Aaron Tracy

But I think that we should certainly approach these issues not in the spirit of blaming people.

If you encounter somebody who doesn't know anything about Roald Dahl's anti-Semitism, right, I don't think the response should be, how could you not know that?

But rather, well, now that you know that, that opens up space for a conversation about how that is going to influence how we engage with the work.

Eric brings up a really good question.

How should we engage with the work?

For me, especially after my conversation with Claire, I'm realizing a lot of it depends on whether I can locate the bigotry in the actual text.

I'm not sure I see it in Dahl's stories.

But what do we do when there's a really clear connection between an artist's problematic actions or beliefs and the work we consume by them?

In our last episode, Roxane Gay talked about the Nobel Prize-winning author Alice Munro, who stayed with her second husband despite apparently knowing that he abused her daughter.

There's a strong case to be made that Munro's guilt comes out in some of her short stories, which makes reading these stories for me now feel pretty icky.

The same goes for a bunch of other artists, too.

Some critics say that in everyone ranging from T.S.

Eliot to Ezra Pound to H.P.

Lovecraft, Picasso, Hemingway, Mailer, to even someone like Mel Gibson, you can see their sometimes monumental personal flaws come out in the work, which makes engaging with that work really complicated.

I spoke more about this with Eric.

Roald Dahl has this very short story for adults, Genesis and Catastrophe.

I'm going to spoil it, so if you don't want to hear it spoiled, you should stop listening.

But it's a very short story.

It involves this kind of tense scene in a hospital where a mother is going through a complicated delivery.

And in a very short space, the writing gets you very concerned for her and the life of her child.