I went to high school a few miles from Princeton University's Firestone Library. Back then I was able to use the library for research (although I could not check books out of the system) as an ordinary member of the public with no affiliation to the University.
The public is no longer welcome at Firestone. Open access is now a thing of the past. It was buried, in part, by a tiny set of opportunists who made it difficult or impossible for large academic libraries to make their collections available even to the qualified public.
I found the 2019 Kathryn Hughes Guardian profile offensive in its indifference to the harm Lee Israel did. In the sixth paragraph of the article Hughes informs us that "No one was getting hurt" by Lee's forgeries, an assertion that requires a rather cribbed construal of the word "hurt." The article barely (paragraph 12) acknowledges the theft and sale for profit of actual (non-forged) letters.
It's certainly possible, as Hughes hints, that Israel's "mid-life plunge into criminality was less a dramatic moral decline than a symptom of decaying mental health." Even the simplest people are complicated. And serious brain pathologies compound that complexity. We don't need to judge. But we also don't need to glamourize and romanticize destructive criminal behavior to soothe the vanity of its practitioners. Hughes writes that Lee Israel "[o]n many occasions [believed] she was offering something [forgeries] better than the original. 'It was better Coward than Coward.'" A person who can say and believe such a thing deserves our pity, not our admiration.
All of that said, what I found sort of wonderful was the sentence Lee Israel received: "banned for life from libraries." It's very Code of Hammurabi, with a punishment that, while obscure, genuinely fits the crime. It speaks to the accused in a language that she uniquely can understand. Like the 1919 Chicago White Sox, who were acquitted in criminal court but still banned for life from baseball, there's something fitting and symbolically right about the punishment.
I went to high school a few miles from Princeton University's Firestone Library. Back then I was able to use the library for research (although I could not check books out of the system) as an ordinary member of the public with no affiliation to the University.
The public is no longer welcome at Firestone. Open access is now a thing of the past. It was buried, in part, by a tiny set of opportunists who made it difficult or impossible for large academic libraries to make their collections available even to the qualified public.
I found the 2019 Kathryn Hughes Guardian profile offensive in its indifference to the harm Lee Israel did. In the sixth paragraph of the article Hughes informs us that "No one was getting hurt" by Lee's forgeries, an assertion that requires a rather cribbed construal of the word "hurt." The article barely (paragraph 12) acknowledges the theft and sale for profit of actual (non-forged) letters.
It's certainly possible, as Hughes hints, that Israel's "mid-life plunge into criminality was less a dramatic moral decline than a symptom of decaying mental health." Even the simplest people are complicated. And serious brain pathologies compound that complexity. We don't need to judge. But we also don't need to glamourize and romanticize destructive criminal behavior to soothe the vanity of its practitioners. Hughes writes that Lee Israel "[o]n many occasions [believed] she was offering something [forgeries] better than the original. 'It was better Coward than Coward.'" A person who can say and believe such a thing deserves our pity, not our admiration.
All of that said, what I found sort of wonderful was the sentence Lee Israel received: "banned for life from libraries." It's very Code of Hammurabi, with a punishment that, while obscure, genuinely fits the crime. It speaks to the accused in a language that she uniquely can understand. Like the 1919 Chicago White Sox, who were acquitted in criminal court but still banned for life from baseball, there's something fitting and symbolically right about the punishment.
I think people who wrote about this were very cavalier. It wasn't clever or to be lauded and I don't think the sellers or collectors deserved this.
What an extremely repulsive person... Why would she ever do something like that?
Of course -- for cash...