Abigail DeVille

The dangers of being an American artist are not greater than those of being an artist
anywhere else in the world, but they are very particular. These dangers are produced by
our history. They rest on the fact that in order to conquer this continent, the particular
aloneness of which I speak—the aloneness in which one discovers that life is tragic, and
therefore unutterably beautiful—could not be permitted. And that this prohibition is
typical of all emergent nations will be proved, I have no doubt, in many ways during the
next fifty years. This continent now is conquered, but our habits and our fears remain.
And, in the same way that to become a social human being one modifies and suppresses
and, ultimately, without great courage, lies to oneself about all one’s interior, uncharted
chaos, so have we, as a nation, modified or suppressed and lied about all the darker forces
in our history. We know, in the case of the person, that whoever cannot tell himself the
truth about his past is trapped in it, is immobilized in the prison of his undiscovered self.
This is also true of nations. We know how a person, in such a paralysis, is unable to
assess either his weaknesses or his strengths, and how frequently indeed he mistakes the
one for the other. And this, I think, we do. We are the strongest nation in the Western
world, but this is not for the reasons that we think. It is because we have an opportunity
that no other nation has in moving beyond the Old World concepts of race and class and
caste, to create, finally, what we must have had in mind when we first began speaking of
the New World. But the price of this is a long look backward when we came and an
unflinching assessment of the record. For an artist, the record of that journey is most
clearly revealed in the personalities of the people the journey produced. Societies never
know it, but the war of an artist with his society is a lover’s war, and he does, at his best,
what lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to himself and, with that revelation, to
make freedom real.