VIRGIL THOMSON
551
thing that will forever remain obscure. That's very hard to achieve,
something you don't understand even thirty years later.
Trilling:
With many obscure works you not only learn to understand
them but pretty soon they become part of your received ideas, of your
received culture. Did Gertrude Stein formulate a theory of the
obscure? Consciously, I mean? Or did she just work that way?
Thomson:
No, no, she had theories. Don't forget that she was very
elaborately educated in psychology and medicine, and when she had
really mastered the obscure thing with
Tender Buttons,
she described
it by saying, "This is an effort to describe something without
naming it," which is what the cubist painters were doing with still
life.
Trilling:
But it's a lso what musicians are always doing.
Thomson:
Well, I got myself into a lovely little-shall we say
controversy-w ith Andre Breton, by pointing out that the discipline
of spontane ity, which he was asking his surrealist neophytes to
adopt, was new for language but something that composers had been
practicing for centuries.
Trilling:
Of course you must always have been aware of this. But now
let's get back to New York.
Thomson:
Well, I had been back and forth a little bit in the thirties and
in the twenties, but I came back to work here in the fall of 1940,
considerably after the fall of France. I spent the first year of the war
in France, and then the next year I found that I couldn't be of any use
to my French friends and I cou ldn 't make any money, so I came back
to
New York on borrowed money, and fell into writing as music
critic of the
Herald Tribune.
I had previously written a number of
articles for magazines, particularly a quarterly called
Modern Music,
and I had publ ished a book in 1939 called
The State of Music.
It was
on that evidence that I could write that I was offered the job, because
of course reviewing music or reviewing anything is a writing job. It's
nice if you are experienced in the field you are writing about, but
writing is what you are doing.
Trilling:
Well, as a composer you had been close
to
certain very
distinguished writers when you were living in Paris. Now that you
were back in America, writing for a living, did you feel connected
either as a composer or a writer with the literary community of New
York? So to speak, the cream of the New York literary community?
Thomson:
What you're assum ing to be the cream of the literary
community in New York-and you may very well be right-was
largely a Jewish cream, and the Jewish cream wasn't too favorable to
