Diana Witchel: Art still transcends morality

There were a few surprises at the Oscars ceremony this year. Winning caused a hormonal surge in the normally melancholy Adrien Brody and for a moment it looked as if a fire hose might be required to peel him off Halle Berry.

Nicole Kidman - oops - forgot to write a speech and demonstrated that, minus the nose, she is no Virginia Woolf.

While the antiwar gestures drew some boos along with the cheers, oddly nobody had a stirring, patriotic word to say in support of the war.

But my biggest "good grief!" of the evening came when Hollywood, normally politically correct to the point of paranoia, awarded Roman Polanski Best Director for The Pianist.

The fact that he clearly was the year's best director didn't make it less of a shock. Also-ran Martin Scorsese rose graciously to his feet, as did quite a few others. But the camera caught one bloke starting to get up then staying put as his wife sternly shook her head, no.

Well, you would think twice before giving a standing ovation to a fugitive from justice who fled the United States for France in 1978. He was avoiding what promised to be a hefty jail sentence for callously plying a 13-year-old with champagne and drugs, then having sex with her. It must have been an odd moment for Jack Nicholson. The offence took place at his house, though he wasn't there at the time.

Polanski is clearly a piece of work. How he's perceived is complicated by his tragic, bizarre life story. He saw his pregnant mother and his father taken off to a concentration camp, where his mother died. At the age of 9 he was left to survive alone. "Walk, don't run," said his father, saving his life.

All this made him the right man to direct The Pianist, although who knows what such experiences would do to a child's social development. "When you are 12," he once said, "you no longer need the parents." Later, there was more horror with the grotesque murder of his pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, by Charles Manson's followers.

But there really is no excuse. "He's a convicted felon and a fugitive, and that's not going to go away," the Los Angeles County District Attorney's spokeswoman, Sandi Gibbons, said in February. "You don't get a pass for longevity." A new twist was added when Polanski's victim said she can understand why he ran. And that his work should be judged on its merits.

She has a point. If we rejected the work solely because of the morality of the artist, there would be a lot less great art in the world.

Take Wagner. If ever there was a case of "nice music, pity about the composer", he was it. Wagner was apparently anti-Semitic but it was his posthumous career as Hilter's favourite composer that has made him so problematic.

Conductor Daniel Barenboim copped all sorts of flak for springing the overture to Tristan and Isolde on concert-goers at a festival in Jerusalem. Barenboim stood his ground: "No one should be allowed to ban anyone else from listening to Wagner." But plans for a further performance of a Wagner opera were cancelled after furious protests.

As a fanatical Bloomsbury Group groupie, I've had to gulp hard and overlook those entries in Virginia Woolf's diaries that reveal her to be a frightful snob, a bit of a bitch and nothing like Nicole Kidman. I was sorely tested by what she said about our own Katherine Mansfield: "She stinks like a well civet cat that has taken to street walking. In truth I'm a little shocked by her commonness at first sight." Meow.

Happily, her art rose above her less appealing opinions, which is why her books have survived even their popularity with earnest women's lit courses.

As Oscar Wilde, who had a little trouble with the law himself, so reasonably put it, "The fact of a man being a poisoner is nothing against his prose."

Part of the trouble in separating art from the artist is that, thanks to the immense popularity of such nosy-parker genres as biography and the kiss-and-tell memoirs, we have way too much information about your average, messed-up creative genius.

My admiration for The Catcher in the Rye survived - just - Joyce Maynard's memoir about how, as an 18-year-old, she was courted, seduced and unceremoniously dumped by a health-obsessed, middle-aged, frozen pea-popping J.D. Salinger.

William Burroughs' outrageous novel Naked Lunch has survived as a cult classic despite, or possibly because of, a life marked by truckloads of drugs and the allegedly accidental shooting of his wife while he was playing a drunken game of William Tell.

To continue to fully enjoy the works of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, D.H. Lawrence or Picasso is to overlook many a dodgy political belief and/or personality defect.

I suspect the only reason Shakespeare the artist is so universally venerated is that we know stuff-all about him.

We know more than we'd like to about Polanski. Giving him his Oscar was always going to be a tricky. But you have to say art was the winner on the night. If art, as The Pianist demonstrated, can transcend tragedy, mortality, loss, pain, it can also - must also - transcend the failings of the artist.