‘THOSE WHO find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all… The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium … No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style … Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art.’
And so on. You will recognise these doubtful aphorisms as part of the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray. When I say ‘doubtful’ I suppose I’m subscribing to the hypocrisy of the period which Oscar Wilde tried to define and which tried to kill him. The post-Paterian aesthetic frightens us vicariously. Believe in art for art’s sake and you will end up in Reading Gaol. The philistine British public is still so scared of art that it sends its political representatives on holiday armed with detective stories. If we want to be strict about morality, the most immoral books ever written are those of the late Dame Agatha Christie, who killed people for sport. This is not the general view.
I see that in my very title, like Wilde himself, I use terms which I’m always too inept or usually too frightened to wish to define. I don’t know what art is, and I’m uncertain about the meaning of ‘immoral’. I practise an art, thought I have adversaries who deny this; my life is moral in that I’ve so far evaded prison in a democratic country. On the other hand, I’ve engaged in the international sport of cheating the State of lawful revenues, travelled second class in a first-class compartment, committed fornication, blasphemed, used obscenities, been drunk, above all, lied. Treat every man according to his desert, says Hamlet, and which of us would scape whipping? When we all gleefully accept that we’re immoral, evidently there’s something wrong with the accepted view of morality.
And, of course, morality is whatever the community, abetted by the State, says that it is. It is contingent, expedient, and changes with the wind. During the Second World War we saw how fickle were principles of right and wrong. It was right to eat bread in a time of moderate plenty, wrong to eat it during a shortage. It was right to kill Germans then; now presumably it is, except on Italian holidays, reprehensible. It’s clear to all of us that the principles of morality which custom, community, and the State enforce are no more than bows towards expediency. Things which were a dirty business during the war and for the rather more gruelling ten years after – exportation of currency, dealing on the black market and so on – now seem quaintly laughable. There has to be a deeper morality that is impervious to the merely contingent. This may or may not coincide in certain areas with the State’s version of behaviour, but it carries a gravitas that looks beyond the merely expedient.
You’ll remember that the late Graham Greene, on being converted to his own idiosyncratic version of Catholicism, began to perceive that there was a secular morality and what might be termed a theological one. He wrote a novel, eventually turned into a film, entitled Brighton Rock. In this a young gang leader, Pinkie, espouses not wrong but evil. He is a Catholic, as idiosyncratic as his author, who sees the logic of eternal punishment but hardly of eternal bliss. Evil to him is an eternal verity. He’s pursued because of his evildoing by a jovial Guinness-swilling highly secular lady who believes in right and wrong. Being a late product of the English Reformation, she’s never heard of good and evil. Greene seems to deride her while granting the theological gangster Pinkie a measure of respect. T.S. Eliot wrote an essay on Baudelaire in which he said that ‘the worst that can be said of our malefactors is that they are not men enough to be damned.’ Baudelaire apparently was man enough to be damned. So is Pinkie. There is, in the Greene-Eliot ethic a certain nobility attached to the conscious awareness of transgressing God’s laws, which may not be the same as man’s. God is not concerned with right and wrong, only good and evil.
These terms have always been difficult to define. ‘God’ is a dangerously ambiguous, perhaps even multiguous, word. When we say that God is good, we could mean that he is good as the taste of an apple is good, that there is a fundamental goodness beyond morality. Nobody would commit a sin if he did not expect a satisfaction to come out of it – an awareness of goodness. But goodness is action as well as a passive state of wellbeing consequent upon an action. Goodness as action is, I should think, the manifestation of concern with the capacity of a living organism to fulfil itself according to a fundamental principle of free will. Interference with this capacity is the opposite of good, and that opposite is termed evil. To kill, to injure, to rape – these are clearly evil, though the state merely calls them criminal. The State, in fact, has to be wary of employing theological terms at all, since it must always be ready to condone the injuring or extinction of putative enemies. The morals of war constitute a total ethical volte-face. I think the term ‘evil’ first made its appearance in popular journalism at the time of the My-Lai massacre in Vietnam, when Time magazine had to use the term to describe a destructive event which served no purpose but itself. Gratuitous acts of destruction represent the full rich cream of evil. To kill without motive is so pure an act that it seems to take on the quality of an art-form.
