Hearings regarding the communist infiltration of the motion picture industry. Hearings before the Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, Eightieth Congress, first session. Public law 601 (section 121, subsection Q (1947)

COMMUNISM IN MOTION PICTURE INDUSTRY 157 The social illumination of this novel and its political meaning would not be possible with a different handling of Gregor. This is so because profound characterization presents all charactei's from their own point of view, allowing them their own full, human .iustification for their behavior and attitudes, yet allowing the reader to judge tlieir objective behavior. This is the special wisdom art can offer us. But if Sholokhov had had a narrow political ax to grind, he would not have allowed Gregor his humanity, he would have wanted only to make the reader hate him, and so the breath of life would have gone from the book. It would have been weaker socially, psychologically, artistically, and politically. The i)itfall of the socially conscious writer who uses his art in a shallow manner is that his goal all too often subtly demands the anniliiliation of certain characters, the gilding of others. It is very, very difficult for him not to handle characters in black and white since his objective is to prove a proposition, not to reveal men in motion as they are. Consequently, it is more than likely that he will "angle" character and events to achieve his point. He may not wish to do this. But he is led to it by his goal — led into idealistic conceptions of character, led into wearing rose-colored glasses which will permit him to see in life that which he wishes to find in order to prove his thesis, led into the portrayal of life, not as it is, but as he would like it to be. And this is not only inferior art, but shallow politics as well. He becomes the author of what Engels called "pinchpenny" socialist novels. This is why "the conflict of conscience," of which Schneider spoke, has resulted so often in schematic writing or wasted writing and, in not a few instances, in a book or a play which must be discharged when a change of newspaper headlines OCCUl'S. This latter calamity is the very symbol of the pitfall dug for the artist by his own narrow approach to his art. I know of at least a dozen plays and novels discarded in the process of writing because the political scene altered. Obviously, the authors in question were not primarily bent upon portraying abiding truths, either of character or the social scene, but were mainly concerned with advancing a political tactic through the manipulation of character. Otherwise, a new headline in the newspapers would not have made them discard their work. I even know a historian who read Duclos and announced that he would have to revise completely the book he was engaged upon. But what type of history was this in the first place? I am convinced that the work-in-progress of an artist who is deeply, truly, honestly recreating a sector of human experience need not be affected by a change in the political weather. A journalist's work, on the other hand, usually is affected. This is not an invidious judgment on the journalist. It is merely the difference between journalism and art. When the artist misuses his art, when he practices journalism instead of art, however decent his purposes, the result is neither the best journalism, nor the best art, nor the best politics. The great humanistic tradition of culture has always been on the side of progress. The writer who works within this tradition — -offering his personal contribution to it — is writing a political work in the broadest meaning of the term. It is not also incumbent upon him that he relate his broad philosophic or emotional humanism to a current and transient political tactic. He may do so if he wishes. That is up to him. But if he does, he must i*emember that, wliere art is a weapon, it is only so when it is art. Those artists who work within a vulgarized approach to art do so at great peril to their own work and to the very purposes they seek to serve. Change the World By Mike Gold (Daily Worker, February 12, 1946) Albert Maltz, who wrote some powerful political and proletarian novels in the past, seems about ready to repudiate that past, and to be preparing for a retreat into the stale old ivory tower of the art-for-art-sakers. If you can extract any other message out of his piece in the current New Masses, you are a better mind reader than this columnist. His thesis is the familiar one, viz: that much "wasted writing and bad art has," for the past 15 years, "been induced in American writers by the intellectual 67683 — 47 11