8
PARTISAN REVIEW
combatants. But as a whole, for a writer of Malraux's high ahil·
ities,
Man's Hope
is a sheer waste.
And the lesson of all this is not that writers were mistaken to
interest themselves in social causes or that they should stay out of
politics. Literature does not make its own conditions; it is subject
to the general process of social determination. The lesson, rather,
is that politics
qua
politics, as the ivory tower
qua
the ivory tower,
is neither good nor bad for literature. Both are X quantities, in
their own right neither regressive nor advanced as modes of literary
response to experience. But they become meaningful insofar as
they are forms or modalities that each historic situation fills with
its own content, with its own time-spirit. Art as such derives no
special benefits from the exclusively esthetic, the social and politi–
cal, the religious, or any other attitude that the artist may adopt
towards life; and we should be wary of the large claims that certain
critics are 'making for politics as a boon to art. The real question
is more specific: what is the artist actually doing in politics? what
is he
doing with it
and what is it
doing to him?
How does his
political faith affect him as a craftsman, what influence does it
exercise on the moral qualities and on the sensibility of his work?
And from this point of view anybody who, in becoming political–
minded, attaches himself to the international Tammany Hall that
Stalinism has turned into, or to some other national or class dogma,
is doing much worse for himself
as an artist
than he who, refusing
to "join up," continues to create in the traditional individualistic
styles. The stupidities that the latter might be guilty of will be at
least of a personal and not of a public character. And the ivory
tower, after all, is an infinitely more commendable home for litera·
ture than Tammany Hall.
yet in our time literature, in its characteristic aspects, is no
longer at liberty to decide for itself' whether to spurn or to enter
politics. For better or worse, politics is shaping its strict destiny.
It might still, to be sure, serve other ends too, but it can no longer
hang back from assuming the duties and facing the hazards of
social partisanship. As the chronic crisis of capitalism extorts
from every human being greater and greater sacrifices of will, con·
sciousness, and individuality, depriving people of whatever inde–
pendence they might have had and of whatever power was theirs to
act upon and determine their own lot, the literf ry themes of private