And yet the term ‘evil’ has to be employed when certain acts are committed that do not seem to contravene regular secular principles. To make a derisive noise during the performance of a Mozart quartet is a breach of etiquette rather than a criminal act. But, in the sense that a piece of music is, metaphorically or perhaps literally, a living organism, an injury has been done to it, and that has to be termed evil. I consider that any interference with free will is evil. But what we do when free will is itself directed towards evil? I suppose we must answer that free will must be instructed in the obligations of free will. You see how difficult it is to say anything useful or even intelligible about the nature of morality.
You will have noticed that Oscar Wilde said something about ‘the morality of art’ without saying what he meant by the high-sounding expression. Evidently he had in mind something about a closed system of conduct on which rigorous judgments can be made. This is pushing the term ‘morality’ too far, but it may be useful to consider how it is possible to make judgments on art at all.
Art has been defined as the disposition of physical material to an aesthetic end. This begs a fundamental question. What do we mean by ‘aesthetic’? Etymology doesn’t help. The Greek aisthánesthai means merely to perceive, and it is perception, not pain, that is wiped out by an anaesthetic. Art is concerned with the creation of beautiful objects, but this is only one aspect of aesthetics, which finds beauty in nature and gets terribly mixed up with biology. For the beauty of a woman, or any other kind of animal, cannot be separated from biological utility. When nature is beautiful, we know that its beauty is attached to its own brand of utility. Even when we find beauty in human artefacts like aircraft, sailing ships or intercontinental ballistic missiles, we’re uneasily aware that a purely aesthetic judgment is out of place. Art is concerned with the creation of beauty for its own sake. Oscar Wilde’s last words in that preamble to Dorian Gray are: ‘All art is perfectly useless.’ When art wants to be useful, then we’re probably justified in saying that it’s not art.
If art is not useful, what is its use? The creation of an artefact which shall be beautiful presupposes that the Platonic term beauty which Wilde doesn’t attempt to define at least has a meaning. It’s not a meaning that can be expressed formulaically, although certain aestheticians have tried. It’s most easily thought of as the objective correlative of a state of feeling. I say that a thing portrays beauty when it induces a feeling of elation which is unrelated to the biological or the utilitarian. The orgasm produces elation because that is nature’s bribe to ensure the continuation of the race, even though that bribe is thwarted. The elation of health, or its recovery, or financial success, the winning of a difficult game doesn’t call into being the praise or near-worship of an artefact. The elation is probably the elation of a kind of metaphysical discovery, and that discovery is very frequently a sense of unity which only the arts can convey. This unity is the contrived coherence of what, in daily life, is not coherent. Coherence can only be brought about by selection, and selection connotes limitation. The essence of art is cunning limitation.
I suppose that the art with which most visual artists are concerned most typically exhibits the necessity of limitation, since the pictorial art is enclosed in the prison of a frame. Within that frame elements of the visual world are so arranged that a fragment of experience looks like a unity of experience. A pattern is imposed on, or grows out of, a selection of physical objects. A photograph will show us physical objects, but we feel that the frame is arbitrary. This is not so with a painting, and of course a photograph can contrive to accept the creative limitation of a painting. Beauty does not lie in the subject matter but in the organisation of the subject matter. This probably applies to all the arts.
I have to confess to great personal limitations when it comes to the pictorial aesthetic. One has to accept the choice that nature makes for us all, confining us to one sense or another. Though my earliest ambitions were pictorial, and my first publications were of cartoons in great daily newspapers, I was always hampered with Daltonianism or colour blindness. This represents a kind of local patriotism, since I was born in Manchester and John Dalton made his numbing discovery there. In my early youth I turned to music and literature – essentially auditory arts. My problem is to find a rough and ready aesthetic which will apply equally to the auditory and visual arts, and the motor ones as well. I don’t think it’s possible for anybody to practise an art without knowing why he is doing it. This entails having a pliable aesthetic.
