About a year ago I
attended a meeting of the P.E.N. Club, the occasion being
the tercentenary of Milton's
Aeropagitica -- a
pamphlet, it may be remembered, in defense of freedom of
the press. Milton's famous phrase about the sin of
"killing" a book was printed on the leaflets
advertising the meeting which had been circulated
beforehand.
There were four
speakers on the platform. One of them delivered a speech
which did deal with the freedom of the press, but only in
relation to India; another said, hesitantly, and in very
general terms, that liberty was a good thing; a third
delivered an attack on the laws relating to obscenity in
literature. The fourth devoted most of his speech to a
defense of the Russian purges. Of the speeches from the
body of the hall, some reverted to the question of
obscenity and the laws that deal with it, others were
simply eulogies of Soviet Russia. Moral liberty -- the
liberty to discuss sex questions frankly in print --
seemed to be generally approved, but political liberty
was not mentioned. Out of this concourse of several
hundred people, perhaps half of whom were directly
connected with the writing trade, there was not a single
one who could point out that freedom of the press, if it
means anything at all, means the freedom to criticize and
oppose. Significantly, no speaker quoted from the
pamphlet which was ostensibly being commemorated. Nor was
there any mention of the various books which have been
"killed" in England and the United States
during the war. In its net effect the meeting was a
demonstration in favor of censorship.
There was nothing particularly
surprising in this. In our age, the idea of intellectual
liberty is under attack from two directions. On the one
side are its theoretical enemies, the apologists of
totalitarianism, and on the other its immediate,
practical enemies, monopoly and bureaucracy. Any writer
or journalist who wants to retain his integrity finds
himself thwarted by the general drift of society rather
than by active persecution. The sort of things that are
working against him are the concentration of the press in
the hands of a few rich men, the grip of monopoly on
radio and the films, the unwillingness of the public to
spend money on books, making it necessary for nearly
every writer to earn part of his living by hackwork, the
encroachment of official bodies like the M.O.I. and the
British Council, which help the writer to keep alive but
also waste his time and dictate his opinions, and the
continuous war atmosphere of the past ten years, whose
distorting effects no one has been able to escape.
Everything in our age conspires to turn the writer, and
every other kind of artist as well, into a minor
official, working on themes handed down from above and
never telling what seems to him the whole of the truth.
But in struggling against this fate he gets no help from
his own side; that is, there is no large body of opinion
which will assure him that he's in the right. In the
past, at any rate throughout the Protestant centuries,
the idea of rebellion and the idea of intellectual
integrity were mixed up. A heretic -- political, moral,
religious, or aesthetic -- was one who refused to outrage
his own conscience. His outlook was summed up in the
words of the Revivalist hymn:
Dare to be a Daniel
Dare to stand alone
Dare to have a purpose firm
Dare to make it known
To bring this hymn up to date one would
have to add a "Don't" at the beginning of each
line. For it is the peculiarity of our age that the
rebels against the existing order, at any rate the most
numerous and characteristic of them, are also rebelling
against the idea of individual integrity. "Daring to
stand alone" is ideologically criminal as well as
practically dangerous. The independence of the writer and
the artist is eaten away by vague economic forces, and at
the same time it is undermined by those who should be its
defenders. It is with the second process that I am
concerned here.
Freedom of thought and of the press are
usually attacked by arguments which are not worth
bothering about. Anyone who has experience of lecturing
and debating knows them off backwards. Here I am not
trying to deal with the familiar claim that freedom is an
illusion, or with the claim that there is more freedom in
totalitarian countries than in democratic ones, but with
the much more tenable and dangerous proposition that
freedom is undesirable and that intellectual honesty is a
form of anti-social selfishness. Although other aspects
of the question are usually in the foreground, the
controversy over freedom of speech and of the press is at
bottom a controversy of the desirability, or otherwise,
of telling lies. What is really at issue is the right to
report contemporary events truthfully, or as truthfully
as is consistent with the ignorance, bias and
self-deception from which every observer necessarily
suffers. In saying this I may seem to be saying that
straightforward "reportage" is the only branch
of literature that matters: but I will try to show later
that at every literary level, and probably in every one
of the arts, the same issue arises in more or less
subtilized forms. Meanwhile, it is necessary to strip
away the irrelevancies in which this controversy is
usually wrapped up.
