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21
Gertrude Stein (1874-1946)

Introduced and Edited by Marianne DeKoven

Gertrude Stein was one of the most prolific, important, and influential writers of this century, with twenty-five books published in her lifetime and approximately the same number, including anthologies, published posthumously.1 She was at the center of three major modernist-avant-garde Parisian groups: the lesbian Left Bank documented by Shari Benstock, the bohemian Montmartre of Picasso and modernist painting described by Stein herself in vivid detail in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and the postwar scene of younger American expatriate modernists, most notably Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Anderson, and Wilder, who sat at Stein's feet at 27 rue de Fleuras. "You are all a lost generation," the quote Hemingway attributes to "Gertrude Stein in conversation" in an epigraph to The Sun Also Rises, generated one of the prime epithets for the literary twenties, rivaled only by Fitzgerald's "jazz age" and Eliot's "waste land."2 Yet the fine, important pieces collected here, like dozens of others that are similarly important and fine, are extremely difficult to obtain, available only in some libraries and, when in print, in obscure, expensive clothbound editions.

Until, in the past decade, feminist and postmodernist criticism began to take Stein's writing very seriously, most studies of her were biographical, focusing on her myriad connections with other important modernist and avant-garde artists and writers rather than on her own remarkable productivity and Page 480 →the diversity and originality of her work. In fact, this originality was defined rather as eccentricity, most importantly by Edmund Wilson in his early, highly influential work on modernism, Axel's Castle. It was not until the avant garde gained wider currency as precursor of postmodernism, poststructuralism, and French feminism, and effected a general shift in our sense of the possible in literature, that the revolutionary character of Stein's work was rendered visible. She went a great deal further than anyone else in the modernist period in reinventing literary language in a way that undoes conventional, hierarchical, patriarchal modes of signification, substituting, in diverse stylistic modes, a rich, complex, open-ended syntactical and semantic polysemy.

She was well aware of what she was doing; she was eminently a literary theorist as well as a practitioner. (She launched her intellectual life as a student of William James at Harvard.) Her essays and extended meditations of the 1930s do a great deal more than explain her own literary practice—they treat standard preoccupations of literary theory, such as definitions of genre, accounts of periodization, and literary nationality, as well as more abstract questions of the nature of representation and of literary time.3 While Stein seldom treats directly the question of gender in these essays, the unpretentiousness and whimsical informality of her style and the simplicity of her diction "do theory" in a way that is welcoming and suggestive for theoretically oriented feminists who find inimical the overbearing, obfuscating language of so much masculine theoretical discourse. At the same time, the quality and structures of her thought are profound, challenging, complex. As she says in "A Transatlantic Interview 1946," reprinted here, "After all, my only thought is a complicated simplicity. I like a thing simple, but it must be simple through complication."

Two of the three critical essays reprinted here have a somewhat ambiguous textual status. "How Writing Is Written" was a lecture delivered at the Choate School during 1934-1935, the year of Stein's triumphant return to America as a famous writer (she had left for Europe, in professional and erotic defeat and depression, in 1903 and had never before returned). The essay first appeared in the Oxford Anthology of American Literature in 1938 and was reprinted by Robert Bartlett Haas in How Writing Is Written: Volume II of the Previously Uncollected Writings of Gertrude Stein in 1974. This version (the only one ever printed) is the result of a transcription from notes taken at the lecture by Dudley Fitts, who admitted that he "had difficulties" (Bridgman 266).

"A Transatlantic Interview 1946," the year of Stein's death (she died of cancer in July), was originally published as "Gertrude Stein Talking—A Transatlantic Interview" in the UCLAN Review (Summer 1962, Spring 1963, and Winter 1964). The interview was arranged by mail from America by Haas, a friend of Stein's, and was conducted by a third person, William S. Sutton, a friend of Haas's.4 The published version was based on two afternoons of conversation between Stein and Sutton at her Paris apartment in January 1946. Sutton recorded in shorthand Stein's answers to questions formulated by Haas; Haas Page 481 →transcribed and presumably edited Sutton's mailings: not a procedure to inspire great confidence in the accuracy of the final printed version, especially since it did not appear in print until sixteen years later. Haas published excerpts of the UCLAN Review version in A Primer for the Gradual Understanding of Gertrude Stein—the version reprinted here—and indicated in his introduction that Stein did at least see and approve some version of the interview: "She inscribed the typescript as follows: 'To Bobby Haas and his progeny forever. You got a scoop! Always, Gertrude Stein' " (14; the "forever" is touching in light of Stein's imminent death).

The textual status of "What Are Master-pieces and Why Are There So Few of Them," on the other hand, is firm. Stein wrote it to be delivered as a lecture at Oxford and Cambridge in 1936, exactly a decade after her Oxford-Cambridge lecture "Composition as Explanation" (still available in paperback in the crucial Carl Van Vechten anthology, Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein) initiated her career as lecturer and essayist. The 1936 lecture was first published in What Are Master-pieces, 1940, and reprinted in the very useful but unfortunately out-of-print paperback anthology, Look at Me Now and Here I Am: Writings and Lectures, 1909-1945.

As Richard Bridgman says, "How Writing Is Written" and "What Are Master-pieces and Why Are There So Few of Them" (subsequently referred to as HWIW and WAM) are "short, lucid statements" and therefore are "useful places to commence a study of Gertrude Stein" (264).5 They condense, in concise, readily accessible but not, pace Bridgman, oversimplified or diluted form, a number of Stein's central critical and theoretical preoccupations. Moreover, they stand in a dialectical relationship to one another that in turn represents the central dialectic in Stein's thought: a dialectic of notions of writing and art in general as transcendent "ends in themselves" (WAM), on one hand, and as prime representations of contemporaneity (HWIW) on the other. Though the two seem to be contradictory—it would seem that art must be either a "pure" end in itself or a social representation—it is in representing contemporaneity that art transcends contingence, and in transcending contingence art represents contemporaneity.

Because it was delivered to an audience of teenagers, HWIW is Stein's most accessible theoretical essay. It clarifies and summarizes the complex arguments Stein had begun in "Composition as Explanation" and developed in Narration, which was written in 1935 and delivered as a series of lectures at the University of Chicago. She continued to pursue the theme in Picasso of 1938. Stein's central concern in HWIW is the issue of contemporaneity in art. She claims, simply, that everyone, including writers and artists, lives in the present, because there is no other time available to live in: the past "is gone" and the future does not yet exist.

Crucially, the writer who is truly expressing "the present" is outcast by her or his contemporaries precisely because they cannot recognize contemporaneity in art. "Contemporaries" live in the present and express and constitute it unconsciously and inevitably, but they do not have interpretive frameworks Page 482 →to account for and normalize it. What they understand and are "soothed" by are representations approximately two generations or forty years behind their own historical moment. Works of art genuinely contemporary with them appear "ugly" and are repudiated.

Clearly, this theory of contemporaneity was constructed in part to "soothe" Stein's own experience of rejection—the ridicule and indifference that greeted her work in the world outside her small circle of admirers until the success of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas in 1932—and to ally it with the experience of Picasso and the other modernist painters she identified with. But it was also influenced by William James's notion of time as a continual flow of present moments. Stein adapted this notion to a mode of writing with one's attention constantly focused on the present moment, which she calls (in "Composition as Explanation") writing in the "continuous present." She further developed her explanation in "The Gradual Making of The Making of Americans," in Lectures in America.

Stein also summarizes in HWIW more succinctly than anywhere else her crucial notion of the difference in "time-sense" between what she thinks of as the English nineteenth century and the American twentieth century. In the English nineteenth century, the time-sense was linear, diachronic; in the American twentieth century, founded by Walt Whitman and then Henry Ford, the time-sense is synchronic: "the whole thing assembled out of its parts" rather than "beginning at one end and ending at another." Stein does not spell out the implications for literature of these divergent time-senses, but evidently the synchrony of the twentieth century implies modes of juxtaposition and collage that annihilate the linearity of nineteenth-century narrative realism.

This synchrony has an internal dynamic, however: "the Twentieth Century gives of itself a feeling of movement." This movement is not teleological but highly abstract. Not only is it an end in itself; it is also "static," like Brownian motion; Stein defines it in opposition to what she calls "events." She argues that journalism has entirely cornered the market on events, making a literature of events pale by comparison. Literature should therefore concern itself with the excitement or "vitality" of "existence," making us see with shock of recognition not what is happening but what is "there."

Stein's peroration in HWIW includes a marvelously succinct summary:

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. . . . If he doesn't put down the contemporary thing, he isn't a great writer, for he has to live in the past.

Having made this passionate assertion of the importance of her own work, she is moved to a striking and sharply observed self-revelation: Speaking of Page 483 →the infinitesimal shifts from sentence to sentence in her early writing that she likens to movement from frame to frame in a film, she states: "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." This rare bit of psychological rather than purely literary-theoretical self-analysis provides insight into the chronological succession of radically diverse styles that characterizes Stein's career as an experimental writer.

The writing in WAM is more sophisticated than that in HWIW, but the essay is almost equally accessible. Stein's concern is not with contemporaneity or with the necessity of great writing to provide an adequate representation of its own historical moment but with the noncontingent qualities of "masterpieces," qualities that make them independent of their historical moment. Again, one of these qualities is, precisely, the adequacy of the representation of contemporaneity, but Stein does not treat this issue in WAM, and perhaps never fully made the connection for herself.

An understanding of WAM is enriched by, though not dependent upon, a familiarity with one of Stein's greatest works, The Geographical History of America Or The Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind, published in 1935, and with the essay "Pictures" in Lectures in America. Stein divides the "human mind," or "entity," from "human nature," or "identity." The human mind is transcendent, independent of memory, the past, all forms of embeddedness in history and human relations, whereas human nature is contingent, imbued with self-consciousness and relatedness. Masterpieces, quite simply, emerge from the human mind and not from human nature. Here Stein allies herself with a predominant quasi-religious modernist credo of the transcendent supremacy of art, which endows art and the artist in the act of creation with the only power available to human beings to rise above daily life and thereby to give it meaning. Versions of this religion of art are also offered by Joyce, Proust, Eliot, Woolf.

Representation, in Stein's radically antirepresentational view here, is at best irrelevant, at worst an encumbrance. Objects, people, events must be used as springboards for art, but "fundamentally the minute one is conscious deeply conscious of these things as a subject the interest in them does not exist." Stein developed this theme with great explicitness in "Pictures" (Lectures in America), where she discusses the "annoyance" one feels at an oil painting being forced to exist in relation to the objects it represents. In WAM, she develops the theme in relation to "psychology," arguing that everyone, particularly women in villages, knows all there is to know about psychology. Therefore, such knowledge of human nature has nothing to do with the creation of masterpieces, which emerge only from the human mind, "a thing in itself and not in relation":

It is not the way Hamlet reacts to his father's ghost that makes the masterpiece, he might have reacted according to Shakespeare in a dozen other ways and everybody would have been as much impressed by the psychology of it. Page 484 →But there is no psychology in it, that is not probably the way any young man would react to the ghost of his father and there is no particular reason why they should.

Since the state of entity, or pure existence beyond "relation and necessity" and wholly within the human mind, is extremely difficult to achieve, there are very few masterpieces: "Everything is against them. Everything that makes life go on makes identity and everything that makes identity is of necessity a necessity."

Interestingly, though Stein is squarely within the idealist tradition here, she is also moving toward poststructuralist feminist notions of a subversive writing subject that is different from, incompatible with, the identity of the coherent, separate, uniquely individuated bourgeois-patriarchal self. It is precisely this self that Stein has in mind when she talks about identity. "What woman say [is] truer than what men say" because women have a looser allegiance to a remembered, consistently structured and self-imposed identity. Similarly, Stein seems to anticipate Lacan's influential "mirror-stage" theory of the inherent alienation in all constructions of the self when she says that "identity consists in recognition and in recognizing you lose identity because after all nobody looks as they look like."

"A Transatlantic Interview 1946" is inevitably looser and more diverse than the two lecture-essays. Much of it, particularly the opening section, recapitulates material Stein had covered many times in her various accounts of the history of her writing life, offering to readers unfamiliar with these accounts an unusually consistent and coherent version (such a version is simultaneously useful and oversimplified). What is unique here is the section containing her responses to excerpts from Tender Buttons. These responses reveal the intense concentration and effort Stein's writing required of her, involving a continual application of complex principles of selection and evaluation, a continual rejection of words that did not do the work she wanted done. For critics who, perhaps in unconscious obedience to the stereotype of women as undisciplined and self-indulgent, dismiss her as an "automatic writer," simply putting on paper whatever came into her head, this section should be particularly enlightening.

