20
DORIS LESSING
newspapers of all sorts, make music, paint pictures, write books, take
photographs. They have abolished that isolated, creative, sensitive
figure - by copying him in hundreds of thousands. A trend has
reached an extreme, its conclusion, and so there will be a reaction
of some sort, as always happens.
The theme of " the artist" had to relate to another, subjectivity.
When I began writing there was pressure on writers not to be "sub–
jective." This pressure began inside communist movements, as a
development of the social literary criticism developed in Russia in
the nineteenth century, by a group of remarkable talents, of whom
Belinsky was the best known, using the arts and particularly litera–
ture in the battle against Czarism and oppression.
It
spread fast
everywhere, finding an echo as late as the fifties, in this country,
with the theme of "commitment." It
is
still potent in communist
countries. "Bothering about your stupid personal concerns when
Rome is burning" is how it tends to get itself expressed, on the level
of ordinary life - and it was hard to withstand, coming from one's
nearest and dearest, and from people doing everything one respected
most: like, for instance, trying to fight color prejudice in South
Africa. Yet all the time novels, stories, art of every sort, became more
and more personal. In the "Blue Notebook," Anna writes of lec–
tures she has been giving: "Art during the Middle Ages was com–
munal, unindividual ; it came out of a group consciousness. It was
without the driving painful individuality of the art of the bourgeois
era. And one day we will leave behind the driving egotism of in–
dividual art. We will return to an art which will express not man's
self-divisions and separateness from his fellows but his responsibility
for his fellows and his brotherhood. Art from the West becomes
more and more a shriek of torment recording pain. Pain is becoming
our deepest reality. . . . I have been saying something like this.
About three months ago, in the middle of this lecture, I began to
stammer and couldn't finish . ..."
Anna's stammer was because she was evading something. Once a
pressure or a current has started, there is no way of avoiding it:
there was no way of
not
being intensely subjective - it was, if you
like, the writer's task for that time. You couldn't ignore it: you
couldn't write a book about the building of a bridge or a dam and
not develop the mind and feelings of the people who built it. (You
