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crippling vanity of total society for they have made the error, I believe, of assuming that society can foresee the future when only man cando that. They have gelded the artist of his real and exciting purpose which is never to fashion huge social products, book editions running to five million copies and dachas and medals and
social
esteem, but rather is the deeper purpose to awake—if it be in but one other person and that in ways the artist did not expect nor even desire—the knowledge that what we see today as simple will later be understood as complex and what we think is complex will appear simple, that in the bad man there is good and in the good man bad, that everything if we look at it carefully enough, even a stranger’s comment on the weather, is a door of perception opening to other doors. That is the artist’s purpose—to open doors—and it is arrogance for the bureaucrat, no matter how intelligent, devoted, and subjectively convinced of his moral purity he may be (I take the exceptional bureaucrat), to decide that the artist’s function is to describe the glories of the room in which one remains. That is to make the artist a prisoner in a museum, a trustee in uniform, doomed forever to whine irritably at children that they must keep their fingers off the paintings.

Raison d’Être

(1956)
    MANY YEARS AGO I remember reading a piece in the newspapers by Ernest Hemingway and thinking: “What windy writing.” That is the penalty for having a reputation as a writer. Any signed paragraph which appears in print is examined by the usual sadistic literary standards, rather than with the easy tolerance of a newspaper reader pleased to get an added fillip for his nickel.
    But this is a fact of life which any professional writer soon learns to put up with, and I know that I will have to put up with it since I doubt very much if this column is going to be particularly well written. That would take too much time, and it would be time spent in what is certainly a losing cause. Greenwich Village is one of the better provinces—it abounds in snobs and critics. That many of you are frustrated in your ambitions, and undernourished in your pleasures, only makes you more venomous. Quite rightly. If I found myself in your position, I would not be charitable either. Nevertheless, given your general animus to those more talented than yourselves, the only way I see myself becoming one of the cherished traditions of the Village is to be actively disliked each week.
    At this point it can fairly be asked: “Is this your only reason forwriting a column?” And the next best answer I suppose is: “Egotism. My search to discover in public how much of me is sheer egotism.” I find a desire to inflict my casual opinions on a half-captive audience. If I did not, there would always be the danger of putting these casual opinions into a new novel, and we know what a terrible thing that is to do.
    I also feel tempted to say that novelists are the only group of people who should write a column. Their interests are large, if shallow, their habits are sufficiently unreliable for them to find something to say quite often, and in most other respects they are more columnistic than the columnists. Most of us novelists who are any good are invariably half-educated; inaccurate, albeit brilliant upon occasion; insufferably vain of course; and—the indispensable requirement for a good newspaperman—as eager to tell a lie as the truth. (Saying the truth makes us burn with the desire to convince our audience, whereas telling a lie affords ample leisure to study the result.)
    We good novelists also have the most unnewspaperly virtue of never praising fatherland and flag unless we are sick, tired, generally defeated, and want to turn a quick dishonest buck. Nobody but novelists would be asked to write columns if it were not for the sad fact that newspaper editors are professionally and obligatorially patriotic, and so never care to meet us. Indeed,