"It is the duty of writers to pay no attention to duty" (1939)

I have been reading E.B. White's One Man's Meat, the collection of White's dispatches from his Maine farm. I have been reading the book because I need something to read, and I can't read the news anymore; I can't read the humor section of The New Yorker anymore, or look at its covers; I can't look at the A.V. Club anymore; I can't do much of anything anymore without seeing one name over and over again: Trump. 

He shows up in the unlikeliest places these days - every thought seems to have its destination in the White House. The A.V. Club has been going downhill for a while now, but it seems to have doubled-down on its culture coverage lately - meaning Trump coverage. He shows up unbidden in reviews and thinkpieces that have nothing to do with him. It seems to me that people feel that if they aren't talking about Trump, he's getting away with something, or that by not professing their hatred for him at every turn, they are endorsing him through silence. I recently watched Patton Oswalt's new comedy special, and it was interesting to me how several times he says that he won't deal with Trump, that the special isn't about Trump, that he's moving on from the Trump material - and yet at least half of the special is about Trump.

I don't agree with our President, and I hope that he is either removed, Nixon-like, or his fairy godmother waves her wand over his sleeping form and he wakes up with good ideas. But to fill every waking hour with disdain for him, hatred of his policies, despair at the direction our country is taking... It seems like he wins that way, because he controls me.

A passage from One Man's Meat struck me as being particularly applicable to this quandary. Of course, White had the rise of fascism on his mind in January 1939, when this entry was written - throughout the book, the situation in Europe provides an ominous undertone to White's small-town life in Maine, and his attempts to wrestle with his idyllic rural isolation and his responsibility to be interested and involved with global affairs make the book a much more powerful one than a simple "personal record of life on a Maine coast salt water farm" (as the book's cover describes it) would be. But I feel that his message here is perfectly suited to the state of letters and media today:

I was sorry to hear the other day that a certain writer, appalled by the cruel events of the world, had pledged himself never to write anything that wasn't constructive and significant and liberty-loving. I have an idea that this, in its own way, is bad news.

All word-mongers, at one time or another, have felt the divine necessity of using their talents, if any, on the side of right - but I didn't realize that they were making any resolutions to that effect, and I don't think they should. When liberty's position is challenged, artists and writers are the ones who first take up the sword. They do so without persuasion, for the battle is particularly their own. In the nature of things, a person engaged in the flimsy business of expressing himself on paper is dependent on the large general privilege of being heard. Any intimation that this privilege may be revoked throws a writer into a panic. His is a double allegiance to freedom - an intellectual one springing from the conviction that pure thought has a right to function unimpeded, and a selfish one springing from his need, as a breadwinner, to be allowed to speak his piece. America is now liberty-conscious. In a single generation it has progressed from being toothbrush-conscious, to being air-minded, to being liberty-conscious. The transition has been disturbing, but it has been effected, and the last part has been accomplished largely by the good work of writers and artists, to whom liberty is a blessed condition which must be preserved on earth at all costs.

But to return to my man who has foresworn everything but what is good and significant. He worries me. I hope he isn't serious, but I'm afraid he is. Having resolved to be nothing but significant, he is in a fair way to lose his effectiveness. A writer must believe in something, obviously, but he shouldn't join a club. Letters flourish not when writers amalgamate, but when they are contemptuous of one another. (Poets are the most contemptuous of all the writing breeds, and in the long run the most exalted and influential.) Even in evil times, a writer should cultivate only what naturally absorbs his fancy, whether it be freedom or cinch bugs, and should write in the way that comes easy. 

The movement is spreading. I know of one gifted crackpot who used to be employed gainfully in the fields of humor and satire, who has taken a solemn pledge not to write anything again till things get straightened around in the world. This seems to me distinctly deleterious and a little silly. A literature composed of nothing but liberty-loving thoughts is little better than the propaganda which it seeks to defeat. 

In a free country it is the duty of writers to pay no attention to duty. Only under a dictatorship is literature expected to exhibit an harmonious design or an inspirational tone. A despot doesn't fear eloquence writers preaching freedom - he fears a drunken poet who may crack a joke that will take hold. His gravest concern is lest gaiety, or truth in sheep's clothing, somewhere gain a foothold, lest joy in some unguarded moment be unconfined. I honestly don't believe that a humorist should take the veil today; he should wear his bells night and day, and squeeze the uttermost jape, even though he may feel more like writing a strong letter to the Herald Tribune.