David Hare is guilty of bourgeois individualism

The playwright David Hare has an article in this morning's Guardian observing that right-wing art is flourishing in what he calls our right-wing times. He is chiefly concerned with the current revival of Terence Rattigan's reputation, though he argues that most of his fellow commentators are exaggerating the extent to which it had fallen.

But I was most struck by an exchange he records later in the article:

During the preparation for a BBC4 documentary to be shown this summer, I was asked a question which was implicitly far more insulting than anything Rattigan's enemies ever flung at him. The researcher wanted to know if it had not been for the emergence of the angry young men whether Rattigan would have gone on to write many more great plays. I tried to explain that most writers, at most times, are doing their best. Their success or failure in mining their imagination depends principally on the limits of that imagination.

But this will not do. A work of art is not just the result of individual talent: it also a result of the artistic climate and wider social climate in which the artist finds himself. There is something nonsensical about asking why Shakespeare did not write a novel.

And, though the the sixties generation of British pop musicians was wonderfully talented, I suspect that the fact that we moved from an intoxicating brew of rhythm and blues and psychedelia to the banality of glam rock within a few years has more than a little to do with the organisation of the record industry.

So it seems to me perfectly sensible to suggest that Rattigan's career may have been affected by the rise of other artists.

And why Hare should feel personally insulted by this exchange escapes me. If it falls to me to remind of a marxist of the importance of wider forces on artistic production, so be it.