This interview is also notable for its egalitarian politics: Stein connects to the crucial democratic idea of "one man one vote" her notion of the "twentieth-century composition" as a principle of organization that rejects the dominating center (another poststructuralist feminist concept) but in which each part is of equal importance. This section, like her tribute to the Resistance in "The Winner Loses: A Picture of Occupied France" and her dissection of the Fascist tyrant in her characterization of "Angel Harper" (Adolf Hitler) in Mrs. Reynolds, is an antidote to Stein's attacks on Roosevelt and to her embarrassing friendship with the Vichy collaborationist Bernard Faÿ.

The remaining selections are literary rather than critical writings. Two of them are from Geography and Plays (1922), one of Stein's most important and Page 485 →most difficult to obtain early anthologies. Its title, like that of Portraits and Prayers, makes evident Stein's intention to reinvent genre as well as writing itself. Geography and Plays contains the brief but fine introductory essay by Sherwood Anderson quoted by Haas in "Transatlantic Interview." It also contains several of the famous works anthologized by Van Vechten in Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein: "Miss Furr and Miss Skeene" (1908-1912), "Susie Asado" (1913), and the early plays "What Happened" of 1913 and "Ladies Voices" of 1916.

Many of the less known (because relatively unavailable) works in Geography and Plays are comparable in quality and interest to the works anthologized by Van Vechten. "Americans" and "White Wines," both of 1913, are fine instances of what I call Stein's "lively words" style (Dekoven 63-84), the prewar culmination of her early experimental career (the best known work in this style is Tender Buttons). In this period (roughly 1909-1913) Stein became interested in the vibrancy of word juxtapositions, generally within short pieces which she considered word-portraits or prose poems rather than in the mammoth accretions of steadily shifting repetition, using a flattened, radically reduced vocabulary, that characterize the extremely lengthy volumes, containing extremely lengthy sentences and paragraphs, of her earlier experimental work, most notably The Making of Americans (1906-1911).

"Americans," which could be considered portraiture as well as "geography," does not depend for its effect on referentiality. The reader who tries to find out from this piece what Stein thought of Americans will be disappointed. Rather, its effect is that of a polysemous verbal collage comprised of multiple semantic resonances, achieved by suggestive, "almost-meaning" juxtapositions, puns, and sound associations. Holding the idea "Americans" in one's mind as one reads augments the experience of the piece, much as the nonabstract titles of some abstract or cubist paintings add to them an extra dimension of referential possibility. I find "Americans" as "successful," to use Stein's own term in "Transatlantic Interview," as the best of the Tender Buttons—a semantic cornucopia of almost infinite suggestiveness, yet at the same time precise and sharply focused in its verbal juxtapositions. It would be an interesting exercise to apply Stein's criteria in her "Transatlantic Interview" responses to Tender Buttons to segments of "Americans."

"White Wines" is one of Stein's earliest plays and is, in fact, an object lesson in the thinking she did about dramatic writing. It is written in the "lively words" style, but with an important difference: the writing is divided into discemibly different voices and into declarative sentences of fairly uniform length and structure employing recognizable speech rhythms. Such structural features are more significant for Stein's dramatic writing than the "Three Acts" into which "White Wines" is divided or the repeated stage directions corresponding to the titles of these acts.

The dramatis personae of "White Wines" are "5 women," and the voices are recognizably feminine: "Cunning very cunning and cheap, at that rate a sale is a place to use type writing. Shall we go home." Many of Stein's plays, Page 486 →most notably "Ladies Voices," and the later operas Four Saints in Three Acts (1927) and The Mother of Us All (1945-1946), seem more concertedly interested in women than Stein's work generally is. Plays enacted for Stein her idea of the twentieth-century "composition" as dynamic movement, existing for its own sake, within an overall stasis that has no dominating center. Perhaps she felt that women's lives and consciousnesses came closer to embodying that composition than men's ("what women say is truer than what men say").

Portraits and Prayers (1934) is even more difficult to obtain than Geography and Plays. It spans the entire range of Stein's experimental career. In "Play," of 1909, we can see Stein's commitment to what Roland Barthes called "the magic of the signifier," and to its "free-play" in her writing. This piece is written in what I call Stein's "insistent" style (she distinguishes "insistence," or shifting repetition, from "repetition," or mechanical reiteration), and is an excellent exemplum of her contention that the gradual shift of meaning from sentence to sentence in this style is just like the barely perceptible movement from frame to frame in a film (DeKoven 46-62). Coming toward the end of this style, "Play" also demonstrates some of the features of the "lively words" style that immediately followed: it is short, sprightly, tightly structured, dependent on semantic polysemy and open-endedness.

"A Description of the Fifteenth of November: A Portrait of T. S. Eliot" of 1924 emerged from the uncomfortable relations between Stein and Eliot. Eliot, highly skeptical about Stein's work, offered to publish something of hers in Criterion on the condition that it be absolutely current.6 Stein titled the piece with the date of its composition, associating Eliot himself, highly appropriately, with the pressure of time. Beyond its anecdotal interest to students of modernism, this piece encompasses several modes of writing Stein employed in the twenties: the repeated motif "the fifteenth of November" exemplifies Stein's new concern with structural cohesion; the opening paragraph employs a kind of verbose doubletalk Stein used to mock the Latinate pretentiousness of so much "serious" sense-making writing; and the sequences of lyrical, incantatory, complexly rhythmed repetition, most notably in the closing paragraph, put us powerfully in the realm of the pre-Oedipal and of ritual uses of language.

"Sitwell Edith Sitwell" of 1925 is a witty, engaging, and quasi-referential piece: it nods in the direction of referentiality, though, characteristic as it is of Stein's twenties' writing, it eludes conventional referentiality itself. It is of inherent interest in a work on the gender of modernism, for Sitwell was a professed admirer of Stein's work and her own work is perhaps more visibly indebted to Stein than anyone else's. Another of Stein's transatlantic women friends, the American Mabel Weeks, figures importantly throughout the piece in various puns. Moreover, the introductory tableau "when they sit around her" foreshadows St. Therese's position in the first "Act One" of Four Saints in Three Acts.7

"To Kitty or Kate Buss" of 1930 is, like its subject, an everywoman of Stein's world of discourse: one of her nearly innumerable portraits of one of Page 487 →her nearly innumerable friends. Like her writing in general, it is simultaneously remarkable, a brilliant and pungent piece, and ordinary, both because it is representative of an enormous amount of similar work and because it is unpretentious, doing its powerful and revolutionary work with a light touch.

NOTES

  1. 1. See Appendix C, "Key to the Yale Catalogue (of Stein's writings), Part 4," in Bridgman, 365-385, for an extremely helpful chronological list of all of Stein's works by date of composition.
  2. 2. See Mellow.
  3. 3. The most important of these writings, in addition to the essays reprinted here, are Lectures In America, 1934, Narration, 1935, The Geographical History of America Or The Relation Of Human Nature To The Human Mind, 1935, and Picasso, 1938 (years given are dates of composition rather than publication).
  4. 4. Haas's Introduction to "Transatlantic Interview," 13-14 in A Primer for the Gradual Understanding of Gertrude Stein, contains this information.
  5. 5. Bridgman warns that, "if taken uncritically," these two essays "can wrench one's understanding of (Stein's) literary work askew," because they tidy the "dishevelled" record of her oeuvre (264). However, the inaccessibility of these two essays makes it unlikely that they will be misused in that way.
  6. 6. See the last chapter of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas for Stein's version of this story (189-190 in Selected Writings).
  7. 7. "Saint Therese half in and half out of doors . . . Saint Therese seated and not surrounded" (Selected Writings, 586).

WORKS CITED

  • Benstock, Shari. Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900-1940. Austin: U of Texas P, 1986.
  • Bridgman, Richard. Gertrude Srein in Pieces. New York: Oxford UP, 1970.
  • DeKoven, Marianne. A Different Language: Gertrude Stein's Experimental Writing. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1983
  • Hemingway, Ernest. The Sun Also Rises. New York: Scribner's, 1926.
  • Mellow, James R. Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein & Company. New York: Avon, 1974.
  • Stein, Gertrude. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. New York: Random House, 1933.
  • ———. "Composition as Explanation." 1926. Selected Writings, 511-523.
  • ———. Four Saints in Three Acts. 1927. Selected Writings, 577-612.
  • ———. The Geographical History of America Or The Relation Of Human Nature To The Human Mind. New York: Random House, 1936.
  • ———. Geography and Plays. 1922. New York: Something Else, 1968.
  • ———. How Writing Is Written: Volume II of the Previously Uncollected Works of Gertrude Stein. Ed. Robert Bartlett Haas. Los Angeles: Black Sparrow P, 1974.
  • ———. Lectures in America. New York: Random House, 1935.
  • ———. Look at Me Now and Here I Am: Writings and Lectures, 1909-1945. Ed. Patricia Meyerowitz. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971.
  • ———. The Making of Americans. 1925. New York: Something Else, 1966.
  • ———. The Mother of Us All. 1946. Last Operas and Plays. New York: Random House, 1949,
  • Page 488 →———. Mrs. Reynolds and Five Earlier Novelettes (1931-1942). New Haven: Yale UP, 1952.
  • ———. Narration. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1935.
  • ———. Picasso. 1938. Boston: Beacon, 1959.
  • ———. A Primer for the Gradual Understanding of Gertrude Stein. Ed. Robert Bartlett Haas. Los Angeles: Black Sparrow P, 1971.
  • ———. Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein. Ed. Carl Van Vechten. New York: Random House, 1946.
  • ———. Tender Buttons. 1914. Selected Writings, 459-509.
  • ———. What Are Master-pieces. Los Angeles: Conference, 1940.
  • ———. "The Winner Loses: A Picture of Occupied France." Selected Writings, 613-637.
  • Wilson, Edmund. Axel's Castle. New York: Scribner's, 1931.

How Writing Is Written

What I want to talk about to you tonight is just the general subject of how writing is written. It is a large subject, but one can discuss it in a very short space of time. The beginning of it is what everybody has to know: everybody is contemporary with his period. A very bad painter once said to a very great painter: "Do what you like, you cannot get rid of the fact that we are contemporaries." That is what goes on in writing. The whole crowd of you are contemporary to each other, and the whole business of writing is the question of living in that contemporariness. Each generation has to live in that. The thing that is important is that nobody knows what the contemporariness is. In other words, they don't know where they are going, but they are on their way.

Each generation has to do with what you would call the daily life: and a writer, painter, or any sort of creative artist, is not at all ahead of his time. He is contemporary. He can't live in the past, because it is gone. He can't live in the future because no one knows what it is. He can live only in the present of his daily life. He is expressing the thing that is being expressed by everybody else in their daily lives. The thing you have to remember is that everybody lives a contemporary daily life. The writer lives it, too, and expresses it imperceptibly. The fact remains that in the act of living, everybody has to live contemporarily. But in the things concerning art and literature they don't have to live contemporarily, because it doesn't make any difference; and they live about forty years behind their time. And that is the real explanation of why the artist or painter is not recognized by his contemporaries. He is expressing the time-sense of his contemporaries, but nobody is really interested. After the new generation has come, after the grandchildren, so to speak, then the opposition dies out; because after all there is then a new contemporary expression to oppose.

That is really the fact about contemporariness. As I see the whole crowd of you, if there are any of you who are going to express yourselves contemporarily, you will do something which most people won't want to look at. Most of you Page 489 →will be so busy living the contemporary life that it will be like the tired businessman: in the things of the mind you will want the things you know. And too, if you don't live contemporarily, you are a nuisance. That is why we live contemporarily. If a man goes along the street with horse and carriage in New York in the snow, that man is a nuisance; and he knows it, so now he doesn't do it. He would not be living, or acting, contemporarily: he would only be in the way, a drag.

The world can accept me now because there is coming out of your generation somebody they don't like, and therefore they accept me because I am sufficiently past in having been contemporary so they don't have to dislike me. So thirty years from now I shall be accepted. And the same thing will happen again: that is the reason why every generation has the same thing happen. It will always be the same story, because there is always the same situation presented. The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn't make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.

Most of you know that in a funny kind of way you are nearer your grandparents than your parents. Since this contemporariness is always there, nobody realizes that you cannot follow it up. That is the reason people discover—those interested in the activities of other people—that they cannot understand their contemporaries. If you kids started in to write, I wouldn't be a good judge of you, because I am of the third generation. What you are going to do I don't know any more than anyone else. But I created a movement of which you are the grandchildren. The contemporary thing is the thing you can't get away from. That is the fundamental thing in all writing.

Another thing you have to remember is that each period of time not only has its contemporary quality, but it has a time-sense. Things move more quickly, slowly, or differently, from one generation to another. Take the Nineteenth Century. The Nineteenth Century was roughly the Englishman's Century. And their method, as they themselves, in their worst moments, speak of it, is that of "muddling through." They begin at one end and hope to come out at the other: their grammar, parts of speech, methods of talk, go with this fashion. The United States began a different phase when, after the Civil War, they discovered and created out of their inner need a different way of life. They created the Twentieth Century. The United States, instead of having the feeling of beginning at one end and ending at another, had the conception of assembling the whole thing out of its parts, the whole thing which made the Twentieth Century productive. The Twentieth Century conceived an automobile as a whole, so to speak, and then created it, built it up out of its parts. It was an entirely different point of view from the Nineteenth Century's. The Nineteenth Century would have seen the parts, and worked towards the automobile through them.