The enemies of intellectual liberty
always try to present their case as a plea for discipline
versus individualism. The issue truth-versus-untruth is
as far as possible kept in the background. Although the
point of emphasis may vary, the writer who refuses to
sell his opinions is always branded as a mere egoist. He
is accused, that is, of either wanting to shut himself up
in an ivory tower, or of making an exhibitionist display
of his own personality, or of resisting the inevitable
current of history in an attempt to cling to unjustified
privilege. The Catholic and the Communist are alike in
assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and
intelligent. Each of them tacitly claims that "the
truth" has already been revealed, and that the
heretic, if he is not simply a fool, is secretly aware of
"the truth" and merely resists it out of
selfish motives. In Communist literature the attack on
intellectual liberty is usually masked by oratory about
"petty-bourgeois individualism," "the
illusions of nineteenth-century liberalism," etc.,
and backed up by words of abuse such as
"romantic" and "sentimental," which,
since they do not have any agreed meaning, are difficult
to answer. In this way the controversy is maneuvered away
from its real issue. One can accept, and most enlightened
people would accept, the Communist thesis that pure
freedom will only exist in a classless society, and that
one is most nearly free when one is working to bring such
a society about. But slipped in with this is the quite
unfounded claim that the Communist Party is itself aiming
at the establishment of the classless society, and that
in the U.S.S.R. this aim is actually on the way to being
realized. If the first claim is allowed to entail the
second, there is almost no assault on common sense and
common decency that cannot be justified. But meanwhile,
the real point has been dodged. Freedom of the intellect
means the freedom to report what one has seen, heard, and
felt, and not to be obliged to fabricate imaginary facts
and feelings. The familiar tirades against
"escapism" and "individualism,"
"romanticism," and so forth, are merely a
forensic device, the aim of which is to make the
perversion of history seem respectable.
Fifteen years ago, when one defended
the freedom of the intellect, one had to defend it
against Conservatives, against Catholics, and to some
extent -- for they were not of great importance in
England -- against Fascists. Today one has to defend it
against Communists and "fellow-travelers." One
ought not to exaggerate the direct influence of the small
English Communist Party, but there can be no question
about the poisonous effect of the Russian mythos on
English intellectual life. Because of it known facts are
suppressed and distorted to such an extent as to make it
doubtful whether a true history of our times can ever be
written. Let me give just one instance out of the
hundreds that could be cited. When Germany collapsed, it
was found that very large numbers of Soviet Russians --
mostly, no doubt, from non-political motives -- had
changed sides and were fighting for the Germans. Also, a
small but not negligible portion of the Russian prisoners
and displaced persons refused to go back to the U.S.S.R.,
and some of them, at least, were repatriated against
their will. These facts, known to many journalists on the
spot, went almost unmentioned in the British press, while
at the same time Russophile publicists in England
continued to justify the purges and deportations of
1936-38 by claiming that the U.S.S.R. "had no
quislings." The fog of lies and misinformation that
surrounds such subjects as the Ukraine famine, the
Spanish civil war, Russian policy in Poland, and so
forth, is not due entirely to conscious dishonesty, but
any writer or journalist who is fully sympathetic for the
U.S.S.R. -- sympathetic, that is, in the way the Russians
themselves would want him to be -- does have to acquiesce
in deliberate falsification on important issues. I have
before me what must be a very rare pamphlet, written by
Maxim Litvinoff in 1918 and outlining the recent events
in the Russian Revolution. It makes no mention of Stalin,
but gives high praise to Trotsky, and also to Zinoviev,
Kamenev, and others. What could be the attitude of even
the most intellectually scrupulous Communist towards such
a pamphlet? At best, the obscurantist attitude of saying
that it is an undesirable document and better suppressed.
And if for some reason it were decided to issue a garbled
version of the pamphlet, denigrating Trotsky and
inserting references to Stalin, no Communist who remained
faithful to his party could protest. Forgeries almost as
gross as this have been committed in recent years. But
the significant thing is not that they happen, but that,
even when they are known about, they provoke no reaction
from the left-wing intelligentsia as a whole. The
argument that to tell the truth would be
"inopportune" or would "play into the
hands of" somebody or other is felt to be
unanswerable, and few people are bothered by the prospect
of the lies which they condone getting out of the
newspapers and into the history books.
