I was trying to get this present immediacy without trying to drag in anything else. I had to use present participles, new constructions of grammar. The grammar-constructions are correct, but they are changed, in order to get this immediacy. In short, from that time I have been trying in every possible way to get the sense of immediacy, and practically all the work I have done has been in that direction.
In The Making Of Americans I had an idea that I could get a sense of immediacy if I made a description of every kind of human being that existed, the rules for resemblances and all the other things, until really I had made a description of every human being—I found this out when I was at Harvard working under William James.
Did you ever see that article that came out in The Atlantic Monthly a year or two ago, about my experiments with automatic writing? It was very amusing. The experiment that I did was to take a lot of people in moments of fatigue and rest and activity of various kinds, and see if they could do anything with automatic writing. I found that they could not do anything with automatic writing, but I found out a great deal about how people act. I found there a certain kind of human being who acted in a certain way, and another kind who acted in another kind of way, and their resemblances and their differences. And then I wanted to find out if you could make a history of the whole world, if you could know the whole life history of everyone in the world, their slight resemblances and lack of resemblances. I made enormous charts, and I tried to carry these charts out. You start in and you take everyone that you know, and then when you see anybody who has a certain expression or turn of the face that reminds you of some one, you find out where he agrees or disagrees with the character, until you build up the whole scheme. I got to the place where I didn’t know whether I knew people or not. I made so many charts that when I used to go down the streets of Paris I wondered whether they were people I knew or ones I didn’t. That is what The Making Of Americans was intended to be. I was to make a description of every kind of human being until I could know by these variations how everybody was to be known. Then I got very much interested in this thing, and I wrote about nine hundred pages, and I came to a logical conclusion that this thing could be done. Anybody who has patience enough could literally and entirely make of the whole world a history of human nature. When I found it could be done, I lost interest in it. As soon as I found definitely and clearly and completely that I could do it, I stopped writing the long book. It didn’t interest me any longer. In doing the thing, I found out this question of resemblances, and I found making these analyses that the resemblances were not of memory. I had to remember what person looked like the other person. Then I found this contradiction: that the resemblances were a matter of memory. There were two prime elements involved, the element of memory and the other of immediacy.
The element of memory was a perfectly feasible thing, so then I gave it up. I then started a book which I called “A Long Gay Book” to see if I could work the thing up to a faster tempo. I wanted to see if I could make that a more complete vision. I wanted to see if I could hold it in the frame. Ordinarily the novels of the Nineteenth Century live by association; they are wont to call up other pictures than the one they present to you. I didn’t want, when I said “water,” to have you think of running water. Therefore I began by limiting my vocabulary, because I wanted to get rid of anything except the picture within the frame. While I was writing I didn’t want, when I used one word, to make it carry with it too many associations. I wanted as far as possible to make it exact, as exact as mathematics; that is to say, for example, if one and one make two, I wanted to get words to have as much exactness as that. When I put them down they were to have this quality. The whole history of my work, from The Making Of Americans, has been a history of that. I made a great many discoveries, but the thing that I was always trying to do was this thing.
One thing which came to me is that the Twentieth Century gives of itself a feeling of movement, and has in its way no feeling for events. To the Twentieth Century events are not important. You must know that. Events are not exciting. Events have lost their interest for people. You read them more like a soothing syrup, and if you listen over the radio you don’t get very excited. The thing has got to this place, that events are so wonderful that they are not exciting. Now you have to remember that the business of an artist is to be exciting. If the thing has its proper vitality, the result must be exciting. I was struck with it during the War: the average dough-boy standing on a street corner doing nothing—(they say, at the end of their doing nothing, “I guess I’ll go home”)—was much more exciting to people than when the soldiers went over the top. The populace were passionately interested in their standing on the street corners, more so than in the St. Mihiel drive.3 And it is a perfectly natural thing. Events had got so continuous that the fact that events were taking place no longer stimulated anybody. To see three men, strangers, standing, expressed their personality to the European man so much more than anything else they could do. That thing impressed me very much. But the novel which tells about what happens is of no interest to anybody. It is quite characteristic that in The Making Of Americans, Proust, Ulysses, nothing much happens. People are interested in existence. Newspapers excite people very little. Sometimes a personality breaks through the newspapers—[Charles] Lindbergh, [John] Dillinger—when the personality has vitality. It wasn’t what Dillinger did that excited anybody. The feeling is perfectly simple. You can see it in my Four Saints [In Three Acts]. Saints shouldn’t do anything. The fact that a saint is there is enough for anybody. The Four Saints was written about as static as I could make it. The saints conversed a little, and it all did something. It did something more than the theatre which has tried to make events has done. For our purposes, for our contemporary purposes, events have no importance. I merely say that for the last thirty years events are of no importance. They make a great many people unhappy, they may cause convulsions in history, but from the standpoint of excitement, the kind of excitement the Nineteenth Century got out of events doesn’t exist.