Oscar Wilde, like his master Walter Pater, saw that all the arts try to attain the condition of music. This is presumably because the arts are happiest when they are dealing with form at its purest, its most remote from representation. This means its safest, for when the arts represent persons or objects they are drawing close to the possibility of moral judgment. There’s an instinctive desire on the part of the artist to keep well away from that area. I don’t think we well understand what music is trying to do. Certainly the musician himself was once confused by the fact that musical sounds, the mere raw material, can be pleasant in themselves. If I sit at the keyboard and strike arbitrary chords, it’s all too possible for some auditor to remark: ‘How beautiful.’ You’ll remember that Miss Skinner, in Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh, says: ‘Give me a simple chord of Beethoven – that is happiness.’ Modern composers, perhaps starting with Stravinsky and Schoenberg, discovered that true musical skill lay in contriving satisfactory patterns out of what was not in itself pleasing. To cease to draw a distinction between a concord and discord was the beginning of modern musical wisdom. Form or pattern was all. The analogy is with, say, Leonardo da Vinci’s painting of an old man, bald and carbuncular, embracing his great grandson. The uglier the nude, the less like a Sun Page Three sub-pornograph, the greater is the possibility of outstanding artistic creation.
Probably in music we see not merely the ultimate art but the most primitive representation of essential structure – that structure out of which cultures and civilisations are made, the structure of oppositions. We live in a binary universe, created by our own brains, which depends on codes of communication made out of opposites. These, of course, do not exist in nature. Colour in nature is a spectrum; the separation of one colour from another is a human achievement. When colours can oppose each other, as in a set of traffic signals, then communication is possible, though not for me the Daltonian. In language we have a whole set of oppositions – phonemes versus morphemes, bound morphemes versus free morphemes, unvoiced consonants versus voiced consonants, consonants versus vowels, and so on. Music is made out of tensions which are resolved only to make new tensions, ending, we hope, with an unequivocal resolution. In traditional music, the dominant opposes the tonic, and the subdominant opposes both. In modern music there is often a difficulty in finding oppositions, and that is why a great number of people stay away from concerts devoted to the music of Pierre Boulez.
Literature is close to music in that it’s an auditory art. The very term literature denies this, preferring to think of it as visual – the arrangement of words, which are made out of letters, fixed on the page. Homer, whoever he was or they were, singing in a pre-literate society, would not have understood this. The development of the Greek alphabet, according to some theorists, was in the service of fixing the Homeric auditory for ever – letters in the service of sounds, not as a substitute for them. Literature then is sounds, but sounds to which meaning is attached. Not phones but phonemes. Literature at its purest, meaning its most poetical, is essentially the manipulation of phonemes already manipulated into words. Words belong to the great world which exists outside art. Literature is the most dangerous of the arts, as Oscar Wilde was to discover, because it allows the possibility of moral judgment.
Another Irishman, James Joyce, against whom, like Wilde, morality unsheathed its claws, was greatly concerned about the possibility that literature might, because it is made out of words, move out of the zone of aesthetic purity into one in which artistic, not moral, impropriety was ready to take over. He talked about proper art and improper art or, to be more technical, static art and kinetic art. Static art aroused emotions which were then cleansed or cathartised by the rhythm of the artistic medium itself. This, of course, is pure Aristotle. Tragedy arouses pity and terror, only to allay them through artistic catharsis. If tragedy were a kinetic art, instead of a static one, then the auditor would leave the presentation terribly aroused and liable to do damage, as after a football match. But Milton’s phrase ‘calm of mind, all passion spent’ is the proper state of mind of one who has suffered the vicarious agonies of King Lear. He perceives torture, mutilation, death, as aspects of the pattern of human life, accepts them, dimly sees the possibility of a unity in which all things are subdued and explained by necessity, and is not only calm but exalted.
