A Conversation

I

May 3, 1935. — This morning I went to see her at her hotel. All the arrangements had been made by her friend and secretary who was there at the door and seemed shy that I shook hands with her first, as if for fear I had mistaken her for the woman I had come to see. The other woman was standing in the middle of the small sitting room, and I saw her through a door, very alert and ready to smile without smiling. She is a short person, strong and round, close to the earth, with an earth face and marvelous eyes. When she looks at you they are straight, but when she looks to one side the right eye seems a little out of focus, seems to go a little further away from you than the other. Her hair is close-cropped, gray, brushed forward or not brushed at all but growing forward in curls, like the hair of the Roman emperors. She looks sun-beaten, but not Indian like her secretary, for the wrinkles around her eyes are sharp, quick, and not wide like Indian wrinkles and she never quite closes her eyes, which are deep brown, but holds them closely with her lids.

If I had seen her a year ago I should have expected a legend, but I had learned to expect a woman, and I came to find something more — more, I mean, than one who had been a fountainhead not so much for herself as for others and certainly for all the young Americans who were writing in Paris after the war. She is more than that because she has grown beyond and most of them have gone only as far as she took them; they repudiated her when they thought they were adult and they went into costume and have never come out. That is the terrible thing which happens to many Americans because they feel that they have a new literature to create, as if it were a duty; so they go into costume, and when the literature is created, if at all, they do not know it or do not know when to stop, and so they go on creating a literature that is already born out of them and has a life of its own; they go on giving birth every day to a thing already alive and on two legs, all because they are in costume and can’t get out. For all I know she may be in costume too, but not in mind and not personally.

She talks freely and volubly and sometimes obscurely, as if she had something there that she was very sure of and yet could not touch it. She has that air of having seen in flashes something which she does not know the shape of, and can talk about, not out of the flashes but out of the spaces between when she has waited.

I do not mean that there is in her conversation any trace of that curious obscurity which dims so much of her prose, for me at least — and I was frank (without wanting to be) in telling her that I could only guess sometimes at the written words. She seems peacefully resigned to the attacks that have been made upon her all her life and she has that air, so rare in writers, of living outside of both fame and criticism.

II

We talked with great freedom from the outset. We started naturally and there was no feeling on my part that I had to tell her why I had come. She seemed to know why I had come and she knew it better than I did, and she started right off to talk about the problem of the young writer in America and she talked about it better than anyone I have ever known because she did not reduce it to elements and harp on any one element that she knew and understood, and there was not the feeling that writers get from writers, — ‘Yes, I’ve gone through that myself, and I’ll tell you what it is and what I did about it,’ — but the true feeling of one before your eyes who was growing into a scene, your scene, without your really telling her about it, and then bringing you into a feeling with the world, not by taking you as an individual, but by taking a world and a spirit of creation and taking them so fully and so happily that you were drawn in suddenly to know that you were there, not by transition, but by recognition. I think that in some of her prose pieces you get that — you do not have to follow; you suddenly know. (Of course you have followed, but it has not been by following that, you have it.)

I had been so miserable, despairing, self-doubtful about my work and for so long a time that I was able to give her the picture clearly, and she got it more clearly than I had given it, and her lids really seemed to take hold on her eyes, not in a squinted, contracted way, but firmly and evenly and restfully.

‘You will write,’ she said, ‘if you will write without thinking of the result in terms of a result, but think of the writing in terms of discovery, which is to say that creation must take place between the pen and the paper, not before in a thought or afterwards in a recasting. Yes, before in a thought, but not in careful thinking. It will come if it is there and if you will let it come, and if you have anything you will get a sudden creative recognition. You won’t know how it was, even what it is, but it will be creation if it came out of the pen and out of you and not out of an architectural drawing of the thing you are doing. Technique is not so much a thing of form or style as the way that form or style came and how it can come again. Freeze your fountain and you will always have the frozen water shooting into the air and falling and it will be there to see — oh, no doubt about that — but there will be no more coming. I can tell how important it is to have that creative recognition. You cannot go into the womb to form the child; it is there and makes itself and comes forth whole — and there it is and you have made it and have felt it, but it has come itself — and that is creative recognition. Of course you have a little more control over your writing than that; you have to know what you want to get; but when you know that, let it lake you and if it seems to take you off the track don’t hold back, because that is perhaps where instinctively you want to be and if you hold back and try to be always where you have been before, you will go dry.