Now in a funny sort of way this expresses, in different terms, the difference between the literature of the Nineteenth Century and the literature of the Twentieth. Think of your reading. If you look at it from the days of Chaucer, you will Page 490 →see that what you might call the "internal history" of a country always affects its use of writing. It makes a difference in the expression, in the vocabulary, even in the handling of grammar. In Vanderbilt's amusing story in your Literary Magazine, when he speaks of the fact that he is tired of using quotation marks and isn't going to use them any more, with him that is a joke; but when I began writing, the whole question of punctuation was a vital question. You see, I had this new conception: I had this conception of the whole paragraph, and in The Making of Americans I had this idea of a whole thing. But if you think of contemporary English writers, it doesn't work like that at all. They conceive of it as pieces put together to make a whole, and I conceived it as a whole made up of its parts. I didn't know what I was doing any more than you know, but in response to the need of my period I was doing this thing. That is why I came in contact with people who were unconsciously doing the same thing. They had the Twentieth Century conception of a whole. So the element of punctuation was very vital. The comma was just a nuisance. If you got the thing as a whole, the comma kept irritating you all along the line. If you think of a thing as a whole, and the comma keeps sticking out, it gets on your nerves; because, after all, it destroys the reality of the whole. So I got rid more and more of commas. Not because I had any prejudice against commas; but the comma was a stumbling block. When you were conceiving a sentence, the comma stopped you. That is the illustration of the question of grammar and parts of speech, as part of the daily life as we live it.

The other thing which I accomplished was the getting rid of nouns. In the Twentieth Century you feel like movement. The Nineteenth Century didn't feel that way. The element of movement was not the predominating thing that they felt. You know that in your lives movement is the thing that occupies you most— you feel movement all the time. And the United States had the first instance of what I call Twentieth Century writing. You see it first in Walt Whitman. He was the beginning of the movement. He didn't see it very clearly, but there was a sense of movement that the European was much influenced by, because the Twentieth Century has become the American Century. That is what I mean when I say that each generation has its own literature.

There is a third element. You see, everybody in his generation has his sense of time which belongs to his crowd. But then, you always have the memory of what you were brought up with. In most people that makes a double time, which makes confusion. When one is beginning to write he is always under the shadow of the thing that is just past. And that is the reason why the creative person always has the appearance of ugliness. There is this persistent drag of the habits that belong to you. And in struggling away from this thing there is always an ugliness. That is the other reason why the contemporary writer is always refused. It is the effort of escaping from the thing which is a drag upon you that is so strong that the result is an apparent ugliness; and the world always says of the new writer, "It is so ugly!" And they are right, because it is ugly. If you disagree with your parents, there is an ugliness in the relation. There is a double resistance that makes the essence of this thing ugly.

You always have in your writing the resistance outside of you and inside of Page 491 →you, a shadow upon you, and the thing which you must express. In the beginning of your writing, this struggle is so tremendous that the result is ugly; and that is the reason why the followers are always accepted before the person who made the revolution. The person who has made the fight probably makes it seem ugly, although the struggle has the much greater beauty. But the followers die out; and the man who made the struggle and the quality of beauty remains in the intensity of the fight. Eventually it comes out all right, and so you have this very queer situation which always happens with the followers: the original person has to have in him a certain element of ugliness. You know that is what happens over and over again: the statement made that it is ugly—the statement made against me for the last twenty years. And they are quite right, because it is ugly. But the essence of that ugliness is the thing which will always make it beautiful. I myself think it is much more interesting when it seems ugly, because in it you see the element of the fight. The literature of one hundred years ago is perfectly easy to see, because the sediment of ugliness has settled down and you get the solemnity of its beauty. But to a person of my temperament, it is much more amusing when it has the vitality of the struggle.

In my own case, the Twentieth Century, which America created after the Civil War, and which had certain elements, had a definite influence on me. And in The Making of Americans, which is a book I would like to talk about, I gradually and slowly found out that there were two things I had to think about; the fact that knowledge is acquired, so to speak, by memory; but that when you know anything, memory doesn't come in. At any moment that you are conscious of knowing anything, memory plays no part. When any of you feels anybody else, memory doesn't come into it. You have the sense of the immediate. Remember that my immediate forebears were people like Meredith, Thomas Hardy, and so forth, and you will see what a struggle it was to do this thing. This was one of my first efforts to give the appearance of one time-knowledge, and not to make it a narrative story. This is what I mean by immediacy of description: you will find it in The Making of Americans, on page 284: "It happens very often that a man has it in him, that a man does something, that he does it very often that he does many things, when he is a young man when he is an old man, when he is an older man." Do you see what I mean? And here is a description of a thing that is very interesting: "One of such of these kind of them had a little boy and this one, the little son wanted to make a collection of butterflies and beetles and it was all exciting to him and it was all arranged then and then the father said to the son you are certain this is not a cruel thing that you are wanting to be doing, killing things to make collections of them, and the son was very disturbed then and they talked about it together the two of them and more and more they talked about it then and then at last the boy was convinced it was a cruel thing and he said he would not do it and the father said the little boy was a noble boy to give up pleasure when it was a cruel one. The boy went to bed then and then the father when he got up in the early morning saw a wonderfully beautiful moth in the room and he caught him and he killed him and he pinned him and he woke up his son then and showed it to him and he said to him 'see what a good father Page 492 →I am to have caught and killed this one,' the boy was all mixed up inside him and then he said he would go on with his collection and that was all there was then of discussing and this is a little description of something that happened once and it is very interesting."

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 in 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 Page 493 →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 1 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 comer 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. 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—Lindbergh, 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. 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 Page 494 →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 in 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 Page 495 →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.

1935

How Writing Is Written: Volume II of the Previously Uncollected Works of Gertrude Stein. Ed. Robert Bartlett Haas. Los Angeles: Black Sparrow P, 1974. 151-160.

What Are Master-pieces and Why Are There So Few of Them

I was almost going to talk this lecture and not write and read it because all the lectures that I have written and read in America have been printed and although possibly for you they might even being read be as if they had not been printed still there is something about what has been written having been printed which makes it no longer the property of the one who wrote it and therefore there is no more reason why the writer should say it out loud than anybody else and therefore one does not.

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Therefore I was going to talk to you but actually it is impossible to talk about master-pieces and what they are because talking essentially has nothing to do with creation. I talk a lot I like to talk and I talk even more than that I may say I talk most of the time and I listen a fair amount too and as I have said the essence of being a genius is to be able to talk and listen to listen while talking and talk while listening but and this is very important very important indeed talking has nothing to do with creation. What are master-pieces and why after all are there so few of them. You may say after all there are a good many of them but in any kind of proportion with everything that anybody who does anything is doing there are really very few of them. All this summer I meditated and wrote about this subject and it finally came to be a discussion of the relation of human nature and the human mind and identity. The thing one gradually comes to find out is that one has no identity that is when one is in the act of doing anything. Identity is recognition, you know who you are because you and others remember anything about yourself but essentially you are not that when you are doing anything. I am I because my little dog knows me but, creatively speaking the little dog knowing that you are you and your recognizing that he knows, that is what destroys creation. That is what makes school. Picasso once remarked I do not care who it is that has or does influence me as long as it is not myself.

It is very difficult so difficult that it always has been difficult but even more difficult now to know what is the relation of human nature to the human mind because one has to know what is the relation of the act of creation to the subject the creator uses to create that thing. There is a great deal of nonsense talked about the subject of anything. After all there is always the same subject there are the things you see and there are human beings and animal beings and everybody you might say since the beginning of time knows practically commencing at the beginning and going to the end everything about these things. After all any woman in any village or men either if you like or even children know as much of human psychology as any writer that ever lived. After all there are things you do know each one in his or her way knows all of them and it is not this knowledge that makes master-pieces. Not at all not at all not at all. Those who recognize master-pieces say that is the reason but it is not. It is not the way Hamlet reacts to his father's ghost that makes the master-piece, he might have reacted according to Shakespeare in a dozen other ways and everybody would have been as much impressed by the psychology of it. But there is no psychology in it, that is not probably the way any young man would react to the ghost of his father and there is no particular reason why they should. If it were the way a young man could react to the ghost of his father then that would be something anybody in any village would know they could talk about it talk about it endlessly but that would not make a master-piece and that brings us once more back to the subject of identity. At any moment when you are you you are you without the memory of yourself because if you remember yourself while you are you you are not for purposes of creating you. This is so important because it has so much to do with the question of a writer to his audience. One of the things that I discovered in lecturing was that gradually one ceased to hear what one said one Page 497 →heard what the audience hears one say, that is the reason that oratory is practically never a master-piece very rarely and very rarely history, because history deals with people who are orators who hear not what they are not what they say but what their audience hears them say. It is very interesting that letter writing has the same difficulty, the letter writes what the other person is to hear and so entity does not exist there are two present instead of one and so once again creation breaks down. I once wrote in writing The Making of Americans I write for myself and strangers but that was merely a literary formalism for if I did write for myself and strangers if I did I would not really be writing because already then identity would take the place of entity. It is awfully difficult, action is direct and effective but after all action is necessary and anything that is necessary has to do with human nature and not with the human mind. Therefore a master-piece has essentially not to be necessary, it has to be that is it has to exist but it does not have to be necessary it is not in response to necessity as action is because the minute it is necessary it has in it no possibility of going on.

To come back to what a master-piece has as its subject. In writing about painting I said that a picture exists for and in itself and the painter has to use objects landcapes and people as a way the only way that he is able to get the picture to exist. That is every one's trouble and particularly the trouble just now when every one who writes or paints has gotten to be abnormally conscious of the things he uses that is the events the people the objects and the landscapes and fundamentally the minute one is conscious deeply conscious of these things as a subject the interest in them does not exist.

You can tell that so well in the difficulty of writing novels or poetry these days. The tradition has always been that you may more or less describe the things that happen you imagine them of course but you more or less describe the things that happen but nowadays everybody all day long knows what is happening and so what is happening is not really interesting, one knows it by radios cinemas newspapers biographies autobiographies until what is happening does not really thrill anyone, it excites them a little but it does not really thrill them. The painter can no longer say that what he does is as the world looks to him because he cannot look at the world any more, it has been photographed too much and he has to say that he does something else. In former times a painter said he painted what he saw of course he didn't but anyway he could say it, now he does not want to say it because seeing is not interesting. This has something to do with master-pieces and why there are so few of them but not everything.

So you see why talking has nothing to do with creation, talking is really human nature as it is and human nature has nothing to do with master-pieces. It is very curious but the detective story which is you might say the only really modem novel form that has come into existence gets rid of human nature by having the man dead to begin with the hero is dead to begin with and so you have so to speak got rid of the event before the book begins. There is another very curious thing about detective stories. In real life people are interested in the crime more than they are in detection, it is the crime that is the thing the shock the thrill the horror but in the story it is the detection that holds the interest and Page 498 →that is natural enough because the necessity as far as action is concerned is the dead man, it is another function that has very little to do with human nature that makes the detection interesting. And so always it is true that the master-piece has nothing to do with human nature or with identity, it has to do with the human mind and the entity that is with a thing in itself and not in relation. The moment it is in relation it is common knowledge and anybody can feel and know it and it is not a master-piece. At the same time every one in a curious way sooner or later does feel the reality of a master-piece. The thing in itself of which the human nature is only its clothing does hold the attention. I have meditated a great deal about that. Another curious thing about master-pieces is, nobody when it is created there is in the thing that we call the human mind something that makes it hold itself just the same. The manner and habits of Bible times or Greek or Chinese have nothing to do with ours today but the master-pieces exist just the same and they do not exist because of their identity, that is what any one remembering then remembered then, they do not exist by human nature because everybody always knows everything there is to know about human nature, they exist because they came to be as something that is an end in itself and in that respect it is opposed to the business of living which is relation and necessity. That is what a master-piece is not although it may easily be what a master-piece talks about. It is another one of the curious difficulties a masterpiece has that is to begin and end, because actually a master-piece does not do that it does not begin and end if it did it would be of necessity and in relation and that is just what a master-piece is not. Everybody worries about that just now everybody that is what makes them talk about abstract and worry about punctuation and capitals and small letters and what a history is. Everybody worries about that not because everybody knows what a master-piece is but because a certain number have found out what a master-piece is not. Even the very masterpieces have always been very bothered about beginning and ending because essentially that is what a master-piece is not. And yet after all like the subject of human nature master-pieces have to use beginning and ending to become existing. Well anyway anybody who is trying to do anything today is desperately not having a beginning and an ending but nevertheless in some way one does have to stop. I stop.

