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growth of ideas; therefore it permits no expression beyond the most clearly defined limits.
    There was a period some years ago when I was half attracted to Stalinism, and so I am not unfamiliar with the muscular appeal it offers many intellectuals. “Poor frustrated spindly thinker,” Stalinism is constantly saying, “when will you realize that your problems are not the problems of the world, and that all men must eat before one man can be privileged to think independently.” Like all absolute assertions it presents a part of the whole. For it is undeniable that there is shame as well as dignity to thought so long as only a few have leisure enough to search for it. The lie, however, and it is the organic contradiction of Stalinism that it cannot recognize this lie which has haunted it, confused it, and even created the insoluble tangles of its very economic inefficiency, has been the lie, the arrogance, of assuming that human development can proceed on a half-truth. The false humility of Stalinist self-criticism is always arrogance, for there is no arrogance like declaring that one’s past works and actions led people in bad directions. It assumes the ridiculous conceit that one’s present works are therefore good.
    Out of this arrogance Stalinism has defined what the artist is, has allocated his specific work, has granted him a specific collective importance, and has denied him a private voice. Like most Western artists I have been tormented more than once by the nightmare of possessing a private voice. All too often one’s work seems meaningless, isolated, and one’s accomplishments pitiful. Yet it must never be forgotten that despair about the meaning of one’s work is more vital to the creative process than social approval.To create, one must first destroy; to be capable of love one must be able to hate, and nothing dulls love and hatred into their pallid social equivalent so much as social approval. Only when the artist is ready to accept despair, isolation, contraction, and spiritual exile can he be able to find the expansive energies and the unrestrained enthusiasm which continue the essential dialectic of human progress. The genius of Marx was that he was a mystic as well as a rationalist, and the intellectual deterioration of Socialism, not to mention the mental petrifaction of Stalinism, comes from denying the mystical element in Marxism and championing the rational. In human history there is finally one umbilical conflict: it is man versus society. For society always consists of the search for the single understanding, the “One,” the rational judgment, the established value or the value to be established; the spectrum of society runs the unilinear gamut of those things admired absolutely to those things detested absolutely. Implicit in every social view is the concealed notion that society (which is One) is good, and man (who is multiple) is thereby bad, man who is mysterious and finally undefinable for he includes the expanding sum of all those things (people, thought, the Self, experience, the universe—one may extend the list indefinitely), all those things man must forever love-and-hate, hate-and-love. So, society, which is necessary to enable man to grow, is also the prison whose walls he must perpetually enlarge. The paradox of this relation—half wedding, half prison—is that without man there cannot be society, yet society must always seek to restrain man, and the total socialization of man is the social view that one man is good and another man is bad.
    It is the artist, embodying the most noble faculty of man—his urge to rebel—who is forever enlarging the walls. An artist who is not ahead of his time is not an artist—he is merely a social producer—and one does not need to be a Marxist to remember that Marx’s most compassionate agony was felt for the horror of separating man from his creative tools. The Stalinists by converting their artists to social producers have exercised the