The organized lying practiced by
totalitarian states is not, as is sometimes claimed, a
temporary expedient of the same nature as military
deception. It is something integral to totalitarianism,
something that would still continue even if concentration
camps and secret police forces had ceased to be
necessary. Among intelligent Communists there is an
underground legend to the effect that although the
Russian government is obliged now to deal in lying
propaganda, frame-up trials, and so forth, it is secretly
recording the true facts and will publish them at some
future time. We can, I believe, be quite certain that
this is not the case, because the mentality implied by
such an action is that of a liberal historian who
believes that the past cannot be altered and that a
correct knowledge of history is valuable as a matter of
course. From the totalitarian point of view history is
something to be created rather than learned. A
totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its
ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be
thought of as infallible. But since, in practice, no one
is infallible, it is frequently necessary to rearrange
past events in order to show that this or that mistake
was not made, or that this or that imaginary triumph
actually happened. Then again, every major change in
policy demands a corresponding change of doctrine and a
revelation of prominent historical figures. This kind of
thing happens everywhere, but is clearly likelier to lead
to outright falsification in societies where only one
opinion is permissible at any given moment.
Totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous
alteration of the past, and in the long run probably
demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective
truth. The friends of totalitarianism in this country
usually tend to argue that since absolute truth is not
attainable, a big lie is no worse than a little lie. It
is pointed out that all historical records are biased and
inaccurate, or on the other hand, that modern physics has
proven that what seems to us the real world is an
illusion, so that to believe in the evidence of one's
senses is simply vulgar philistinism. A totalitarian
society which succeeded in perpetuating itself would
probably set up a schizophrenic system of thought, in
which the laws of common sense held good in everyday life
and in certain exact sciences, but could be disregarded
by the politician, the historian, and the sociologist.
Already there are countless people who would think it
scandalous to falsify a scientific textbook, but would
see nothing wrong in falsifying an historical fact. It is
at the point where literature and politics cross that
totalitarianism exerts its greatest pressure on the
intellectual. The exact sciences are not, at this date,
menaced to anything like the same extent. This partly
accounts for the fact that in all countries it is easier
for the scientists than for the writers to line up behind
their respective governments.
To keep the matter in perspective, let
me repeat what I said at the beginning of this essay:
that in England the immediate enemies of truthfulness,
and hence of freedom of thought, are the press lords, the
film magnates, and the bureaucrats, but that on a long
view the weakening of the desire for liberty among the
intellectuals themselves is the most serious symptom of
all. It may seem that all this time I have been talking
about the effects of censorship, not on literature as a
whole, but merely on one department of political
journalism. Granted that Soviet Russia constitutes a sort
of forbidden area in the British press, granted that
issues like Poland, the Spanish civil war, the
Russo-German pact, and so forth, are debarred from
serious discussion, and that if you possess information
that conflicts with the prevailing orthodoxy you are
expected to either distort it or keep quiet about it --
granted all this, why should literature in the wider
sense be affected? Is every writer a politician, and is
every book necessarily a work of straightforward
"reportage"? Even under the tightest
dictatorship, cannot the individual writer remain free
inside his own mind and distill or disguise his
unorthodox ideas in such a way that the authorities will
be too stupid to recognize them? And in any case, if the
writer himself is in agreement with the prevailing
orthodoxy, why should it have a cramping effect on him?
Is not literature, or any of the arts, likeliest to
flourish in societies in which there are no major
conflicts of opinion and no sharp distinction between the
artist and his audience? Does one have to assume that
every writer is a rebel, or even that a writer as such is
an exceptional person?
Whenever one attempts to defend
intellectual liberty against the claims of
totalitarianism, one meets with these arguments in one
form or another. They are based on a complete
misunderstanding of what literature is, and how -- one
should perhaps say why -- it comes into being. They
assume that a writer is either a mere entertainer or else
a venal hack who can switch from one line of propaganda
to another as easily as an organ grinder changing tunes.
But after all, how is it that books ever come to be
written? Above a quite low level, literature is an
attempt to influence the viewpoint of one's
contemporaries by recording experience. And so far as
freedom of expression is concerned, there is not much
difference between a mere journalist and the most
"unpolitical" imaginative writer. The
journalist is unfree, and is conscious of unfreedom, when
he is forced to write lies or suppress what seems to him
important news; the imaginative writer is unfree when he
has to falsify his subjective feelings, which from his
point of view are facts. He may distort and caricature
reality in order to make his meaning clearer, but he
cannot misrepresent the scenery of his own mind; he
cannot say with any conviction that he likes what he
dislikes, or believes what he disbelieves. If he is
forced to do so, the only result is that his creative
faculties will dry up. Nor can he solve the problem by
keeping away from controversial topics. There is no such
thing as a genuinely non-political literature, and least
of all in an age like our own, when fears, hatreds, and
loyalties of a directly political kind are near to the
surface of everyone's consciousness. Even a single taboo
can have an all-round crippling effect upon the mind,
because there is always the danger that any thought which
is freely followed up may lead to the forbidden thought.
