I read magazines and periodicals published in English in the communist countries: Russia, China, East Germany, etc. etc., and if there is a story or an article or a novel ‘suitable for British conditions’, I draw Jack’s, and therefore John Butte’s, attention to it. Very little is ‘suitable for British conditions’; an occasional article or short story. Yet I read all this material avidly, as Jack does, and for the same reasons: we read between and behind lines, to spot trends and tendencies.

But — as I became aware recently — there is more to it than that. The reason for my fascinated absorption is something else. Most of the writing is flat, tame, optimistic, and on a curiously jolly note, even when dealing with war and suffering. It all comes out of the myth. But this bad, dead, banal writing is the other side of my coin. I am ashamed of the psychological impulse that created Frontiers of War. I have decided never to write again, if that is the emotion which must feed my writing.

During the last year, reading these stories, these novels, in which there might be an occasional paragraph, a sentence, a phrase, of truth; I’ve been forced to acknowledge that the flashes of genuine art are all out of deep, suddenly stark, undisguisable private emotion. Even in translation there is no mistaking these lightning flashes of genuine personal feeling. And I read this dead stuff praying that just once there may be a short story, a novel, even an article, written wholly from genuine personal feeling.

And so this is the paradox: I, Anna, reject my own ‘unhealthy’ art; but reject ‘healthy’ art when I see it.

The point is that this writing is essentially impersonal. Its banality is that of impersonality. It is as if there were a new Twentieth Century Anon at work.

Since I have been in the Party, my ‘Party work’ has consisted mostly of giving lectures on art to small groups. I say something like this: ‘Art during the Middle Ages was communal, unindividual; it came out of a group consciousness. It was without the driving painful individuality of the art of the bourgeois era. And one day, we will leave behind the driving egotism of individual art. We will return to an art which will express not man’s self-divisions and separateness from his fellows but his responsibility for his fellows and his brotherhood. Art from the West…’ to use the useful catchphrase ‘— becomes more and more a shriek of torment from souls recording pain. Pain is becoming our deepest reality …’ I’ve been saying something like this. About three months ago, in the middle of this lecture, I began to stammer and couldn’t finish. I have not given any more lectures. I know what that stammer means.