Should We Cancel Jerks? Remembering 2014’s Chelsea Cain Controversy

Facebook is an interesting thing. Bad in lots of ways, and I think it is mostly bad. Friends bragging about their kids, about their lives that are better than yours, visiting your home city and not calling you, going to parties you weren’t invited to. Terrible.  

But it also serves as a sort of weird diary, or even a memory bank.

For example, today, FB reminded me of an opinion that I expressed seven years ago about the Chelsea Cain controversy.

The what?

Chelsea Cain’s 2014 Controversy

This is what I said on Facebook.

I felt really strongly about the cause of supporting unlikable authors back then, and I swore that I would buy her books. (Full disclosure: I didn’t buy any of her books. I didn’t even download a sample. I announced my intentions to the world and promptly forgot all about it.) I also blogged about her.

What did Chelsea Cain do, back then, that was so bad?

It’s awfully hard to figure out what she did after the space of just under a decade. The screen shots are available on Goodreads, in a closed group, and of course, as with anyone who speaks a little too loudly on the web, she has since deleted whatever it was she said.

But from various comments on Goodreads in response to my post, I can gather this: Ms. Cain, a thriller writer, received a bunch of questions from readers about what order she would prefer that they read her books. At one in the morning, facing disappointing sales of her most recent novel, she released a post somewhere expressing some annoyance. It appears she used the “eff word,” and that she referred to these questions as “boneheaded.” And the feeding frenzy began. She deleted her posts but clarified that she would not apologize for a single word she had written, and a new feeding frenzy began.

Should we cancel books written by jerks?

I wrote a column, not defending her poor manners, but arguing that we should still read books by poor mannered authors, if they are good. I received responses! One reader, Zahara Cerise, wrote, “the idea that any person is going to be hurt by not reading a particular author’s books is kind of silly. Unless the author has written the most unqualifiedly brilliant book of all eternity past, present and future, no one is going to sustain any damage from not reading certain books.”

While Ms. Cerise overstated the point, I generally agreed. If the author has not written a good book, no one who does not read it will suffer in any way. So if the author is not nice, and the book is not especially good, then by all means don’t read it. I would go a step further: if the author is nice, but the book is not good, you should still not read it. As I wrote back then, “If she is good but not great, then we shouldn’t be reading her anyway (at least till we’ve finished with all the greats, which will take some time)!”

But what if the author is a jerk and her book is great? Then, by all means read it. What if the author is a criminal, but her book is great? Read it. Don’t invite the author to your cocktail party, or to speak to your bridge club, but read her book.

A qualified defense of novelists who are jerks

And, as I noted seven years ago:

Many many many novelists are peculiar people who behave in self-defeating ways, and many of them really don’t understand what they’ve done wrong. That’s why they were novelists in the first place back in the good old days – they lacked the talent to go out into the world and hold down a “real” job that required “people skills,” and we could lock them away someplace where they wouldn’t insult too many people, and they could drink themselves to death without ruining too many other lives in the process. Unfortunately, the advent of the internet has changed all that …. Novelists need to package themselves, publicize themselves, write entertaining tweets and so on. I hope I seem relatively comfortable in that sort of venue, but not everyone is. There should be some place in our world for the incurably socially awkward.

You see, if you are an asshole, you should be a novelist!

I also have a day job, which involves sharpening pencils and replying to emails. What if I start sending nasty emails to my colleagues? Then I should be fired. And what if a prospective employer calls for a recommendation? No one should then recommend me. Cannot control his emails.

But people should still read my books if they are great. (Views differ.)

Great literature and great art is more important to the culture than great pencil sharpening and email replying. There are plenty of people who can quite handily step into my shoes at work. But for better or worse, there is only one person who could have written The Strange and Astounding Memoirs of Watt O’Hugh the Third. If it is great, read it. If it is not, do not.

Chelsea Cain, in case you are wondering, remains controversial, shoots off her mouth. And I still haven’t read any of her books. But none of this mishigas is standing in the way.

On Paricia Highsmith, A.A. Milne, Frederick Exley and other jerks

I will tie this up with a few words from the younger Drachman, which I wrote back in 2014:

If we need great suspense writers, we can start with Patricia Highsmith [rather than Chelsea Cain] before we bother with the good-but-not-great. Patricia Highsmith was really really not a nice person, but I am glad that didn’t keep me from reading the first two Ripley books, and if she were alive and on the web, we’d all be in for a lot of abuse.

I am not defending [Chelsea Cain], any more than I defend F. Scott Fitzgerald’s adultery, Frederick Exley’s horrible treatment of his first wife, William Styron’s cold behavior towards his children, J. D. Salinger’s weird stalking of Hollywood starlets, A.A. Milne’s inability to relate lovingly with Christopher Robin other than through the printed page, or any number of other strange and self-destructive things that novelists do and have done and will continue to do.

Back when I was a film critic, one director whom I admire a great deal was horribly and unjustifiably rude to me, regardless of the incredibly nice things I had said about him in print. At that moment, I understood one reason why he had not succeeded in Hollywood, in spite of being one of the most original and entertaining directors around. I still recommend his movies, because they are very good, but I won’t have him over for tea. I hope he will still have a chance to continue to make movies, even though he is a jerk. I do think I would have lost out without that director’s films, and without A.A. Milne’s books, or those of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Frederick Exley, and so on.

A.A. Milne was an interesting case, and I wrote a column on it back in the ’80s when the issue first came to light. (It’s not on the web – it was pre-web.) I just couldn’t believe that he didn’t love his young son. I thought maybe he expressed it through the written word because that was the only way he could. A strange fish indeed, and it was very sad, and he created a lot of pain, not the least of which was the fact that his son, who felt quite unloved, had to hear throughout his life what a wonderful father his old pop was. He could not leave it behind, because it was always there in front of him, on TV, in bookstores, in movie theaters. I hope he found some sort of peace with this. While this wrinkle affects my view of Milne pere, he still created a magical world that I don’t mind visiting. A.A. Milne never had the opportunity to interact with his readers, because he wrote in the 1920s, but I suspect that if he had, it would have been awkward and unsettling for the readers.

Here’s to all the assholes who write great books. Enjoy!

^^^

Steven S. Drachman is the author of The Strange and Astounding Memoirs of Watt O’Hugh the Third, which is available in paperback from your local bookstore, Amazon and Barnes & Noble; it is also available as a Kindle e-book.

If you wish to read 2014’s debate in its entirety, you may see it here.