What do you do when someone who has been very influential in your life turns out to be a bad person?
In my last blog, I listed a number of authors who inspired me to write. Purposefully, I left one off—Marion Zimmer Bradley (MZB). I started reading her Darkover novels many years ago, when I was still a young woman with an uncertain future and nearly empty pockets. She wrote about tomboys—young girls who refused to bend to the stereotypes of their world. She spoke to my heart, as I was a woman who loved the outdoors, animals, science, and building things with my own hands, and who hated dresses, cooking, and babies. What was wrong with me? MZB showed me that I was not alone. She wrote about people struggling out of difficult places and making their ways to better lives. She gave me optimism.
Marion Zimmer Bradley began writing at the age of 17, and passed away in 1999. She was noted for the female perspective in her writing, something before little-seen in sword and sorcery fantasy. She co-founded the Society for Creative Anachronism in 1966. She was posthumously awarded the World Fantasy Award for lifetime achievement in 2000.
In 2014, her daughter reported that Bradley had sexually abused her, and allegedly assisted her second husband, convicted child abuser Walter Breen, in his own grooming and sexual abuse of multiple unrelated children. Many science fiction authors have since publicly condemned Bradley.
I learned about the dark side of MZB about three years ago. It shocked me, and left me feeling uncertain about the influence she’d had on my life. I do not condone what she did. However, after much research, I came to realize that the situation was neither black nor white, but very, very grey:
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- MZB grew up in an abusive situation.
- It was unclear whether or not MZB truly understood what she was getting into when she married Walter Breen (there are comments from her fans about needing to “warn” her about Breen’s past child abuse offenses). In any case, it was clear that, in the end, she assisted in these abuses.
- There is some question in my mind about MZB’s psychological state. Her son, Mark Greyland, said “There was no believing she was getting better as you could not tell which one of her would wake up at any moment.” Having grown up with a mother who was an untreated (and largely unrecognized) schizophrenic, I feel that maybe there was something like this going on in MZB’s life.
- These offenses took place during the 60’s and 70’s—a time of experimentation with drugs, sex, new religions, and the loosening of morals. This does not condone those acts, but it does place them in context.
- People who have been abused often go unheard. Unfortunately, they may ultimately go to great lengths, including potentially “elaborating” on the facts to make their story “louder” and harder to ignore. This may have been the case with MZB’s daughter, Moira Greyland. She published a book, entitled “The Last Closet: The Dark Side of Avalon” which was published by Castalia House, a company founded by Vox Day (Vox Day is a homophone of the Latin phrase vox Dei, meaning the voice of God, and is a pseudonym for Theodore Robert Beale), an American activist and writer. He has been described as a far-right white supremacist, a misogynist, and part of the alt-right. The Wall Street Journal described him as “the most despised man in science fiction“.
I make these points not to excuse Marion Zimmer Bradley from the actions she committed before she died, but rather to point out that her life was grey—she was both very good and very bad. How do we accept what was good in the face of what was evil? Here are a several quotes worth thinking about:
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- “We learn from everything that happens to us. Your feelings are real: if you felt empowered or freed from reading her stories, that is real. It happened and you felt it. You had no reason to know. There is no blame to share; what happens behind closed doors was unseen.“—Mark Greyland
- “We cannot separate the art from the artist. We cannot separate the artist from the person. People aren’t pies—you can’t slice them up and just take the bits you want. It’s all mixed up together. Was Marion a great writer and important to SF? Yes. Did she at the least aid and abet in crimes, and probably commit them herself? Yes. Did she help and comfort the abused? Yes, that too. Do her works remain important to genre history? Yes. Can we separate anything out to make a clean narrative of any kind? No. No, we cannot.“—Caitri
- “So, should you feel guilt over this book? I don’t think you should, but ultimately that is your decision. She’s dead. She died 19 years ago. She did some terrible things, but she’s dead. She will have no new victims. We can create an atmosphere of compassion for victims and hold people to better standards now and in the future, but we should not feel guilt over other’s atrocities. Buying her book was not giving her permission to be a terrible person, nor did it give her the means to be terrible. It would be silly to boycott her books because she’s not alive to make apologies, to care what other’s think of her, or to care how her actions impacted others.“—Diane Nivens
So, here is my Dark Horse author:
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- Marion Zimmer Bradley, World Fantasy Award for lifetime achievement—for her strong women protagonists, her ageless androgynes—the Chieri, and her laran-based technology in which the psychic and psionic abilities were acquired through interbreeding with the Chieri.
Further reading: