I had a shock today when I read how Marion Zimmer Bradley
protected her pedophile husband who committed serial sexual abuse and how her
daughter has been saying that the fantasy writer was violent and sexually
abused her too.
Like the writer Jim Hines who wrote the blog with all the details, I
was a big fan of Zimmer Bradley who opened up the Arthurian mysteries to me.
The world she portrayed was full of strong feminist figures fighting against
some really unpleasant male aggression.
Now that world and those characters and world is dead to me. They are the creations of a writer who did
not mean a word of it. Her fantasy
worlds were not an expression of what she believed.
What is also strange is how there is a movement among her
fans to say that this does not matter, what matters is the worlds and
characters she created. Equally there are those who say that Bradley and her
husband should not be judged because the matter has been “dealt with.” Besides
But a writer is, in some ways, a God, or a magician. Everything that happens in a book is a
creation of the writer. To write a novel
is to expose yourself to the reader.
In the Zimmer Bradley case the writer is a hypocritical god…
she is not her heroines, but the cruel abusers. She is not the struggling
feminist icons but the oppressor. Needless to say this turns Zimmer Bradley’s
books on their heads and makes them effectively unreadable.
In her books it is the heroines who hold the magic and not
the oppressors and what Zimmer Bradley is effectively projecting is her own
cruelty against her magical self. She is
unconsciously aware that the two things are mutually incompatible. You cannot be a magician and be cruel to the
innocent.
Now you can be a magician and an arsehole. Being a magician does not stop you being
arrogant, violent, intolerant, rude, or anything that many in the new age world
says you should not be. But there seems to be a line after all, one where you
stop being a magician and become something else. That line appears to be one of
cruelty to another person or form of life for your own aggrandisement. If you contribute to wrecking another’s life,
then like Marian Zimmer Bradley’s universe, your magical world collapses. Suddenly you lose the right to speak because
the world has seen your hypocracy. The
magic might continue, but really the spirit of it has gone.
Watchers of the Dawn ran a story about how one of the heads of the AO
Order in Ireland had been sentenced by a court for collecting child porn. If
true and it seems to be, not only did the head of the Order David Griffin know
about the man’s convictions but also he expelled three members for daring to
complain about it.
Like the Zimmer Bradley case we are being asked to look away
by those who are “fans” of that system.
On Facebook, the writer Fr Barabbas, who always takes the
role of Griffin’s apologist, said that it was not up to anyone to judge someone
who had already been sentenced and punished in a court of law. (Of course you could use the same logic to say that you should not judge someone who has NOT been found guilty in a court of law) Another person
suggested that the story was just part of the Golden Dawn Flame wars and people
should really be getting on with each other.
But really, like the Zimmer Bradley case, the magic dies
when you hear of such things.