‘You think you have used up all the air where you are, Preston; you said that you had used it up where you live, but that is not true, for if it were it would mean that you had given up all hope of change. I think writers should change their scenes; but the very fact that you do not know where you would go if you could means that you would take nothing truly to the place where you went and so there would be nothing there until you had found it, and when you did find it, it would be something you had brought and thought you had left behind. And that would be creative recognition, too, because it would have all to do with you and nothing really to do with the place.’

But what if, when you tried to write, you felt stopped, suffocated, and no words came and if they came at all they were wooden and without meaning? What if you had the feeling you could never write another word?

‘Preston, the way to resume is to resume,’ she said laughing. ‘It is the only way. To resume. If you feel this book deeply it will come as deep as your feeling is when it is running truest and the book will never be truer or deeper than your feeling. But you do not yet know anything about your feeling because, though you may think it is all there, all crystallized, you have not let it run. So how can you know what it will be? What will be best in it is what you really do not know now. If you knew it all it would not be creation but dictation. No book is a book until it is done, and you cannot say that you are writing a book while you are just writing on sheets of paper and all that is in you has not yet come out. And a book — let it go on endlessly — is not the whole man. There is no such thing as a one-book author. I remember a young man in Paris just after the war — you have never heard of this young man — and we all liked his first book very much and he liked it too, and one day he said to me, “This book will make literary history,” and T told him: “ It will make some part of literary history, perhaps, but only if you go on making a new part every day and grow with the history you are making until you become a part of it yourself.” But this young man never wrote another book and now he sits in Paris and searches sadly for the mention of his name in indexes.’

III

Her secretary came in and out of the room, putting things away in a trunk that stood open at the end of the couch (they sail to-morrow noon), exchanging a few words in a voice that was new for its softness; and suddenly out of something that we were saying about America came the discovery that both she and I were from Seattle and that she had known my father when he was a young man and before he went into the Klondike. And then as her secretary spoke a strange deep kinship of land seemed to take possession of the other woman, — who had been born in Pennsylvania and raised in Oakland, California, and had been in far-off Paris for thirty years without sight of her native earth, — for she began to speak with deep-felt fervor of her American experience in the past six months.

‘Preston,’ she said, ‘you were saying that you had torn up roots ten years ago and tried to plant them again in New England where there was none of your blood, and that now you have a feeling of being without roots. Something like that happened to me, too. I think I must have had a feeling that it had happened or I should not have come back. I went to California. I saw it and felt it and had a tenderness and a horror too. Roots are so small and dry when you have them and they are exposed to you. You have seen them on a plant and sometimes they seem to deny the plant if it is vigorous.’ She paused when I lit a cigarette; I could not make out whether she had been alarmed at my smoking so much or whether she was instinctively silent in the face of any physical activity on the part of her listener. ‘Well,’ she went on, ‘we’re not like that really. Our roots can be anywhere and we can survive, because if you think about it, we take our roots with us. I always knew that a little and now I know it wholly. I know because you can go back to where they are and they can be less real to you than they were three thousand, six thousand miles away. Don’t worry about your roots so long as you worry about them. The essential thing is to have the feeling that they exist, that they are somewhere. They will take care of themselves, and they will take care of you too, though you may never know how it has happened. To think only of going back for them is to confess that the plant is dying.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but there is something more. There is the hunger for the land, for the speech.’

‘I know,’ she said almost sadly. ‘America is wonderful!’ Then without any warning she declared: ‘I feel now that it is my business here. After all, it is my business, this America!’ And she laughed with a marvelous heartiness, a real lust. When I asked her if she would come back she looked up slyly and was smiling still and she opened and shut her eyes with the same zestful expression with which a man smacks his lips.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘you have had a long time to look. What is it that happens to American writers?’

‘What is it you notice?’

