The Silence Of Writers

For the great writers of the 20th century, art could not be separated from politics. Today, there is adisturbing silence on the dark matters that should command our attention.

In 1935, the first Congress of American Writers was held at the Carnegie Hall in New York, followed byanother two years later. By one account, 3,500 crammed into the auditorium and a thousand more were turnedaway. They were electric events, with writers discussing how they could confront ominous events in Abyssinia,China and Spain. Telegrams from Thomas Mann, C Day Lewis, Upton Sinclair and Albert Einstein were read out,reflecting the fear that great power was now rampant and that it had become impossible to discuss art andliterature without politics.

"A writer," Martha Gellhorn told the second congress, "must be a man of action now... A manwho has given a year of his life to steel strikes, or to the unemployed, or to the problems of racialprejudice, has not lost or wasted time. He is a man who has known where he belonged. If you should survivesuch action, what you have to say about it afterwards is the truth, is necessary and real, and it willlast."

Her words echo across the silence today. That the menace of great and violent power in our own times isapparently accepted by celebrated writers, and by many of those who guard the gates of literary criticism, isuncontroversial. Not for them the impossibility of writing and promoting literature bereft of politics. Notfor them the responsibility to speak out - a responsibility felt by even the unpolitical Ernest Hemingway.

Today, realism is declared obsolete; an ironic hauteur is affected; false symbolism is all. As for thereaders, their political imagination is to be pacified, not primed; after all, what do they care? Martin Amisexpressed this well in Visiting Mrs Nabokov: "The dominance of the self is not a flaw, it is anevolutionary characteristic; it is just how things are."

So it is "evolution". We have evolved to the apolitical self; to the introspection and squabblesof individuals divorced from any notion that their self-obsession is less important and less interesting thanan engagement with how things really are for the rest of us.

Some years ago, the then budding literary critic D J Taylor wrote a rare piece called When the pensleeps. He expanded this into a book, A Vain Conceit, in which he wondered why the English novel sooften degenerated into "drawing room twitter" and why the urgent issues of the day were shunned bywriters, unlike their counterparts in, say, Latin America who felt an obligation to take up the politicalessence in all our lives and which shapes our lives.

Where, he asked, were the George Orwells, the Upton Sinclairs, the John Steinbecks? (Taylor recently seemedto be repudiating this; let's hope he has recovered his nerve.)

The main literature prize shortlists bear out his original thesis. Yet according to Claire Armistead,literary editor of the Guardian, "writers are challenging any sort of parochialism". But whatelse do they challenge? She describes "a real generic inventiveness" in the three non-fictionnominations of the Guardian Book Award. One is about a neurologist who plays with words in a "totallyeccentric" way; another is about mountains; another is about the former East Germany which, she says,"makes you understand a little better what a funny old world we live in".

But where are the contemporary works that go to the heart of this funny old world, as the books ofSteinbeck and Joseph Heller did? Where is the equivalent of Eduardo Galeano's Open Veins of Latin America,Jonathan Coe's What a Carve-Up! and Timothy Mo's The Redundancy of Courage? There are, ofcourse, honourable exceptions. You can buy James Kelman's collection And the Judges Said... in W HSmith, which proves that books that rescue true politics from the Westminster media village's "banteringinconsequence" (to borrow from F Scott Fitzgerald) are wanted very much by the public.

Indeed, there are countless books by little-known authors, produced by ever-struggling publishers such asPluto and Zed, which illuminate, sometimes brilliantly, the shadows of rapacious power and which are ignoredin the so-called mainstream. No doubt, they are deemed "political"; and unless politics can bediminished to its stereotypes and, better still, turned into a TV drama, no thank you.

After all, as one critic who dominates the reviews of paperback non-fiction, wrote: the suggestion thatsocial democracy is threatened by the insane march of George Bush and his attendant McCarthyism is, well,"silly". No matter that when you fly to the United States you lose the basic civil liberty of yourprivacy; that your name alone can lead to body searches, as Edward Said frequently experienced; that the FBInow routinely inspects the reading lists of public libraries.

These are dangerous times, and surreal. Column after column is devoted to the Martin Amis cult: he whodescribes politics as having "withered away in this country, and that's a great tribute to its highlyevolved character", and who sneers at the great anti-capitalist and anti-war demonstrations as"really [about] anti-politics; they're protesting about politics itself".

While the Guardian rejoices in the new-found humanity of the former US secretary of state MadeleineAlbright as she promotes her autobiography, Madam Secretary, there is not a single reference to thefact that this same woman, when asked if the deaths of 500,000 children in Iraq as a result of American-drivensanctions were a price worth paying, replied: "We think the price is worth it." The headline overher smiling face read: "I loved what I did."

"When truth is replaced by silence," the Soviet dissident Yevgeny Yevtushenko said, "thesilence is a lie." No writers' congress today worries about the lies and crimes of George Bush and TonyBlair. It is gratifying that the playwright David Hare has broken his silence ("America provides thefirepower; we provide the bullshit") and joined the courageous dissident Harold Pinter.

There is an urgency now. A Downing Street document, circulated among "progressive" Europeangovernments, wants a world order in which western powers have the authority to attack any other sovereigncountry. In six years, Blair has sent British troops to take part in five conflicts, and he wants yet morebloodletting. The document echoes his views on "rights and responsibilities" - to kill and devastatepeople in faraway places, thereby endangering and diminishing all of us.

What would George Orwell make of this? There is a series of Orwell events planned to mark the centenary ofhis birth. Most of those participating are politically safe or accredited liberal warriors. What if Orwell hadturned Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four into parables about thought control in relativelyfree societies, in which he identified the disciplined minds of the corporate state and the invisibleboundaries of liberal control and the latest fashions in emperor's clothes? Would they still celebrate him?

"They won't say..." wrote Bertolt Brecht in In Dark Times, "... when the great warswere being prepared for... they won't say: the times were dark. Rather: why were their poets silent?"

This article first appeared in the New Statesman.Courtesy, Znet