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PARTISAN REVIEW
the identification of cultural and political aims. When we tum to our
own age we find that the dilemma has become more acute. These
are some characteristic pronouncements made by English writers
between 1937 and 1947:
A writer who wishes to produce the best work that he is capable of
producing must first of all become a socialist in his practical life, must go
over to the progressive side of the class-conflict (Edward Upward).
The only thoroughly satisfying attitude for the writer today, the
only way in which his life can become an integrated whole with the life
around
him,
is by participation in political activity: yet such participa–
tion in political activity is likely to eliminate altogether his capacity to
produce art (Julian Symons).
Either you go into politics or you stay out.. .. Literary values are
human values: those who cherish literary values must associate them–
selves with political movements which set human values first: or they
must reconcile themselves to being ineffectual bewailers of a dying
civilization (Christopher Hill).
One of the oddest features of English literary life in the thirties
was the tendency of young men who had had the most expensive sort
of education to reverse the movement of their predecessors and to
throw in their lot with what Stendhal contemptuously called "shop–
keepers." It was not a very happy experiment in
declassement.
They
were in general despised by the party-member who did not hesitate
to stigmatize them as "bourgeois," and political dogmatism ruined
such small talent for verse-writing as they have possessed.
What is particularly disquieting about the three passages I have
just quoted is the naive assumption that your only hope of writing
well is to purchase the party ticket and the equally groundless assump–
tion that politics should be preferred to
art,
that you must confonn
to the party line even if it means sacrificing yourself as a writer.
Although these assumptions must be rejected absolutely, the
pronouncements of the three writers do draw attention to a genuine
dilemma which cannot be shirked. It is of course the problem of the
writer in politics which has become inseparable from the problem of
the writer in society. The contemporary writer's obsession with politics
is not accidental. It has been forced on him by the transfonnation of
the political scene during the past hundred years. He has come to
realize that he is a twofold being, that he has his duty as a writer and
his duty as a citizen at the polling booth. When political parties in