‘It is obvious. They look gigantic at first. Then they get to be thirty-five or forty and the juices dry up and there they are. Something goes out of them and they begin to repeat according to formula. Or else they grow silent altogether.’

‘The trouble is a simple one,’ she said. ‘They become writers. They cease being creative men and soon they find that they are novelists or critics or poets or biographers, and they are encouraged to be one of those things because they have been very good in one performance or two or three, but that is silly. When a man says, “I am a novelist,” he is simply a literary shoemaker. If Mr. Robert Frost is at all good as a poet, it is because he is a farmer — really in his mind a farmer, I mean. And there is another whom you young men are doing your best — and very really your worst — to forget, and he is the editor of a small-town newspaper and his name is Sherwood Anderson. Now Sherwood’ — he was the only man she called by his first name, and then affectionately — ‘ Sherwood is really and truly great because he truly docs not care what he is and has not thought what he is except a man, a man who can go away and be small in the world’s eyes and yet perhaps be one of the very few Americans who have achieved that perfect freshness of creation and passion, as simple as rain falling on a page, and rain that fell from him and was there miraculously and was all his. You see, he had that creative recognition, that wonderful ability to have it all on paper before he saw it and then to be strengthened by what he saw so that he could always go deep for more and not know that he was going. Scott Fitzgerald, you know, had it for a little while, but — not any more. He is an American Novelist.’

‘What about Hemingway?’ I could not resist asking her that question. Her name and the name of Ernest Hemingway are almost inseparable when one thinks of the Paris after the war, of the expatriates who gathered around her there as a sibyl. ‘He was good until after A Farewell to Arms.’

‘No,’ she said, ‘he was not really good after 1925. In his early short stories he had what I have been trying to describe to you. Then — Hemingway did not lose it; he threw it away.

I told him then: “Hemingway, you have a small income; you will not starve; you can work without worry and you can grow and keep this thing and it will grow with you.” But he did not wish to grow that way; he wished to grow violently. Now, Preston, here is a curious thing. Hemingway is not an American Novelist. He has not sold himself and he has not settled into any literary mould. Maybe his own mould, but that’s not only literary. When I first met Hemingway he had a truly sensitive capacity for emotion, and that was the stuff of the first stories; but he was shy of himself and he began to develop, as a shield, a big Kansas City-boy brutality about it, and so he was “tough” because he was really sensitive and ashamed that he was. Then it happened. I saw it happening and tried to save what was fine there, but it was too late. He went the way so many other Americans have gone before, the way they are still going. He became obsessed by sex and violent death.’

She held up a stubby forefinger. ‘Now you will mistake me. Sex and death are the springs of the most valid of human emotions. But they are not all; they are not even all emotion. But for Hemingway everything became multiplied by and subtracted from sex and death. But I knew at the start and I know better now that it was n’t just to find out what these things were; it was the disguise for the thing that was really gentle and fine in him, and then his agonizing shyness escaped into brutality. No, now wait — not real brutality, because the truly brutal man wants something more than bullfighting and deep-sea fishing and elephant killing or whatever it is now, and perhaps if Hemingway were truly brutal he could make a real literature out of those things; but he is not, and I doubt if he will ever again write truly about anything. He is skillful, yes, but that is the writer; the other half is the man.’

I asked her: ‘Do you really think American writers are obsessed by sex? And if they are, is n’t it legitimate?’

‘It is legitimate, of course. Literature — creative literature — unconcerned with sex is inconceivable. But not literary sex, because sex is a part of something of which the other parts are not sex at all. No, Preston, it is really a matter of tone. You can tell, if you can tell anything, by the way a man talks about sex whether he is impotent or not, and if he talks about nothing else you can be quite sure that he is impotent — physically and as an artist too.

