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The Language of the Night: What to do with my Gaiman collection? [1]

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Date: 2025-01-20

Trigger warning : There’s no explicit sexual content in this diary, but if you’re a #Believe All Women or a #Not All Men type, please show yourself the door. This is not for you.

I don’t want to write this., but I need to. And it’s fitting today, a day that’s godawful, tragic and portentous for America, that I write this. I didn’t intend it this way — it’s just a weird consonance. Here goes:

I’ve admired Neil Gaiman’s work for a long time. And amassed a collection, some first editions, some signed, some battered and worn. Actually, I think I’ve got all of his stuff. I attended one of his readings at Wolftrap, and can testify to the fact that he’s a great reader of stories, and a great teller of them.

But I never wanted to meet him.

A lot of that has to do with me. I get tongue-tied easily, and I live in dread of blurting out stupid crap under pressure. When faced with someone I admire, I get a lot worse.

This applies to writing, too. In fact, I’ve written only one fan letter in my life. It was to Ursula Le Guin, and of course I made an idiot of myself, and of course she was perfectly kind. In my defense, I was in the middle of chemotherapy and my wits were not all they should have been, but that doesn’t excuse my stupidity. I recall the letter I wrote with embarrassment and her answer with gratitude. I have tried hard to avoid the people I admire because I don’t want to make an ass of myself. (That said, Rev. Barber was lovely and he would never remember me, but I’ll never forget him.)

Because I stay away from my heroes, I keep my connection to their works without the complication of any personal feelings about them, because they would inevitably involve disappointment. For the same reason, I don’t read biographies. In fact, I actively hate them.

Burton Bernstein’s Thurber did that for me. Bernstein stripped the charm and the art from the man and exposed him as a mean, drunken, abuser of women and men alike. In that biography, I lost the graceful, whimsical weaver of tales and lover of dogs. And I have not read Thurber since without being soured by my memory of the man himself as Bernstein presented him.

So that’s me: lover of the art, completely uncaring about the artist. Most of the time.

But….. Ah, but. Neil Gaiman.

Because you’re part of Readers and Book Lovers, I know you’ve already heard about Gaiman. And I don’t doubt that you’ve already formed your opinions. Because you’re already informed, we don’t have to dredge through the muck. I haven’t read the details, either from the podcast or the assorted articles that have followed, and that’s because I don’t want to and I don’t have to. It’s enough that the accusations exist along with NDAs and the fact that all his accusers are women who were at the time vulnerable and indebted to him. Thanks, Angmar, for pre-clearing this part of my research — you’re a peach, and you’ve gone places I don’t want to.

Some of Gaiman’s apologists predict this will pass. They note that he hasn’t been charged with any crimes. All the accusations have played out in the media. Which means it hasn’t hit a legal threshold. And Gaiman may survive it. He’s relatively young(ish) and has a long potentially productive life ahead of him. Indeed, the scandal might not endure.

The moral stain, however, will not go away. He’s like the Andy Griffith character in A Face in the Crowd, wounded, perhaps not fatally, but irrevocably. He will never be what he was. Reminds me of a certain once-and-future President of whom one could say the same, having traded dignity and humanity for power.

I’m trying hard to understand how this could have happened, not only because Gaiman is/was a fabulously talented writer, but because he wrote works that are close to my heart. I need to take something away from this, so forgive me while I work through a theory.

[E]vil at one time or another seems good,

to him whose mind a god leads to ruin — Sophocles, Antigone

I don’t believe that Gaiman started out an abuser. I think he was a normal working writer with a marriage and a family. In the acknowledgements section of The Graveyard Book, he writes that watching his two-year old son Michael riding his tricycle in the local cemetery inspired the novel. Like any writer, his job was to plumb the heights and depths of human nature, trying to understand it all, while his peers, the people he loved, rode herd on his worst impulses.

We all have worst impulses. We all would like to think we have the moral fiber to keep us from acting on them but, given power, we might find that our morals are flexible. We all could act on those awful impulses, but we don’t — because the people we love, the people in our lives, are our checks. We will not alienate the people we love. We won’t shame ourselves before them.

But something unlikely happened to Gaiman: he got famous. Crazy famous. All the hard work of his earlier life started paying off. He had a devoted fandom, multiple streaming deals, wealth, etc. He would need bodyguards, and owned multiple houses with domestic help and nannies for his youngest kid. His fame insulated him from average people, the people who had served as his peers. You could say that he was kissed by the gods. And, as Ovid makes clear in Metamorphoses, attention from the gods almost always ends badly. For Gaiman, everyone in his immediate circle was dependent on him. He had power and no one in his world to check him.

His exercise of abuse makes him triply culpable. Because he created Richard Madoc and Erasmus Fry, both of whom raped the muse in “Calliope,” in Volume 3 of The Sandman. And he created (or adapted) the horrific John Dee in “Preludes and Nocturnes.” And he wrote so often from the perspective of the abused that it’s become a trope in his writing — from Jed Walker, who appears first in “A Doll’s House” to the narrator of The Ocean at the End of the Lane. He was the abused child — he’s written about it. He was a victim in his childhood. He knew what is was to suffer at the hands of someone with power, so it’s not like he’s ignorant of the anguish and pain that comes from being powerless and victimized.

That’s what makes it so much worse. It makes his denials and non-apology apologies a mockery, and it’s why I don’t need to know the particulars.

What to make of all this? Especially on this awful day when the US slides officially into fascism, I am at a loss. I know three things:

1) Although he is, as I wrote above, youngish and capable, I believe Gaiman’s literary life is done, not only because publishers won’t touch him now and his streaming projects are being shut down, but because anything he writes from this point on will be an exercise in self-defense, even if he doesn’t admit it. And he’s gotten away from writing, was drawn into production: show-running and script-writing and revisiting his own greatest hits. His audience greatly diminished, his publishers and literary friends (like John Scalzi and others) alienated from him, I don’t see his career continuing.

He won’t ever be able to make sufficient apology or recompense, and his moves in that direction have been superficial and self-serving at best, PR-driven at worst. His reputation in tatters, his career is effectively over. And justifiably. This will follow him, at least among the people who have mattered to him — his fans.

2) I rather doubt that believes he did anything wrong because he was surrounded by people whose job would be to tell him he was awesome.

3) Fame is a drug and a poison: Metamorphoses teaches that a wise person avoids the attention of the gods at all cost. It’s never a good idea to become powerful, because that road is pitted with the deepest of holes, and it takes the strongest of wills to avoid them. Gaiman didn’t escape his fame, succumbed to hubris, and is paying the price. It’s a price he can’t afford, and one that won’t compensate his victims at all.

I think for now I’ll put all my Gaiman away for now. Maybe someday I can read The Graveyard Book and The Sandman again without thinking about the author. After a term in storage, I’ll have distance and will decide. Right now I can’t, but I don’t want to get rid of a collection I’ve spent years building — I don’t collect things or authors, except for Gaiman and Le Guin. Thank the gods she never broke my heart.

Here is what I see for Gaiman going forward:

Here’s the Schedule for the next few weeks:

Monday, January 27: Angmar

Monday, February 3: Me

Monday, February 10: open

Monday, February 17: open

Monday, February 24: open

Monday March 3: (possible)DesiderataDetritus

Clio2 is also somewhere in the mix. Thank you all the people who are sustaining this.

READERS & BOOK LOVERS SERIES SCHEDULE

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