And so what I am trying to make you understand is that every contemporary writer has to find out what is the inner time-sense of his contemporariness. The writer or painter, or what not, feels this thing more vibrantly, and he has a passionate need of putting it down; and that is what creativeness does. He spends his life in putting down this thing which he doesn’t know is a contemporary thing. If he doesn’t put down the contemporary thing, he isn’t a great writer, for he has to live in the past. That is what I mean by “everything is contemporary.” The minor poets of the period, or the precious poets of the period, are all people who are under the shadow of the past. A man who is making a revolution has to be contemporary. A minor person can live in the imagination. That tells the story pretty completely.
The question of repetition is very important. It is important because there is no such thing as repetition. Everybody tells every story in about the same way. You know perfectly well that when you and your roommates tell something, you are telling the same story in about the same way. But the point about it is this. Everybody is telling the story in the same way. But if you listen carefully, you will see that not all the story is the same. There is always a slight variation. Somebody comes in and you tell the story over again. Every time you tell the story it is told slightly differently. All my early work was a careful listening to all the people telling their story, and I conceived the idea which is, funnily enough, the same as the idea of the cinema. The cinema goes on the same principle: each picture is just infinitesimally different from the one before. If you listen carefully, you say something, the other person says something; but each time it changes just a little, until finally you come to the point where you convince him or you don’t convince him. I used to listen very carefully to people talking. I had a passion for knowing just what I call their “insides.” And in The Making Of Americans I did this thing; but of course to my mind there is no repetition. For instance, in these early Portraits, and i
n a whole lot of them in this book [Portraits And Prayers] you will see that every time a statement is made about someone being somewhere, that statement is different. If I had repeated, nobody would listen. Nobody could be in the room with a person who said the same thing over and over and over. He would drive everybody mad. There has to be a very slight change. Really listen to the way you talk and every time you change it a little bit. That change, to me, was a very important thing to find out. You will see that when I kept on saying something was something or somebody was somebody, I changed it just a little bit until I got a whole portrait. I conceived the idea of building this thing up. It was all based upon this thing of everybody’s slightly building this thing up. What I was after was this immediacy. A single photograph doesn’t give it. I was trying for this thing, and so to my mind there is no repetition. The only thing that is repetition is when somebody tells you what he has learned. No matter how you say it, you say it differently. It was this that led me in all that early work.
You see, finally, after I got this thing as completely as I could, then, of course, it being my nature, I wanted to tear it down. I attacked the problem from another way. I listened to people. I condensed it in about three words. There again, if you read those later Portraits, you will see that I used three or four words instead of making a cinema of it. I wanted to condense it as much as possible and change it around, until you could get the movement of a human being. If I wanted to make a picture of you as you sit there, I would wait until I got a picture of you as individuals and then I’d change them until I got a picture of you as a whole.
I did these Portraits, and then I got the idea of doing plays. I had the Portraits so much in my head that I would almost know how you differ one from the other. I got this idea of the play, and put it down in a few words. I wanted to put them down in that way, and I began writing plays and I wrote a great many of them. The Nineteenth Century wrote a great many plays, and none of them are now read, because the Nineteenth Century wanted to put their novels on the stage. The better the play the more static. The minute you try to make a play a novel, it doesn’t work. That is the reason I got interested in doing these plays.
When you get to that point there is no essential difference between prose and poetry. This is essentially the problem with which your generation will have to wrestle. The thing has got to the point where poetry and prose have to concern themselves with the static thing. That is up to you.
CLM
Introduction to The Geographical History Of America
(1936)
Thornton Wilder
This book grew out of Miss Stein’s meditations on literary masterpieces. Why are there so few of them? For what reasons have they survived? What qualities separate the masterpieces from the works that are almost masterpieces?1 The answers usually given to these questions did not satisfy her. It was not enough to say that these books were distinguished by their “universality,” or their “style,” or their “psychology” or their “profound knowledge of the human heart.” She thought a great deal about the Iliad and the Old Testament and Shakespeare, about Robinson Crusoe and the novels of Jane Austen—to quote the works that appeared most frequently in her conversation during the months that this book was approaching completion—and the answer she found in regard to them lay in their possession of a certain relation to the problems of identity and time.2
In order to approach their treatment of identity and time Miss Stein made her own distinction between Human Nature and the Human Mind. Human Nature clings to identity, its insistence on itself as personality, and to do this it must employ memory and the sense of an audience. By memory it is reassured of its existence through consciousness of itself in time-succession. By an audience it is reassured of itself through its effect on another—“‘I am I,’ said the little old lady, ‘because my dog knows me.’”3 From Human Nature, therefore, come all the assertions of the self and all the rhetorical attitudes that require the audience—wars, politics, propaganda, jealousy, and so on. The Human Mind, however, has no identity; every moment “it knows what it knows when it knows it.” It gazes at pure existing. It is deflected by no consideration of an audience, for when it is aware of an audience it has ceased to “know.” In its highest expression it is not even an audience to itself. It knows and it writes, for its principal expression is in writing and its highest achievement has been in literary masterpieces. These masterpieces, though they may be about human nature are not of it. Time and identity and memory may be in them as subject-matter—as that existing at which the Human Mind gazes—but the absence from the creative mind of those qualities has been acknowledged by the vast multitudes of the world who, striving to escape from the identity-bound and time-immersed state, recognize that such a liberation has been achieved in these works.
