This is brought about by an introduction to a book I’ve been meaning to read for a while. Eudora Welty, writer and Mississippian, who wrote a ton of things that have been celebrated as part of the American and specifically Southern Gothic tradition, wrote a small book called On Writing. As I’ve been consuming books about writing and getting my own thoughts out of my head in as productive and eloquent way as I can, I gravitated towards the book for the name, the author, and its size. One hundred and six pages? Who could say no to that?

What roused my ire, though, was something written even before I got to her words. In the introduction, an author of some renown – I’ve never heard of him, but he’s writing the intro to this book, so who the hell am I? – says something that irked the hell out of me.

The one thing most evident in her criticism is good sense.

And tear us what is so frequently lacking in the critics of the day, the era that has been termed postmodern, and that I have elsewhere called post-sensical. It is an overly politicized era…Everything is politics, the professor tells us, and the writer is morally bound to expose this or that injustice. And in keeping with this morality, writers who have gone before us are lifted or devalued by how well they can withstand the heresy-hunting party line: for instance Joseph Conrad was an imperialist, according to this feature of the critical climate, and Faulkner was a racist.”

I couldn’t help but read this with the voice and tone of a plantation owner, snickering that his slaves were “triggered” by daring to question a person’s position on slavery or racism, or some Mad Men chad who is amused by “little women” daring to think outside their station as baby factories.

This has the tack of pooh-poohing every social movement that dares cast people as what they were. Daring to call a spade a spade. Daring to ado the biography of great men that may’ve contributed to the American canon, but were horrible, horrible people. Men like this , who were never in the crosshairs of those bigots, racists and misogynists, want to tell the world that it wasn’t really a big deal. That the work stands on its own and that the new knowledge is immaterial to the judgement of the individual, who surely didn’t anything but just write, you know.

To preface this in a book penned by Eudora Welty, what least wasn’t a virulent racist and seemed very not so, was surely a choice. How dare we judge people on the standards of today! My thing is, good people are good people, and shall be so by any measure of time or morality. All of these celebrated writers had opportunities to be good people, to not be racist assholes or petty “alpha” men or cheerleading colonialism. but I’m supposed to discount that they weren’t? The chance to be a good person, to disavow all of these things that had real consequences for other people, was possible! Sure, it may have been hard to hang with Hemingway and not be a raging asshole, racist, womanizer, or whatever because of peer pressure, but it was POSSIBLE to not be.

I’m not giving judos for shit you’re SUPPOSED to do. Your creative output is one thing, but how you lived as a person certainly influences how I engage with the work and, indeed, colors my opinion of you. Those who were never the targets are free to kvetch about how unfair this is, or how I don’t get it, or rail about “kids these days are so sensitive!” but, at the end of the day, these people were never the targets of these bad-acting people who made celebrated art and thusly, their opinions are for shit.