of life coexist. It’s certainly how I have chosen to treat my own life.

I’m not sure what will happen to Gaiman. It’s reality, not a tale. Still, we must watch the tales we tell ourselves. The redemptive narrative is inspiring, but does not always hold true. Suffering does not always make people better, although it can.