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Partisan Review in its November, 1948, issue published an exchange of letters among three distinguished writers. The writers were V. S. Pritchett, Elizabeth Bowen and Graham Greene. They approach their theme: “What, if any, is the artist's relation to society?” with intellectual honesty. There are no attempts to dodge the issue. There is no retreating into ivory towers. Each in turn wrestles with the dragon as he envisages the dragon. And yet to the psychoanalytic observer reading between the lines, the leitmotif “the artist's relation to society” is slowly but surely superseded by an unconscious one, an unspoken reproach: “You shouldn't have asked that question.”
Here are three excerpts from the letters:
V. S. Pritchett: “Why do I write? … Many years ago I wrote a story about the X-ray department of a hospital. Lately, a nurse wrote to me and praised me for exposing in this story one of the glaring evils of hospital life and the nursing profession. She said I had done a great public service … My correspondent was not wrong: I had undoubtedly exposed an evil; but I had no idea when I wrote that I was doing so; it was not my motive. I recall that all my labor and indeed all my conscience was in the choice of the best words … If any social passion entered into the story, it was of a diffused and personal kind. I have always disliked the way the State and the