I do not know whether I have made any of this very clear, it is clear, but unfortunately, I have written it all down all summer and in spite of everything I am now remembering and when you remember it is never clear. This is what makes secondary writing, it is remembering, it is very curious you begin to write something and suddenly you remember something and if you continue to remember your writing gets very confused. If you do not remember while you are writing, it may seem confused to others but actually it is clear and eventually that clarity will be clear, that is what a master-piece is, but if you remember while you are writing it will seem clear at the time to any one but the clarity will go out of it that is what a master-piece is not.

All this sounds awfully complicated but it is not complicated at all, it is just Page 499 →what happens. Any of you when you write you try to remember what you are about to write and you will see immediately how lifeless the writing becomes that is why expository writing is so dull because it is all remembered, that is why illustration is so dull because you remember what somebody looked like and you make your illustration look like it. The minute your memory functions while you are doing anything it may be very popular but actually it is dull. And that is what a master-piece is not, it may be unwelcome but it is never dull.

And so then why are there so few of them. There are so few of them because mostly people live in identity and memory that is when they think. They know they are they because their little dog knows them, and so they are not an entity but an identity. And being so memory is necessary to make them exist and so they cannot create master-pieces. It has been said of geniuses that they are eternally young. I once said what is the use of being a boy if you are going to grow up to be a man, the boy and the man have nothing to do with each other, except in respect to memory and identity, and if they have anything to do with each other in respect to memory and identity then they will never produce a master-piece. Do you do you understand well it really does not make much difference because after all master-pieces are what they are and the reason why is that there are very few of them. The reason why is any of you try it just not to be you are you because your little dog knows you. The second you are you because your little dog knows you you cannot make a master-piece and that is all of that.

It is not extremely difficult not to have identity but it is extremely difficult the knowing not having identity. One might say it is impossible but that it is not impossible is proved by the existence of master-pieces which are just that. They are knowing that there is no identity and producing while identity is not.

That is what a master-piece is.

And so we do know what a master-piece is and we also know why there are so few of them. Everything is against them. Everything that makes life go on makes identity and everything that makes identity is of necessity a necessity. And the pleasures of life as well as the necessities help the necessity of identity. The pleasures that are soothing all have to do with identity and the pleasures that are exciting all have to do with identity and moreover there is all the pride and vanity which play about master-pieces as well as about every one and these too all have to do with identity, and so naturally it is natural that there is more identity that one knows about than anything else one knows about and the worst of all is that the only thing that anyone thinks about is identity and thinking is something that does so nearly need to be memory and if it is then of course it has nothing to do with a master-piece.

But what can a master-piece be about mostly it is about identity and all it does and in being so it must not have any. I was just thinking about anything and in thinking about anything I saw something. In seeing that thing shall we see it without it turning into identity, the moment is not a moment and the sight is not the thing seen and yet it is. Moments are not important because of course Page 500 →master-pieces have no more time than they have identity although time like identity is what they concern themselves about of course that is what they do concern themselves about.

Once when one has said what one says it is not true or too true. That is what is the trouble with time. That is what makes what women say truer than what men say. That is undoubtedly what is the trouble with time and always in its relation to master-pieces. I once said that nothing could bother me more than the way a thing goes dead once it has been said. And if it does it it is because of there being this trouble about time.

Time is very important in connection with master-pieces, of course it makes identity time does make identity and identity does stop the creation of masterpieces. But time does something by itself to interfere with the creation of masterpieces as well as being part of what makes identity. If you do not keep remembering yourself you have no identity and if you have no time you do not keep remembering yourself and as you remember yourself you do not create anybody can and does know that.

Think about how you create if you do create you do not remember yourself as you do create. And yet time and identity is what you tell about as you create only while you create they do not exist. That is really what it is.

And do you create yes if you exist but time and identity do not exist. We live in time and identity but as we are we do not know time and identity everybody knows that quite simply. It is so simple that anybody does know that. But to know what one knows is frightening to live what one lives is soothing and though everybody likes to be frightened what they really have to have is soothing and so the master-pieces are so few not that the master-pieces themselves are frightening no of course not because if the creator of the master-piece is frightened then he does not exist without the memory of time and identity, and insofar as he is that then he is frightened and insofar as he is frightened the master-piece does not exist, it looks like it and it feels like it, but the memory of the fright destroys it as a master-piece. Robinson Crusoe and the footstep of the man Friday is one of the most perfect examples of the non-existence of time and identity which makes a master-piece. I hope you do see what I mean but anyway everybody who knows about Robinson Crusoe and the footstep of Friday knows that it is true. There is no time and identity in the way it happened and that is why there is no fright.

And so there are very few master-pieces of course there are very few master-pieces because to be able to know that is not to have identity and time but not to mind talking as if there was because it does not interfere with anything and to go on being not as if there were no time and identity but as if there were and at the same time existing without time and identity is so very simple that it is difficult to have many who are that. And of course that is what a master-piece is and that is why there are so few of them and anybody really anybody can know that.

What is the use of being a boy if you are going to grow up to be a man. And Page 501 →what is the use there is no use from the standpoint of master-pieces there is no use. Anybody can really know that.

There is really no use in being a boy if you are going to grow up to be a man because then man and boy you can be certain that that is continuing and a master-piece does not continue it is as it is but it does not continue. It is very interesting that no one is content with being a man and boy but he must also be a son and a father and the fact that they all die has something to do with time but it has nothing to do with a master-piece. The word timely as used in our speech is very interesting but you can any one can see that it has nothing to do with master-pieces we all readily know that. The word timely tells that master-pieces have nothing to do with time.

It is very interesting to have it be inside one that never as you know yourself you know yourself without looking and feeling and looking and feeling make it be that you are some one you have seen. If you have seen any one you know them as you see them whether it is yourself or any other one and so the identity consists in recognition and in recognizing you lose identity because after all nobody looks as they look like, they do not look like that we all know that of ourselves and of any one. And therefore in every way it is a trouble and so you write anybody does write to confirm what any one is and the more one does the more one looks like what one was and in being so identity is made more so and that identity is not what any one can have as a thing to be but as a thing to see. And it being a thing to see no master-piece can see what it can see if it does then it is timely and as it is timely it is not a master-piece.

There are so many things to say. If there was no identity no one could be governed, but everybody is governed by everybody and that is why they make no master-pieces, and also why governing has nothing to do with master-pieces it has completely to do with identity but it has nothing to do with master-pieces. And that is why governing is occupying but not interesting, governments are occupying but not interesting because master-pieces are exactly what they are not.

There is another thing to say. When you are writing before there is an audience anything written is as important as any other thing and you cherish anything and everything that you have written. After the audience begins, naturally they create something that is they create you, and so not everything is so important, something is more important than another thing, which was not true when you were you that is when you were not you as your little dog knows you.

And so there we are and there is so much to say but anyway I do not say that there is no doubt that master-pieces are master-pieces in that way and there are very few of them.

Look at Me Now and Here I Am: Writings and Lectures, 1909-1945. Ed. Patricia Meyerowitz. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971. 148-156.

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A Transatlantic Interview 1946

Sherwood Anderson wrote, “For me the work of Gertrude Stein consists in a rebuilding, an entire new recasting of life, in the city of words." Is this an adequate summation of what you are trying to do?

It is and it isn't. The thing was not so simple as all that. In the beginning you must remember that I have always been from my babyhood a liberal reader of all English literature. In San Francisco they had a Mechanics library. As it happened, it had an uncommonly good collection for an ordinary town, and they had a really marvelously complete Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century English Literature collection, and the early Nineteenth Century. And when I was a youngster I used to spend days and days reading things there, and that was my early contact. And then when I became a scientist and became a psychologist, I was only being a scientist for a while, but I did not really care for science. I then went to England and read Elizabethan plays extensively which were very rich in word value.

Everything I have done has been influenced by Flaubert and Cézanne, and this gave me a new feeling about composition. Up to that time composition had consisted of a central idea, to which everything else was an accompaniment and separate but was not an end in itself, and Cézanne conceived the idea that in composition one thing was as important as another thing. Each part is as important as the whole, and that impressed me enormously, and it impressed me so much that I began to write Three Lives under this influence and this idea of composition and I was more interested in composition at that moment, this background of word-system, which had come to me from this reading that I had done. I was obsessed by this idea of composition, and the Negro story ("Melanctha" in Three Lives) was a quintessence of it.

You see I tried to convey the idea of each part of a composition being as important as the whole. It was the first time in any language that anyone had used that idea of composition in literature. Henry James had a slight inkling of it and was in some senses a forerunner, while in my case I made it stay on the page quite composed. You see he made it sort of like an atmosphere, and it was not solely the realism of the characters but the realism of the composition which was the important thing, the realism of the composition of my thoughts.

After all, to me one human being is as important as another human being, and you might say that the landscape has the same values, a blade of grass has the same value as a tree. Because the realism of the people who did realism before was a realism of trying to make people real. I was not interested in making the people real but in the essence or, as the painter would call it, value. One cannot live without the other. This was an entirely new idea and had been done a little by the Russians but had not been conceived as a reality until I came along, but I got it largely from Cézanne. Flaubert was there as a theme. He, too, had a little of the feeling about this thing, but they none of them conceived it as an Page 503 →entity, no more than any painter had done other than Cézanne. They all fell down on it, because the supremacy of one interest overcame them, while the Cézanne thing I put into words came in the Three Lives and was followed by the Making of Americans.

In the Making of Americans I began the same thing. In trying to make a history of the world my idea here was to write the life of every individual who could possibly live on the earth. I hoped to realize that ambition. My intention was to cover every possible variety of human type in it. I made endless diagrams of every human being, watching people from windows and so on until I could put down every type of human being that could be on the earth. I wanted each one to have the same value. I was not at all interested in the little or big men but to realize absolutely every variety of human experience that it was possible to have, every type, every style and nuance. I have always had this obsession, and that is why I enjoy talking to every GI. I must know every possible nuance.

Conception of this has to be based on a real feeling for every human being. The surprises of it are endless. Still there are the endless surprises, the combination that you don't expect, the relation of men to character that you do not expect. It never ends. All the time in it you see what I am singling out is that one thing has the same value as another. There are of course people who are more important than others in that they have more importance in the world, but this is not essential, and it ceases to be. I have no sense of difference in this respect, because every human being comprises the combination form. Just as everybody has the vote, including the women, I think children should, because as soon as a child is conscious of itself, then it has to me an existence and has a stake in what happens. Everybody who has that stake has that quality of interest, and in the Making of Americans that is what I tried to show.

In writing the Three Lives I was not particularly conscious of the question of style. The style which everybody shouted about surprised me. I was only interested in these other things. In the beginning gradually I became more conscious of the way you did this thing and I became gradually more conscious of it and at that time particularly of a need for evenness. At this time I threw away punctuation. My real objection to it was that it threw away this balance that I was trying to get, this evenness of everybody having a vote, and that is the reason I am impatient with punctuation. Finally I got obsessed with these enormously long sentences and long paragraphs. All that was an effort to get this evenness, and this went on until it sort of exhausted itself.

On the Making of Americans I had written about one thousand pages, and I finished the thing with a sort of rhapsody at the end. Then I started in to write Matisse, Picasso, and Gertrude Stein. You will see in each one of these stories that they began in the character of Making of Americans, and then in about the middle of it words began to be for the first time more important than the sentence structure or the paragraphs. Something happened. I mean I felt a need. I had thought this thing out and felt a need of breaking it down and forcing it into little pieces. I felt that I had lost contact with the words in building up these Beethovian passages. I had lost that idea gained in my youth from the Seventeenth Page 504 →Century writers, and the little rhymes that used to run through my head from Shakespeare, who was always a passion, got lost from the overall pattern. I recognized and I recognize (if you look at the Long Gay Book) this something else I knew would guide that.

I began to play with words then. I was a little obsessed by words of equal value. Picasso was painting my portrait at that time, and he and I used to talk this thing over endlessly. At this time he had just begun on cubism. And I felt that the thing I got from Cézanne was not the last composition. You had to recognize words had lost their value in the Nineteenth Century, particularly towards the end, they had lost much of their variety, and I felt that I could not go on, that I had to recapture the value of the individual word, find out what it meant and act within it.

Also the fact that as an American my mind was fresher towards language than the average English mind, as we had more or less renewed the word structure in our language. All through that middle period the interest was with that largely, ending up with Tender Buttons. In this I think that there are some of the best uses of words that there are. The movement is simple and holds by little words. I had at the same time a new interest in portraiture. I began then to want to make a more complete picture of each word, and that is when the portrait business started. I wait until each word can intimate some part of each little mannerism. In each one of them I was not satisfied until the whole thing formed, and it is very difficult to put it down, to explain, in words.

While during that middle period I had these two things that were working back to the compositional idea, the idea of portraiture and the idea of the recreation of the word. I took individual words and thought about them until I got their weight and volume complete and put them next to another word, and at this same time I found out very soon that there is no such thing as putting them together without sense. It is impossible to put them together without sense. I made innumerable efforts to make words write without sense and found it impossible. Any human being putting down words had to make sense out of them.

