DO I TAKE MY POLITICS SERIOUSLY (?)

At first glance this may seem a strange question to ask of myself, and yet there is a good reason for asking it. The reader will recall that I wrote about the disparity between the private person and the writer, a disparity in which the latter thrives at the former's expense. Is not the political bias I have in my writings, which is generally that of a socialistic transcendentalist, connected with the writer, and does not this radical writer thrive at the private person's expense? Yes, I am constrained to answer that he does! For the private person is really rather depressed and conscious of the fact that he is out-of-place in an urban environment such as the one he's currently living in. This individual says to himself: I would not now be in this fix if it wasn't for the fact that I've been stuck in north London all these years, living in poverty-stricken solitude. I ought not to have to endure such a depression, I ought really to be living with a wife in the suburbs or provinces, with regular access to intelligent companionship and sex. But I have been denied these things through confinement in the Borough of Haringey, and the writer I have now become is, in large part, a consequence of this denial. He has thrived at my personal expense.

The writer has become a socialistic radical with revolutionary sympathies, but I, the private person, am terribly depressed and in need of a better deal. Yet the writer is really a consequence of the fact that I don't get that better deal. He is a usurper, and what he says, while there may be some truth in it, is said in consequence of private misfortune, the bad luck which tore me away from my provincial roots and obliged me to endure north London. He says it but I ... do not feel particularly happy with depression, celibacy, solitude, failure, and poverty weighing heavily upon me. In Goethe's oft-quoted words, 'Two souls, alas, dwell in my breast', and dwell, I should imagine, in many other breasts, too! But if the well-being of the professional soul leads to or necessarily entails the sickness of the private one, then the two souls are incompatible, there is a friction between them which can only grow worse with the passing of time. Thus speaks the private soul!

Yet while this soul may not take the writer's politics too seriously, the writer most certainly does, and for the very sound reason that he writes about it and develops it as he progresses in his chosen vocation. The writer knows what he is saying to be valid, even if it isn't necessarily relevant to the private person, the perverted provincial with middle-class sympathies, who yet retains an inkling of his suburban roots. The writer reminds this latter person that Lenin and Trotsky were also perverted provincials in their private souls, and so too, if to a lesser extent, were Goebbels and Hitler. And the writer knows that, as the professional soul, it is his opinion and allegiance that really count, since politics is a profession and therefore not something aligned with the personal predilections or preferences of the private person.

But one can't very well be a successful politician with a chronic depression, and so the writer's professional allegiance is still hampered, so to speak, by the sorry condition of the private person. If the latter is sick, then the former can't expect to operate successfully or properly in the event of his becoming a politician. He is, after all, a usurper, a creature that should never have been. The return to full mental health of the private person, brought about by an appropriate change in living conditions or, more specifically, environment, may well result in the modification or even destruction of the writer, with his radical politics. Yet what had been written at the private individual's expense would still remain, and he would have an extremely difficult task proving it wasn't valid in itself!

Thus whatever happens in the future to the private person, the writer's work will remain, and it will be that work, rather than any subsequent modified political thinking, which would count for most in radical circles. The private person, returned to health through the acquirement of suburban privileges, might well disown it, but he could never refute it! And if he became known for it, he would have no option but to take a stand on it, since the exceptional man must always put his professional self, or persona, before his private self, or person, in such matters, not be dictated to by the latter. Even if, through reconditioning imposed by his return to a provincial lifestyle, the private person didn't particularly approve of what the writer had written, he could not deny it was true. Private misfortune may have led to the writer's writing it, but the fact that it was written is the most important thing, whether or not a perverted provincial was involved! Evolutionary progress often depends on such strange quirks of fate. Were not men of exceptional intelligence and moral integrity occasionally 'pulled over', through force of circumstances, to the proletariat's side, it is doubtful whether they would by themselves achieve very much vis-à-vis bourgeois oppression. For, as a rule, they aren't particularly bright!