The relation between politics and letters is necessarily a dangerous liaison, and the questions which it raises are huge, blunt and disobliging. Acknowledged too readily, it is apt to highlight the less becoming features in each. But its potential for treachery is probably greatest when its existence is most vehemently denied. If imagination and the exercise of power were ever simple antinomies in human life, the relation could perhaps be avoided in principle. But to suppose that they often are (or even could be) is to sentimentalise both power and imagination, conceiving the former negatively (as intrinsically oppressive) and the latter positively (as intrinsically 'liberating'). Raymond Williams has made a more persistent attempt to grasp the nature of this relation than any living British writer and has certainly avoided sentimentalising imagination, even if his conception of power has proved rather more equivocal. In the present volume he is interviewed by a trio from the New Left Review on his motives for making this attempt, and on the degree of success which has attended his efforts.

LRB 24 January 1980 | PDF Download