What I Think of Artistic Freedom

...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...

...in reaching—to wit, those German Stalinists whose faith might be fluttering...

...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...

...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...

...therefore it permits no expression be yond the most clearly defined limits...

...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...

...the spectrum of society runs the unilinear gamut of those things admired absolutely to those things detested absolutely...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...If this happens, the agreement is that my article will in turn be printed in some East German publication...

...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...

...M. To say anything about "artistic freedom" in a few pages is of course almost impossible...

...In human history there is finally one umbilical conflict: it is man versus society...

...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...

...All too often one's work seems meaningless, isolated, and one's accomplishments pitiful...

...It is the artist, embodying the most noble faculty of man— his urge to rebel—who is forever enlarging the walls...

...The false humility of Stalinist self-criticism is always arrogance, for there is no arrogance Iike declaring that one's past works and actions led people in bad directions...

...So, society, which is necessary to enable man to grow, is also the prison whose walls he must perpetually enlarge...

...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...

...Writing it, however, was a little like trying to follow a movie with one's eyes closed for I had very little "sense" or "feeling" of the people who would read if, especially the ones I was most interested...

...Stalinism, in its churchly wisdom, has recognized for decades that nothing is more difficult to anticipate than the move ment and growth of ideas...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...One has the doubtful choice of making a few private remarks or else listing a series of platitudes...

...So I do not write this credo with any idea of being a champion of America or the West...

...1955...

...It was requested of several American writers including myself by Melvin Lasky, editor of "Der Monat" in West Berlin, and there is a chance that Bert Brecht, the playwright and poet now in East Germany, will agree to answer it in the pages of "Der Monat...

...Like most Western artists I have been tormented more than once by the nightmare of possessing a private voice...

...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...

...And some words are large cliches, meaningless to some, infinite to others...

...To create, one must first destroy...

...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 cliche is buried a truth, and to contemplate a cliche, 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 cliche flattening the variety of experience it attempts to illumine...

...Like all absolute assertions it presents a part of the whole...

...It assumes the ridiculous conceit that one's present works are therefore good...

...It is highly unlikely of course but the opportunity was too good to pass by...

...There is one further preface I must make...

...Still, this is better than total zero...

...Hence the decision to write it the way I did.—N...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...we need only think of "God," "Life," "Adventure," "Color,"—whichever word one chooses...

...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 maga continued on page 192 continued from page 98 zines whose circulation is pitifully small...