In a key scene in the movie "Frost/Nixon," the David Frost character,played by Michael Sheen, challenges Frank Langella's Nixon on his actions leading up to his impeachment. Frost can't understand how Nixon, as an attorney and as President of the United States, could possibly have justified his criminal behavior: "Are you really saying, the President can do something illegal?" Frost asks in disbelief. Nixon barks back, "I'm saying, if the President does it, that means it's not illegal!!" It is a moment that elucidates both Nixon's overweening arrogance and his breathtaking sense of entitlement, and it solidifies in the audience's mind his completely warped moral character. We think: who does he think he is? No one – no one – is above the law.
For the past couple of weeks, the literary world has been abuzz with the tawdy and depressing melodrama of choosing the Oxford Professor of Poetry. What has bothered me most about the whole business is not the sordid politics of academia (anyone who has taught at the college level is familiar with it; if you're not, I suggest Richard Russo's Straight Man as an eye-opener), or even the accusations back and forth involving Walcott and Padel, the validity of which I'm not going to debate here. What is disturbing to me is something I think is much bigger. It is the attitude, articulated by some at Oxford and many in cyber commentary, that artists, poets in particular, are excused from responsibility for their actions because of their art. To this I say, Bullshit.
Hermione Lee, one of Walcott's champions, commented at the beginning of
the controversy, "Should great poets who behave badly be locked away
from social
interaction? We are acting as purveyors of poetry not of chastity…You
might ask yourself…whether you
wanted Byron or Shelley as a professor of poetry, neither of whom had
personal lives free from criticism." No one is suggesting that sexual chastity is an altar to be worshipped at. That was never the argument, and I think Lee's answer is disingenous. Neither am I suggesting setting up poets as paragons of virtue; poets are, first off, people – flawed, struggling, imperfect. But poets, like everyone else, should try to behave ethically and with integrity. Their art does not excuse them from this.
Part of the artist's job is to challenge accepted wisdom and mores, and to help us see the world in a new way, to tell us when the Emperor has no clothes. Certainly, poets like Allen Ginsberg and Frank O'Hara shook up and challenged sexual mores and attitudes; they pushed the world toward a new vision and new ways of defining love, and sometimes, especially with Ginsberg, their work was messy and uncomfortable and profane. They were also both good folks, known for their generosity and kindness toward younger poets and for their lack of pretension and ego, and they contradict the belief that there is something inherent in the arts that says the artist, by definition, must behave like an asshole. This is true as well of almost all the poets I know – they are good people, not perfect, but doing their best to live their lives with integrity and decency.
The classic examples of using art to excuse unethical behavior are those who say the great poetry of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot negates their unethical actions – it doesn't matter what they did because their contributions to poetry are so immense (this argument helped to save Pound from execution). Those who disagree with this are often characterized as moralizers and Philistines. But while the poets' actions do not erase their contributions to poetry, neither does "The Waste Land" cancel out the fact that Eliot was an anti-Semite who locked up his troublesome wife in a madhouse and then abandoned her, nor The Pisan Cantos that Pound acted as a shill for the Italian Fascists and stood up to be counted with the mass-murderers. Both the poets' poems and their behavior are part of the picture.
On a less dramatic level, there is also the case of Robert Lowell's book, The Dolphin, in which he lifted (without permission) large chunks of his wife's private letters and for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. Lowell was a brilliant poet, and he made beautiful poems out of these letters. But it was still a lousy thing to do, and I don't believe the poems, however beautiful and stirring, excuse or change that.
So call me a Philistine, but I believe it is no more right for a poet to claim entitlement because of his/her
art than it is for a rock star to claim it because he has a hit record; a
professional athlete because he can throw a ball farther than anyone
else; a minister because he is the "conduit of God's word"; a politician
because he is in a position of power and can get away with it. I'm
not talking about challenging outdated sexual social codes or
attempting to see the world in a new way. What I mean is this: hurting
people is wrong. Abuse of power is wrong. Malicious cruelty is wrong.
It doesn't matter if you are Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Robert Lowell, Richard Nixon, the guy who runs the service station on the corner, or you or me. It's wrong.
Poets aren't paragons; they are human beings with all the same challenges and struggles as everyone else. But like everyone else, they have an obligation to behave with integrity, to stand, finally, for something more than the sounds of their own voices.