TO V. S. PRITCHETT

Pritchett observed that since the days of patronage were over and taxation policy had ended the ‘private income’, the state ought to provide endowments and scholarships for writers. He also argued for a tax on the classics and a reorganisation of libraries to compensate authors for the use of single books by many readers. Greene rejected all but the last of these proposals since they would undermine the writer’s independence from the state.

London [1948]

The last time I received a letter in this series I was reading the Life of Charlotte Brontë: this time the poems of Thomas Hood, and the change of mood may account for my uneasy suspicion that in my last letter I simplified far too much. Perhaps that magnificent poem, ‘The Song of the Shirt’, has unduly influenced me, for I am not quite so sure now that the writer has no responsibility to society or the State (which is organized society) different in kind from that of his fellow citizens.⁴⁵

You remember Thomas Paine’s great apothegm, ‘We must take care to guard even our enemies against injustice,’⁴⁶and it is there – in the establishment of justice – that the writer has greater opportunities and therefore greater obligations than, say, the chemist or the estate agent. For one thing he is, if he has attained a measure of success, more his own master than others are: he is his own employer: he can afford to offend; for one of the major objects of his craft (I speak, of course, of the novelist) is the awakening of sympathy. Now the State is invariably ready to confuse, like a schoolmaster, justice with retribution, and isn’t it possibly the storyteller’s task to act as the devil’s advocate, to elicit sympathy and a measure of understanding for those who lie outside the boundaries of State sympathy? But remember that it is not necessarily the poor or the physically defenceless who lie there. The publicans and sinners belong to all classes and all economic levels. It has always been in the interests of the State to poison the psychological wells, to restrict human sympathy, to encourage cat-calls – Galilean, Papist, Crophead, Fascist, Bolshevik. In the days of the totalitarian monarchy, when a sovereign slept uneasily with the memories of Wyatt, Norfolk, Essex,⁴⁷in his dreams, it was an act of justice to trace the true source of action in Macbeth, the murderer of his king, and Shakespeare’s play has for all time altered our conception of the usurper. If at times we are able to feel sympathy for Hitler, isn’t it because we have seen the woods of Dunsinane converging on the underground chambers of the Chancellory?

Here in parenthesis I would emphasize once again the importance and the virtue of disloyalty. If only writers could maintain that one virtue – so much more important to them than purity – unspotted from the world. Honours, State patronage, success, the praise of their fellows all tend to sap their disloyalty. If they don’t become loyal to a Church or a country, they are too apt to become loyal to some invented ideology of their own, until they are praised for consistency, for a unified view. Even despair can become a form of loyalty. How few die treacherous or blaspheming in old age, and have any at all been lucky enough to die by the rope or a firing squad? I can think of none, for the world knows only too well that given time the writer will be corrupted into loyalty. Ezra Pound therefore goes to an asylum … (the honorable haven of the uncorruptible – Smart, Cowper, Clare and Lee).⁴⁸Loyalty confines us to accepted opinions: loyalty forbids us to comprehend sympathetically our dissident fellows; but disloyalty encourages us to roam experimentally through any human mind: it gives to the novelist the extra dimension of sympathy.

I hope I have made it clear that I am not advocating a conscious advocacy of the dispossessed, in fact I am not advocating propaganda at all, as it was written by Dickens, Charles Reade or Thomas Hood. The very act of recreation for the novelist entails sympathy: the characters for whom he fails in sympathy have never been truly recreated. Propaganda is only concerned to elicit sympathy for the innocent, or those whom the propagandist likes to regard as innocent, and this he does at the expense of the guilty: he too poisons the wells. But the novelist’s task is to draw his own likeness to any human being, the guilty as much as the innocent. Isn’t our attitude to all our characters more or less – There, and may God forgive me, goes myself?

If we can awaken sympathetic comprehension in our readers, not only for our most evil characters (that is easy: there is a cord there fastened to all hearts that we can twitch at will), but of our smug, complacent, successful characters, we have surely succeeded in making the work of the State a degree more difficult – and that is a genuine duty we owe society, to be a piece of grit in the State machinery. However acceptable the Soviet State may at the moment find the great classic writers, Dostoevski, Tolstoy, Chehov, Turgenev, Gogol, they have surely made the regimentation of the Russian spirit an imperceptible degree more difficult or more incomplete. You cannot talk of the Karamazovs in terms of a class, and if you speak with hatred of the kulak doesn’t the rich humorous memory of the hero of Dead Souls come back to kill your hatred? Sooner or later the strenuous note of social responsibility, of Marxism, of the greatest material good of the greatest number must die in the ear, and then perhaps certain memories will come back, of long purposeless discussions in the moonlight about life and art, the click of a billiard ball, the sunny afternoons of that month in the country, the blows of an axe that has only just begun to fell the cherry trees.

