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PARTISAN REVIEW
society, it is not just personal relationships, jokes between friends,
surrealist extravaganzas, sex nightmares and mysteries. Whoever cares
for it must fight to achieve it not only in his life but also in society.
Doubtless it was partly considerations of this kind which per–
suaded writers as detached from political passions as E. M. Forster,
Maritain, Gide, Benda, Bergamin and Thomas Mann, to play a politi–
cal role in the 1930's. They realized that the inner life of civilization
which they maintained in their art, was in process of being destroyed
in the external world of political action. Accordingly, they intervened,
and although recently in England there has been a cooling off of
relations between writers and leftist politicians, that does not affect
the ultimate repercussions which their intervention will have. The
1930's were a turning point because they marked the realization of
many artists that they had a responsibility toward civilization in the
world outside themselves and their friends. The doubts that have
arisen since are not as to this responsibility, but as to the part that
the writer should play: whether he should lend himself to party
propaganda, whether he should give up time for writing to appear on
political platforms, whether he should, as T. S. Eliot suggests, define
for himself very exactly the part which the man of letters may take
in supporting cultural activities and limit himself to that.
The political activities of writers in the 1930's led to misunder–
standing for a clear reason. The writers, for the most part, supported
leftist causes, such as that of the Republicans in Spain, because they
believed that, on the whole, the Republicans and the socialists were
the defenders of civilization. In addition to
this,
in supporting the
Republicans they were supporting the great cause of social justice
which many intellectuals have supported in Europe ever since the
time of Voltaire. But although they were indeed supporting a move–
ment which was fighting for the cause of intellectual freedom, this
movement itself had very little use for poetry and for art, except
perhaps in Spain itself among Spaniards. When supported by some
of the most brilliant young writers of the decade, the English Com–
munist leaders had no idea of putting them to a better use than the
crude one of getting them killed as quickly as possible on the battle–
fields of Spain, and of then using their names as propaganda. In this
the Communists were not malicious, they simply revealed their com–
plete ignorance of the very highest values of the freedom of the spirit
for which they were supposed to be fighting, and their pathetic faith
in the idea that the only use of any talent outside that of party politics
is the value to which it can be turned as political propaganda.