‘One thing which I have tried to tell Americans,’ she went on, ‘is that there can be no truly great creation without passion, but I’m not sure that I have been able to tell them at all. If they have not understood it is because they have had to think of sex first, and they can think of sex as passion more easily than they can think of passion as the whole force of man. Always they try to label it, and that is a mistake. What do I mean? I will tell you. I think of Byron. Now Byron had passion. It had nothing to do with his women. It was a quality of Byron’s mind and everything he wrote came out of it, and perhaps that is why his work is so uneven, because a man’s passion is uneven if it is real; and sometimes, if he can write it, it is only passion and has no meaning outside of itself. Swinburne wrote all his life about passion, but you can read all of him and you will not know what passions he had. I am not sure that it is necessary to know or that Swinburne would have been better if he had known. A man’s passion can be wonderful when it has an object which may be a woman or an idea or wrath at an injustice, but after it happens, as it usually does, that, the object is lost or won after a time, the passion does not survive it. It survives only if it was there before, only if the woman or the idea or the wrath was an incident in the passion and not the cause of it — and that is what makes the writer.

‘ Often the men who really have it are not able to recognize it in themselves because they do not know what it is to feel differently or not to feel at all. And it won’t answer to its name. Probably Goethe thought that Young Werther was a more passionate book than Wilhelm Meister, but in Werther he was only describing passion and in Wilhelm Meister he was transferring it. And I don’t think he knew what he had done. He did not have to. Emerson might have been surprised if he had been told that he was passionate. But Emerson really had passion; he wrote it; but he could not have written about it because he did not know about it. Now Hemingway knows all about it and can sometimes write very surely about it, but he has n’t any at all. Not really any. He merely has passions. And Faulkner and Caldwell and all that I have read in America and before I came. They are good craftsmen and they are honest men, but they do not have it.’

IV

I have never heard talk come more naturally and casually. It had none of the tautness or deadly care that is in the speech of most American intellectuals when they talk from the mind out. If sometime you will listen to workingmen talking when they are concentrated upon the physical job at hand, and one of them will go on without cease while he is sawing and measuring and nailing, not always audible, but keeping on in an easy rhythm and almost without awareness of words — then you will get some idea of her conversation.

‘Well, I think Thomas Wolfe has it,’ I said. ‘I think he really has it — more than any man I know in America.’ I had just read Of Time and the River and had been deeply moved.

‘I read his first book,’ she said, misnaming it. ‘And I looked for it, but I did not find it. Wolfe is a deluge and you are flooded by him, but if you want to read carefully, Preston, you must learn to know how you are flooded. In a review I read on the train Wolfe was many things and among them he was Niagara. Now that is not so silly as it sounds. Niagara has power and it has form and it is beautiful for thirty seconds, but the water at the bottom that has been Niagara is no better and no different from the water at the top that will be Niagara. Something wonderful and terrible has happened to it, but it is the same water and nothing at all would have happened if it had not been for an aberration in one of nature’s forms. The river is the water’s true form and it is a very satisfactory form for the water and Niagara is altogether wrong. Wolfe’s books are the water at the bottom and they foam magnificently because they have come the wrong way, but they are no better than when they started. Niagara exists because the true form ran out and the water could find no other way. But the creative artist should be more adroit.’

‘You mean that you think the novel form has run out?’

‘Truly — yes. And when a form is dead it always happens that everything that is written in it is really formless. And you know it is dead when it has crystallized and everything that goes into it must be made a certain way. What is bad in Wolfe is made that way and what is good is made very differently — and so if you take what is good, he really has not written a novel at all.’

‘Yes — but what difference does it make?’ I asked her. ‘It was something that was very true for me, and perhaps I did n’t care whether it was a novel or not.’

‘Preston,’ she said, ‘you must try to understand me. I was not impatient because it was not a novel but because Wolfe did not see what it might have been — and if he really and truly had the passion you say he has, he would have seen because he would have really and truly felt it, and it would have taken its own form, and with his wonderful energy it would not have defeated him.’

‘What has passion got to do with choosing an art form?’

‘Everything. There is nothing else that determines form. What Wolfe is writing is his autobiography, but he has chosen to tell it as a story and an autobiography is never a story because life does not take place in events. What he has really done is to release himself, and so he has only told the truth of his release and not the truth of discovery. And that is why he means so much to you young men, because it is your release too. And perhaps because it is so long and unselective it is better for you, for if it stays with you, you will give it your own form and, if you have any passion, that too, and then perhaps you will be able to make the discovery he did not make. But you will not read it again because you will not need it again. And if a book has been a very true book for you, you will always need it again.’

