Perhaps my hero Solzhenitsyn would scorn my saying so but I am tempted to believe that the systematic cruelty inflicted upon animals trapped in our food and research apparatus is comparable—for who can measure the aggregates of pain, the sum of suffering?—to the agony that contemporary despotisms have exacted from human beings caught in their archipelagos of tyranny. Not merely comparable but analogous. Not merely analogous but causally connected. Contempt for animal life leads to contempt for human life.

4. I could easily go on all night, all week, with this bill of indictment. But shall note one crime more and call a halt. I mean the destruction, through industrialism, scientific technology and multiplying human numbers, of the habitat of life. We are befouling and destroying our own home, we are committing a slow but accelerating race suicide and life murder—planetary biocide. Now there is a mighty theme for a mighty book but a challenge to which no modern novelist or poet has yet responded: Where is our Melville, our Milton, our Thomas Mann when we need him most?

Individuals do not live in isolation, nor do lovers, nor do families: any honest fiction or poetry which claims to deal with the lives of human beings must take into account the social context of those lives, directly or by implication. It’s not a matter of restricting the writer to one mode of art—as in, say, the naturalism of Zola or the ponderous social realism of Dreiser—but rather of getting straight the connections between the fate of the author’s fictional characters and the nature of the society which largely determines that fate. There is more truth in the sometimes airy fantasies of Kurt Vonnegut than in the tedious naturalism of John Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom novels. Vonnegut writes as a critic of society; Updike in passive acceptance. As a result, assuming both do well what they set out to do, Vonnegut’s work is more provocative, suggestive, meaningful—more interesting.

What I have said so far is much too crude, rough, plain, simple, even simple-minded to satisfy those who care about the arts of fiction, poetry and essay. I recognize as well the banality of my basic argument, its old-fashioned overpolitical ring. Here I make the qualifications and reservations.

The author’s primary task and the only thing that justifies his miserable existence is the writing of readable books worth reading: to have something interesting to say and to say it well. The writer’s first job is to write, not aspire to a position of moral leadership. Quite so. Nevertheless—in and through the work, somehow, the writer must play his morally obligatory role as social critic, as spiritual guidon, as intellectual leader.

I present this plain and simple argument not to defend but to define an old and honorable tradition in American letters, one still alive despite temporary muffling by this gross, slimy, gluttonous slum of a decade, this Age of Reaganism and Servility. The majority of American writers today have chosen passive nonresistance to things as they are, producing sloughs of poetry about their personal angst and anomie, cascades of short stories and rivers of novels obsessed with the nuances of domestic relationships—suburban hanky-panky—chic boutique shopping-mall literary soap opera. When they do speak out on matters of controversy they attack not the evils of our time but fellow writers who may still insist on complaining. Updike, for example, in a recent review of Edmund Wilson’s work, attacks Wilson for condemning the uses to which our federal government puts the money it extracts from American citizens. Wilson, in his grave for many years now, cannot respond to Updike’s attack. But Wilson’s words will live, I predict, long after Updike’s fussy, prissy, precious novels have sunk into the oblivion they so richly deserve.