It follows that the atmosphere of totalitarianism is
deadly to any kind of prose writer, though a poet, at any
rate a lyric poet, might possibly find it breathable. And
in any totalitarian society that survives for more than a
couple of generations, it is probable that prose
literature, of the kind that has existed during the past
four hundred years, must actually come to an end.
Literature has sometimes flourished
under despotic regimes, but, as has often been pointed
out, the despotisms of the past were not totalitarian.
Their repressive apparatus was always inefficient, their
ruling classes were usually either corrupt or apathetic
or half-liberal in outlook, and the prevailing religious
doctrines usually worked against perfectionism and the
notion of human infallibility. Even so it is broadly true
that prose literature has reached its highest levels in
periods of democracy and free speculation. What is new in
totalitarianism is that its doctrines are not only
unchallengeable but also unstable. They have to be
accepted on pain of damnation, but on the other hand,
they are always liable to be altered on a moment's
notice. Consider, for example, the various attitudes,
completely incompatible with one another, which an
English Communist or "fellow-traveler" has had
to adopt toward the war between Britain and Germany. For
years before September, 1939, he was expected to be in a
continuous stew about "the horrors of Nazism"
and to twist everything he wrote into a denunciation of
Hitler: after September, 1939, for twenty months, he had
to believe that Germany was more sinned against than
sinning, and the word "Nazi," at least as far
as print went, had to drop right out of his vocabulary.
Immediately after hearing the 8 o'clock news bulletin on
the morning of June 22, 1941, he had to start believing
once again that Nazism was the most hideous evil the
world had ever seen. Now, it is easy for the politician
to make such changes: for a writer the case is somewhat
different. If he is to switch his allegiance at exactly
the right moment, he must either tell lies about his
subjective feelings, or else suppress them altogether. In
either case he has destroyed his dynamo. Not only will
ideas refuse to come to him, but the very words he uses
will seem to stiffen under his touch. Political writing
in our time consists almost entirely of prefabricated
phrases bolted together like the pieces of a child's
Meccano set. It is the unavoidable result of
self-censorship. To write in plain, vigorous language one
has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one
cannot be politically orthodox. It might be otherwise in
an "age of faith," when the prevailing
orthodoxy has long been established and is not taken too
seriously. In that case it would be possible, or might be
possible, for large areas of one's mind to remain
unaffected by what one officially believed. Even so, it
is worth noticing that prose literature almost
disappeared during the only age of faith that Europe has
ever enjoyed. Throughout the whole of the Middle Ages
there was almost no imaginative prose literature and very
little in the way of historical writing; and the
intellectual leaders of society expressed their most
serious thoughts in a dead language which barley altered
during a thousand years.
Totalitarianism, however, does not so
much promise an age of faith as an age of schizophrenia.
A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes
flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has
lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by
force or fraud. Such a society, no matter how long it
persists, can never afford to become either tolerant or
intellectually stable. It can never permit either the
truthful recording of facts or the emotional sincerity
that literary creation demands. But to be corrupted by
totalitarianism one does not have to live in a
totalitarian country. The mere prevalence of certain
ideas can spread a kind of poison that makes one subject
after another impossible for literary purposes. Wherever
there is an enforced orthodoxy -- or even two
orthodoxies, as often happens -- good writing stops. This
was well illustrated by the Spanish civil war. To many
English intellectuals the war was a deeply moving
experience, but not an experience about which they could
write sincerely. There were only two things that you were
allowed to say, and both of them were palpable lies: as a
result, the war produced acres of print but almost
nothing worth reading.
It is not certain whether the effects
of totalitarianism upon verse need be so deadly as its
effects on prose. There is a whole series of converging
reasons why it is somewhat easier for a poet than a prose
writer to feel at home in an authoritarian society. To
begin with, bureaucrats and other "practical"
men usually despise the poet too deeply to be much
interested in what he is saying. Secondly, what the poet
is saying -- that is, what his poem "means" if
translated into prose -- is relatively unimportant, even
to himself. The thought contained in a poem is always
simple, and is no more the primary purpose of the poem
than the anecdote is the primary purpose of the picture.
