What I Think of Artistic Freedom
(1955)
TO SAY ANYTHING ABOUT “artistic freedom” in a few pages is of course almost impossible. One has the doubtful choice of making a few private remarks or else listing a series of platitudes. If I choose the second procedure it is because the platitude for all its obvious disadvantages has nonetheless a particular advantage we are too likely to forget—in every cliché is buried a truth, and to contemplate a cliché, to explore it, to search for its paradoxes and attempt to resolve them is a most characteristic activity of thought, if indeed it is not thought itself, for in a very real sense every word in a language is a small cliché flattening the variety of experience it attempts to illumine. And some words are large clichés, meaningless to some, infinite to others; we need only think of “God,” “Life,” “Adventure,” “Color”—whichever word one chooses.
There is one further preface I must make. For years I have been alternately attracted to Marxism and anarchism, and in the tension between the two I suppose I have found the themes for my novels. So I do not write this credo with any idea of being a champion of America or the West. As a practical matter, and one can hardly scorn such an important practical matter, there is more liberty to express unpopular, radical, “useless,” or dangerous ideas in the United States than there is in the Soviet Union or the “Eastern Democracies.” Nonetheless it is done at one’s disadvantage if not one’s outright danger, and the advertisers of America’s artistic liberties often neglect to mention that our unpopular ideas are invariably buried in tangential newspapers and magazines whose circulation is pitifully small. Still, this is better than total zero. Stalinism, in its churchly wisdom, has recognized for decades that nothing is more difficult to anticipate than the movement and growth of ideas; therefore it permits no expression beyond the most clearly defined limits.
There was a period some years ago when I was half attracted to Stalinism, and so I am not unfamiliar with the muscular appeal it offers many intellectuals. “Poor frustrated spindly thinker,” Stalinism is constantly saying, “when will you realize that your problems are not the problems of the world, and that all men must eat before one man can be privileged to think independently.” Like all absolute assertions it presents a part of the whole. For it is undeniable that there is shame as well as dignity to thought so long as only a few have leisure enough to search for it. The lie, however, and it is the organic contradiction of Stalinism that it cannot recognize this lie which has haunted it, confused it, and even created the insoluble tangles of its very economic inefficiency, has been the lie, the arrogance, of assuming that human development can proceed on a half-truth. The false humility of Stalinist self-criticism is always arrogance, for there is no arrogance like declaring that one’s past works and actions led people in bad directions. It assumes the ridiculous conceit that one’s present works are therefore good.
Out of this arrogance Stalinism has defined what the artist is, has allocated his specific work, has granted him a specific collective importance, and has denied him a private voice. Like most Western artists I have been tormented more than once by the nightmare of possessing a private voice. All too often one’s work seems meaningless, isolated, and one’s accomplishments pitiful. Yet it must never be forgotten that despair about the meaning of one’s work is more vital to the creative process than social approval. To create, one must first destroy; to be capable of love one must be able to hate, and nothing dulls love and hatred into their pallid social equivalent so much as social approval. Only when the artist is ready to accept despair, isolation, contraction, and spiritual exile can he be able to find the expansive energies and the unrestrained enthusiasm which continue the essential dialectic of human progress. The genius of Marx was that he was a mystic as well as a rationalist, and the intellectual deterioration of Socialism, not to mention the mental petrifaction of Stalinism, comes from denying the mystical element in Marxism and championing the rational. In human history there is finally one umbilical conflict: it is man versus society. For society always consists of the search for the single understanding, the “One,” the rational judgment, the established value or the value to be established; the spectrum of society runs the unilinear gamut of those things admired absolutely to those things detested absolutely. Implicit in every social view is the concealed notion that society (which is One) is good, and man (who is multiple) is thereby bad, man who is mysterious and finally undefinable for he includes the expanding sum of all those things (people, thought, the Self, experience, the universe—one may extend the list indefinitely), all those things man must forever love-and-hate, hate-and-love. So, society, which is necessary to enable man to grow, is also the prison whose walls he must perpetually enlarge. The paradox of this relation—half wedding, half prison—is that without man there cannot be society, yet society must always seek to restrain man, and the total socialization of man is the social view that one man is good and another man is bad.
It is the artist, embodying the most noble faculty of man—his urge to rebel—who is forever enlarging the walls. An artist who is not ahead of his time is not an artist—he is merely a social producer—and one does not need to be a Marxist to remember that Marx’s most compassionate agony was felt for the horror of separating man from his creative tools. The Stalinists by converting their artists to social producers have exercised the crippling vanity of total society for they have made the error, I believe, of assuming that society can foresee the future when only man can do that. They have gelded the artist of his real and exciting purpose which is never to fashion huge social products, book editions running to five million copies and dachas and medals and social esteem, but rather is the deeper purpose to awake—if it be in but one other person and that in ways the artist did not expect nor even desire—the knowledge that what we see today as simple will later be understood as complex and what we think is complex will appear simple, that in the bad man there is good and in the good man bad, that everything if we look at it carefully enough, even a stranger’s comment on the weather, is a door of perception opening to other doors. That is the artist’s purpose—to open doors—and it is arrogance for the bureaucrat, no matter how intelligent, devoted, and subjectively convinced of his moral purity he may be (I take the exceptional bureaucrat), to decide that the artist’s function is to describe the glories of the room in which one remains. That is to make the artist a prisoner in a museum, a trustee in uniform, doomed forever to whine irritably at children that they must keep their fingers off the paintings.
