Literature and politics are a plausible pairing. Practitioners of both trades use words to shape a reality that suits their convenience. The writer at the desk and the politician on a platform are both weavers of tales that try to persuade. Perhaps the one lives by the imagination and is after your mind while the other lives by power and tells you how to live. But the poets and politicians form a single group. In the foreground stand the obvious tribunes of the people. And in the background are the unacknowledged - those intellectual voyagers whose true power becomes obvious as time's arrow shoots ahead.
There is more to this idea than romantic myth. Writers can and do influence political views. Charles Dickens is responsible for the persistently popular view of what the Victorians were all about: hypocrisy and child labour. Rousseau invented the modern confessional style in literature. And his associated idea that organised society was somehow unnatural lived on after his death and breathed an imaginative power into the French destruction of 1789. While history's most famous example of posthumous literary power comes from the British Museum, where a late-German romantic analysed the capitalist Prometheus and invented the Marxism that went into battle after his death.
But the power of the littérateur - that seductive ease with language - is an argument for scepticism when it comes to the pronouncements of the novelist, the playwright and the poet on politics then and now. A way with words is not the same as an understanding of the way of the world. And the history of those interventions is part comic, part tragic and persistently gauche. It is as if the sensitivity to individual cases, that care for the shape of the human that goes into great literature, flies out of the window when politics looms. And in its place there arrives a leaden-footed folly.
In the 20th century the right has been morally repulsive but often grimly interesting. Hence Leni Riefenstahl's cinematic infatuation with fascist chic. The non-Stalinist left has been morally right but artistically boring. Hence Orwell's failure as a novelist. Whether right or left, the political interventions of the littérateur have been a disaster.
Kingsley Amis was a goose on politics in his communist youth. And carried on being politically silly in his Tory senescence. His friend, the creepy librarian Larkin, stooped to admire Margaret Thatcher. And John Osborne's politics degenerated into a sad farce of carry on barking. Graham Greene campaigned against corruption in his sunset boulevard backyard in the south of France. But the J'accuse style always carried with it a self-admiring quality. Waugh on the road in the 30s parodied Abyssinia, sneered at Africans and then propagandised a fantasy view of England, just as TS Eliot did with his thin-lipped hierarchies.
Wyndham Lewis did not even have Ezra Pound's excuse of mental illness for going all goggle-eyed at the sight of strong men strapped inside black leather belts. Auden at least lived long enough to realise that his most famously political line of poetry ("We must love one another or die") was just pietistic gibberish.
The history of literary fellow travellers, of the Wells-Shaw-Webb gang of the highminded who stumbled, is a well-known tale. And Martin Amis now revisits the scene of the morally obtuse. But he then produces a surreal form of ambulance-chasing obtuseness. Twenty million dead and the gulag become an episode in a north London autobiography. Do they pause to wonder by the banks of the Don?
The closer the artist gets to power recommendations, the greater the infirmity of purpose. Sartre existentialised himself into 20th-century literature as the artist of conscience and authenticity. But his most remarkable act of resistance during the German occupation was to move his daily cafe from the Latin quarter to Montparnasse. Tolstoy is the most tragic example of an artist who turned his back on art because he wanted action - in his case a kind of apostolic purity that rejected art as a lie. Which did not stop him from carrying on as the great Russian seigneur.
The encyclopaedia of errors is sometimes a question of just getting it factually wrong. From reading Dickens you would never think that mid-Victoria England was a high point of activist social legislation against social abuses. Sometimes it is an imaginative corruption as well: Rousseau's idea of a general will that can do no wrong started as social mysticism - and ended being used as a totalitarian defence.
The union of the fabulists in politics and literature is a real one since both are campaigns for power and influence. And along the way there is a sickly self-exploration that stops both groups from looking at the real world. What is missing from both when they start to deal with real life and death is the poetry and the tragedy of the everyday - the real suffering and experiences of the ordinary. And that music of humanity cannot be translated into mere phrases to be conveniently used among either the literary ambitious or the politically programmed. For that is the stuff of history not of dreams.
