VIRGIL THOMSON
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Genrude Stein 's one evening with George Antheil, being invited by
George. Ac tuall y he was afraid to go alone, and she didn 't care for
George very much , but she was curious about him because he was a
pro tecto ra te of j oyce. And I remarked in my account that Gertrude
and I got on like Harvard men. We loved the Harvard affair, and we
had bo th loved World War
I.
We talked about it constantl y.
Trilling:
Many writers I have known refer to the p eople who stand in
back o f their typewriters when they write a piece. They mean the
audience to which they direct themselves. When you and Genrude
Stein worked together, or even when you worked separately, were
you writing for Americans and Europeans, or were you writing
primar il y for Americans?
Thomson:
Well , you don 't write music for one country.
Trilling:
A writer is likely to have a particular audien ce in mind ,
maybe a group o f friends-five, eight people-and he thinks that if
those p eople like wha t he's done, then he' ll h ave done wha t he set
out to do.
Thom son:
Stein once said, " I write for myself and strangers," and I
think j oyce did exactl y tha t too. Eliot I wouldn ' t be sure about
because, aga in to quote myse lf, between the idea and its realization
comes a lways the shadow of his education . With Eliot, somewhere in
the back o f his mind he had to please Irving Babbitt or some such
p ro fessor o f CompoLit.
Trilling:
Well , there's also something else. When you say that, I think
no t o f his pl easing Irving Babbitt or whoever it was a t Harvard , but
o f the fact th at he h ad in back of him Mark Twain and the
Miss issippi River; he had an idiom a vail able to him of this magnifi–
cent concreteness . Wherever he carried this intellectually, it had been
g iven him by Mark Twa in , an American, and you don ·t find it in an y
o f the Eng lish writers. But Eliot has it straight from his American
background , and it would be my gu ess that Gertrude Stein had it in
just tha t sense too . She had that wonderful commonpl ace idiom .
Thomson :
And she had read all of Mark Twain . Mark Twain and
H enry j ames were her forbears.
T ri lling:
Now this is wha t I'm trying to get at. She was an American
writer a nd stood in a tradition. She h ad a very clear awareness of h er
Ameri can literary heritage. Did anybody coming after her in the New
York literary world that I am dealing with have a sense of her place
in tha t heritage?
Thom son:
I don't know whether they ever sensed her place in it, but
believe me, the most success ful and widely admired American poets
o f, say, around thiny-five to fo n y-five today-john Ashbery or Frank
