by Walker Evans
George Gudger is a human being, a man, not like any other human being so much as he is like himself. I could invent incidents, appearances, additions to his character, background, surroundings, future, which might well point up and indicate and clinch things relevant to him which in fact I am sure are true, and important, and which George Gudger unchanged and undecorated would not indicate and perhaps could not even suggest. The result, if I was lucky, could be a work of art But somehow a much more important, and dignified, and true fact about him than I could conceivably invent, though I were an inimitably better artist than I am, is that fact that he is exactly, down to the last inch and instant, who, what, where, when and why he is. He is in those terms living, right now, in flesh and blood and breathing, in an actual part of a world in which also, quite as irrelevant to imagination, you and I are living. Granted that beside that fact it is a small thing, and granted also that it is essentially and finally a hopeless one, to try merely to reproduce and communicate his living as nearly exactly as possible, nevertheless I can think of no worthier and many worse subjects of attempt.
The same seems to me true of every item in the experience of which I am speaking, and I could say it with equal sincerity of conviction of all human experience. Moreover, and especially if you bear in mind such structures as those of disease and symmetry I sketched out a little, I cannot see how such a piece of work could be small in intensity, ‘truth,’ complex richness and stature of form and nature, as compared with a work of art. Calling for the moment everything except art Nature, I would insist that everything in Nature, every most casual thing, has an inevitability and perfection which art as such can only approach, and shares in fact, not as art, but as the part of Nature that it is; so that, for instance, a contour map is at least as considerably an image of absolute ‘beauty’ as the counterpoints of Bach which it happens to resemble. I would further insist that it would do human beings, including artists, no harm to recognize this fact, and to bear it in mind in their seining of experience, and to come as closely as they may be able, to recording and reproducing it for its own, not for art’s sake.
One reason I so deeply care for the camera is just this. So far as it goes (which is, in its own realm, as absolute anyhow as the traveling distance of words or sound), and handled cleanly and literally in its own terms, as an ice-cold, some ways limited, some ways more capable, eye, it is, like the phonograph record and like scientific instruments and unlike any other leverage of art, incapable of recording anything but absolute, dry truth.
Who, what, where, when and why (or how) is the primal cliche and complacency of journalism: but I do not wish to appear to speak favorably of journalism. I have never yet seen a piece of journalism which conveyed more than the slightest fraction of what any even moderately reflective and sensitive person would mean and intend by those inachievable words, and that fraction itself I have never seen clean of one or another degree of patent, to say nothing of essential, falsehood. Journalism is true in the sense that everything is true to the state of being and to what conditioned and produced it* (which is also, but less so perhaps, a limitation of art and science): but that is about as far as its value goes. This is not to accuse or despise journalism for anything beyond its own complacent delusion, and its enormous power to poison the public with the same delusion, that it is telling the truth even of what it tells of. Journalism can within its own limits be ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ ‘true’ or ‘false,’ but it is not in the nature of journalism even to approach any less relative degree of truth. Again, journalism is not to be blamed† for this; no more than a cow is to be blamed for not being a horse. The difference is, and the reason one can respect or anyhow approve of the cow, that few cows can have the delusion or even the desire to be horses, and that none of them could get away with it even with a small part of the public. The very blood and semen of journalism, on the contrary, is a broad and successful form of lying. Remove that form of lying and you no longer have journalism.
Nor am I speaking of ‘naturalism,’ ‘realism’: though just here may be the sharpest and most slippery watershed within this first discussion.
Trying, let us say, to represent, to reproduce, a certain city street, under the conviction that nothing is as important, as sublime, as truly poetic about that street in its flotation upon time and space as the street itself. Your medium, unfortunately, is not a still or moving camera, but is words. You abjure all metaphor, symbol, selection and above all, of course, all temptation to invent, as obstructive, false, artistic. As nearly as possible in words (which, even by grace of genius, would not be very near) you try to give the street in its own terms: that is to say, either in the terms in which you (or an imagined character) see it, or in a reduction and depersonalization into terms which will as nearly as possible be the ‘private,’ singular terms of that asphalt, those neon letters, those and all other items combined, into that alternation, that simultaneity, of flat blank tremendously constructed chords and of immensely elaborate counterpoint which is the street itself. You hold then strictly to materials, forms, colors, bulks, textures, space relations, shapes of light and shade, peculiarities, specializations, of architecture and of lettering, noises of motors and brakes and shoes, odors of exhausts: all this gathers time and weightiness which the street does not of itself have: it sags with this length and weight: and what have you in the end but a somewhat overblown passage from a naturalistic novel: which in important ways is at the opposite pole from your intentions, from what you have seen, from the fact itself.
