Kurt Vonnegut on a bad man who wrote great books
Goodness came from vileness
One of those writers almost universally respected and often revered, and most famous for the antiwar novel Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut had a strong and humanistic moral sense that was not simple-mindedly black and white. This is taken from his “Address at the Rededication of Wheaton College Library,” in Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons.
[The books in the library] come from the best parts of human beings who have often, in real life, been contemptible in many ways. The best example I know of goodness from vileness is the body of humane writings produced by Louis-Ferdinand Celine, a French physician and novelists, who was a convicted war criminal after World War Two.
His real name was Louis-Ferdinand Destouches. He was the son of poor people. He spend most of his adult life as a badly paid physician who treated the poor.
I read his early novels without knowing anything about his vicious anti-semitism. He kept it out of his early books. The internal evidence of those books persuaded me, and may others, too, that I was in the presence of a great man.
I was in the fact in the presence of greatness in a man — the goodness he could find when ransacking himself. So be it. He is dead now. I love the good part of him.