Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1912 (Heft 40))

A NEW FORM OF LITERATURE *

THE art-loving public has for some time been interested, if not pleased, by what is
called Post-Impressionism in Painting and Sculpture, represented most prominently,
as far as American knowledge of it is concerned, by the Paris painters Matisse and
Picasso.
They are artistically strenuous persons who are passionately attempting to find a way
to express more intimately and intensely the emotional-mood-subjective life of all of us than
the historical forms in painting and art have been able to do. They attempt to set our dreams
and our feelings out on to the canvas, making of our moods and sentiments objective realities.
In America, as far as I know, there is no writer at present who is influenced by the Post-
Impressionist movement. In Paris there are writers who are attempting, with less success
than the painters, to express those feelings, moods, and mental processes hitherto, as they
think, inadequately reproduced in current literary forms.
There is an American woman now living in Paris who is, I think, the only American living who
is trying to do in writing what Picasso and Matisse and others are trying to do in plastic art.
Her name is Gertrude Stein. Some years ago she published in America a book which
only a very few persons have ever read. It was called “Three Lives,” and, in form, it was
what most people would call “weird.” It was written in a style almost unreadable for its
repetitions, its apparent childishness. It had no dramatic climaxes and next to no incidents.
It had no sentimentality. It did not deal with any conventional or unconventional moralities.
I read it only because I had had my attention called to it in a special way. If I had come
across it unexpectedly I would have thrown it aside as trash, imbecility, or pose, after reading
a few pages. But with pain and difficulty I read on; the difficulty continued all the way
through the book, but the pain gradually gave way to a kind of pleasure.
I began to see that, somehow, the picture of life was attained in this mass of repetition,
simplicity, and apparent inanity. I began to feel the personages dealt with, the mood atmos-
phere in which they lived, their relations to each other. I felt the human situation, and this
much more completely than is at all frequent in conventional novels even of power.
Few of us are aware at any one moment of what is going on within us. We are so active
that we do not self-consciously dream and feel. We are not often fully aware of the contents
of our mood at the time. This book of Miss Stein’s makes us dream about the fundamental
mood-realities of our existence. It gives us the sense of the mysteries of our inner lives, when
the great simplicities of our inner lives are made prominent to our attention. We long, and
fear, and hope, and desire, and when these are deep they are simple, always determining the
color and quality of our mood. In action they are obscured and lost sight of. In this uncon-
ventional, actionless book they are brought out with mysterious power, and with no apparent
art, with apparently childishness in form, and with not attractiveness.
In the current special number of Camera Work, an art and photographic publication,
the creator of which is Alfred Stieglitz, he of notorious Photo-Secession fame, Miss Stein has
two little essays, one on Matisse and one on Picasso. In the same number are photographic
illustrations of the work of these two artists.
These two little bits of writing by Miss Stein, recently done, are in the same line as her
book, “Three Lives,” but even more purely express the instinct for a new literary form. They
would undoubtedly seem absurd to nearly all readers. Few words are used, and these are
repeated over and over. To quote would be useless. It would be impossible to get the mood
through anything but a long quotation—a very long one.
They naturally seem absurd, because they depart absolutely from the usual ways of
criticizing and essaying. Miss Stein has been familiar for years with the work of Picasso and
Matisse, and this work has sunk very deep into her imagination.
So when she writes these little sketches she does not formally criticize nor does she even
state ideas or conclusions. There is no intellectualism in these essays, no comparisons, no
authority or authorities mentioned or implied.

♦Reprinted from N. Y. Globe, September 26, 1912.
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