All these things interested me very strongly through the middle years from about after the Making of Americans until 1911, leading up to Tender Buttons, which was the apex of that. That was the culmination. Then came the war, and through the war I was traveling a great deal.

After the war the form of the thing, the question of the play form, began to interest me very much. I did very little work during the war. As soon as the war was over I settled down and wrote the whole of the Geography and Plays. That turned into very strong interest in play form, and then I began to be slowly impressed by the idea of narration.

After all, human beings are interested in two things. They are interested in the reality and interested in telling about it. I had struggled up to that time with the creation of reality, and then I became interested in how you could tell this thing in a way that anybody could understand and at the same time keep true to Page 505 →your values, and the thing bothered me a great deal at that time. I did quite a few plays and portraits, and that ended roughly with the Four Saints, 1932. Most of the things that are in the Useful Knowledge, including a book of poetry which was not printed, were constant effort, and after that I was beginning the narration consisting in plays at first, ending with the Four Saints.

After the Four Saints the portrait narration began, and I went back to the form of narration, and at that time I had a certain reputation, no success, but a certain reputation, and I was asked to write a biography, and I said "No." And then as a joke I began to write the Autobiography of Alice Toklas, and at that moment I had made a rather interesting discovery. A young French poet had begun to write, and I was asked to translate his poems, and there I made a rather startling discovery that other people's words are quite different from one's own, and that they can not be the result of your internal troubles as a writer. They have a totally different sense than when they are your own words. This solved for me the problem of Shakespeare's sonnets, which are so unlike any of his other work. These may have been his own idea, undoubtedly they were, but the words have none of the violence that exists in any of the poems, in any of the plays. They have a roughness and violence in their juxtaposition which the sonnets do not have, and this brought me to a great deal of illumination of narrative, because most narrative is based not about your opinions but upon someone else's.

Therefore narrative has a different concept than poetry or even exposition, because, you see, the narrative in itself is not what is in your mind but what is in somebody else's. Plays use it less, and so I did a tour de force with the Autobiography of Alice Toklas, and when I sent the first half to the agent, they sent back a telegram to see which one of us had written it! But still I had done what I saw, what you do in translation or in a narrative. I had recreated the point of view of somebody else. Therefore the words ran with a certain smoothness. Shakespeare never expressed any feelings of his own in those sonnets. They have too much smoothness. He did not feel "This is my emotion, I will write it down." If it is your own feeling, one's words will have a fullness and violence.

Then I became more and more interested in the subject of narration, and my work since this, the bulk of my work since then, has been largely narration, and I had done children's stories. I think Paris, France and Wars I Have Seen are the most successful of this. I thought Lhad done it in Everybody's Autobiography. I worked very hard on that and was often very exhausted, but it is often confused and not clarified. But in Wars I Have Seen and in Paris, France, to my feeling, I have done it more completely.

I have done the narration, because in narration your great problem is the problem of time in telling a story of anybody. And that is why newspaper people never become writers, because they have a false sense of time. They have to consider not the time in which to write but the time in which the newspaper is coming out. Three senses of time to struggle with, the time the event took place, the time they are writing, and the time it has to come out. Their sense of time can Page 506 →not be but false. Hemingway, on account of his newspaper training, has a false sense of time. One will sooner or later get this falsity of time, and that is why newspapers cannot be read later out of their published time.

I found out that in the essence of narration is this problem of time. You have as a person writing, and all the really great narration has it, you have to denude yourself of time so that writing time does not exist. If time exists, your writing is ephemeral. You can have a historical time, but for you the time does not exist, and if you are writing about the present, the time element must cease to exist. I did it unconsciously in the Autobiography of Alice Toklas, but I did it consciously in Everybody’s Autobiography and in the last thing Wars I Have Seen. In it I described something momentous happening under my eyes and I was able to do it without a great sense of time. There should not be a sense of time, but an existence suspended in time. That is really where I am at the present moment, I am still largely meditating about this sense of time.

Words hold an interest that you never lose, but usually at one moment one is more preoccupied with one thing than another, the parts mould into the whole. The narrative phase began in the middle thirties and has continued to the present time. Anderson was interested in the phase I was going through at the moment that he knew me. The thing that worried him the most was the narrative, and like other writers of that period he had not freed himself from the Nineteenth Century influence. He was sort of a cutout of the old into the new design. This is well illustrated in a little book he wrote about farmers.

Will you give an account of the results of your experimentation with writing since your lecture tour in the United States?

This has already been covered. There is one thing that impressed me a good many years ago. The characters in the novels of the Nineteenth Century lived a queer kind of way. That is to say people lived and died by these characters. They took a violent interest in them: the Dickens characters, the George Eliot characters, the Meredith characters. They were more real to the average human being than the people they knew. They were far more real, and they would discuss them and feel for them like people they knew. At the end of the Nineteenth Century that died out. Meredith was the last to produce characters who people felt were alive. In the characters of Henry James this is really very little true, the characters do not live very much. The ensemble lives, but nobody gets excited about the characters.

You see there really has been no real novel writing in that sense in the Twentieth Century. The most creative writings were western stories and detective stories, but these were not enough. The hero was usually a dead man in the beginning of the book, and the rest of it is largely a question of a system, one man's way of doing a thing or Scotland Yard's way. The individual that made the Nineteenth Century live practically does not live in the Twentieth Century, Page 507 →where the individual does not stick out enough for the people reading about him. Take Sherwood Anderson, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, in all these it is the title and the form of the book that you remember rather than the characters in the book. That is the reason that the novel has not been a successful form of the Twentieth Century. Proust did it the best, but he made an old-fashioned thing of it. You take the average novel that is written in America today. No character sticks out, and no women's club gets all het up and excited about the character in the latest novel they read, or very little, surely.

You realize how they did in the Nineteenth Century. People really worried about and felt for these characters. Now, you see, even the cinema doesn't do it for them. A few actors or actresses do, but not the characters they portray. As long as the novel has existed, the characters were dominant. Can you imagine any one today weeping over a character? They get excited about the book but not the character.

This has interested me very much. I think that is the reason why the novel as a form has not been successful in the Twentieth Century. That is why biographies have been more successful than novels. This is due in part to this enormous publicity business. The Duchess of Windsor was a more real person to the public and while the divorce was going on was a more actual person than anyone could create. In the Nineteenth Century no one was played up like that, like the Lindbergh kidnapping really roused people's feelings. Then Eleanor Roosevelt is an actuality more than any character in the Twentieth Century novel ever achieved.

To my mind the novel form has not been a successful affair in the Twentieth Century. There has been nothing that you can honestly call a novel. There has not been one in the Twentieth Century with the possible exception of Proust. That makes the novel scheme quite out of the question. One falls back on the thing like I did in Ida, where you try to handle a more or less satirical picture within the individual. No individual that you can conceive can hold their own beside life. There has been so much in recent years. Napoleon was, you might say, an ogre in his time. The common people did not know all the everyday things, did not know him intimately, there was not this enormous publicity. People now know the details of important people's daily life unlike they did in the Nineteenth Century. Then the novel supplied imagination where now you have it in publicity, and this changed the whole cast of the novel. So the novel is not a living form, and people try to get out of the difficulty by essay and short story form, and that is a feeble form at best.

The only serious effort that has been made is the detective story, and in a kind of way Wallace is the only novelist of the Twentieth Century. He failed in the same way. He created an atmosphere of crime and did not have characters that people worried about. You cannot say that there is a novel of the Twentieth Century. I mean a more or less creative writer has never written anything that could in any reasonable sense of the word be called a novel. I have created a lot of characters, but that is another story.

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Have there been any new developments in your attitude toward poetry?

Poetry is understandable, and the best poetry is real. The children's books and some of that in Tender Buttons and in some of the children's plays. There have been no new developments in poetry farther than that.

How and when are poetry and prose separate things?

I did that pretty thoroughly in that book of poetry and prose, and since then what poetry I have done has been in the children's books, and that you might call spontaneous poetry, and in Paris, France there is quite a bit of it, but that is mainly dealing with children. Somehow or other in war time the only thing that is spontaneously poetic is children. Children themselves are poetry. The poetry of adults in wartime is too intentional. It is too much mixed up with everything else. My poetry was children's poetry, and most of it is very good, and some of it as good as anything I have ever done. The World is Round is being included in a new American anthology.

The early book, Tender Buttons, was written in Spain in 1913 and was Gertrude Stein's first attempt to "express the rhythm of the visible world." Tender Buttons was, therefore, to Gertrude Stein's development what the “Demoiselles d'Avignon" was to Picasso's, a key work marked with the enormous struggle of creating a new value.

The following readings were chosen at random from Tender Buttons and are followed by Gertrude Stein's verbatim responses.

A DOG

A little monkey goes like a donkey that means to say that means to say that more sighs last goes. Leave with it. A little monkey goes like a donkey.

"A little monkey goes like a donkey ..." That was an effort to illustrate the movement of a donkey going up a hill, you can see it plainly. "A little monkey goes like a donkey." An effort to make the movement of the donkey, and so the picture hangs complete.

A WHITE HUNTER

A white hunter is nearly crazy.

"A white hunter is nearly crazy." This is an abstract, I mean an abstraction of color. If a hunter is white he looks white, and that gives you a natural feeling that he is crazy, a complete portrait by suggestion, that is what I had in mind to write.

A LITTLE GIRL CALLED PAULINE (excerpt)

A little called anything shows shudders.

Come and say what prints all day. A whole few

watermelon. There is no pope.

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No cut in pennies and little dressing and choose

wide soles and little spats really little spices.

A little lace makes boils. This is not true. . . .

"A little called anything shows shudders." This was another attempt to have only enough to describe the movement of one of those old-fashioned automobiles, an old Ford, the movement is like that automobile. This is an account of movement that is not always successful. For the most part it is successful and is rather interesting.

A LITTLE BIT OF A TUMBLER

A shining indication of yellow consists in there having been more of the same color than could have been expected when all four were bought. This was the hope which made the six and seven have no use for any more places and this necessarily spread into nothing. Spread into nothing.

I have used this idea in more places. I used to take objects on a table, like a tumbler or any kind of object and try to get the picture of it clear and separate in my mind and create a word relationship between the word and the things seen. "A shining indication of yellow ..." suggests a tumbler and something in it. ". . . when all four were bought" suggests there were four of them. I try to call to the eye the way it appears by suggestion the way a painter can do it. This is difficult and takes a lot of work and concentration to do it. I want to indicate it without calling in other things. "This was the hope which made the six and seven have no use for any more places ..." Places bring up a reality. "... and this necessarily spread into nothing," which does broken tumbler which is the end of the story.

A WAIST

A star glide, a single frantic sullenness, a single financial grass greediness.

Object that is in wood. Hold the pine, hold the dark, hold in the rush, make the bottom.

A piece of crystal. A change, in a change that is remarkable there is no reason to say that there was a time.

A woolen object gilded. A country climb is the best disgrace, a couple of practices any of them in order is so left.

"A star glide, a single frantic sullenness, a single financial grass greediness." This was probably an effort to express an emotion, another version of an "Ode to a Mistress's Eyebrows." "Object that is in wood. Hold the pine, hold the dark, hold in the rush, make the bottom. A piece of crystal. A change, in a change that is remarkable there is no reason to say that there was a time." This is fairly successful of what I knew up to that date. I did not have to call in other things to Page 510 →help. I do not like to do this, there is so much one must reject to keep the even smoothness of suggestion.

A PIECE OF COFFEE

More of double.

A place in no new table.

A single image is not splendor. Dirty is yellow. A sign of more in not mentioned. A piece of coffee is not a detainer. The resemblance to yellow is dirtier and distincter. The cleaner mixture is whiter and not coal color, never more coal color than altogether.

The sight of a reason, the same sight slighter, the sight of a simpler negative answer, the same sore sounder, the intention to wishing, the same splendor, the same furniture.

The time to show a message is when too late and later there is no hanging in a blight.

A not torn rose-wood color. If it is not dangerous then a pleasure and more than any other if it is cheap is not cheaper. The amusing side is that the sooner there are no fewer the more certain is the necessity dwindled. Supposing that the case contained rose-wood and a color. Supposing that there was no reason for a distress and more likely for a number, supposing that there was no astonishment, it is not necessary to mingle astonishment.

The settling of stationing cleaning is one way not to shatter scatter and scattering. The one way to use custom is to use soap and silk for cleaning. The one way to see cotton is to have a design concentrating the illusion and the illustration. The perfect way is to accustom the thing to have a lining and the shape of a ribbon and to be solid, quite solid in standing and to use heaviness in morning. It is light enough in that. It has that shape nicely. Very nicely may not be exaggerating. Very strongly may be sincerely fainting. May be strangely flattering. May not be strange in everything. May not be strange to.

