The screen writer (Apr-Oct 1948)

ACTUALLY, the only human being, living or dead, that I deeply and honestly know anything about is myself. About the rest of you, I can only wonder. But I suspect that all of us are never what we seem to others and I imagine we all put on different masks and poses for the many different aspects of our outward lives. We learn to make certain standard sets of noises that are expected of us, and we play our daily roles of husband, wife, mother, business man, working man, Democrat, Republican, and so on. I don't think that any of those masks we wear, or those sounds we make, truly represent us, and that beneath it all, we are each of us profoundly unique individuals, irrational, passionate, terrible, and sometimes lovely . . . but nevertheless undefinable in a rational sense. Perhaps we play these various roles for ourselves as well as for others, in a rather devout belief that we should be explicable to ourselves as well as to those around us. That's confused enough to sound real intellectual. But I want to make the point that each of us has a private inner life that should command more respect than it does, in these days when so much emphasis is placed, misplaced, I believe, on the life of the group and its outward behavior. So I will return to the one subject on which I am an expert . . . myself. To myself I am the most important thing in this universe. Speaking personally, all life, good or bad, and all people, flow out of me and towards me. Ever since Ernest Hemingway gave some free publicity to Dr. John Donne's thought that no-man-is-anisland, it has been fashionable to make that sound. It's a good metaphor, and contains truth. But the converse makes a lot of sense too. Every man is an island. That is the basis of my own individualism, and that is why I prefer, as a man and a writer, to hold fast to a belief in the individual, in the freedom, as much as possible, of the individual. That is to say, in one individual, myself, and therefore in all other individuals . . . you. I say as much as possible, because we have to live with people, whether in one or many worlds. And we have to make our compromises in good spirit in order to enjoy that life. But we should never, never subordinate our individualism to dependence on some great mass thing that ignores our secret inner selves and only promises in return that we might be able to slick up our outer selves with an abundance of good factory-made products. There is a theory going around that man is primarily a consumer of worldly goods, although he does acquire a lot of goods, there are always soreheads who say he is oppressing the people who weren't so lucky, and that is all right, too. But in our eagerness for security and gadgets we should not forget that shy little fellow, hiding behind that mask. I am not going to confuse this thing further by using words like Democracy and Communism, Capitalism and Socialism. Goodness knows they've taken enough of a beating from better men than I. And I'll gladly permit any of you to shoot me the minute I mention those two idiot children, Right and Left, or that advertising slogan, Private Enterprise. But I do hope that you get the idea that I am personally in favor of any kind of life that permits me to act decently and freely, as an individual. And that I am against any kind of life that keeps invading my individual privacy, by imposing conditions against which I, the center of my own private universe, rebel. NOW what has this got to do with my hero, the Writer? I believe we left him locked up with an Eskimo girl in a quick freezing unit. No, he was beating the drum for the little fellow, the common man, and he has discovered that wonderful adjective, collective. Collective bargaining, collective security, collective this and that. He turns it into a noun, collectivism. He takes what he calls Little Men, and wishes to collect them into one body, for their own good, of course. And in his advanced stages he defines his collectivism as anticapitalistic, which obscures the fact that is is really anti-individualistic. Yes, that's what he is doing . . . negating the individual and his private inner needs. And it is the saddest sight for a writer of all people to think himself into this state, because in so doing he negates the very essence of his own creative process, which is the creation of unique characters, or individuals. Nearly all good writing is subjective, not abstract. A novel or a play is the sum of its characters. And nearly all good characters are unique, not typical. There is no such thing as a collective man. And to me it is a paradox that so many writers, if they had their way, would move into a society in which the unique individual could not exist ; furthermore a society in which they as writers would have to change their function and the definition. They therefore declaim against their art, and, I also believe, against their instincts. Why, I do not know. Perhaps because in these more or less godless times a writer feels the need to have faith in something outside of himself. And in the absence of God, there is the Cause . . . and it is today's fashion that the Cause is for the masses, which is most worthwhile until it reaches the point where the individual becomes lost in the mass, and subject to the orders of those who control the mass. These political attractions which draw a writer towards life lived through and by the mass would, if realizable, tend to destroy the individual as a unique spirit. The dependence on things of the mass would, if achievable, create a race of conformists, none of whom would be adequate subjects for any painter, writer, or actor. I say, if realizable, because I don't think the individuals who make up this world will ever entirely submit, or for long, to a controlled, collective life where there is no chance for individuality, where there is no opportunity either for rebellion or serenity; where the group is always greater than the individual in it; and where art, as well as life, becomes subject to the high-policy decisions of the group leaders. 16 The Screen Writer, April, 194: