The Prevention of Literature

1946

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.

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