Everybody's Autobiography (35 page)

I talked with them all almost every afternoon the things I would
naturally have been writing. There is a bother about that you get more familiar with a thing when you say it than when you write it, when you say it you repeat it when you write it you never do because when you write it is in you and when you say it they hear you. After two weeks I wondered if I heard what I said or if I only heard them hearing what I said. When I write I write and when I talk I talk and the two are not one, no not for any one and when they come near being one, then the inside is not inside and the outside is not outside and I like the inside to be inside and the outside to be outside, it makes it more necessary to be one.

It was the first time I had been with a number of students all together since I left Radcliffe and did the experiments there on automatic writing and had about twenty Radcliffe and twenty Harvard students to experiment on. Then I concluded that there is no such thing as automatic writing among the people as one knows them. There has been a lot said about those experiments in automatic writing and I might as well tell it all over again.

To begin with.

When I was at Radcliffe I was of course very interested in psychology. I was interested in biology and I was interested in psychology and philosophy and history, that was all natural enough, I came out of the nineteenth century you had to be interested in evolution and biology, I liked thinking so I had to be interested in philosophy and I liked looking at every one and talking and listening so I had to be interested in history and psychology, I did not like anything abnormal or frightening so I did not care for histology or medicine and I do not like what is not what people are doing so chemistry and physiology did not attract me, and astronomy and mathematics were too far away and again too frightening, I read everything that was natural enough and not a thing to be studied, I knew what writing was and if you read it and could read it you knew it so there was no use having any one teach you anything about it, I suppose about all these things I have not changed much.

James and Münsterberg were interested in me and so although I was an undergraduate indeed one who had not yet passed the entrance examinations they said I could come to the seminar in psychology and I liked that.

We were quite a funny lot, Sidis was there who afterwards had the son who passed everything when he was a little boy and then did nothing, McDougall a man afterwards well known who worked on conversion, William James was interested in that in connection with his Varieties of Religious Experience and Thorndyke who was busy incubating chickens and what they did then and a man named Leon Solomons who came from California and who was an intimate friend of mine, there were a number more but these were the ones I remember. Münsterberg had just come from Berlin and was interested in experimental psychology and William James liked thinking and talking and wondering about what any one was doing and we all of us worked with both of them. Sidis was interested in studying sub-conscious reactions but being a Russian he naturally expected us to do things and we did not do them. He would have a table covered with a cloth and one of us sat in front of it and then when he pulled off the cover there was a pistol underneath it, I remember I naturally did nothing after all why should any one do anything when they see a pistol around and there is no danger of anybody shooting. We all of us were somewhat discouraging to all of us. I remember one man complained when he was not given a good mark in the course he said after all he had been as good a subject as he could be he had done everything they had expected him to do and what more could he do. Leon Solomons and I were to work together, he was a graduate student taking his doctorate in psychology, we first were to do some thing connected with a tuning fork but as neither one of us had a very good ear for music that is for notes that was given up, and then it was suggested that we should do experiments in fatigue, and William James added a planchette, he liked a planchette, we made one of a piece of wood
and strings and then we were to try each other, I think it was I who preferred trying somebody else, after the months in the laboratory I had lost confidence in ourselves as subjects for experimentation, however Solomons tried me and I tried him one sat with the hand on the planchette and the other did not exactly guide it but started it, anyway he had us produce writing and then I was to experiment with students who had nothing to do with the study of psychology, any of them could come and they were to come the same ones before their examination and then afterwards, this piece of the work I did alone. Here I had no results there was no automatic writing, there were some circles and sometimes a vague letter but never any word or anything that could be called writing, there were about forty of them finally chosen at random and there were none who wrote anything. I was much interested because I gradually found out what was what in The Making of Americans I called the bottom nature of each one of them and I was very much interested in the way they had their nature in them and sitting there while their arm was in the planchette and hardly vaguely talking, it was interesting to me to see how I came to feel that I could come sometime to describe every kind there is of men and women and the bottom nature of them and the way it was mixed up with the other natures in them, I kept notes of each one of them and watched the difference between being active and being tired, the way it made some go faster and some go slower and I finally felt and which in The Making of Americans I began to do that one could make diagrams and describe every individual man and woman who ever was or is or will be living and then after I did so much of it The Making of Americans I decided that since it could be done what was the use of doing it, and anyway you always have to stop doing something sometime.

So this was my part of the experiments that were reported in the Psychological Review, Solomons reported what he called his and my automatic writing but I did not think that we either of us had
been doing automatic writing, we always knew what we were doing how could we not when every minute in the laboratory we were doing what we were watching others doing, that was our training, but as he wrote the article after all I was an undergraduate and not a professional and as I am always very docile, and all the ideas had been his all that had been mine were the definitions of the characters of the men and women whom I had seen naturally it was as if I had written that I did that automatic writing. I did not think it was automatic I do not think so now, I do not think any university student is likely certainly not under observation is likely to be able to do genuinely automatic writing, I do not think so, that is under normal conditions, where there is no hypnotism or anything of that kind.

So that is the story of the article about automatic writing upon which has been based a great deal of theory about my writing. No, writing should be very exact and one must realize what there is inside in one and then in some way it comes into words and the more exactly the words fit the emotion the more beautiful the words that is what does happen and anybody who knows anything knows that thing.

One afternoon they the students there in Chicago asked me about automatic writing and I told them.

