Art over Man: The Roger Waters Test Case
When we create art, we are our best selves, better than the selves we are outside of art.
In February 1980, aged fifteen, I found myself at the Nassau Coliseum in Long Island watching a spectacular performance of Pink Floyd’s The Wall. I didn’t even know the band. I had to be talked into going by my friend Richie, who had scalped tickets for $75 each, which was an enormous sum for a teenager at the time. I received a brisk education in the venue parking lot, where a stranger we met played us his old Pink Floyd tapes and told us the story of Syd Barrett, the band’s founder whose mental breakdown had inspired The Wall. Later, I would learn that the album was as much about Roger Waters, who was then the band’s frontman, but it hardly mattered. I was hooked.
Over 26 tracks, The Wall tells the story of a musician named Pink, a sensitive young man mocked at school by his teachers, traumatised by an overbearing mother, used by the establishment, and let down by his lovers. It was not my story, but the alienated rage, the haunted isolation, and the flight into the imagination all struck a chord in me. Over the next few years, I’d wallpaper my bedroom with Pink Floyd posters and work my way through their entire back-catalogue, from Animals through Wish You Were Here to the comically strange Ummagumma and their debut LP Piper at the Gates of Dawn, which was the band’s only record with Syd Barrett.
Forty-four years later, I’m a different man. Today, I’m a husband and a father, I’m an observant Jew not a Christian, I’m married to an Israeli, and I have developed deep attachments to Judaism and Israel, a country about which I knew next to nothing when I was fifteen. I like to believe that Roger Waters today is also a very different man from the one who authored the soundtrack of my adolescence. This week, Waters appeared on Piers Morgan Uncensored and flatly denied that Hamas had raped Israeli women on 7 October. Those who claim otherwise, he told his host, are spreading “filthy, disgusting lies.”
Unsurprisingly ‘human rights’ campaigner Roger Waters calls the reality of Hamas raping Israelis on October 7 a “filthy lie”. Then he goes on to bizarrely reason with himself to calm down. Absolutely mad. Despicable. And dangerous. pic.twitter.com/fGFy7gogAU
— Heidi Bachram 🎗️ (@HeidiBachram) July 2, 2024
It’s not just that I still want to be able to listen to “Comfortably Numb” and (attempt to) play “Wish You Were Here” on my ukulele without feeling like I’m celebrating a Jew hater. I want to believe that the art we create is superior to the people we are—that when we create art, we are our best selves, better than the self we are outside of art.
You don’t need to be a Zionist to join me on this ride. We don’t have to agree about Israel’s conduct during the Gaza War or “who started it.” You can even go along—if you must—with Roger Waters’ expressed belief that “there is no evidence” that the Hamas invaders committed rape and other atrocities on 7 October. Let us just agree that an audience will sometimes hold views diametrically opposed to those of the artist whose work they love. The question is what can be done about this? And how should we think about it?
I don’t want to abandon work that brings truth and beauty into the world. Besides being a writer, I teach creative writing, and I’ve designated my classroom a safe space for art. There are no cancelled authors in my class, I tell my students. We deal with the work, not the person. And yet, in light of Waters’ remarks—and his longstanding and venomous hostility to Israel—I can more readily sympathise with a student who dismissed J.K. Rowling as “a terrible person.”
I privately reprimanded the student for making such a statement in class, not because I agree with Rowling on transgender—though I mostly do—but because I believe her politics have little to do with the Harry Potter series that earned the love of so many readers. Say what you like about the quality of the novels; I won’t have students running down writers in my class. Nonetheless, I appreciate that someone from the other side of the transgender debate would struggle to engage positively with Rowling’s work. I can sympathise with someone who grew up loving her novels and now hears her express ideas they find repugnant.
Still, looking beyond the person to the artist is a worthwhile struggle, and not simply for the practical reason that otherwise one’s choices will narrow. I know, for example, that my love of nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature would suffer considerably if I were to eliminate the novels and poetry of all the writers of that period who harboured antisemitic feelings.
Indeed, some of my favourite writers were Jew haters of one kind or another. Blake, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, and others on my go-to list have all been criticised for antisemitic statements or writing, but I continue to read them—and not just so I can identify the antisemitic passages. I do so partly because I forgive these men the limitations of their historical positions. This is the “everyone-pretty-much-hated-Jews-at-that-time” perspective.
That, however, is not my strongest argument for appreciating the art of artists whose personal lives or views repel me. I simply believe that the work is superior to the person who produced it. Dostoyevsky, the novelist and the narrator of stories, was a better person than the man who shared his name. So was Dickens. So is J.K. Rowling, for that matter. So was short-story writer Flannery O’Connor, who has recently been accused of racism.
