[Prestidigitweeze]

I can see why some people might view Mr. Keene's strategy for marketing his book as naive even as others defend it, just as I understand why people were arguing in favor of different definitions of the word appreciation. Both definitions are correct, but only one matches Keene's usage.

What I can't see is vowing not to read Keene's fiction any more simply because one finds his online "whining" (or "whinging", if you prefer) annoying.

Many have said they admire Keene's fiction but now dislike him as a person. Both observations might be true, but only one matches culture's assessment of writers over time.

Making cool works of art does not make any artist a cool person. Some writers truly are laid-back and welcoming, some are adept at appearing that way, some milk their notoriety and others screw up endlessly in public while trying desperately to be likable or stick up for themselves.

None of that has anything to do with the quality of their work. Writing is a lonely craft. It often attracts pariahs and misanthropes -- people who can't get along with others or actually detest them. No accident that many of the greatest modernist writers were fascists.

I still read Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis despite evidence in their work and elsewhere of their anti-Semitism. I still listen to Richard Strauss despite his long-term employment by Adolf H. You could argue that Shakespeare was an anti-Semite as well (though you'd be hard-pressed to find an Elizabethan who wasn't similarly predisposed).

Whinemeal, endless writers have led lives of tolerance and altruism, some of them devoting themselves to causes in which I believe. Yet I do not read their books unless they write very well, because living well isn't enough. Most of us have time to do one of the other. Few have had time for both.

When I was fourteen, an older writer friend took me to a week-long workshop taught by a dozen famous novelists. There I got the chance to meet many of the writers whom I'd read and admired for years.

Very few of them were likable, none cared if they were, and many disappointed me in some way. I'd thought they would all be cool guys because they wrote cool books. A few really were what I'd hoped, but so many weren't that I learned an important lesson:

Artists are not their work. Some put the best part of themselves into it and some are even comparably wretched people. Some seem identical to their work but really aren't (as their posthumous letters sometimes reveal). And some are simply very different from it, as actors often claim to be from their characters.

Since then, several reasonably successful writers have told me personally that to write fiction is to lie. One of them actually said it gleefully, practically rubbing her palms at the idea.

The impact of that statement is not moral but philosophical. The writers who confessed this are not wrong for "lying," but neither can their books be considered windows into their souls. A writer's likability or lack of it has nothing to do with the seductiveness of their fiction.