It is no surprise that favorite avant-garde intellectuals, writers, and artists betrayed their own moral centers throughout their lives, and yet it is somehow often still a surprise to me, a source of small anguish, a twinge of consternation. It’s something to do with how I turned to these people in make-it or break-it moments of my own moral development—I clung to Jean Paul Sartre’s Essays in Existentialism as a teenager in flight from the Christian fundamentalism of my upbringing, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex post-psych-ward stay as I reconfigured my relationship to my professional and romantic desires, Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas in grad school as I stopped getting angry-drunk every night and started, instead, writing creative nonfiction as a disruption of my spiritless compulsions. I didn’t expect Sartre or de Beauvoir or Stein to be perfect, morally infallible human beings—indeed their writings often revealed the stumbling blocks of their humanity in ways that illuminated the necessity and prevalence of human mistakes, deceptions of self and other, outsized ego, overwhelming id.
© 2024 Cameron Steele
Substack is the home for great culture