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
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
at
tainable, 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
"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