THE ARTIST AND FASCISM
By RICHARD HILLARY*
IT has been said that the artist, the scientist and the truly religious are the three greatest bulwarks any country can have against Fascism and Hitler. Of the scientist and, even more, the truly religious, that is certainly true. I cannot presume to any knowledge of artists, but it is not of artists in the strict sense of the word that I wish to speak, so much as of those of us who would truly love to be creative artists but who are not, those of us who are authors, art critics, columnists, not because we have something in us which must come out, but because it is the thing we do best, because we have the facility and it gives us a certain position and a certain power. I mean all of us with a taste for music, painting and writing, who can see a table and realise that it is not really a p4nk on four legs, and that there are semitones in life and that everything is not really black or white, as opposed to the factual. It is we, I suggest, at this moment who are primarily in the position of being a bulwark against Fascism and Hitler. A true artist, a creative artist, is always an individualist, and although I realise it is dangerous to generalise, I think it is true to say that if he has any political leanings at all they are really always towards anarchy. Surely nothing could be further from Fascism.
I myself—if I may take myself—as an artist or pseudo-artist, have always believed that man's salvation lies in his own hands and I have always avoided any form of control from above. I have always been, and still am, a passionate believer in free trade, private enterprise and laissez faire, and I should like to see the day when a government realised that its only proper function was to vote itself out of existence. But I know that day, or anything approach- ing that, is very far off,—so far off, in fact, that it can never be until man is willing to satisfy his material needs by economic rather than by political means: in other words until he realises that it is to his advantage to produce and exchange, rather than to wait for somebody else to produce something and then to take it away from him. In view of the present state of the world today it does not seem likely that he will come to that realisation in our lifetime. Therefore, as I see it, after this war some form of planned and organised society is absolutely inevitable, and however much one may cry individual liberty in a planned society, it is a contradiction In terms.
Facing up to realities, then, •what of the state of mind of the individualist when he realises mat he can no longer go his own sweet way, but must conform to some pattern of an organised society? Those of us of a certain education, who before the war prided ourselves on our responsibility, thought personal relation- * This article is the substance of an address given by the late Flight- Lieut. Hillary, author of The Last EnemA at Foyle's Literary Luncheon on October 22nd, 1942. ships the most important thing in life, second only to the state of one's own mind and the realisation of oneself. And we did not lack encouragement in that belief either. Remarque, who wrote All Quiet on the Western Front, was asked if he liked Germans, and he replied, "No." _Then he was asked if he liked Frenchmen and he said, "No." Then he was asked if he liked Englishmen and he said, "No." He was then asked, "Whom do you like ? " "I like my friends," he replied. That was a suitable and human answer before the war. Now, I suggest, it is not enough.
Let us now assume, then, that belief in self-realisation and personal relationships. We are asked if we believe in humanity. "Yes," we say, paying lip service but continuing to live entirely for our own small circle of friends. We are then told that we must accept the fact that man is basically good, that there is, or some day will be, such a thing as homo sapiens, that we must accept mankind as a whole or else call ourselves Fascists. We feel_ we are being critical and we agree to that, too. Do we then accept the Australian aborigine ? Have we no responsibility towards him ? No, certainly we have not ; why, one was brought over here at the age of three months and educated up to the age of eleven, and at the age of eleven his mind slipped and everything stopped ; he is a beast. Yet I suggest it is not such a very big step from him to the sweating crowd at Marble Arch tube station, that crowd that gets into the tube and clogs all the restaurants when we come home on leave. In peace-time we could have avoided it, but now we cannot. The world is closing in and will continue to do so. And this is the point: these people we would like to remove, and every thinking man, have something of the Fascist in them. What are we left with? Our own small circle of friends again ; and that is where, in every country now in Europe, we have .to take a big step to this—that it is no longer a question of whether so and so is a friend, speaks the same language, has the same tastes, and went to the same school: it is a question of what, in the last analysis, do I fight for ? Do I shoot you or do you shoot me ? Which side of the fence are you on ? In applying that form of reasoning to ourselves and in reducing this argument to its logical absurdity, what we are prepared to fight for with our backs to the wall is our own small
circle of friends—and that, we must realise, is putting ourselves a straight into the Fascist camp, because that is exactly what they say. "Think as we do ; act as we do ; believe as we do, and you are all right. Otherwise —! " That is an appalling and terrible fact to face up to Now assume for one moment that we lost this war and had a b collaborationist government in this country, as in France, or even s that we have not lost the war but have a Fascist government here ii under another name. What, then, will our position be? At this moment there are many artists, musicians and journalists, together si with those of us who profess and call ourselves intellectuals, who are b in the Services, men who before the war had a position in a certain u sphere. Let us take from among them a completely imaginary a example. Let us imagine someone who before the war was an o art critic, with a column admired in some newspaper. Now, let us say, he is in the Air Force. Nobody reads his column, nobody ir knows his name, he is a cog in the machine, and he does not like ti it, and despises his dull companions with their lack of awareness,
perception and sensibility. Let us suppose he is sitting in the G mess, feeling awfully bored by a garrulous and rather drunken pi species of station medical officer, who before the war had a large B
and very brilliant practice, a man who, according to our friend, B has no subtleties whatsoever, but Who, in his own way, is completely of orientated towards medicine. He also is bored by the dull pilot in on his right with a pint of beer in one hand and the Daily Mirror cl in the other, that pilot whose emotional reaction to the most culti- til vated woman or the local barmaid is identical—to him they are fa simply women—but that boy's life lies up in the sky. Our friend would say that he had no sensibility, but how wrong he would be. Pt
What we usually think of- when we speak of a man's sensibility
is somebody with a keener awareness of life than the average, of the spiritual rather than the factual, the unseen rather than the ha seen—and that pilot has that awareness, acquires that sensibility hi through the combination of great mobility and great power, alone at
with wind and stars. He may be boring on the ground, but neither wi he nor that garrulous and slightly drunken medical officer will go Fascist. Each is far too well orientated in his own sphere.
But what of our friend ? It seems to me that in his intellectual frustration he approaches very closely to a character of Miss Dorothy Thompson in an admirable article in Harper's Magazine, a character who, given a chance, would make the most perfect Goebbels of a budding Fascist movement. If his life cannot be apart from those he despises he cannot ignore them and will seek to dominate them, for the man who despises those around him who have power but not his intellectual attainments, those who attained that power by birth or marriage, feels it is his right to wrest that power from them.
I suggest that that man is perhaps representative of all of us, of the subconscious of all of us anyway, of all of us whose art is not a thing big enough of itself but simply a means to power. Let us remember two things : one, that Fascism is not a national creed but a state of mind ; two, that all those who love power more than people will go Fascist if and when Fascism is a majority movement. Finally, let us not go around and look at our friends and say, "Oh, he will be a Nazi." Let us rather ask ourselves— what is my position ? And if we can answer that question fairly, then I think that that itself is a not inconsiderable war aim, and if, after having looked into our hearts and seen the danger, we can honestly say it is all right when the day comes, I shall feel then we shall have a spiritual armour which, come what may, will see us through to the end.
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