The Cuddled Little Vice

It’s been six weeks since Vulture‘s gut-wrenching report on the sexual assault accusations against Neil Gaiman, which expanded on allegations raised last summer. The story was a blockbuster—it remained at the top of Vulture‘s most read articles list for a month, barely even dipping when the Oscar nominations were announced. It has also triggered some real-life consequences: Gaiman’s publishers have been distancing themselves from him, future projects and adaptations of his work have been cancelled (as I predicted last month, Netflix’s The Sandman will end after its upcoming second season), and one of his accusers, Scarlett Pavlovich, has filed a civil suit against Gaiman and his estranged wife Amanda Palmer.

In terms of reevaluation of Gaiman’s work, however, what we’ve mainly been seeing are attempted “gotchas” that highlight aspects of Gaiman’s writing that are disturbing or deal with abuse, categorical dismissal, or attempts to claim that his accomplishments actually belonged to others (the Good Omens fandom has been doing energetic work on that last front). Enter Elizabeth Sandifer, a scholar and critic who has, for more than a decade, been writing an extended series titled Last War in Albion, “an ongoing critical history of the British comics industry focused primarily on the magical war between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison”, the first volume of which, collected in print in 2019, runs to 800 pages. While Gaiman isn’t the focus of this series, his status as Moore and Morrison’s protégé, as well as his importance in late 20th century comics, make him impossible to ignore. Sandifer has now produced “The Cuddled Little Vice”, an in-depth, monumental overview of Gaiman’s career in light of what we now know about him.

To an extent, what Sandifer delivers, over the course of some sixty thousand words, is no different from what a critical study of Gaiman’s career might have looked like a year ago. She walks us through his bibliography step by step, in particular his magnum opus The Sandman, which she analyzes with painstaking precision, focusing on Gaiman’s burgeoning relationships with career-long collaborators like Dave McKean and Charles Vess, on the role of lesser-known but still vital contributors like letterer Todd Klein, on the influence of Gaiman’s friendships with author, poet, and trans activist Roz Kaveney, fellow comics writer and occultist Rachel Pollack, and musician Tori Amos, and on the canny way in which he parlayed the series’s success into unprecedented creative control of, and public identification with, what was after all a DC-owned property, and then into a broader writing career.

Any previous attempt to write such a consideration, however, would probably have ended up tangled in Gaiman’s self-mythologizing, in the hagiography that built up around him, and in the deference that his fame and wealth guaranteed him. Freed from these forces, Sandifer has produced something much more clear-eyed, and occasionally caustic. She can speak honestly about the naked careerism that drove Gaiman to, for example, ensure that Sandman was perceived as a writer’s comic, rather than a collaboration between a writer and artists. She gives voice to what was apparently an open secret in comics circles, the fact that Gaiman routinely had affairs with young fans while on tour. And she situates him in the context of his upbringing in the Scientologist church, a childhood she treats as abusive by default, while also identifying how its precepts continue to inform Gaiman’s behavior throughout his life. The result avoids sensationalism while still holding Gaiman to account. Here’s Sandifer on the Sandman issue “Calliope”, which many commentators have taken as a signed confession of his proclivities:

What’s crucial to note is that this is not Gaiman telling on himself. It’s not just that Gaiman was still a decade away from the sort of outright abuse being allegorized in “Calliope”; the story is plainly aware of the horror of its subject. The line about Madoc considering himself a feminist is followed immediately by him being asked where he gets his ideas from, pointing very directly to the bitter irony of that claim. And Gaiman takes pains to linger in the awful sadism of Madoc’s behavior, most especially in the beat immediately after he gets Calliope back to his house in which he rapes her “nervously, on the musty old camp bed. She’s not even human, he told himself. She’s thousands of years old. But her flesh was warm, and her breath was sweet, and she choked back tears like a child whenever he hurt her.” Even the use of Gaiman’s office as visual reference is plainly a wry joke about the fact that the script for the issue proved a nightmare after he was forced to abandon his original idea, […] Gaiman switched to a story about writer’s block. and then sent reference photos of his office as a means of poking fun at himself for suffering from it.

No, “Calliope” is far more disturbing than the comic book equivalent of that monologue from the serial killer who started following women around with a knife in his pocket before escalating. It’s a warning of what’s to come, yes, but the warning is not a comment on the author’s private fantasies; it’s a comment on the degree to which he fundamentally failed to understand the magic he was taking hold of, and what its consequences might be. He understood the broad strokes—that if he could survive the tightrope grind of monthly comics for long enough and create a work of sufficient quality and impact he could change his life decisively enough to get him fully out from the towering shadow of his upbringing. He understood that writing this story, about the King of Dreams and his tragedy, would allow him to also rewrite his story—to become Neil Gaiman instead of David Gaiman’s son. But he did not understand what that meant.

But here she is on a post-Sandman story in which he seems to simultaneously confess his sins and expiate them:

The dramatic core of the story is Foxglove and Hazel’s rapidly disintegrating relationship, which is suffering under the strain of Foxglove’s celebrity. Talking to Death, Hazel reflects on how “it was like she wasn’t just mine. She was everybody’s. I mean. I’d hate it. I’d love her when she was at home, with me, with Alvie But I didn’t love her when she was in a crowd. I didn’t love the star. I didn’t love the person they all loved. They didn’t know her. I knew her,” and how “it wad like she was going up in a balloon. And she was getting further and further away from me. And I just felt stupider and stupider. And I mean I am pretty stupid. I mean, I’m not, but I never knew much except cooking.” Foxglove, meanwhile, has been cheating on Hazel while on tour—a one point she reflects on how she started kissing a woman “before I had a chance to think about what I was doing—because I was so far from home—her head between my legs—stuttering my lust into the night—knowing somewhere down deep that I could take whatever I wanted, but that one day it would all have to be paid for.” As with Shakespeare in “The Tempest,” it’s difficult not to see Gaiman’s own marriage reflected in this, nor the ominous shades of what was to come in the dissociated but power-hungry comment about being able to take whatever one wanted (to say nothing of the scene where Foxglove initiates sex with Hazel while Alvie is still in the bed with them).

The Time of Your Life ultimately sees Hazel and Foxglove reconcile. There’s a climactic beat in which Foxglove confesses to Hazel that “for a while now, I’ve been, well. Not as faithful as maybe you thought I was. And there’s a girl who’s going to the magazines about it. I didn’t want to be outed. I don’t think I ever wanted to be inned. And I don’t know what’s going to happen. But I don’t think I love you anymore,” to which Hazel laughs and, not unreasonably, points out that Foxglove just spent three issues following her “into Death, because I needed you. What do you think love is?” And with that and a heroic sacrifice from a side character all is well. It’s plainly a fantasy, and almost heartbreaking in its innocence—Gaiman imagining a sort of idealized peace that might be waiting for him if he came clean to his wife. Perhaps he even did, and Mary McGrath gave him that sort of perfect acceptance, though if so, it plainly didn’t change his behavior.

It’s a long read, but worthwhile if you’re interested in a clear-eyed analysis of a horrible man whose contributions to culture are nevertheless undeniable. In a landscape where the question of how (and whether) to separate the art from the artist often seems to be raised as little more than a cudgel with which to beat on others who don’t share your opinion, it’s an intelligent, thought-provoking attempt at an answer.