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)

160 COMMUNISM IN MOTION PICTURE INDUSTRY This total truth about the h»ft wing is tliorcforo the only proper foundation and matrix for a discussion of specific errors in the practice of social criticism and creative writing. It was in the omission of this total truth— in taking it for granted — in failing to record the host of writers who have been, and are now, nourished by the ideas and aspirati(ms of the left wing — that I presented a distorted view of the facts, history and contribution of left-w^ng culture to American life. This was not my desire, but I accept it as the objective result. And, at the same time, by my one-sided zeal in attempting to correct errors, and so forth, I wrote an article that opened the way for the New Leader to seize upon my comments in order to "support" its unprincipled slanders against the left. Of all that my article unwittingly achieved, this is the most difficult pill for me to swallow. My statements are now being offered up as fresh proof of the old lie: That the left puts artists in uniform. But it is a pill I have had to swallow and that I now want to dissolve. Who and what keeps artists in uniform? In our society uniforms are indeed fitted for artists at every turn. But how? By a system of education which instructs a whole society in the belief that the status quo is luialterable, that social inequality is normal, that race prejudice is natural ; by a social order which puts writing talent at the disposal of Hearst and artistic talent at the disposal of advertising agencies ; by a total pressure made up of pressures and intellectual pressures and moral pressures, all designed to harness writers, artists, teachers, journalists, scientists, into willing or confused or frightened support of the established order in society, into maintaining, if need be, capitalist povei'ty, crime, prostitution, the cycle of wars and depressions — into maintaining all of this by their talent. This the way in which artists, unless they break loose in conscious and organized protest, are put into one of the many, elegantly cut uniforms offered them by our kings of monopoly, our lords of the press, radio, and so forth. No ; it is not the left wing that is guilty of this. On the contrary, the left wing, by its insistence that artists must be free to speak the absolute truth about society, by the intellectual equipment it offers in Marxist sqientiiic thought, is precisely the force that can help the artist strip himself of the many uniforms into which he has been stepping since birth. This is my conviction, and it has been my conviction for years. For precisely this reason it high lights the contradiction between my intentions in writing my article — and its result. By allowing a subjective concentration upon problems met in my own writing in the past to become a major preoccupation, I produced an article distinguished for its omissions, and succeeded in merging my comments with the unprincipled attacks upon the left that I have always repudiated and combated. And this, as I said earlier, is the process by which one-sided thinking can lead to total error — it is the process by which objects, seen in a distortion mirror, can be recognized, but bear no relation to their precise features. It was this, among other things, that my critics pointed out sharply. For that criticism I am indebted. Ideas and opinions are worth holding when they are right, not when they are wrong. The effort to be useful involves always the possibility of being wrong; the right of being wrong, however, bears with it the moral obligation to analyze errors and to correct them. Anything else is irresponsible. Ill The second major criticism of the thinking in my article revolved about a separation between art and ideology, which was traced in varied terms, through a number of illustrations I had used and concepts I had advanced. I suppose I might claim here that it was merely inept formulation on my part which resulted in an "impression" that I was separating art from politics, the artist from the citizen, etc. But in the course of reading and rereading the criticisms of my article and the article itself, I have come to agi-ee that I did make the separations mentioned, and that I made them not only in the writing, but in my thinking on the specific problems I was discussing. Once again, this is the result of a one-sided, nondialectical approach. Out of a desire to find clear, creative paths for my own work and the work of others. I felt it necessary to combat the current of thought that, in the past, has tended to establish a mechanical relationship between ideology and art — a tendency that works particular harm to creative writing because it encourages a narrow, sloganized literature of a living reflection of society. However, in the course of