PARTISAN REVIEW
I don't mean anything flamboyant by the phrase "telling the
truth": I don't mean exposing anything. By truth I mean accuracy–
it is largely a matter of style. It is my duty to society not to write:
"I stood above a bottomless
gulf"
or "going downstairs, I got into a
taxi," because these statements are untrue. My characters must not
go white in the face or tremble like leaves, not because these phrases
are cliches but because they are untrue. This is not only a matter of
the artistic conscience but of the social conscience too. We already see
the effect of the popular novel on popular thought. Every time a
phrase like one of these passes into the mind uncriticized,
it
muddies
the stream of thought.
The other duty, to accept no privileges, is equally important. The
kindness of the State, the State's interest
in
art, is far more dangerous
than its indifference. We have seen how in time of war there is
always some well-meaning patron who will suggest that artists should
be in a reserved class. But how, at the end of six years of popular
agony, would the artist be regarded if he had been reserved, kept
safe and fattened at the public expense, too good to die like other
men? And what would have been expected of
him
in return? In
Russia the artist
has
belonged to a privileged class: he has been given
a better ·flat, more money, more food, even a certain freedom of
movement: but the state has asked in return that he should cease to
be an artist. The danger does not exist only in totalitarian countries.
The bourgeois State, too, has its gifts to offer to the artist--or those
it regards as artists, but in these cases the artist has paid like the
politician in advance. One thinks of the literary knights, and then
one turns to the plain tombstones with their bare
hie jacets
of Mr.
Hardy, Mr. James and Mr. Yeats. Yes, the more I think of it, that
is a duty the artist unmistakably owes to society-to accept no favors.
Perhaps the greatest pressure on the writer comes from the
society within society:
his
political or his religious group, it may even
be his university or his employers. It does seem to me that one privi–
lege he can claim, in common perhaps with his fellow human beings,
but possibly with greater safety, is that of disloyalty. I met a farmer
at lunch the other day who was employing two lunatics; what fine
workers they were, he said; and how loyal. But of course they were
loyal; they were like the conditioned beings of the brave new world.
Disloyalty
lS
our privilege. But it is a privilege you will never get
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