A poem is an arrangement of sounds and associations, as a
painting is an arrangement of brushmarks. For short
snatches, indeed, as in the refrain of a song, poetry can
even dispense with meaning altogether. It is therefore
fairly easy for a poet to keep away from dangerous
subjects and avoid uttering heresies; and even when he
does utter them, they may escape notice. But above all,
good verse, unlike good prose, is not necessarily and
individual product. Certain kinds of poems, such as
ballads, or, on the other hand, very artificial verse
forms, can be composed co-operatively by groups of
people. Whether the ancient English and Scottish ballads
were originally produced by individuals, or by the people
at large, is disputed; but at any rate they are
non-individual in the sense that they constantly change
in passing from mouth to mouth. Even in print no two
versions of a ballad are ever quite the same. Many
primitive peoples compose verse communally. Someone
begins to improvise, probably accompanying himself on a
musical instrument, somebody else chips in with a line or
a rhyme when the first singer breaks down, and so the
process continues until there exists a whole song or
ballad which has no identifiable author.
In prose, this kind of intimate
collaboration is quite impossible. Serious prose, in any
case, has to be composed in solitude, whereas the
excitement of being part of a group is actually an aid to
certain kinds of versification. Verse -- and perhaps good
verse of its own kind, though it would not be the highest
kind -- might survive under even the most inquisitorial
regime. Even in a society where liberty and individuality
had been extinguished, there would still be a need either
for patriotic songs and heroic ballads celebrating
victories, or for elaborate exercises in flattery; and
these are the kinds of poems that can be written to
order, or composed communally, without necessarily
lacking artistic value. Prose is a different matter,
since the prose writer cannot narrow the range of his
thoughts without killing his inventiveness. But the
history of totalitarian societies, or of groups of people
who have adopted the totalitarian outlook, suggests that
loss of liberty is inimical to all forms of literature.
German literature almost disappeared during the Hitler
regime, and the case was not much better in Italy.
Russian literature, so far as one can judge by
translations, has deteriorated markedly since the early
days of the revolution, though some of the verse appears
to be better than the prose. Few if any Russian novels
that it is possible to take seriously have been
translated for about fifteen years. In western Europe and
America large sections of the literary intelligentsia
have either passed through the Communist Party or have
been warmly sympathetic to it, but this whole leftward
movement has produced extraordinarily few books worth
reading. Orthodox Catholicism, again, seems to have a
crushing effect upon certain literary forms, especially
the novel. During a period of three hundred years, how
many people have been at once good novelists and good
Catholics? The fact is that certain themes cannot be
celebrated in words, and tyranny is one of them. No one
ever wrote a good book in praise of the Inquisition.
Poetry might survive in a totalitarian age, and certain
arts or half-arts, such as architecture, might even find
tyranny beneficial, but the prose writer would have no
choice between silence or death. Prose literature as we
know it is the product of rationalism, of the Protestant
centuries, of the autonomous individual. And the
destruction of intellectual liberty cripples the
journalist, the sociological writer, the historian, the
novelist, the critic, and the poet, in that order. In the
future it is possible that a new kind of literature, not
involving individual feeling or truthful observation, may
arise, but no such thing is at present imaginable. It
seems much likelier that if the liberal culture that we
have lived in since the Renaissance comes to an end, the
literary art will perish with it.
Of course, print will continue to be
used, and it is interesting to speculate what kinds of
reading matter would survive in a rigidly totalitarian
society. Newspapers will presumably continue until
television technique reaches a higher level, but apart
from newspapers it is doubtful even now whether the great
mass of people in the industrialized countries feel the
need for any kind of literature. They are unwilling, at
any rate, to spend anywhere near as much on reading
matter as they spend on several other recreations.
Probably novels and stories will be completely superseded
by film and radio productions. Or perhaps some kind of
low grade sensational fiction will survive, produced by a
sort of conveyor-belt process that reduces human
initiative to the minimum.
It would probably not be beyond human
ingenuity to write books by machinery. But a sort of
mechanizing process can already be seen at work in the
film and radio, in publicity and propaganda, and in the
lower reaches of journalism. The Disney films, for
instance, are produced by what is essentially a factory
process, the work being done partly mechanically and
partly by teams of artists who have to subordinate their
individual style. Radio features are commonly written by
tired hacks to whom the subject and the manner of
treatment are dictated beforehand: even so, what they
write is merely a kind of raw material to be chopped into
shape by producers and censors. So also with the
innumerable books and pamphlets commissioned by
government departments. Even more machine-like is the
production of short stories, serials, and poems for the
very cheap magazines. Papers such as the Writer abound
with advertisements of literary schools, all of them
offering you ready-made plots at a few shillings a time.