I think it might be useful to consider this theory of the static and the kinetic in graphic terms. Let’s suppose that the whole process of artistic communication is contained in the middle of a line. This line is a continuum. At one end of it, it uses the materials of communication to instruct, at the other end it uses those materials to excite. In other words, there is a static area in the middle, and at one end a didactic area, at the other a pornographic area. The true artist has to avoid invading either of these two areas, but avoidance is not easy.
Perhaps for simplicity’s sake I should confine myself for the moment to literature. Books are most revered, especially in America, when they are didactic, when they wish to teach. A didactic book will tell you about anything from the abacus, or the aardvark, to the zygospore. It uses language not for an aesthetic end but as a medium of instruction. It does not try to excite. It does not address the emotions, only the brain. At the other end of the continuum we have pornography, which addresses neither the emotions nor the brain but the senses. Etymologically, pornography means the representation of a harlot, a desirable but anonymous sexual partner. Because of a large accumulation of associations, because of an increase in the discovery of the fountains of human action, the term has expanded its meaning. Anything which provokes violence, usually with a sexual connotation,
But pornography is generally harmless – in the social sense. It promotes auto-erotic acts, it is masturbatory. It provokes a sexual discharge, but usually in solitude. It is cathartic. It may, far more than the didactic, use the materials of art, though usually in a manner defiantly unoriginal. I don’t think it is in order to make a moral judgment on it. The only possible judgment is a Wildean one: pornography is improper art; it offends against the morality of art because it arouses what cannot be purged within the rhythm of art. It provokes a discharge outside itself. In the same way, didactic writing is fulfilled outside itself: it leads to action in the same way as pornography. When it pretends to be art, it is to be condemned on the same moral grounds as its distant or polar partner.
Think again of that continuum – art in the middle, the didactic and the pornographic at the ends. The line is pliable and can be bent. More, one end can be made to touch the other. Most readers of books feel guilty if they’re surrendering to sheer enjoyment. Information allays guilt: the book they read has a use. Grant the reader, as a reward, a touch of the pornographic, and he will be thoroughly content. A couple may copulate, discuss hotel management, aeronautics or Florentine incunabula, and then fall once more to love. They are mere phantoms anyway: if they all fall to their messy deaths in a defective hotel elevator, no one is going to bewail their disappearance.
I think it was André Gide who called pornography one-handed literature. He might have applied the same term to a book on cookery: stir the pot with one hand, hold the book with the other. In each case the book becomes unclean, literally stained.
Joyce, in his autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, has his hero Stephen Dedalus expound very eloquently on the morality of art – meaning the closed code that forbids the pornographic and the didactic alike. Strangely, when I first read the book at the age of fifteen I was so appalled by the sermon on hell which frightens young Stephen out of sin and into repentance that I vowed never to touch it again. In other words, the novel was acting kinetically and not statically. The ghastly rhetoric of the Jesuit sermon ought to belong either to the didactic or the pornographic zone, but, not being addressed to the brain, it cannot be didactic; not exciting the sexual instinct it can hardly be pornographic. What then is it? If we expand pornography to signify any appeal to the flesh – not a pleasurable appeal, far from it – and if we expand the didactic to mean any appeal to reason and emotion combined, then the sermon inhabits a double area. Of course, in a work that so diligently tried to obey the aesthetic propounded within it, that sermon should not be there. But the novelist always has the problem of trying to cope with the inclusion of material that leaps outside the confines of the static aesthetic appeal. So probably does the painter.