The language of ‘reality’ (in the sense of ‘reality’ we are trying to speak of here) may be the most beautiful and powerful but certainly it must in any case be about the heaviest of all languages. That it should have and impart the deftness, keenness, immediacy, speed and subtlety of the ‘reality’ it tries to reproduce, would require incredible strength and trained skill on the part of the handler, and would perhaps also require an audience, or the illusion of an audience, equally well trained in catching what is thrown: an audience to whom the complex joke can simply be told, without the necessity for a preceding explanation fifteen times the length of the joke which founders every value the joke of itself has. I know of no one with this particular training or interest who is using words, though one man, at least, is doing even more difficult and more valuable things.
For the camera, much of this is solved from the start: is solved so simply, for that matter, that this ease becomes the greatest danger against the good use of the camera.
Words could, I believe, be made to do or to tell anything within human conceit That is more than can be said of the instruments of any other art But it must be added of words that they are the most inevitably inaccurate of all mediums of record and communication, and that they come at many of the things which they alone can do by such a Rube Goldberg articulation of frauds, compromises, artful dodges and tenth removes as would fatten any other art into apoplexy if the art were not first shamed out of existence: and which, in two centrally important and inescapable ways: falsification (through inaccuracy of meaning as well as inaccuracy of emotion); and inability to communicate simultaneity with any immediacy; greatly impairs the value and the integrity of their achievement. It may, however, be added: words like all else are limited by certain laws. To call their achievement crippled in relation to what they have tried to convey may be all very well: but to call them crippled in their completely healthful obedience to their own nature is again a mistake: the same mistake as the accusation of a cow for her unhorsiness. And if you here say: ‘But the cow words are trying to be a horse,’ the answer is: That attempt is one of the strongest laws of language, just as it is no law at all so far as cows are concerned.’ In obeying this law words are not, then, at all necessarily accusable, any more than in disobeying it The cleansing and rectification of language, the breakdown of the identification of word and object is very important, and very possibly more important things will come of it than have ever come of the lingual desire
of the cow for the horse: but it is nevertheless another matter whenever words start functioning in the command of the ancient cow-horse law. Human beings may be more and more aware of being awake, but they are still incapable of not dreaming; and a fish forswears water for air at his own peril.
I doubt that the straight ‘naturalist’ very well understands what music and poetry are about. That would be all right if he understood his materials so intensely that music and poetry seemed less than his intention; but I doubt he does that, too. That is why his work even at best is never much more than documentary. Not that documentation has not great dignity and value; it has; and as good ‘poetry’ can be extracted from it as from living itself: but the documentation is not of itself either poetry or music and it is not, of itself, of any value equivalent to theirs. So that, if you share the naturalist’s regard for the ‘real,’ but have this regard for it on a plane which in your mind brings it level in value at least to music and poetry, which in turn you value as highly as anything on earth, it is important that your representation of ‘reality’ does not sag into, or become one with, naturalism; and in so far as it does, you have sinned, that is, you have fallen short even of the relative truth you have perceived and intended. And if, anti-artistically, you desire not only to present but to talk about what you present and how you try to present it, then one of your first anxieties, in advance of failure foreseen, is to make clear that a sin is a sin.
I feel sure in advance that any efforts, in what follows, along the lines I have been speaking of, will be failures.*
‘Description’ is a word to suspect.
Words cannot embody; they can only describe. But a certain kind of artist, whom we will distinguish from others as a poet rather than a prose writer, despises this fact about words or his medium, and continually brings words as near as he can to an illusion of embodiment In doing so he accepts a falsehood but makes, of a sort in any case, better art. It seems very possibly true that art’s superiority over science and over all other forms of human activity, and its inferiority to them, reside in the identical fact that art accepts the most dangerous and impossible of bargains and makes the best of it becoming, as a result both nearer the truth and farther from it than those things which, like science and scientific art, merely describe, and those things which, like human beings and their creations and the entire state of nature, merely are, the truth.
Most young writers and artists roll around in description like honeymooners on a bed. It comes easier to them than anything else. In the course of years they grow or discipline themselves out of it At best they are undoubtedly right in doing so. But again I suspect that the lust for describing, and that lust in action, is not necessarily a vice. Plain objects and atmospheres have a sufficient intrinsic beauty and stature that it might be well if the describer became more rather than less shameless: if objects and atmospheres for the secret sake of which it is customary to write a story or poem, and which are chronically relegated to a menial level of decoration or at best illumination, were handled and presented on their own merits without either distortion or apology. Since when has a landscape painter apologized for painting landscapes;* and since when, again, should a cow put on a false beard and play horse or, on the other hand, blush and dither over the excellent fact of being a good plain cow, a creature no horse can ever be?