"Dirty is yellow." Dirty has an association and is a word that I would not use now. I would not use words that have definite associations. This was earlier work and none of the later things have this. This early work is not so successful. It is an effort and does not come clean. "The time to show a message is when too late and later there is no hanging in a blight." There is too much phantasy here. "A not torn rose-wood color. If it... is not necessary to mingle astonishment." That is the image but it is not completely successful, but it is better than the first part. You see there is too much appeal to the eye.

"The settling of stationing . . . May not be strange to." There is too much effort. If an effort that you make is successful, if you do get what you want to create, the effort must not show. It should create a satisfaction in the mind of the reader but in the same image as the creation. In this the mind is distracted and that is not satisfactory and it is therefore a failure. Here I am groping. I have not mastered my material. Insofar as creation is successful a reader realizes it as a successful entity, and in this you can see how successfully you have mastered your material.

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A BROWN

A brown which is not liquid not more so is relaxed and yet there is a change, a news is pressing.

"A brown which is not liquid ..." The color is held within and there you see I was groping for the color.

PEELED PENCIL, CHOKE

Rub her coke.

That is where I was beginning and went on a gool deal after that period to make sound pictures but I gave that up as uninteresting.

EGGS

Kind height, kind in the right stomach with a little sudden mill.

Cunning shawl, cunning shawl to be steady.

In white in white handkerchiefs with little dots in a white belt all shadows are singular they are singular and procured and relieved.

No that is not the cows shame and a precocious sound, it is a bite.

Cut up alone the paved way which is harm. Harm is old boat and a likely dash.

"In white in white handkerchiefs with little dots in a white belt all shadows are singular ..." There I used a lot of imagery and from what I was interested in it is not a success. It should allow imagery with it without troubling anybody.

SUGAR (excerpts)

A violent luck and a whole sample and even then quiet.

Water is squeezing, water is almost squeezing on lard. Water, water is a mountain and it is selected and it is so practical that there is no use in money. A mind under is exact and so it is necessary to have a mouth and eye glasses.

A question of sudden rises and more time than awfulness is so easy and shady. There is precisely that noise ....

Put it in the stew, put it to shame. A little slight shadow and a solid fine furnace.

The teasing is tender and trying and thoughtful. .

A canoe is orderly. A period is solemn. A cow is accepted....

This is rather fine, looking at it dispassionately. "A violent luck . . . There is precisely that noise." I call that from my standpoint a successful poem. "...slight shadow and a solid fine furnace." You see a "little slight shadow" has poetical appeal, but it is not quite successful poetry.

"Water is squeezing, water is almost squeezing on lard." The imagery of that is really a perfect example of realism, there is enough there to a person Page 512 →looking at water that is realistic, there is enough use that is outside the image before your eyes. "A mind under is exact and so it is necessary to have a mouth and eyeglasses." That impresses any person, so to speak it is part of the water and is therefore valid. It is supposed to continue the actual realism of water, of a great body of water.

You must remember each time I took something, I said, I have got to satisfy each realistic thing I feel about it. Looking at your shoe, for instance, I would try to make a complete realistic picture of your shoe. It is devilish difficult and needs perfect concentration, you have to refuse so much and so much intrudes itself upon you that you do not want it, it is exhausting work.

MUTTONS (excerpts)

Mouse and mountain and a quiver, a quaint statue and pain in an exterior and silence more silence louder shows salmon a mischief intruder ... A sign is the specimen spoken.

A meal in mutton, mutton, why is lamb cheaper, it is cheaper because so little is more. Lecture, lecture and repeat instruction.

"Mouse and mountain and a quiver ..." Here you see I was wise enough not to hesitate and still I dominated. "... A sign is the specimen spoken." You see also here you have a very good example. You take a paragraph like that and the values are pretty steady though this seems difficult to a normal reader's understanding. This is pretty good because it is more abstract.

You see it is the people who generally smell of the museums who are accepted, and it is the new who are not accepted. You have got to accept a complete difference. It is hard to accept that, it is much easier to have one hand in the past. That is why James Joyce was accepted and I was not. He leaned toward the past, in my work the newness and difference is fundamental. Cézanne was my great influence though I never met him; he was an ailing man at that time.

This book is interesting as there is as much failure as success in it. When this was printed I did not understand this creation. I can see now, but one cannot understand a thing until it is done. With a thing in the process of doing, you do not know what you are doing until it is done, finished, and thus you cannot explain it. Until then you are struggling.

I was not interested in what people would think when they read this poetry; I was entirely taken up with my problems and if it did not tell my story it would tell some story. They might have another conception which would be their affair. It is not necessarily attached to the original idea I had when I wrote it.

Nobody enters into the mind of someone else, not even a husband and wife. You may touch, but you do not enter into each other's mind. Why should you? In a created thing it means more to the writer than it means to the reader. It can only mean something to one person and that person the one who wrote it.

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What was the character of your first audience?

Well, Carl Van Vechten was the first person who published me, and Carl was a great believer in me from the very beginning. Then there was a group of young people in New York. I do not know what has become of them now. They were all friends of Carl Van Vechten. There was a man called Don Marquis, and he in the guise of making fun was very much interested in my work. Henry McBride said, "If you laugh with her you have more fun than laughing at her." Protestingly, he used pieces of my work in his paper. I was essentially a writer's writer. My audience in France, that was a perfect audience. The first person who ever printed anything of mine here was Jean Cocteau. That was in a book called Potomac, in 1913. He was the first one. He printed the Portrait of Mabel Dodge, which he heard read in a cafe. Then there was Edith Sitwell, who was my chief English contact. Harold Acton was another one. Then there was Bernard Fay, who printed a piece of Melanctha, and he lectured on my work a great deal at the Collège de France.

Will you trace for me something of the nature of the development of your acceptance?

I became fairly early in the game a writer's writer. Sherwood Anderson and people like that scattered all over the country were interested, and it gave them something to think about—Bromfield, Hemingway, Anderson, Wendell Wilcox —and it disseminated between one and another. When 1 was at a dinner party at Beverly Hills in Hollywood, there were a great many of the big vedettes of the cinema. After the dinner all these people were seated in front of me, and I did not know what it was all about or what they wanted, and finally one blurted out, "What we want to know is how do you get so much publicity?" So I told them, "By having such a small audience. Begin with a small audience. If that small audience really believes, they make a big noise, and a big audience does not make a noise at all."

What is your attitude toward lecturing?

Picasso and I were talking the other day. I always said I never minded living in France. I write with my eyes, not with my ears or mouth. I hate lecturing, because you begin to hear yourself talk, because sooner or later you hear your voice, and you do not hear what you say. You just hear what they hear you say. As a matter of fact, as a writer I write entirely with my eyes. The words as seen by my eyes are the important words, and the ears and mouth do not count. I said to Picasso, "When you were a kid you never looked at things." He seemed to swallow the things he saw but he never looked, and I said, "In recent years you have been looking, you see too much, it is a mistake for you." He said, "You are quite right." A writer should write with his eyes, and a painter paint with his ears. You should always paint knowledge which you have acquired, not by Page 514 →looking but by swallowing. I have always noticed that in portraits of really great writers the mouth is always firmly closed.

What about your relationship with Richard Wright?

Richard Wright I first encountered through his writings on my work. I was impressed by the quality of his writings. I think in the first place he has a great mastery of the English language, and I think, to my mind, he has succeeded in doing the most creative work that has been done in many a year. His Black Boy is a very masterly novel, and every time he writes there is a form. He dominates his language. He holds it. Uncle Tom's Children has a piece of consummate description in the first of the story. I do not think there has been anything done like it since I wrote Three Lives. There has not been anything so good in the English language since. The others are merely followers. Richard Wright is not a follower. He does admire my writing thoroughly. He did a criticism of Wars I Have Seen. I saw it in a newspaper and was astounded by the quality of the writing and asked who he was and was given some of his books. He writes very wonderful letters. His meditations on the American scene are the most interesting I have heard from anybody. 1 think he is a very, very interesting person.

In Esquire, July 1945, Sinclair Lewis wrote: “. . . When the exhibitionist deliberately makes his rites as confusing as possible, he is permitted to go on only because so many people are afraid to blurt out, 'I don’t know what it means.' For that same reason, Gertrude Stein, the Mother Superior of all that shoddy magic, is still extensively admired even though she is also extensively unread."

The best answer to that is what Picasso said, a perfectly good answer. In the first place this is my answer. The facts of the case are that all these people, including myself, are people with a considerably large endowment, and most of us spent thirty years of our life being made fun of and laughed at and criticized and having no existence and being without a cent of income. The work needs concentration, and one is often exhausted by it. No one would do this merely for exhibitionism; there is too much bitterness. Picasso said, "You see, the situation is very simple. Anybody that creates a new thing has to make it ugly. The effort of creation is so great, that trying to get away from the other things, the contemporary insistence, is so great that the effort to break it gives the appearance of ugliness. Your followers can make it pretty, so generally followers are accepted before the master. The master has the stain of ugliness. The followers who make it pretty are accepted. The people then go back to the original. They see the beauty and bring it back to the original."

Sinclair Lewis would never accept, for instance, that the GI is an entirely different creature from the Sammy of the last war. It would never occur to him to enter into things. He follows the journalistic form and is a newspaperman with a gift for writing books. I have been accused of repetition, but that is not so, and Sinclair Lewis is talking as they talked thirty years ago. The young man and the GI of today would never come to talk to me if I was an exhibitionist or a repetitionist, Page 515 →because time would have killed that. These do not last through time. The point is that the repetition is in Lewis; it is not in me. Lewis is saying what they said thirty years ago about Tender Buttons. Anderson also was protesting against it. You see the thing I mean is very well stated in Composition. I do not consider that any creative artist is anything but contemporary. Only he is sensitive to what is contemporary long before the average human being is. He puts down what is contemporary, and it is exactly that. Sooner or later people realize it.

I remember one day in the rue Raspail I was walking with Picasso. There came down the street a camouflaged truck, and he stood absolutely still and stared at it and said, "That is what you and I have been doing for years. What is the matter with these people?" He had known fifteen years before they knew that it was contemporary. Picasso said that no one is capable of understanding you who is not capable of doing the same work himself.

Why have you not explained more generally what you are attempting to do?

You explain it to anybody that asks, but if the asking desire is not there, the explanation is useless. You can explain when there is contact, and that person who has made contact can explain to others. It is in Wars I Have Seen and Everybody's Autobiography. But the thing you have to remember is that it is what these people like, and what Sinclair Lewis cannot understand is that it lives and is ageless.

He is the perfect example of the false sense of time of the newspaper world. He lives in the past and present but not the future. They have no time other than false time. He makes Main Street as if time were the main thing, which it isn't. He does not see that Main Street is made up of clear accounts of things. He was always dominated by an artificial time when he wrote Main Street. After all, the average human being is selfish and as such is interesting, everybody is, and he gives a little character to it. All right, but that is a cliché. He did not create actual human beings at any time. That is what makes it newspaper. Sinclair Lewis is the typical newspaperman who writes novels as a newspaperman, and everything he says is newspaper. The difference between a thinker and a newspaperman is that a thinker enters right into things; a newspaperman is superficial.

When I was in America one day there were three young newspapermen and a photographer, and they had just come out of college and took themselves very seriously, but eventually we got talking about things in general. The only one of the four of them who understood my writing was the photographer. He said, "I don't have to remember what you say. I am not involved with the mechanics of remembering it, and so I can understand it. They are too busy trying to remember what you say."

Why did you answer questionnaires like those in Little Review and transition cryptically, with a chip on your shoulder?

That does not interest me; it is like the Gallup Poll. After all, my only thought is a complicated simplicity. I like a thing simple, but it must be simple through Page 516 →complication. Everything must come into your scheme; otherwise you cannot achieve real simplicity. A great deal of this I owe to a great teacher, William James. He said, "Never reject anything. Nothing has been proved. If you reject anything, that is the beginning of the end as an intellectual." He was my big influence when I was at college. He was a man who always said, "Complicate your life as much as you please, it has got to simplify."

Nothing can be the same thing to the other person. Nobody can enter into anybody else's mind; so why try? One can only enter into it in a superficial way. You have slight contacts with other people's minds, but you cannot enter into them.

Then why did you publish manuscripts that were really written only for yourself?

There is the eternal vanity of the mind. One wants to see one's children in the world and have them admired like any fond parent, and it is a bitter blow to have them refused or mocked. It is just as bitter for me to have a thing refused as for any little writer with his first manuscript. Anything you create you want to exist, and its means of existence is in being printed.

A Primer for the Gradual Understanding of Gertrude Stein. Ed. Robert Bartlett Haas. Los Angeles: Black Sparrow P, 1971. 15-35.

Americans

Eating and paper.

A laugh in a loop is not dinner. There is so much to pray.

A slight price is a potatoe. A slimness is in length and even in strength.

A capable extravagance that is that which shows no provision is that which when necessity is mild shows a certain distribution of anger. This is no sign of sin.

Five, five are more wonderful than a million. Five million, five million, five million, five are more wonderful than two together. Two together, two together.