I recognise that painting has an origin in magic, or so the primitive cave-drawings of our remote ancestors seem to tell us, and that in its long history it proceeds through other kinds of kinesis. A religious painting, like a religious play of the old guild cycles, has a didactic task, and the function of teaching remains as deliberate as the anecdotal pictures of the Victorians, which I personally love. But this is not what the pictorial art is about. Nor is it the task of the pure artist to depict the human form with the intention of arousing any passion other than of a kind of formal or structural love. But I can’t deny that the Rokeby Venus or Bronzino’s allegory of Venus, Love, Folly and Time in the National Gallery excites in a distinctly carnal manner. And the Cecil B. DeMille canvases of Alma Tadema, another painter I guiltily admire, are near-pornographic. But I can think of only one painter whose works were confiscated by the police, along with a volume of Blake reproductions that happened to be lying around. These were painted by a man who was not a painter at all – D.H. Lawrence. He hated the Tate Gallery and everything he considered that it stood for, and he produced male and female nudes intended to glorify human love. They were not well done, and any sin Lawrence committed was against the morality of art. This was, perhaps rightly, construed by the Home Office as a sin against public morality. This kind of confiscation is rare. But in the field of literature it is not uncommon.
You’ll forgive me, I hope, if I draw on my thirty-odd years of experience as a professional writer to exemplify the particular dangers that the writer of fiction faces. The first instance relates to morality of a special kind, personal injury frequently unintended, often unconscious, which carries heavy damages in civil courts. Libel is attached to a work and not essentially to its author. The fear of the unwilling committal of this tort, a tort not being quite a crime, leads writers to give up writing or when, like myself, they’re tied to the craft because no other seems available, to become unbecomingly escapist. When, by total accident, I discovered that I’d libelled a former lady mayor of Banbury named Miss Bustin, I ceased to write about the present and composed instead a novel about Shakespeare’s love-life. In this, somewhat vindictively, I placed an unpleasant Mistress Bustin, a puritan of Banbury and almost at once was threatened with another libel suit. The late Constantine Fitzgibbon, writing a novel about an imaginary future, placed a London nightclub in it which bore the same name as an existing one in the real present. He was sued. I doubt if even portrait-painters have this problem. Mrs Churchill would have liked Graham Sutherland to have this problem, but all she could do was to destroy the portrait of her husband that he’d painted.
Another moral problem I’ve faced in my time is that of meeting a charge of blasphemy. I believe it was Mrs Mary Whitehouse who was prepared to raise this spectre when I published my translations of some of the sonnets of Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli, a poet who lived in the Napoleonic era, and just after, and produced nearly 2,700 sonnets in the Roman dialect. These sonnets are of profound anthropological interest. They depict the Roman psyche through the gutter language of the Romans. I chose those of Belli’s sonnets which dealt with religious subjects and was faithful in dealing with his obscenity as well as his blasphemy. The voice is not quite mine. The original voice is not quite Belli’s. Belli was a respectable academic poet who served as a Vatican theatre censor. The work is ventriloquial. Who is being obscene? Who is being blasphemous? Surely it is in order to display the foul nature of the lower-class Roman mind? Surely, in a novel, if it is permissible to present blasphemy, disclaiming it oneself but attaching it to an invented or even real-life personage. The Muslims have decided that this is not so. We all know what has happened to Mr Salman Rushdie and his Satanic Verses. Here is some of my own verse, heavily didactic in the style of a debased Alexander Pope:
Ladies and gentlemen, a graver theme
Confronts us. To begin, let us blaspheme.
Jesus, the bastard of a drunken brute,
Was gotten on the village prostitute.
His followers were active sodomites
Who dragged in Judas to their dark delights.
The heavenly kingdom was not for the just
But just the devotees of lawless lust.
Read this, and then re-read it. Having read,
Do not heap hot damnation on my head,
But add inverted commas and ‘he said’.
I may have written this, but on behalf
Of some fictitious sneerer whose foul laugh
A fictional believer counters thus:
‘Your fiction is so vilely blasphemous
You damn yourself to darkness.’ The reply?
‘Christ was a liar and he taught a lie,
A bastard brat, son of a fucking whore,
His words a drunkard’s belch and nothing more.’
Our world is built of opposites. Not strange
That one mind can engender this exchange,
And it’s unjust to fasten on to me
The fouler voice of the antiphony.
Imagine death and take the blame for death?
Macbeth is bad, but Shakespeare’s not Macbeth.
Turn to a later giver of God’s laws
And you may libel him with greater cause.
Mohamed claimed no heavenly origin,
And to defame his essence is no sin.
