Read Mind of an Outlaw for Free Online

Perhaps I have succeeded. He will never be a character many readers admire, but it is possible that they will have feeling for him. At least he is no longer a simple object of ridicule, nor the butt of my malice, and I believe
The Deer Park
is a better book for the change. My hope is that some readers may possibly be stimulated to envisage the gamut of homosexual personality as parallel to the gamut of heterosexual personality even if Teddy Pope is a character from the lower half of the spectrum. However, I think it is more probable that the majority of homosexual readers who may get around to reading
The Deer Park
when it is published will be dissatisfied with him. I can only say that I am hardly satisfied myself. But this time, at least, I have discovered the edges of the rich theme of homosexuality rather than the easy symbolic equation of it to evil. And to that extent I feel richer and more confident as a writer. What I have come to realize is that much of my homosexual prejudice was a servant to my aesthetic needs. In the variety and contradiction of American life, the difficulty of finding a character who can serve as one’s protagonist is matched only by the difficulty of finding one’s villain, and so long as I was able to preserve my prejudices, my literary villains were at hand. Now, the problem will be more difficult, but I suspect it may be rewarding too, for deep down I was never very happy nor proud of myself at whipping homosexual straw boys.
    A last remark. If the homosexual is ever to achieve real social equality and acceptance, he too will have to work the hard row of shedding his own prejudices. Driven into defiance, it is natural, if regrettable, that many homosexuals go to the direction of assuming that there is something intrinsically superior in homosexuality,and carried far enough it is a viewpoint which is as stultifying, as ridiculous, and as antihuman as the heterosexual’s prejudice. Finally, heterosexuals are people too, and the hope of acceptance, tolerance, and sympathy must rest on this mutual appreciation.

What I Think of Artistic Freedom

(1955)
    TO SAY ANYTHING ABOUT “artistic freedom” in a few pages is of course almost impossible. One has the doubtful choice of making a few private remarks or else listing a series of platitudes. If I choose the second procedure it is because the platitude for all its obvious disadvantages has nonetheless a particular advantage we are too likely to forget—in every cliché is buried a truth, and to contemplate a cliché, to explore it, to search for its paradoxes and attempt to resolve them is a most characteristic activity of thought, if indeed it is not thought itself, for in a very real sense every word in a language is a small cliché flattening the variety of experience it attempts to illumine. And some words are large clichés, meaningless to some, infinite to others; we need only think of “God,” “Life,” “Adventure,” “Color”—whichever word one chooses.
    There is one further preface I must make. For years I have been alternately attracted to Marxism and anarchism, and in the tension between the two I suppose I have found the themes for my novels. So I do not write this credo with any idea of being a champion of America or the West. As a practical matter, and one can hardly scorn such an important practical matter, there ismore liberty to express unpopular, radical, “useless,” or dangerous ideas in the United States than there is in the Soviet Union or the “Eastern Democracies.” Nonetheless it is done at one’s disadvantage if not one’s outright danger, and the advertisers of America’s artistic liberties often neglect to mention that our unpopular ideas are invariably buried in tangential newspapers and magazines whose circulation is pitifully small. Still, this is better than total zero. Stalinism, in its churchly wisdom, has recognized for decades that nothing is more difficult to anticipate than the movement and