PARTISAN REVIEW
19
possibility that people looking back on our time may see it not at all
as we do - just as we, looking back on the English, the French,
or even the Russian Revolutions see them differently from the peo–
ple living then.) But "Marxism" and its various offshoots, has fer–
mented ideas everywhere, and so fast and energetically that, once
"way out," it has already been absorbed, has become part of or–
dinary thinking. Ideas that were confined to the far Left thirty or
{arty years ago had pervaded the Left generally twenty years ago,
and have provided the commonplaces of conventional social thought
from Right to Left for the last ten years. Something so thoroughly
absorbed is finished as a force - but it was dominant, and in a
novel of the sort I was trying to do, had to be central.
Another thought that I had played with for a long time was
that a main character should be some sort of an artist, but with
a,
"block." This was because the theme of the artist has been dominant
in art for some time - the painter, writer, musician, as exemplar.
Every major writer has used it, and most minor ones. Those arche–
types,
the artist and his mirror-image the businessman, have strad–
dled our culture, one shown as a boorish insensitive, the other as a
creator, all excesses of sensibility and suffering and a towering ego–
tism which has to be forgiven because of his products - in exactly
the same way, of course, as the businessman has to be forgiven for the
sake of his. We get used to what we have, and forget that the artist–
as-exemplar is a new theme. Heroes a hundred years ago weren't
often artists. They were soldiers and empire builders and explorers
and clergymen and politicians - too bad about women who had
scarcely succeeded in becoming Florence Nightingale yet. Only odd–
balls and eccentrics wanted to be artists, and had to fight for it. But
to use this theme of our time "the artist," "the writer," I decided
it would have to be developed by giving the creature a block and
discussing the reasons for the block. These would have to be linked
with the disparity between the overwhelming problems of war, fam–
ine, poverty, and the tiny individual who was trying to mirror them.
But what was intolerable, what really could not be borne any longer,
was this monstrously isolated, monstrously narcissistic, pedestaled
paragon.
It
seems that in their own way the young have seen this
and changed it, creating a culture of their own in which hundreds
and thousands of people make films, assist in making films, make
