STATE OF AMERICAN WRITING
classic situation of claustrophobia has become the literary "con–
ference" in which quite sensible people discuss the condition of lit–
erature and the social function of the writer.
I like and respect literature as a trade and wish it could nowa–
days be a trade more often and more easily. I believe that it is a
great help to certain kinds of writers to work in relation to a paying
audience, even though a small one. To please and to tempt, to stay
in touch with established conventions in order to use, circumvent
and transmute them-this has the effect of keeping the artist's will
under pressure, of hiding some part of
his
intention even from him–
self, thus permitting him to strike deeper both into
his
own uncon–
scious and into that of his audience. I don't believe that the ideal
situation of the artist is the freedom to work
only
in relation to
his
own will and intention.
And then I can understand literature as a necessity, which I
take it to have been with such writers as Baudelaire, Rimbaud and
Kafka, a continuous demonstrative act, the full summation of their
lives. These aren't my favorite writers but I
think
I know what they
are up to-and what they are up to doesn't allow them to take
"conditions" into account. And I can understand liter.ature as an
instrument, the way it was thought of by Blake and Lawrence, who
consciously undertook to change the consciousness of society and for
whom society's resistance to what they were saying was the given
and accepted circumstance of their work.
These categories are not, of course, exclusive of each other. And
they have one thing in common, which is the open
demand
of the
writer-for money, or for attention to
his
internal world, or for
a change in the external world. They have nothing to do with the
idea of the writer which establishes itself whenever literature is dis–
cussed as an institution: that is, the idea of the writer as ideally a
kind of highly privileged priest who is subsidized by a corrupt society
to do it some good. On such occasions the self-pity that suffuses every
statement, the hidden desire to become a civil servant, an under–
secretary in charge of spiritual hygiene, suggest an essential lack of
realism about the present social situation and, indeed, about any
possible social situation.
Nothing I have said
is
meant as derogation of the guild spirit
among writers, which at the present time is probably inadequate.
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