‘This shoveller of camel-droppings who
Craftily married and pretended to
Broadcast the Word from Gabriel’s microphone
– We have his word for it, but that alone –
Raped virgins under age and robbed the poor,
Corrupted Arab, Persian, Turk and Moor,
And left a bloody legacy of hate
To doubter, heretic and apostate,
A stinking rubbish dump made white with paint,
A shaitan masquerading as a saint.’
[From An Essay on Censorship]
The next of my moral problems as regards literary expression goes back some years and still goes on. In 1961 I wrote a novel in which I tried to tackle an essentially theological theme – that of free will. The cult of juvenile violence had just begun in this country. Home from Malaysia, I was interested in phenomena like the Teddy Boys and the Mods and Rockers. I was especially interested to hear talk about quelling this belligerence through conditioning techniques. I think the notion of a kind of super-Pavlovian control of the reflexes came from Professor B.F. Skinner in America. To me, with a traditional Christian upbringing, such a notion was appalling. Men and women are free – free to make moral choices; other kinds of freedom don’t greatly matter. I wrote a book called A Clockwork Orange in which I presented – implicitly, not, I think, with overt didacticism – the case for regarding freely chosen evil as somehow better than imposed good. I’d come back from speaking Malay, in which the word for human being is orang. Orang and orange were close, possessing in common colour, sweetness, juice, organic life. Conditioning or brain-washing meant the imposition of mechanical laws on a product of nature.
My aim was simple. To present a young thug committed to violence, rape, robbery, murder and other vices who is caught by the police, tried, imprisoned, and then given the chance to participate in a psychological experiment. He is made to watch films depicting gross violence while, at the same time, an injected substance courses through his arteries which induces nausea. In the Pavlovian manner, he associates extreme sickness with any thought of violence after the completion of this cure. He avoids sin not because sin is morally wrong, but because his body forbids it. Unfortunately, the use of music as an emotional intensifier during the showing of these films of violence produces an effect unintended by the devisers – nausea is attached to the hearing of the music by Beethoven. The young man tries to kill himself while listening, against his will, to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Falling from a high window, he undoes his condition and becomes the young thug he always was. But, as the story ends, he grows out of his taste for violence. He grows up.
The novel was published in 1962 to little notice and small applause. Ten years later it was made into a film which convulsed the nation. This was because it was made out of visual images, not literary constructs. Words can hit hard, but not as hard as shapes in technicolour. The film was alleged to have been the cause of gratuitous violence among the young. Parliament asked for it to be banned. The director, Stanley Kubrick, an American living at Borehamwood, was, apparently, threatened by guardians of public order. The film exists elsewhere in the world – as Uhrwerk Orange and Naranja Meccanica and so on – but not here. Kubrick committed a secondary sin in making the film; the primary sin was my own.
And yet I’d done my best to avoid the pornography of violence through the employment of verbal tricks. I wrote the novel in a weird invented language – a mixture of Russian, rhyming slang, gipsy bolo, with the rhythms of the King James Bible – in order to make the violent substance of the book difficult for the reader to reach. By the time the reader had deciphered a phrase like ‘I gave him a tolchock on the rot and dratsed him with my oozo on the ochkies’, the referent had, I assumed, already passed by. There was no real possibility of corruption. But in the film there was total explicitness, and for this I was blamed.
Was it possible to write a serious novel about the dangers of conditioning without showing what was to be conditioned out of existence? Yes, but it would have been cheating. Even the mildest and most innocent old lady would demand, rightly, to know what crimes the criminal had committed. It is sometimes necessary for the novelist to come close to corrupting himself.The kind of novel that cabinet ministers read on holiday – Jeffrey Archer, Dame Agatha Christie and so on – is not of the type which A Clockwork Orange represents. I’m not referring to content but to technique. When language obtrudes, when it refuses to be a pane of well-polished glass through which actions can be viewed, when it prefers opacity to transparency, then it belongs to a different class of literary endeavour than the popular novel. The transparent novel, in which language is not important, I call Class One fiction. The opaque novel, in which language is a character, a constituent of the action, I call Class Two fiction. It’s interesting to note that two of the most remarkable novels belonging to this class in this century – Joyce’s Ulysses and Nabokov’s Lolita – have both earned moral condemnation, just like A Clockwork Orange. It seems that the novelist who is interested in language is also interested in life – too interested, say the censors.
