We may flinch at this sort of thing, but we remain, for the most part, curiously reluctant to reject Faulkner’s credo of artistic ruthlessness altogether. The belief that artists are entitled to be morally careless — that great art excuses everything — has proved to be one of the more tenacious parts of our Romantic inheritance. In Hollywood movies about artists, the characters who challenge the hero’s license to be inconsiderate — the landlady who hassles van Gogh about the appalling state of his garret, the neighbor who yells at Beethoven to keep the noise down, the sulky wife who insists that Johnny Cash stop canoodling with June Carter — are invariably presented as dreary philistines who must be ignored or defeated if truth and beauty are to triumph. (Yes, it’s sad for Mrs. Cash that Johnny prefers June, but what is the fleeting unhappiness of a suburban housewife compared with the timeless splendor of “Jackson”?)

Perhaps one way of disturbing our reflexive deference to the bad manners of great men is to read the firsthand testimonies of the women who have suffered them. Listening to the robbed mothers and oppressed spouses and neglected children of literary history, we notice that much of what has traditionally been ascribed to artistic ruthlessness is indistinguishable from the standard-issue selfishness of non-artists.

“And his biographers will tell of how he helped the laborers to carry buckets of water,” Countess Tolstoy wrote in her journal, “but no one will ever know that he never gave his wife a rest and never — in all these 32 years — gave his child a drink of water or spent five minutes by his bedside to give me a chance to rest a little, to sleep, or to go out for a walk, or even just recover from all my labors.”

Was it Tolstoy’s artistic vocation that stopped him from bringing one of his 13 children the odd glass of water, or just boorishness of the same dreary, unglamorous kind that is wont to afflict firemen and accountants? Speaking of children, why is it that Tolstoy, and so many other devoted artists, insisted on marrying and reproducing? It’s one thing to renounce the great world and hole up in a hermit’s shack in the service of your art. But it seems a very selective sort of ruthlessness to allow yourself all the conventional comforts of a bourgeois household and then insist on being unaccountable when it comes to the chores.

Sometimes, of course, the claims of art are genuinely at odds with the claims of human kindness, and an artist really does have to choose between, as it were, his sonnet and his mother. But it’s by no means clear that the “true” artist will always opt for the sonnet. Robert Lowell faced a version of this dilemma when deciding whether to publish “The Dolphin,” a set of poems that contained altered excerpts from the letters of his second wife, Elizabeth Hardwick. His friend Elizabeth Bishop wrote to him, urging against publication, but he went ahead anyway: “I couldn’t bear to have my book (my life) wait inside me like a dead child,” he later explained. The poems endure. But then so too does Bishop’s beautiful, agitated letter, in which she considers the cruelty of the poems — the immense distress they are bound to cause — and concludes, simply, “Art just isn’t worth that much.”