I am sorry to return over and over again to this question of loyalty or disloyalty, but isn’t disloyalty as much the writer’s virtue as loyalty is the soldier’s? For the writer, just as much as the Christian Church, is the defender of the individual. The soldier, the loyal man, stands for the mass interment, the common anonymous grave, but the writer stands for the uneconomic, probably unhealthy, overcrowded little graveyard, with the stone crosses preserving innumerable names.

There is a price to be paid, of course. We shall never, I suppose, know how many Russian writers have taken the same stand as Ivan Karamazov (one has only to substitute the words the State for the word God) and studied a long silence:

‘This harmony has been assessed too dearly; the price for entry is already too high for our pockets. I prefer to hand back my entrance-ticket; and as an honest man I am bound to return it as soon as possible. So that is what I am doing. It is not that I reject God, Alyosha; I merely most respectfully hand Him back the ticket.’

One mustn’t, of course, forget, writing as I have just done, that at the moment the chief danger to us of Russia is the danger the publican represented to Pharisees. We spend so much time as writers thanking God that we are not as the Soviet League of Writers, rejoicing in our freedom, that we don’t see in how many directions we have already bartered it, in the interests of a group, whether political or religious.

I realize that I haven’t taken up any of your practical and useful points on the question of the State’s responsibility to the writer. But I remain intransigent. It seems to me unquestionable that if once writers are treated as a privileged class from the point of view of taxation they will lose their independence. What the State gives it can take away, and it is so terribly easy for a gift enjoyed for a few years to become a necessity. Once give us protection and we shall soon forget how we kept the wolf away in those past winters. And another danger is that privilege separates, and we can’t afford to live away from the source of our writing in however comfortable an exile. I am one of those who find it extraordinarily difficult to write away from England (I had to do so at one time during the war), and I dread the thought of being exiled at home. It is possible, though I don’t think it probable, that taxation might kill the novel, but it won’t kill the creative passion. It may be that we are passing out of the literary period during which the novel has been the dominant form of expression, but there will still be literature. I cannot see why the poet should be affected by high taxation …

When you write of means other than State support for the novelist, I find myself more in agreement with you. Some kind of royalty collectable on library lendings is long overdue, but all the same don’t let us make the mistake of treating the librarian as an enemy. He is our greatest friend. We have already emerged from the artificial book boom (that strange period when people bought novels) and are nearly back to normal times. In normal times it has been the library (I am not referring now to the public library) which has given the young novelist at least a basic salary. We must be careful not to kill the goose.

As for your proposed tax on the classics, I feel even more doubt, for who is to administer this fund if not the State? A committee of authors? But who is to choose the authors? In any one generation how many authors could you name whom you would trust to show discrimination or even common integrity? And as a matter of publishing fact, don’t the classics already subsidize the living writers? A publisher’s profits finance his work in progress. The best seller – or the classic – helps to finance the young author, the experimental book, the work of scholarship which cannot expect to show a return. There are certain publishers (we could agree on names) who never by any chance publish a book of literary merit, but these are not the publishers who are making money out of the classics. (I except a few mushroom firms who belong to the boom period and are dying with it.)

You may well ask, have you no plan, have you not one constructive suggestion to make? and my answer is quite frankly, None. I don’t want a plan for literature. I don’t want a working party, however high-minded or benevolent, to study the standard of life among novelists and decide a minimum wage. Even if by a miracle the State could be excluded from such a plan, I still don’t want it. A plan can be taken over later by other authorities. Nor can a craft be trusted to legislate wisely for itself. Think of the Board of Film Censors which was set up by the industry itself, and consider how it has hampered the free development of films in a way that would have been impossible to the Lord Chamberlain’s office.

No, our life is too organized already. Let us leave literature alone. We needn’t worry too much. Man will always find a means to gratify a passion. He will write, as he will commit adultery, in spite of taxation.
Graham Greene

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 705