Let us now glance at the poppies, at the danger which is becoming known as “escapism”. This is not a significant word, for in itself escaping cannot be right or wrong nor worthy of comment until we know from what danger the escapist is fleeing and whether flight is his best method or preservation. Escaping from a concentration camp or a burning building is admirable, escaping from responsibility, like the patient who wrote to his psychiatrist that he was “only happy when he had cast off every shred of human dignity” is sometimes not. We are all destroyed through that first escapist, Eve, and saved by the second who built an ark. The word is generally employed by realists to beat romantics with; thus it was “escapist” to live at Tossa or Torre Molinos till 1936, when the centre of actuality shifted, and Sir Peter Chalmers-Mitchell who had retired to end his days in the sun, found himself, for a few hours in Malaga, in the intenser glare of History.
It is vain to accuse people of escaping from contemporary reality. Time is not uniform for all of us, neither is our imagination’s food nor our artistic material. We cannot all do our best work with the sun in our eyes. There is but one crime; to escape from our talent, to abort that growth which, ripening and maturing, must be the justification of the demands we make on society.
At present the realities are life and death, peace and war, fascism and democracy; we are in a world which may soon become unfit for human beings to live in. A writer must decide at what remove from this conflagration he can produce his best work and be careful to keep there.
The poppies [fragment]
uit:
Enemies of promise - Cyril Connolly