Charlotte Allen
And I believe that the 1980s Roger Waters, the voice of The Wall and Wish You Were Here, was a better man than the person spitting fear and loathing on The Piers Morgan Show. I know this because it’s my experience as a reader. I see, for example, in Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov a moral sensitivity and intelligence that rises far above the irrational hatred attributed to the man Dostoevsky. I see in Flannery O’Connor’s “Everything That Rises Must Converge” an awareness of black humanity far exceeding that of the girl who allegedly “sat between her two cousins on the subway lest she have to sit next to people of color.”
Whatever my gifts (or lack thereof) as an artist, I know that the man typing these words is a deeper, more measured thinker, and a kinder, gentler individual than I am when I’m not sitting before a computer trying to make something true and beautiful. In real life, I’m angrier, pettier, less fair-minded, less empathic. But when I’m writing, the words I produce are better than I am. This is not hypocrisy. This is art.
There are, of course, some people who write “closer to the bone” than others. I don’t see a huge gap, say, between the character in Portnoy’s Complaint, who surreptitiously masturbates next to a girl on the bus, and the novel’s author, Philip Roth, who seems to have lived a life of sexual self-indulgence. James Joyce’s character Leopold Bloom, who gets off on the thought of his wife having sex with another man, was not that distant from the Irish writer who fantasised about his spouse doing the same.
Charlotte Allen
Even so, when Joyce mocks Bloom he is also mocking himself, which allows him to become better than himself. Likewise, I suppose, Roger Waters was writing close to the bone when he was penning his rock-star-turns-fascist fantasy The Wall, and yet I can still find a self-awareness in that work that I cannot find in the anti-Zionist Waters.
Of course, there are times when art itself fails to fully rise above its author. Isay Fomitch, a minor character in Dostoevsky’s novel The House of the Dead, is a stock Jew of low comedy, and Fagin, the villain of Dicken’s Oliver Twist, is the personification of an even more sinister antisemitic trope. Even so, I read the latter to my son when he was a boy. We talked about how Dickens absorbed the antisemitism of his time and then went on to enjoy the rest of the book. The book was better than its caricature, and better than its author.
So yes, I am saying what may be a cliché: we must separate the art from the artist. But that is not always as simple as it may sound. For example, consider this painting:
I like it. It may not be a masterpiece, but it’s the sort of thing that, when I was backpacking through Europe, I might have bought as a postcard. It may be that, as one seller of paintings by this artist asserts, it is “of no artistic value,” but that’s not my first response. If I were to come across this painting in a museum, I’d say it was pretty good. If I could paint that well myself, I’d be proud.
But the artist was Adolf Hitler, the man responsible for the murder of three of my four grandparents, not to mention some six million other Jews, not to mention some 75 million people all told. You can make up whatever stories you like about the composition, but I see no Jew hatred or evil in this picture. And so, I conclude that the artist painting it was a better man than the man he was when he was not painting. Would I hang this work in my living room? Of course not. Because once I know who the artist is, I can’t rid the work of that association, even if it doesn’t deserve it. But that’s my limitation, not the painting’s.
And, of course, Roger Waters, however hateful I may consider his views, is not Hitler. He’s just an angry old man. Is he hurting Jews? I suppose he is, but only indirectly and out of a misguided and misinformed sense of justice. If he had actually participated in the 7 October attacks, if he had intentionally directed or funded them in some way, I might feel differently.
But even then, I’d still maintain that this Roger Waters is a different man to the 1980s one, just as I am not the same person who sat in the Coliseum parking lot listening with rapt attention to faux Floyd lore. I’ve grown up, changed my perspective and even my religion. But even that fifteen-year-old me, when he was writing stories, was different from, better than, the kid attending the concert.
Iona Italia
I believe that art is better than the man because I know that I have not always been a good man, but I’ve always been a good writer. I’ve said and done things I regret, but I haven’t written anything I regret. Yes, I’ve got some old stories I consider embarrassingly bad from a technical point of view, but not from a moral point of view. And that is why, for example, I don’t hesitate to share some of my worst juvenilia with my students when I want them to see how far I’ve progressed, how much worse a writer I was than they may be now.
I must admit, Roger Waters is testing my limits. He’s waging a war of attrition against the joy I derive from his music. But for as long as I can, I’ll let the music prove its superiority to the person from whom it came—at least until I can finally master the guitar solos in “Wish You Were Here” on my ukulele.