Raison d’Être
(1956)
MANY YEARS AGO I remember reading a piece in the newspapers by Ernest Hemingway and thinking: “What windy writing.” That is the penalty for having a reputation as a writer. Any signed paragraph which appears in print is examined by the usual sadistic literary standards, rather than with the easy tolerance of a newspaper reader pleased to get an added fillip for his nickel.
But this is a fact of life which any professional writer soon learns to put up with, and I know that I will have to put up with it since I doubt very much if this column is going to be particularly well written. That would take too much time, and it would be time spent in what is certainly a losing cause. Greenwich Village is one of the better provinces—it abounds in snobs and critics. That many of you are frustrated in your ambitions, and undernourished in your pleasures, only makes you more venomous. Quite rightly. If I found myself in your position, I would not be charitable either. Nevertheless, given your general animus to those more talented than yourselves, the only way I see myself becoming one of the cherished traditions of the Village is to be actively disliked each week.
At this point it can fairly be asked: “Is this your only reason for writing a column?” And the next best answer I suppose is: “Egotism. My search to discover in public how much of me is sheer egotism.” I find a desire to inflict my casual opinions on a half-captive audience. If I did not, there would always be the danger of putting these
casual opinions into a new novel, and we know what a terrible thing that is to do.
I also feel tempted to say that novelists are the only group of people who should write a column. Their interests are large, if shallow, their habits are sufficiently unreliable for them to find something to say quite often, and in most other respects they are more columnistic than the columnists. Most of us novelists who are any good are invariably half-educated; inaccurate, albeit brilliant upon occasion; insufferably vain of course; and—the indispensable requirement for a good newspaperman—as eager to tell a lie as the truth. (Saying the truth makes us burn with the desire to convince our audience, whereas telling a lie affords ample leisure to study the result.)
We good novelists also have the most unnewspaperly virtue of never praising fatherland and flag unless we are sick, tired, generally defeated, and want to turn a quick dishonest buck. Nobody but novelists would be asked to write columns if it were not for the sad fact that newspaper editors are professionally and obligatorially patriotic, and so never care to meet us. Indeed, even The Village Voice, which is remarkably conservative for so young a paper, and deeply patriotic about all community affairs, etc., etc., would not want me either if they were not so financially eager for free writing, and a successful name to go along with it, that they are ready to put up with almost anything. And I, as a minority stockholder in the Voice corporation, must agree that this paper does need something added to its general languor and whimsy.
At any rate, dear reader, we begin a collaboration which may go on for three weeks, three months, or, the Lord forbid, for three-and-thirty years. I have only one prayer—that I weary of you before you tire of me. And therefore, so soon as I learn to write columns in a quarter of an hour instead of the unprofitable fifty-two minutes this has taken, we will all know better if our trifling business is going to continue. If it does, there is one chance in a hundred—make it a hundred thousand—that I will become a habitual assassin-and-lover of a columnist who will have something superficial or vicious or inaccurate to say about many of the things under the sun, and who knows but what some of the night.
On Lies, Power, and Obscenity
(1956)
A WARNING: The column this week is difficult. True to my commitment to the Voice, I wrote it quickly. Because I do not want to lose all my readers at once, I suggest that all but the slowest readers pass me by this time. If you are not in a mood to think, or if you have no interest in thinking, then let us ignore each other until the next column. And if you do go on from here, please have the courtesy to concentrate. The art of careful writing is beginning to disappear before the mental impotence of such lazy audiences as the present one. Thought, after all, is one of the two prime pleasures available (at least theoretically) in a rational democracy, the other being sensual love, politely called the pursuit of happiness.
SINCE A NEWSPAPER column is supposed to be concerned with communication, it would not be the worst idea to attempt to trace what communication might be.
Thought begins somewhere deep in the unconscious—an unconscious which conceivably is divine—or if finite may still be vast enough in its complexity to bear comparison to an ocean. Out of each human being’s vast and mighty unconscious, perhaps from the depths of our life itself, up over all the forbiddingly powerful and subterranean mental mountain ranges which forbid expression, rises from the mysterious source of our knowledge the small self-fertilization of thought, conscious thought.