A song, if a sad song is in unison and is sung, a sad song is singing. A sign of singing.

A gap what is a gap when there is not any meaning in a slice with a hole in it. What is the exchange between the whole and no more witnesses.

Press juice from a button, press it carelessly, press it with care, press it in a storm. A storm is so waiting and awful and moreover so much the worse for being where there is a storm that the use the whole use of more realization comes out of a narrow bridge and water faucets. This is no plain evidence of disaster. The point of it is that there is a strange straw being in any strange ice-cream.

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A legal pencil a really legal pencil is incredible, it fastens the whole strong iron wire calender.

An inherent investigation, does that mean murder or does it only mean a railroad track with plenty of cinders.

Words that cumber nothing and call exceptionally tall people from very far away are those that have the same center as those used by them frequently.

Bale, bale is a thing that surrounding largely means hay, no hay has any more food than it needs to weigh that way henceforward and not more that most likely.

A soap, a whole soap, any piece of a whole soap, more whole soap and not mistily, all this is no outrage and no blessing. A precious thing is an oily thing. In that there is no sugar and silence.

A reason is that a curly house an ordinary curly house is exactly that, it is exactly more than that, it is so exactly no more than more than that.

Waiter, when is a waiter passive and expressed, a waiter is so when there is no more selection and really no more buckets altogether. This is what remains. It does. It is kindly exacted, it is pleased, it is anxious, it is even worthy when a material is like it. It is.

What is a hinge. A hinge is a location. What is a hinge necessarily.

When the butter cup is limited and there are radishes, when radishes are clean and a whole school, a real school is outrageous and more incensed, really more incensed and inclined, when the single satisfaction is so perfect and the pearl is so demure when all this is changed then there is no rattle there is hardly any rattle.

A and B and also nothing of the same direction is the best personal division there is between any laughing. The climate, the whole thing is surrounded, it is not pressed, it is not a vessel, it is not all there is of joining, it is a real anxious needful and it is so seldom circular, so more so than any article in the wire. The cluster is just the same ordinarily.

Supposing a movement is segregated and there is a piece of staging, suppose there is and the present is melted does that mean that any salt is bitter, would it change an investigation suddenly, when it would would it mean a long wide and not particular eddy. Would it and if it did would there be a change. A kind of exercise is hardest and the best excellence is sweet.

Finding a best hat with a hardy hat pin in midsummer is a reason for being blindly. A smell is not in earth.

A wonder to chew and to eat and to mind and to set into the very tiny glass that is tall. This is that when there is a tenement. All weights are scales.

No put in a closet, no skirt in a closet, no lily, no lily not a lime lily. A solving and learned, awake and highing and a throat and a throat and a short set color, a short set color and a collar and a color. A last degree in the kink in a glove the rest.

A letter to press, a letter to press is not rowdy, it is not sliding, it is not a measure of the increasing swindling of elastic and breaking.

The thread, the thread, the thread is the language of yesterday, it is the resolution of today, it is no pain.

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What is pain, pain is so changing the climate and the best ever that it is a time, it is really only a time, it is so winding. It is even.

A warm banana is warm naturally and this makes an ingredient in a mixture which has banana in it.

Cooling in the chasing void, cooling more than milder.

Hold that ho, that is hold the hold.

Pow word, a pow word is organic and sectional and an old man's company.

Win, win, a little bit chickeny, wet, wet, a long last hollow chucking jam, gather, a last butter in a cheese, a lasting surrounding action.

White green, a white green. A looking like that is a most connected piece of example of what it is where there is no choking, no choking in any sign.

Pin in and pin in and point clear and point where.

Breakfast, breakfast is the arrangement that beggars corn, that shows the habit of fishes, that powders aches and stumblings, and any useful thing. The way to say it is to say it.

No counting, no counting in not cousins, no counting for that example and the number of thirty and thirteen and thirty six and thirty.

A blind hobble which makes distress. A place not to put in a foot, a place so called and in close color, a place best and more shape and really a thought.

Cousin why is there no cousin, because it is an article to be preparatory.

Was it green told, was it a pill, was it chased awake, will it sale per, peas are fish, chicken, cold ups, nail poppers, nail pack in hers extra. Look pase per. Look past per. Look past per. Look past fer. Look past fer. Look past fer.

No end in yours, knock puzzler palers, no beast in papers, no bird.

Icer cream, ice her steam, ice her icer ice sea excellent, excel gone in front excel sent.

Leaves of wet perfect sharpen setters, leaves of wet purr feet shape for seal weight for shirters.

Leaves of wet for ear pole ache sold hers, ears for sake heat purse change to meeters, change to be a sunk leave to see wet hers, but to why in that peace so not. Knot lot.

Please bell room please bell room fasten a character fasten a care in apter buttons fasten a care in such, in such. Fasten a care in, in in a in.

A lovely life in the center makes a mine in found a lovely pond in the water makes it just a space. A lovely seat in a day lump makes a set to collapse, a lovely light in a grass field makes it see just the early day in when there is a sight of please please please.

Due tie due to die due show the never less more way less. Do, weigh the more do way less.

Let us call a boat, let us call a boat.

Leave little grace to be. Leave little grace to bea, live little grace to bee.

Leave little grace. Leave little.

Leave little grace to be.

Near red reserve leave lavender acre bat.

Shout us, shout horse curve less.

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Least bee, least bay alter, alter the sat pan and left all, rest in, resafe in article so fur.

A cannon ball a cigar and a dress in suits, a cannon ball a cigar and a dress suit case, a cannon ball a cigar and a dress suit case, a head a hand a little above, a shake in my and mines.

Let us leaves, moor itch. Bars touch.

Nap old in town inch chair, nap on in term on chain, do deal sack file in for, do bale send on and for, reset the pan old in for same and chew get that all baste for, nice nor call churches, meet by and boot send for in, last when with and by that which for with all do sign call, meet with like shall what shirs not by bought lest, not by bought lest in own see certain, in own so same excellent, excellent hairy, hairy, excellent not excellent not knot excellent, excellent knot.

B r, brute says. A hole, a hole is a true, a true, a true.

Little paper and dolls, little paper and row why, little paper and a thin opera extra.

No use to age mother, no whole wide able recent mouth parcel, no relief farther, no relief in loosens no relief abler, no relief, no relief pie pepper nights, no relief poor no relief or, no relief, or no relief.

America a merica, a merica the go leading’s the go leading’s cans, cans be forgot and nigh nigh is a niecer a niecer to bit, a niecer to bit.

It was a peach, it was a long suit, it was a heavy harsh singes.

Leave crack his leave crack his eats, all guest all guest a stove. Like bit.

Nuts, when and if the bloom is on next and really really really, it is a team, it is a left and all it cut, it is a so like that between and a shun a shun with a believer, a believer in the extra, extra not, extra a rechange for it more. No sir.

No it sir.

It was a tame in, it was a tame in and a a little vent made a whole simmer simmer a wish.

What is it not to say reach house. Coal mill. Coal mill well. It to lease house. Coal mill tell. Coal in meal tell.

A pill shape with a round center.

Color Cook color him with ready bbs and neat show pole glass and nearly be seen every day more see what all a pearly little not shut, no rail see her.

No peter no rot.

Poles poles are seeds and near the change the change pets are swimming swimming and a plate all a plate is reed pour for the grammar grammar of lake.

Lake in a sad old chimney last and needs needs needs needs needs needs needs, in the mutton and the meat there is a change to pork walk, with a walk mean clean and butter and does it show the feather bench does it mean the actual and not or does it light the cylinder. It is in choice and chosen, it is in choice and knee and knee and knee and just the same two bay.

To irregulate to irregulate gums.

America key america key.

It is too nestle by the pin grove shirr, all agree to the counting ate ate pall. Paul is better.

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Vest in restraint in repute.

Shown land in constate.

I am sorry I am awfully sorry, I am so sorry, I am so sorry.

No fry shall it see c bough it.

Nibbling bit, nibbling bit, may the land in awe for.

It is not a particular lamp lights which absolutely so far pull sizes and near by in the change with it not in the behoof.

It was a singe, it was a scene in the in, it was a singe in.

Never sink, never sink sinker, never sink sinker sunk, sink sink sinker sink.

A cattle sheep.

By the white white white white, by the white white white white white white, by the white white white white by the white by the white white white white.

Needless in pins.

In the fence in the for instance, in the fence or how, hold chirp, hold chirp her, hold your paper, hope hop in hit it.

Extra successive.

Little beats of long Saturday tileing.

No neck leg ticking.

Peel more such wake next stir day.

Peel heaps pork seldom.

Coiled or red bench.

A soled in a light is not waver. There is for much ash so.

In the second, in the second second second.

Pour were whose has. Pole sack sirs.

A neat not necklace neglect.

A neat not neglect. A neat.

A neat not neglect.

Put a sun in Sunday. Sunday.

Geography and Plays. 1922. New York: Something Else, 1968. 39-45.

Page 521 →

White Wines

THREE ACTS

1. All together.

2. Witnesses.

3. House to house.
 (5 women)

All together.

Cunning very cunning and cheap, at that rate a sale is a place to use type writing. Shall we go home.

Cunning, cunning, quite cunning, a block a strange block is filled with choking.

Not too cunning, not cunning enough for wit and a stroke and careless laughter, not cunning enough.

A pet, a winter pet and a summer pet and any kind of a pet, a whole waste of pets and no more hardly more than ever.

A touching spoon a real touching spoon is golden and show in that color. A really touching spoon is splendid, is splendid, and dark and is so nearly just right that there is no excuse.

The best way is to wave an arm, the best way is to show more used to it than could be expected.

Comfort a sudden way to go home, comfort that and the best way is known.

All together.

Hold hard in a decision about eyes. Hold the tongue in a sober value as to bunches. See the indication in all kinds of rigorous landscapes. Spell out what is to be expected.

Show much blame in order and all in there, show much blame when there is a breath in a flannel. Show the tongue strongly in eating. Puzzle anybody.

Violet and the ink and the old ulster, shut in trembling and a whole departure, flood the sunshine, terrorize the grown didy, mingle sweetness with communion.

All together.

Change the sucking with a little sucking.

Modify the brave gallant pin wheel. Show the shout, worry with wounds, love out what is a pendant and a choke and a dress in together.

Punish the grasshopper with needles and pins are plenty. Show the old chink.

All together.

Put the putty in before the door put the oil glass in with what is green. Put the mellow choice with all the test, rust with night and language in the waist. Praise the cat and show the twine the door, mention every scrap of linen carpet, Page 522 →see the eagle and behold the west, win the day light with the hat unpressed, show it in a shudder and a limp, make a best container with no speed, and a jacket and a choice and beets, beets are what there are when bets are less. Bets are less in summer.

SINGLE WITNESSES

(1). A spread out case is so personal it is a mountain of change and any little piece is personal, any one of them is an exchange. No forethought is removed. Nothing, hindrances, butter, a safe smooth, a safe why is a tongue a season, why is a loin large by way of spoiling. There is no cake in front. A choking is an example.

More witnesses.

It is true, it certainly is true and a coat any coat, any dress, all dress, a hat, many hats, all colors, every kind of coloring, all this makes shadows longer and birds, makes birds, just makes birds.

Not much limping is in the back, not much limping is in the front, not much limping is circular, a bosom, a candle, an elegant foot fall, all this makes daylight.

Single Witnesses.

(2). A blunder in a charger is blue. A high pocket not higher than the wrist and the elbow, the pocket is not added.

A clutch, a real clutch is merry and a joke and a baby, a real clutch is such a happy way. A real clutch is so soon worried so easily made the same, so soon made so.

[A real white and blue, blue and blue, blue is raised by being so and more much more is ready. At last a person is safe.

More witnesses.

Pile in the windows, freeze with the doors, paint with the ceiling, shut in the floors, paint with the ceiling, paint with the doors, shut in the ceiling, shut out the doors, shut in the doors, shut in the floors, shut in the floors, shut in the doors.

More witnesses.

Put the patient goat away, put the patient boat away, put away the boat and put it, the boat, put it, put away that boat. Put away the boat.

Single Witnesses.

(3). An army of invincible and ever ready mustaches and all the same mind and a way of winding and no more repertoire, not any more noise, this did increase every day.

A moon, a moon, a darkness and the stars and little bits of eels and a special sauce, not a very special sauce, not only that.

A wide pair that are not slippers, not a wide pair of slippers, not pressed to be any of that in that particular but surely, surely, surely a loan, surely every kind of a capital.

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More Witnesses.

A splendid little Charles louis philip, a splendid spout of little cups and colds, a splendid big stir, a splendid glass, a splendid little splinter, a splendid cluster.

Single Witnesses.

(4). Why should wet be that and cut, cut with the grass, why should wet be that and clut with the purse, why should wet be wet and the wet that wet. Why should wet be the time to class. Why should there be solemn cuppings.