I liked all of them, Thornton had chosen them not those only who were interested in literature, but those interested in philosophy and history and anything, which made it much more varied and interesting. The head of the English Department at Princeton when he selected the men to come and meet me after the lecture asked every one who had been reading my work before I came to America, naturally he said they will all read at it now but you will want to meet those who were interested before you came over, and there were again the same mixture those interested in writing were not the majority.

So I did enjoy everything, there were three of them who were always
insisting on proletarian literature and I used to tease them a good deal and then one day all three of them came with their heads shaved and I asked them why and they said they just had their hair shaved off them and I said summer has not come and they said they had anticipated something, there were three others who made poetry together, one of them had a charming rabbit expression and he wrote long poems and I liked them, he and the two others were inventing meters to go with sounds but I have never since heard anything of them, one interested in history had a very good way of having things pour out of him, nor do I know what has become of him, the only one of them all whom I have continued to hear from is Wendell Wilcox. He is one of the four young men whose writing just then was interesting, and all four of them were not very young they were all nearer thirty than twenty. It does change the age that is young, once in Paris it was twenty-six, then it was twenty-two, then it was nineteen and now it is between thirty and forty. They tell about a new young man, how old is he you say and they say he is thirty. In America too the most interesting young men just then were nearer thirty, Wendell Wilcox, Max White, Sam Steward and Paul Drus.

Max White was the first one of them about a year before I went to America he sent me some short stories about Spain, he had written an introduction I read that introduction and did not care for the introduction, then one day I picked it up again and read the stories one by one and I liked them and I wrote to him and told him and he wrote to me and he went on writing and I went on answering and then when we were to go to America he said we would not know him but he would be there to see us come in. We saw him quite often in New York and he was writing novels and I got some to look at them but not to take them and then he wanted the Guggenheim Prize and wanted me to write for him and I told him he probably had not much chance but my liking him certainly would not help and he sweetly said he would rather
not get it backed by me than have it with some one else back of him and that was very nice of him and of course they did not give it to him. Now his first novel has been published and it is interesting and we like him, he does something that his newer crowd do do he makes a very clear line coming out of his writing, not heavy as the last generation were doing, but clear and as if everything was there not in the air but in being clearly there. That was Max White and he was one and then there was Paul Drus. Paul Drus is a Pole and is in Los Angeles and he sells photo-engravings and he writes a simple romantic story which has no romance in it because it is intended to be simply a story as he sees it and he prints each one of these on a little hand-press and sends it to me and I like to read them, lately he has not written one, I have never seen him I did not know about him when I was over there, he writes to me and I write to him, perhaps he will not write any more of these little stories which would be a pity because I liked them. Then there is Sam Steward. Sam Steward I have never seen, he had sent me a little book it was not what I liked it had more fancy than imagination and so I told him and now he has written another one Angels On The Bough and that is a good one, that too is clear and has in it more than clarity, he and Max White both succeed in saying something more than they say, their clear line creates something, it gave me pleasure, they took away his job from him at the University of the State of Washington on account of his book but now he has another one in the Loyola University of Chicago. We are expecting him this summer I think that he is interesting. Wendell Wilcox is not in their tradition, he has a feeling for meaning that is not beyond what the words are saying and of course that does make more brilliant writing and that is what he is doing.

So there were the young men thirty years old the young men that were interesting and then of course best of all there was Lloyd Lewis and being American. He has written the book which as he says is the history of a dead man and after all an American should
do that, from Mark Twain on the American writer is the only one who has been able to write about a dead man as if he is a dead man. Detective fiction does do it now but then they have to think of it as a corpse but the American can think of a dead man as all dead and make him exist as a really dead one. There was that of course in the Old Testament but since then until the Americans wrote it was never done again. Lloyd Lewis in his Myths After Lincoln did this thing, Lincoln was dead and to be a dead man is that thing and Lloyd Lewis can do it, Mark Twain was the first one who did it. Perhaps it is because America is so little inhabitable that there have been so many animals simply dead there killed of course but simply dead there.

We saw a good deal of Lloyd Lewis those two weeks in Chicago and it was America that he really saw whatever else he saw. When we went to Pinafore, he leaned over when the little midshipman was there and whispered to me and it was thrillingly, that was the costume that when Farragut was young he wore. Pinafore was a nice thing but Farragut was more thrilling.

I am always wanting to collaborate with some one I wanted to collaborate with Sherwood Anderson in a history of Grant I wanted to collaborate with Louis Bromfield in a detective story and now I want to collaborate with Lloyd Lewis in a history of Grant. They are all very polite and enthusiastic about it but the collaboration does never take place. I suppose I like the word collaboration and I have a kind of imagination of how it could take place. Well anyway.

All this time we were living in the apartment Thornton had given us in Drexel Avenue and Alice Toklas praised the way the milk was there in the morning and she had never seen the milkman bring it in, she did catch him one morning slipping it in the hole in the wall that made it possible to do this thing and he was a little sheepish these things are not supposed to be seen, not like in France where nothing comes out without everything to do with its coming
in. She liked it all the things to roast in everything that went by itself, the excellent meat that came to be most excellently roasted, the vegetables that were fresh and the cook books that told everything. She has fifteen of them, Mrs. Hahner at Marshall Fields kept giving her another one and now Mrs. Hahner has not forgotten for this year she sent another one The Country Kitchen and this one did excite me as much as it did Alice Toklas, we like to think about the American kitchen. On the whole we did eat well, some places much better than others but on the whole we did eat well and well.