I don’t know whether Rowan Williams got into any trouble for praising the works of William Mayne, a children’s author convicted last year of sexual offences against young female fans. I hope not. Since it was the Sunday Times that got the story, a lot of other papers are going to discount the possibility that it might be true. What struck me, however, was the comment from “Michelle Elliott, director of Kidscape, a child safety group who is herself a children’s author” [sic, including the absent comma].
“I wouldn’t touch his (Mayne’s) books with a barge pole. Books are the sum of you as a person. To divorce the writings of an author from the author himself is impossible.” But the whole point of books is that that they allow us to subtract from ourselves as people. They let us leave out all the vain dull and inadequate bits. They let us backspace till we have got it right.
The whole Mayne tragedy fascinates and baffles me. To write as he does (and at his best he is very good indeed) must surely require a good deal of self-criticism and self-knowledge, yet the trial revealed a pathetically self-deluded man who could only mutter “I thought you wanted it” when confronted by one of his victims. It was a disgusting abuse of trust, no doubt about it, but my over-riding feeling is one of bewilderment. How could he write like that and yet behave like that? How did he reconcile the two?
Catherine Bennett had a good article in the Guardian last year, looking for clues in the novels, not finding much, but shrewdly observing that “one of their particular attractions for a child — the regular escapes from the harsh, adult-run world, often into a different place altogether — cannot but echo, for an adult reader, Mayne’s real efforts to establish private complicitie and relations with children behind the backs of their families”.
The most revealing quote in the S. Times article, I thought, came from his publishers, who were happy enough to take the credit when he was winning prizes but now claim, disingenuously, that “we were struggling to make a commercial success of him”. There’s gratitude for you! However, a quick search on the Internet turns up Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells declaring indignantly: “no doubt Mayne’s publishers are hoping that the controversy will blow over and they will eventually be able to go back to milking the cash cow”. If that’s the general mood, I can see why Hodder are reluctant to stand by their man.
I read a reasonably cogent article recently about Patrick O’Brian which supposed Jack Aubrey (and to some extent Maturin) to be P O’B’s attempt at rewriting himself – especially in matters of loyalty and family – as the person he wanted to be, but could not. Certainly, any fiction where the characters had to be subsets and no more of the writer’s persona would be dull stuff.
It’s not on the same scale as Mayne, but I’m currently a bit at sea over the discovery that Beck Hansen (musician, your honour, does a smorgasbord of lightly surrealistic wry rock) is a Scientologist and thoroughly in the belly of the beast…
R
Hodders have the further difficulty that they do a great deal of evangelical Christian stuff, and used to be run by a very pious family.
I wonder if Ms Elliott is as shrill and irritating as she sounds. If we were to discard the works of writers, artists musicians according to their morals there’d be almost nothing left to read or listen to. And what there was would probably be unbearably dull. What’s wrong with judging works of art or scholarship on their merits?