I think there’s a parallel to this process in the visual arts. When painting began to move away from the representational it was, in effect, freeing itself from the dangerous real world where moral judgments are made. In other words, Class 1 painting, Class 2 painting. And sculpture. Architecture? Music? They’ve always been somehow outside the possibility of moral censure. Or when moral censure culminating in censorship appears, this is always ideological, which means bizarrely impertinent. The Nazis proscribed Mendelssohn because they could hear Jewish elements even in his Italian and Scottish Symphonies – just as they could find Jewish corpuscles in blood identical with the Aryan variety, as it has to be. Israel decided that Wagner’s music was Nazi. Walking round the Stadio in Rome, or viewing the architecture of EUR, I think I see fascism in the very structure. I don’t know whether I’m right or not.
Painting has been able to cleanse itself of the dirty world by becoming abstract – a process which totalitarian ideologies naturally attack. After post-impressionism, we had cubism, vorticism and a yielding to the appeal of non-representational design. Literature tries to do this, though with great difficulty. The nearest literature can get to abstraction is surrealism, in which fragments of the outside world are reorganised, as in this poem from Edith Sitwell’s Façade:
When Sir Beelzebub
Called for his syllabub….
This makes a kind of sense, but not in the covenant the reader expects to be drawn up with the writer. This covenant relates every-day logic to the logic of literature, which is not always wise. Some years ago I wrote a novel in which a former jockey appeared. I wrote: ‘He got up, or down, from his chair.’ The fury of the response was unexpected. The visual confusion in the minds of some readers was so intense that it led to a kind of dementia. A covenant was being broken. Write genuine surrealism, and the reader shrugs it away as though he knew there was no covenant. Try this: ‘The five-toed spider, cognaccoloured, annexes the perspex keyboard’. The perfect syntax of that mad utterance half-persuades us that there is sense there. The wellformed sentence, however insane its burden, speaks a kind of sanity. This is what Noam Chomsky meant when he formulated the classical statement ‘Colourless green dreams sleep furiously’.
Whether we like it or not, we novelists are committed to a kind of waking sense. Unless, of course, we’re writing Finnegans Wake, which recounts a dream in dream-language. Here the urge to make language behave like music is extremely powerful. Writers of verse or prose envy music its capacity to say more than one thing at the same time.
I must seem to have wandered away from my initial question – ‘Can art be immoral?’ The answer is yes, if art disobeys its own rules, if it ceases to proffer a static pleasure and moves down the continuum in the direction of either the didactic or the pornographic. ‘The perfect use of any imperfect medium’ – so Oscar Wilde defined the morality of art. No artist can concern himself with the exterior morality decreed by the State. Of its very nature art cannot subscribe to the primacy of evil, whose function is to break not make. Art is in the deepest sense ethical in the sense that it accepts the holiness of the human imagination. I see I’m quoting William Blake. There’s a song sung by our Women’s Institutes which is worth quoting in this connection:
And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills,
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among those dark Satanic mills?
Most of our chanting matrons assume that Jerusalem is Zion, the fulfilment of the Christian vision, and that the dark Satanic mills are the smoky horrors of the industrial revolution. This is not true. Jerusalem to Blake meant the human imagination, seasoned with free sensuality, the dark Satanic mills were primarily churches, which taught restriction and the narrowest of moralities. They were naturally also the State, the philistine community, those forces of darkness which would import a contingent, expedient morality into the self-sufficient morality of art. Art cannot be immoral. If it seems to be immoral, it is not art.
Previously unpublished. A version of this piece was given as a speech at the Tate Gallery, London on 17 October 1991.