George Gudger is a man, et cetera. But obviously, in the effort to tell of him (by example) as truthfully as I can, I am limited. I know him only so far as I know him, and only in those terms in which I know him; and all of that depends as fully on who I am as on who he is.
I am confident of being able to get at a certain form of the truth about him, only if I am as faithful as possible to Gudger as I know him, to Gudger as, in his actual flesh and life (but there again always in my mind’s and memory’s eye) he is. But of course it will be only a relative truth.
Name me one truth within human range that is not relative and I will feel a shade more apologetic of that.
For that reason and for others, I would do just as badly to simplify or eliminate myself from this picture as to simplify or invent character, places or atmospheres. A chain of truths did actually weave itself and run through: it is their texture that I want to represent, not betray, nor pretty up into art. The one deeply exciting thing to me about Gudger is that he is actual, he is living, at this instant He is not some artist’s or journalist’s or propagandist’s invention: he is a human being: and to what degree I am able it is my business to reproduce him as the human being he is; not just to amalgamate him into some invented, literary imitation of a human being.
The momentary suspension of disbelief is perhaps (and perhaps not) all very well for literature and art: but it leaves literature and art, and it leaves an attempt such as this, in a bad hole. It means that anything set forth within an art form, ‘true’ as it may be in art terms, is hermetically sealed away from identification with everyday ‘reality.’ No matter how strong and vivid it may be, its strength and vividness are not of that order which, in the open air of our actual, personal living, we draw in every time we breathe. Even at its very best it is make believe, requiring the killing insult of ‘suspension of disbelief? because it is art. This is in some degree true even of the most ‘real’ writing I know. It is simply impossible for anyone, no matter how high he may place it to do art the simple but total honor of accepting and believing it in the terms in which he accepts and honors breathing, lovemaking, the look of a newspaper, the street he walks through. If you think of that a little while, and have any respect for art and for what it is or should be capable of if it is to be held worthy of its own existence, that is a crucially serious matter.
And yet is there any good reason why socalled art cannot without any complicated wrench of the mind, be accepted as living, as telling of the living ‘truth,’ so long as art meets you halfway, and tries to tell of nothing else?*
When, in talk with a friend, you tell him, or hear from him, details of childhood, those details are perhaps even more real to you than in your solitary memory; and they are real and exciting to both of you in a way no form of art can be, or anyhow is. He is accepting what you say as truth, not fiction. You in turn, and the truth you are telling, are conditioned in some degree by his personality—you are in part, and he knows you are in part, selecting or inventing toward his color—but your whole effort, at which you both may be willing and interested to spend a great deal of time, is to reduce these half-inventions more and more towards the truth. The centrally exciting and important fact, from which ramify the thousand others which otherwise would have no clear and valid existence, is: that was the way it was. What could be more moving, significant or true: every force and hidden chance in the universe has so combined that a certain thing was the way it was.
And why is it that, written, these facts lose so much of their force and reality. Partly the writer’s doing: as part-artist he feels the strength of need to select and invent.* Also, he is not aware that the truth is more important than any pretty he he may tell. And partly the reader’s doing: he is so used to the idea that art is a fiction that he can’t shake himself of it And partly the whole weight of art tradition, the deifying of the imagination. All right, go ahead and deify it: I will grant that it is responsible for every great work in any art. What of it! Must it therefore interfere with still another way of seeing and telling of still another form of the truth which is in its own way at least as sound? Is there such a cleavage between the ‘scientific’ and the ‘artistic’? Isn’t every human being both a scientist and an artist; and in writing of human experience, isn’t there a good deal to be said for recognizing that fact and for using both methods?
I will be trying here to write of nothing whatever which did not in physical actuality or in the mind happen or appear; and my most serious effort will be, not to use these ‘materials’ for art, far less for journalism, but to give them as they were and as in my memory and regard they are. If there is anything of value and i
nterest in this work it will have to hang entirely on that fact. Though I may frequently try to make use of art devices and may, at other times, being at least in part an ‘artist,’ be incapable of avoiding their use, I am in this piece of work illimitably more interested in life than in art.
Needless perhaps to say, then, I shall digress, and shall take my time over what may seem to be nonessentials, exactly as seems best.
Make no mistake in this, though: I am under no illusion that I am wringing this piece of experience dry. Nor do I even want to wring it dry. There are reasons of time, judgement and plain desire or, if you like, whim.
Time: It took a great artist seven years to record nineteen hours and to wring them anywhere near dry. Figure it out for yourself; this lasted several weeks, not nineteen hours. I take what I am trying here seriously but there are other pieces of work I want still more to do.