11.
The
Spanish war and other events in 1936-7 turned the
scale and thereafter I knew where I stood.
Every line of serious work that I have written since
1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against
totalitarianism
and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.
It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own,
to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects.
Everyone
writes of them in one guise or another. It
is simply a question of which side one takes and what
approach one follows. And the more one is conscious
of one's political bias, the more chance one has of
acting politically without sacrificing one's aesthetic
and intellectual integrity.
12.
What I have most wanted to do throughout the past
ten years is to make political writing into an art.
My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship,
a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write a book
I do not say to myself, "I am going to produce
a work of art." I write it because there is some
lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want
to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get
a hearing. But I could not do the work of writing
a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were
not also an aesthetic experience. Anyone who cares
to examine my work will see that even when it is downright
propaganda it contains much that a full-time politician
would consider irrelevant. I am not able, and I do
not want, completely to abandon the world-view that
I acquired in childhood. So long as I remain alive
and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose
style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take
a pleasure in solid objects and scraps
of useless information. It is no use trying to suppress
that side of myself. The
job is to reconcile
my ingrained
likes and dislikes with the essentially public, non-individual
activities that this age forces on all of us.