If then Miss Stein is writing metaphysics, why does she not state her ideas in the manner that metaphysicians generally employ?
There are three answers to this question.
In the first place, a creative metaphysician must always invent his own terms. Even though his concepts may have something in common with those of his predecessors—with such concepts as subjective, objective, soul, imagination, and consciousness—he cannot in certain places employ those terms, because they come bringing associations of (for him) varying validity and bringing with them the whole systems of which they were a part. The contemporaries of Kant complained (as the contemporaries of Professor Whitehead are now complaining) that the philosopher’s terminology was arbitrary and obscure.
In the second place, Miss Stein is not only a metaphysician; she is an artist. In varying degrees artists, likewise, have always sought to invent their own terms. The highest intuitions towards a theory of time, of knowledge or of the creative act have always passed beyond the realm of “text-book” exposition. When the metaphysician is combined with the poet we get such unusual modes of expression as the myths in Plato, the prophetic books of [William] Blake, and the difficult highly-figured phrases in [John] Keats’s letters. Miss Stein’s style in this book might be described as a succession of “metaphysical metaphors.” On the first page, for example, we read:
“If nobody had to die how would there be room for us who now live to have lived. We never could have been if all the others had not died there would have been no room.
Now the relation of human nature to the human mind is this.
Human nature does not know this. . . .
But the human mind can.”
(Human Nature, hugging identity-survival cannot realize a non-self situation. The Human Mind, knowing no time and identity in itself, can realize this as an objective fact of experience.)
Similarly, further down we come upon the question:
“What is the use of being a little boy if you are growing up to be a man?”
(Since the Human Mind, existing, does not feel its past as relevant, why does succession in identity have any importance? What is the purpose of living in time? One cannot realize what one was like four seconds ago, four months ago, twenty years ago. “Only when I look in the mirror,” said Picasso’s mother, “do I realize that I am the mother of a grown-up man.”)
This book is a series of such condensations, some of them, like the plays and the “detective stories” about pigeons, of considerable difficulty. These latter, it is only fair to add, have, with a number of other passages, so far exceeded the delighted but inadequate powers of this commentator. The book presupposes that the reader has long speculated on such matters and is willing and able to assimilate another person’s “private language,”—and in this realm what can one give or receive, at best, but glimpses of an inevitably private language?
The third reason that renders this style difficult for many readers proceeds from the author’s humor. Metaphysics is difficult enough; metaphysics by an artist is still more difficult; but metaphysics by an artist in a mood of gaiety is the most difficult of all. The subject-matter of this book is grave, indeed; and there is evide
nce throughout of the pain it cost to express and think these things. (It is not without “tears” that Human Nature is found to be uninteresting and through a gradual revelation is discovered to be sharing most of its dignities with dogs.) But Miss Stein has always placed much emphasis on the spirit of play in an artist’s work. The reward of difficult thinking is an inner exhilaration. Here is delight in words and in the virtuosity of using them exactly; here is wit; here is mockery at the predecessors who approached these matters with so cumbrous a solemnity. One of the aspects of play that most upsets some readers is what might be called “the irruption of the daily life” into the texture of the work. Miss Stein chooses her illustrations from the life about her. She introduces her friends, her dogs, her neighbors. Lolo, about whom gather the speculations as to the nature of romance, lived and died in a house that could be seen from Miss Stein’s terrace in the south of France. She weaves into the book the very remarks let fall in her vicinity during the act of writing. Similarly at one period, Picasso pasted subway-tickets upon his oil-paintings; one aspect of the “real” by juxtaposition gives vitality to another aspect of the real, the created.
But why doesn’t Miss Stein at least aid the reader by punctuating her sentences as we are accustomed to find them? And why does she repeat herself so often?
A great many authors have lately become impatient with the inadequacy of punctuation. Many think that new signs should be invented; signs to imitate the variation in human speech; signs for emphasis; signs for word-groupings. Miss Stein, however, feels that such indications harm rather than help the practice of reading. They impair the collaborative participation of the reader. “A comma by helping you along holding your coat for you and putting on your shoes keeps you from living your life as actively as you should live it. . . . A long complicated sentence should force itself upon you, make yourself know yourself knowing it.”4