Her secretary came into the room, looked at her watch, and said: ‘You have twenty-five minutes for your walk. You must be back at ten minutes to one.’ I arose, suddenly conscious that, having asked for fifteen minutes out of her last day in America, I had stayed over an hour utterly unaware of time. I made to go.

‘No,’ she said abruptly, ‘there is still more to say. Walk with me because I want to say it.’ We went out of the hotel. ‘Walk on my left,’ she said, ‘because my right ear is broken.’ She walked very sturdily, almost rapidly, and shouted above the traffic.

‘There are two particular things I want to tell you because I have thought about them in America. I have thought about them for many years, but particularly in America I have seen them in a new light. So much has happened since I left. Americans are really beginning to use their heads — more now than at any time since the Civil War. They used them then because they had to and thinking was in the air, and they have to use them now or be destroyed. When you write the Civil War you must think of it in terms of then and now and not the time between. Well, Americans have not gone far yet, perhaps, but they have started thinking again and there are heads here and something is ahead. It has no real shape, but I feel it and I do not feel it so much abroad and that is why my business is here. You see, there is something for writers that there was not before. You are too close to it and you only vaguely sense it. That is why you let your economic problem bother you. If you see and feel you will know what your work is, and if you do it well the economic problem takes care of itself. Don’t think so much about your wife and child being dependent upon your work. Try to think of your work being dependent upon your wife and child, for it will be if it really comes from you, and if it does n’t come from you — the you that has the wife and child and this Fifth Avenue and these people — then it is no use anyway and your economic problem will have nothing to do with writing because you wall not be a writer at all. I find you young waiters worrying about losing your integrity and it is well that you should, but a man who really loses his integrity does not know that it is gone, and nobody can wrest it from you if you really have it. An ideal is good only if it moves you forward and can make you produce, Preston, but it is no good if you prefer to produce nothing rather than write sometimes for money alone, because the ideal defeats itself when the economic problem you have been talking about defeats you.’

We were crossing streets and the crowds were looking curiously at this bronze-faced woman whose picture had been so often in the papers, but she was unaware of them, it seemed to me, but extraordinarily aware of the movement around her and especially of taxicabs. After all, I reflected, she had lived in Paris.

‘The thing for the serious writer to remember,’ she said, ‘is that he is writing seriously and is not a salesman. If the writer and the salesman are born in the same man it is lucky for both of them, but if they are not, one is sure to kill the other when you force them together. And there is one thing more.’

We turned off Madison Avenue and headed back to the hotel.

‘A very important thing — and I know it because I have seen it kill so many writers — is not to make up your mind that you are any one thing. Look at your own case. You have written, first a biography, then a history of the American Revolution, and third a modern novel. But how absurd it would be if you should make up your mind that you are a Biographer, a Historian, or a Novelist!’ She pronounced the words in tremendous capitals. ‘The truth is probably that all those forms are dead because they have become forms, and you must have felt that or you would not have moved on from one to another. Well, you will go on and you will work in them, and sometime, if your work has any meaning and I am not sure that anything but a lifework has meaning, then you may discover a new form. Somebody has said that I myself am striving for a fourth dimension in literature. I am striving for nothing of the sort and I am not striving at all but only gradually growing and becoming steadily more aware of the ways things can be felt and known in words, and perhaps if I feel them and know them myself in the new ways it is enough, and if I know fully enough there will be a note of sureness and confidence that will make others know too.

‘And when one has discovered and evolved a new form, it is not the form but the fact that you are the form that is important. That is why Boswell is the greatest biographer that ever lived, because he was no slavish Eckermann with the perfect faithfulness of notes — which are not faithful at all — but because he put into Johnson’s mouth words that Johnson probably never uttered, and yet you know when you read it that that is what Johnson would have said under such and such a circumstance — and you know all that because Boswell discovered Johnson’s real form which Johnson never knew. The great thing is not ever to think about form but let it come. Does that sound strange from me? They have accused me of thinking of nothing else. Do you see the real joke? It is the critics who have really thought about form always and I have thought about — writing!’

Gertrude Stein laughed enormously and went into the hotel with the crowd.