But for a thought to live (and so give us dignity) before it disappears, unexpressed and perhaps never to be thought again, it must be told to someone else: to one’s mate, to a good friend, or occasionally to a stranger. It is in the act of telling a thought that the thought—no matter how unlikely—may be convincing to another, and inspiring him or her to some small action. Needless to say that small action is not likely to be the one we have suggested, but it is an action to which we have been the tangential father. We have at least, no matter how crudely or ineptly, succeeded in communicating something, and the actions of others, as well as our own, are the result. In the rigorous sense there is no communication unless action has resulted, be it immediately or in the unknown and indefinite future. Communication which does not lead to new action is not communication—it is merely the abortive presentation of new social ideas or the monotonous transportation of old ones.
Lies
But an old social idea is a lie. Where it is not sheer premeditated falsity (four-fifths of gossip columnists’ spew, for example) it is at best a description of something which no longer exists. Society at any moment is the stubborn retarded expression of mankind’s previous and partially collected experience. Yet our previous experience is the past, it is our knowledge of death, and theologians to the side (for I frankly am all but ignorant of theology) I would argue most seriously that growth is a greater mystery than death. All of us can understand failure, we all contain failure and death within us, but not even the successful man can begin to describe the impalpable elations and apprehensions of growth. When we can all agree, including odd dialectical idealists like myself, that history is not foreseeable and the future is unknown, we must also agree that although society is a machine, it does not determine man’s fate, but merely processes nine-tenths of his possibilities on the basis of what society has learned from the past. Since we are all in the process of changing, since we are already in the privacy of our minds far ahead of the life we see around us (for civilized man has always been outraged by what he sees, or else there would be no civilization)—since we are all advanced in our dreams beyond the practical social possibilities open to our immediate time, that present living time which is all but strangled by the slow mechanical determinations of society, we know and feel that whatever happens to us will happen as the reaction between our urgent desires to express ourselves, to discover the passionate attachment of our lives, and the resistant, mechanical network of past social ideas, platitudes, and lies.
Power
Only it is difficult to express oneself. The act of writing something (which one expects or hopes will be published) is a social act, it becomes—even at its best—all but a lie. To communicate socially (as opposed to communicating personally or humanly) means that one must accept the sluggish fictions of society for at least nine-tenths of one’s expression in order to present deceptively the remaining tenth which may be new. Social communication is the doom of every truly felt thought. (Naturally, all men who wish to communicate seek social communication nonetheless, for it is the only way to influence great numbers of people in a relatively short time.)
To communicate socially is to communicate by way of the mass media—movies, radio, television, advertising, newspapers, best-selling novels, etc.—which is to communicate by way of the largest and most debased common denominator—which in turn is equivalent to communicating very little, for procedurally one becomes part of a machine which is antithetical to one’s individual existence. Antithetical, I say, because this machine attempts to direct the fortunes of men by the obsolete and hence impractical results of the past. As one writes, one enters an external network of expectations, consequences, fears, cupidities, social fashions: in short, reward or punishment turns the language and alters the thought. This is true even of the most serious attempts to communicate, by artists let us say, or the occasional creative scholar. Once one enters the land of massive social communication, of network communication, once one becomes attached to the machine belt of the mass media—specifically, in our case, the assembly line of the columnist—there is no desire to retain even the father’s ghost of a thought. There is only power for the sake of power, and it is cowardly power for it masquerades in coy and winsome forms. On the surface there is only the attempt to entertain in a conventional way. (Obviously, to entertain and yet say nothing new is quite a difficult game, which is why perhaps columnists, commercial writers, and so forth are paid so well.)
Therefore, I propose to try something I do not believe I can accomplish. I
will try to write for you (this column to the contrary) as if I were talking in my living room, or in yours. So my opinions will be half-formed, if not totally inarticulate, but at least they can be awkwardly close to the questions I am really thinking about.
Obscenity
Even so, I promise very very little. For example I will be able to use no obscenities, and obscenities communicate a great deal in the living room and indeed in other places as well. For what are obscenities finally but our poor debased gutturals for the magical parts of the human body, and so they are basic communication, for they awake, no matter how uneasily, many of the questions, riddles, aches, and pleasures which surround the enigma of life.
No, I will not be able to use obscenities—what a pity!—because a little social fact which is too often forgotten is that obscene language, which is used at least once in a while by 95 percent of the people living in this country, would forbid the passage of this newspaper through the mails. And there are other restrictions, stories I cannot tell about unpleasant people in the daily news, people who are pusillanimous, or archly vicious, or hypocritical, or worse, or simply no good, stories I cannot tell because this paper would be sued for libel. (Ah, well, perhaps we will find a way yet.)
So these restrictions and all others sadden me, because I would like to express myself properly, and the true communication of soul to soul is speeded on its way, as every soldier and ex-soldier knows, by the foul language God gave our tongues, along with everything else He gave us including malicious stories, women, society, pain, pleasure, lights and darks, and all the other mysterious dualities of our mysterious universe.
Mind of an Outlaw: Selected Essays Page 4