Since we cannot expect much truth from our institutions, we must expect it from our writers. Tolstoy said: “The hero of my work, in all of his naked unadorned glory, is truth…” Thoreau said: “The one great rule of composition is to speak the truth.” And that other troublemaker said, “Ye shall hear the truth and the truth shall make ye free.”

Truth, truth, what is truth? The word drops easily from the mouth but what does it mean? I venture to assert that truth for one thing is the enemy of Power, as Power is the enemy of truth. The writer, like the ancient Hebraic prophets, must dare to speak truth to Power and the powerful, face to face if need be. Hemingway said it once and said it good, in respect to Power: “A writer is like a gypsy. He owes no allegiance to any government. If he is a good writer he will never like any government he lives under. His hand should be against it and its hand will always be against him.” (From a letter to Ivan Kashkin, his Russian translator, in 1935.)

What is truth? I don’t know and I’m sorry I raised the point. I mean to dodge it if I can, for the question leads at once into a bog of epistemological problems too deep for me—or as I might say otherwise, beyond the scope of this essay. I will state only what I believe, that truth, like honor, generosity, tolerance, decency, is something real, that truly exists, whether we can define it or not. Subjectively, truth is that statement of cases which accords with my own view of the world—insofar as I have one—and which corresponds to the actual shape, color, substance of things and events—insofar as we can share and agree upon our perception of such matters. What is reality? For the purposes of daily life, as well as for the composition of stories, poems and essays, I am willing to go by appearances. It appears to me, for example, that torture is wrong, a hideous wrong, and always wrong; that the death penalty—the cold-blooded infliction of death by instruments of the state—is an evil greater than murder; it seems to me, judging by appearances only, that it’s wrong to allow children to die of malnutrition and equally wrong—worse than wrong, criminally stupid—to bring children into the world when you are not prepared to feed and care for them; it appears to me that the domination of many by a few, whatever the creed behind it, whatever the means, leads always to injustice and is therefore wrong, always wrong, leading to greater wrongs. I cite these banal, crude and simple examples only to demonstrate that there is a moral area in which the true can easily be distinguished from the false. I cheerfully agree that there are other areas where the distinction is more difficult to ascertain.

But the writer’s duty, I am arguing, goes beyond the utterance and support of commonly agreed-upon truths. Any hack can spout truisms, clichés, tautologies and redundancies by the bookful. The task of the honest writer—the writer as potential hero—is to seek out, write down and publish forth those truths which are not self-evident, not universally agreed upon, not allowed to determine public feeling and official policy. We can see this clearly enough when we look abroad. Most of us admire Solzhenitsyn for his courage in bringing to light the full extent and horror of the Gulag Archipelago and for defying his own government’s effort to suppress his work. There are many other writers in the Soviet empire, less well-known than Solzhenitsyn, who continue to write and publish, through underground channels, the truth about what goes on in their native lands. There are similar writers at work, I hope, though we may not know their names, against the cruel and corrupt governments of South Africa, Kenya, Poland, Cuba, Chile, Zaire, South and North Korea, Ethiopia, Brazil, Indonesia, Vietnam, Guatemala, El Salvador and many other nations around the globe.