Some, together with the plot, supply the opening and
closing sentences of each chapter. Others furnish you
with a sort of algebraical formula by the use of which
you can construct plots for yourself. Others have packs
of cards marked with characters and situations, which
have only to be shuffled and dealt in order to produce
ingenious stories automatically. It is probably in some
such way that the literature of a totalitarian society
would be produced, if literature were still felt to be
necessary. Imagination -- even consciousness, so far as
possible -- would be eliminated from the process of
writing. Books would be planned in their broad lines by
bureaucrats, and would pass through so many hands that
when finished they would be no more an individual product
than a Ford car at the end of the assembly line. It goes
without saying that anything so produced would be
rubbish; but anything that was not rubbish would endanger
the structure of the state. As for the surviving
literature of the past, it would have to be suppressed or
at least elaborately rewritten.
Meanwhile, totalitarianism has not
fully triumphed anywhere. Our own society is still,
broadly speaking, liberal. To exercise your right of free
speech you have to fight against economic pressure and
against strong sections of public opinion, but not, as
yet, against a secret police force. You can say or print
almost anything so long as you are willing to do it in a
hole-and-corner way. But what is sinister, as I said at
the beginning of this essay, is that the conscious
enemies of liberty are those to whom liberty ought to
mean most. The big public do not care about the matter
one way or the other. They are not in favour of
persecuting the heretic, and they will not exert
themselves to defend him. They are at once too sane and
too stupid to acquire the totalitarian outlook. The
direct, conscious attack on intellectual decency comes
from the intellectuals themselves.
It is possible that the Russophile
intelligentsia, if they had not succumbed to that
particular myth, would have succumbed to another of much
the same kind. But at any rate the Russian myth is there,
and the corruption it causes stinks. When one sees highly
educated men looking on indifferently at oppression and
persecution, one wonders which to despise more, their
cynicism or their shortsightedness. Many scientists, for
example, are the uncritical admirers of the U.S.S.R. They
appear to think that the destruction of liberty is of no
importance so long as their own line of work is for the
moment unaffected. The U.S.S.R. is a large, rapidly
developing country which has an acute need of scientific
workers and, consequently, treats them generously.
Provided that they steer clear of dangerous subjects such
as psychology, scientists are privileged persons.
Writers, on the other hand, are viciously persecuted. It
is true that literary prostitutes like Ilya Ehrenburg or
Alexei Tolstoy are paid huge sums of money, but the only
thing which is of any value to the writer as such -- his
freedom of expression -- is taken away from him. Some, at
least, of the English scientists who speak so
enthusiastically of the opportunities to be enjoyed by
scientists in Russia are capable of understanding this.
But their reflection appears to be: "Writers are
persecuted in Russia. So what? I am not a writer."
They do not see that any attack on intellectual liberty,
and on the concept of objective truth, threatens in the
long run every department of thought.
For the moment the totalitarian state
tolerates the scientist because it needs him. Even in
Nazi Germany, scientists, other than Jews, were
relatively well treated and the German scientific
community, as a whole, offered no resistance to Hitler.
At this stage of history, even the most autocratic ruler
is forced to take account of physical reality, partly
because of the lingering-on of liberal habits of thought,
partly because of the need to prepare for war. So long as
physical reality cannot altogether be ignored, so long as
two and two have to make four when you are, for example,
drawing the blueprint of an aeroplane, the scientist has
his function, and can even be allowed a measure of
liberty. His awakening will come later, when the
totalitarian state is firmly established. Meanwhile, if
he wants to safeguard the integrity of science, it is his
job to develop some kind of solidarity with his literary
colleagues and not disregard it as a matter of
indifference when writers are silenced or driven to
suicide, and newspapers systematically falsified.
But however it may be with the physical
sciences, or with music, painting and architecture, it is
-- as I have tried to show -- certain that literature is
doomed if liberty of thought perishes. Not only is it
doomed in any country which retains a totalitarian
structure; but any writer who adopts the totalitarian
outlook, who finds excuses for persecution and the
falsification of reality, thereby destroys himself as a
writer. There is no way out of this. No tirades against
"individualism" and the "ivory
tower," no pious platitudes to the effect that
"true individuality is only attained through
identification with the community," can get over the
fact that a bought mind is a spoiled mind. Unless
spontaneity enters at some point or another, literary
creation is impossible, and language itself becomes
something totally different from what it is now, we may
learn to separate literary creation from intellectual
honesty. At present we know only that the imagination,
like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity.
Any writer or journalist who denies that fact -- and
nearly all the current praise of the Soviet Union
contains or implies such a denial -- is, in effect,
demanding his own destruction.