The lean bark, that is the round and intense and common stop and in shouting, the left bark and the right bark and a belt, in that belt, in no belt and a corset, in a belt and chores, in a belt and single stitches, in more boys than enough, in all thin beer and in all such eggs, in all the pile and in all the bread, in the bread, in the bread, in the condition of pretty nearly saying that yesterday is today, and tomorrow, tomorrow is yesterday. The whole swindle is in short cake and choice cake is white cake and white cake is sponge cake and sponge cake is butter.

House to house.

(1). A habit that is not left by always screaming, a habit that is similar to the one that made quiet quite quiet and made the whole plain show dust and white birds and little plaintive drops of water, a habit which brightened the returning butter fly and the yellow weed and even tumbling, the habit which made a well choose the bottom and refuses all chances to change, the habit that cut in two whatever was for the use of the same number, the habit which credited a long touch with raising the table and the hour glass and even eye glasses and plenty of milk, the habit which made a little piece of cheese wholesome and darkness bitter and clanging a simple way to be solemn, a habit which has the best situation and nearly all the day break and the darkness a habit that is cautious and serious and strange and violent and even a little disturbed, a habit which is better than almost anything, a habit that is so little irritating, so wondering and so unlikely is not more difficult than every other.

(2). A change a real change is made by a piece by any piece by a whole mixture of words and likenesses and whole outlines and ranges, a change is a butt and a wagon and an institution, a change is a sweetness and a leaning and a bundle, a change is no touch and buzzing and cruelty, a change is no darkness and swinging and highness, a change is no season and winter and leaving, a change is no stage and blister and column, a change is no black and silver and copper, a change is no jelly and anything proper, a change is not place, a change is not church, a change is not more clad, a change is not more in between when there is that and the change is the kind and the king is the king and the king is the king and the king is the king.

(3). Could there be the best almost could there be almost the most, could there be almost almost, could there be the most almost. Could there be the most almost, could there be the most almost, could there be almost almost. Could there be almost, almost.

Can the stretch have any choice, can the Page 524 →choice have every chunk, can the choice have all the choice, can the stretch have in the choice. Can there be water, can there be water and water. Can there be water. Can there be.

(4). A cousin to cooning, a cousin to that and mixed labor and a strange orange and a height and a piece of holy phone and a catching hat glass and a bit of undertaking. All this makes willows and even then there is no use in dusting not in really redusting, not in really taking everything away. The best excuse for shadows is in the time when white is starched and hair is released and all the old clothes are in the best bag.

House to house.

A wet hurt and a yellow stain and a high wind and a color stone, a place in and the whole real set all this and each one has a chin. This is not a claim it is a reorganization and a balance and a return.

Geography and Plays. 1922. New York: Something Else, 1968. 210-214.

Play

Play, play every day, play and play and play away, and then play the play you played to-day, the play you play every day, play it and play it. Play it and remember it and ask to play it. Play it, and play it and play away. Certainly every one wants you to play, every one wants you to play away, to play every day, to play and play, to play the play you play every day, to play and remember it and ask to play it and play it and to play away and to play every day and to-day and all day. That's the way to play, to play every day and all day, to play away, to play and play and play, to play and to remember what you play and to play it the next day and to ask to play it another day and to play it and to play it every day, to play it to-day, to play it all day.

This is the way to play, every one wants them to play all day, to play away, to play to-day, to play all day, to play every day, always to play. Every one is very glad to have them play, to have them play all day, to have them play every day, to have them play and play and play.

Every one is certain that some of them are playing, playing and playing and playing every day and all day and to-day. Every one is certain that some of them are playing and remembering and playing again again what they were playing. Some of them are certainly playing, playing, playing. Every one is wanting some of them to be playing and playing and playing, to be playing to-day, to be playing all day, to be playing every day, to be playing away.

Some are certain that playing is good for them, good for some of them, playing all day, every day is good for them, good for some of them.

Some are going to be playing all day, playing every day. Some are going to Page 525 →be playing to-day, going to be playing away, going to be remembering to play and going to play every day, all day, going to play and play and play.

Some play every day, play all day, play every day and all day, play all day every day. Some play and play and play and play all day and play every day.

Some play and remember what they play and ask to play that again the next day and they play it again the next day and play it all day and play and play.

Some play every day. Some play all day. Some play to-day. Some play and play. Some play and play and play. Some play every day and all day. Some play away. Some play and play and play.

Portraits and Prayers. New York: Random House, 1934.160—161.

A Description of the Fifteenth of November:
A Portrait of T. S. Eliot

On the fifteenth of November we have been told that she will go either here or there and in company with some one who will attempt to be of aid in any difficulty that may be pronounced as at all likely to occur. This in case that as usual there has been no cessation of the manner in which latterly it has all been as it might be repetition. To deny twice. Once or twice.

On the fifteenth of November in place of what was undoubtedly a reason for finding and in this way the best was found to be white or black and as the best was found out to be nearly as much so as was added. To be pleased with the result.

I think I was.

On the fifteenth of November have it a year. On the fifteenth of November they returned too sweet. On the fifteenth of November also.

The fifteenth of November at best has for its use more than enough to-day. It can also be mentioned that the sixteenth and any one can see furniture and further and further than that. The idea is that as for a very good reason anything can be chosen the choice is the choice is included.

After contradiction it is desirable.

In any accidental case no incident no repetition no darker thoughts can be united again. Again and again.

In plenty of cases in union there is strength.

Can any one in thinking of how presently it is as if it were in the midst of more attention can any one thinking of how to present it easily can any one really partake in saying so. Can any one.

All of it as eagerly as not.

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Entirely a different thing. Entirely a different thing when all of it has been awfully well chosen and thoughtfully corrected.

He said we, and we.

We said he.

He said we.

We said he, and he.

He said.

We said.

We said it. As we said it.

We said that forty was the same as that which we had heard.

It depends entirely upon whether in that as finally sure, surely as much so.

Please please them. Please please please them.

Having heard half of it.

Please having having had please having had please having had half of it.

Please please half of it.

Pleases.

Yes and a day.

A day and never having heard a thing.

Extra forty.

There is no greater pleasure than in having what is a great pleasure.

Happy to say that it was a mistake.

If at each part of one part and that is on the whole the best of all for what it provides and any satisfaction if at each part less less and more than usual it is not at all necessary that a little more has more added in a day. It is considerably augmented and further it settles it as well.

This makes mention more and more and mention to mention this makes it more and more necessary to mention that eighteen succeeds three. Can going again be startling.

On the fifteenth of November in increase and in increases, it increases it as it has been carefully considered. He has a son and a daughter and in this case it is important because although in itself a pleasure it can be a pleasure.

Fortunately replacing takes the place of their sending and fortunately as they are sending in this instance if there are there and one has returned and one is gone and one is going need there be overtaking. Overtaken. A usefulness to be.

Mentioned as a mistake. No mention not mentioned not mentioning not to be before and fortunately. It was very fortunate.

If calling had come from calling out, Come and call. Call it weekly.

In this case a description.

Forward and back weekly.

In this case absolutely a question in question.

Furnished as meaning supplied.

Further back as far back.

Considerably more.

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Simply and simply and simply, simply simply there. Simply so that in that way, simply in that way simply so that simply so that in that way.

November the fifteenth and simply so that simply so that simply in that simply in that simply so that in that simply in that simply in that way simply so that simply so that in that way simply in that way, simply in that way so that simply so that simply so that simply simply in that, simply in that so that simply so that simply so that simply in that, so that simply in that way.

Actually the fifteenth of November.

Played and plays and says and access. Plays and played and access and impress. Played and plays and access and acquiese and a mistake. Actually the fifteenth of November. Let us lose at least three. You too. Let us lose at least three. You too. Let us lose at least three. Three and there makes made three and three made makes, there and three makes, fourteen is a few.

A few separated rather separated separately.

As readers make red as pallor and few as readers make red and so do you.

Very nearly actually and truly.

A bargain in much as much a bargain in as much as there is of it. Have had it in reserve. To have had it in reserve. And have had it in reserve. Or have had it in reserve. Or have had it in reserve. To have had it in reserve. Touch a tree touch a tree to it.

Irons make an iron here and there.

And do declare.

The fifteenth of November has happily a birthday. And very happily a birthday. And very happily a birthday. The fifteenth of November has, happily, a birthday and very happily a birthday, and very happily a birthday.

Not as yet and to ask a question and to ask a question and as yet, and as yet to as yet to ask a question to and as yet.

Not as yet and to ask a question and to ask a question and as not yet. As not yet and to as yet and to ask a question and to as yet and to wind as yet and to as yet and to ask a question and to as yet ask a question as not yet, as not yet and to ask as not yet, and as not yet to ask a question as yet, and to as yet to wind as not yet, as not yet to wind please wind as not yet to ask a question and to and not yet. Please wind the clock and as yet and as not yet. Please wind the clock and not yet, to please not yet as not yet.

He said enough.

Enough said.

He said enough.

Enough said.

Enough said.

He said enough.

He said enough.

Enough said.

He said enough.

Not only wool and woolen silk and silken not only silk and silken wool and Page 528 →woolen not only wool and woolen silk and silken not only silk and silken wool and woolen not only wool and woolen silk and silken not only silk and silken not only wool and woolen not only wool and woolen not only silk and silken not only silk and silken not only wool and woolen.

Portraits and Prayers. 68-72.

Sitwell Edith Sitwell

In a minute when they sit when they sit around her.

Mixed it with two who. One two two one two two. Mixed it with two who.

Weeks and weeks able and weeks.

No one sees the connection between Lily and Louise, but I do.

After each has had after each has had, after each has had had had it.

Change in time.

A change in time is this, if a change in time. If a change in time is this. If a change in time.

Did she come to say who.

Not to remember weeks to say and asking, not to remember weeks to-day. Not to remember weeks to say. Not to remember weeks to say and asking.

And now a bow.

When to look when to look up and around when to look down and around when to look down and around when to look around and around and altered.

Just as long as any song.

And now altogether different.

It was in place of places and it was here.

Supposing she had had a key supposing she had answered, supposing she had had to have a ball supposing she had it fall and she had answered. Supposing she had it and in please, please never see so.

As much even as that, even can be added to by in addition, listen.

Table table to be table to see table to be to see to me, table to me table to be table to table to table to it. Exactly as they did when when she was not and not and not so. After that perhaps.

She had a way of she had a way of not the name.

Little reaching it away.

As afternoon to borrow.

It made a difference.

This is most.

Introduces.

This is for her and not for Mabel Weeks.

Page 529 →

She could not keep it out.

Introduces have and heard.

Miss Edith Sitwell have and heard.

Introduces have and had.

Miss Edith Sitwell have and had.

Introduces have and had introduces have and had and heard.

Miss Edith Sitwell have and had and heard.

Left and right.

Part two of Part one.

If she had a ball at all, if she had a ball at all too.

Fill my eyes no no.

It was and held it.

The size of my eyes.

Why does one want to or to and to, when does one want to and to went to.

To know it as well as all there.

If a little other more not so little as before, now they knew and that and so.

What in execute.

Night is different from bright.

When he was a little sweeter was he.

Part two.

There was a part one.

He did seem a little so.

Half of to mention it at all.

And now to allow literally if and it will if and it does if and it has if and it is.

Never as much as a way.

How does she know it.

She could be as she sleeps and as she wakes all day. She could be as she sleeps and as she wakes all day it is not so.

It leads it off of that.

Please carried at.

Twice at once and carry.

She does and care to and cover and never believe in an and being narrow.

Happily say so.

What is as added.

And opposite.

Now it has to be something entirely different and it is.

Not turned around.

No one knows two two more.

Lose and share all and more.

Very easily arises.

It very easily arises.

Absently faces and by and by we agree.

By and by faces apparently we agree.

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Apparently faces by and by we agree.

By and by faces apparently we agree.

Apparently faces by and by we agree.

Portraits and Prayers. 92-95.

To Kitty or Kate Buss

It is in ingredients that mays are a measure.

Which they are when they are whichever they are.

It is made by a text. When this you see remember me, that mays are made an extremely urgent measure. They are used to measure whichever they are used for as it is for weights which are weights with which to measure.

They made them have lambs which are colored like dogs.

They did have with them what they had with them.

They were by themselves in a minute.

A minute is a long time in which to say yes.

Cingria said Kitty had a name

Fortune tellers a name

For which they came.

Kitty Buss had the name

Kitty Buss had the same

Kitty Buss is the same as Kitty which is a name.

Katy Buss came with her name.

This is why she asked a little name to blame.

She is to blame for the name Kate Buss is a name which could rhyme with game but does it all the same. Which is for it as with it a name.

She meant to be had as when they went to leave it as a Basket. A basket if it is mentioned dates it.

Do you see how I introduce dates. Dates a flower dates a fruit. She is made to have it mean Jasmine a muguet.

Excuse me for introducing French it is not my custom but it seemed a choice thanks so much.

Portraits and Prayers. 103-104.

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