Last of the inkblots

 The most cutting criticism spoke to the Rorschach’s great selling point: that the results depended on who you were, not on how you were trving to present yourself. The Rorschach was an X-ray, the test that couldn't be faked any more than a slide could fool a slide projector. By 1960, though, studies were showing that examiners could consciously or unconsciously influence the results and that test takers modified their responses depending on why the test was being given, what the examiner thought of them, or just the examiner’s personal style. While some saw the interpersonal aspect of the test as part of its power, this did make the test less objective. 

What psychological testers liked to call “clinical validity”—the fact that a skilled interpreter could use the Rorschach to gain insights that worked in practice and that could then be confirmed with the patient or checked against other sources—was starting to look very different to skeptics. They described these so-called insights as a combination of confirmation bias (overvaluing, even overperceiving, information one already agrees with), illusory correlations (deciding a connection exists that isn’t there), and the kinds of techniques used by fortune-tellers and psychics (unconsciously using contextual information, making statements true of almost everyone but felt to be insightful, offering “push” predictions subtly modified or even totally reversed in followup questions, and so on). 

Blind diagnosis eliminated some of these issues but by no means all. The test still had to be administered by someone in contact with the test taker. Any verification of the diagnosis required checking it against the judgments of someone like the subject’s regular therapist, whic only replicated the problem. Besides, for psychological truths, it ) hard to say what outside confirmation could look like. Ifa clinician a patient both felt that a description of the patient was true, what e. was there? But these feelings would not satisfy a demand for hard proof. 

Few claimed that Rorschach testers were consciously cynical frauds or quacks. Then again, a fortune-teller surrounded by customers amazed at the accuracy of his mind-reading might start to believe in his own astounding abilities, too—and some of the most forceful critics of the Rorschach drew just this analogy. At the very least, they ex pressed dismay at a “Rorschach culture” of orthodoxy, arguments from authority, and antiscientific bias. 

Such criticisms, appearing in professional publications, had little effect on the Rorschach, which was in widespread use and central to che self-definition of clinical psychology. There was too great a demand for the access to the personality that the inkblots claimed to provide. 

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The Cold War was running at its hottest in the sixties, demanding total ideological clarity in the battle between communism and capitalism, and there were moments when the fate of the world quite literally depended on how ambiguity was interpreted. In October 1962, President Kennedy was handed photographs of Cuba taken from America’s most advanced U-2 spy plane, which either did or didn’t show a Soviet medium-range ballistic missile launch site, and either were or weren't reason to start a nuclear war. 

JFK saw “a football field” in one picture; RFK saw “the clearing of a field for a farm or the basement of a house.” Even the deputy director of the National Photographic Interpretation Center—there was such a thing, established in 1961—admitted that the president would have to take “on faith” what the pictures showed. But what was needed was certainty. When JFK delivered a televised address to the nation on October 22, he called the photographs “unmistakable evidence” of aSoviet missile site; when they were reproduced around the world, the public found them just as unmistakable. 

The combination of real ambiguity and an overwhelming need for Visual and ideological certainty produced what has been called a “Cold War crisis of images” affecting both sides of the Iron Curtain. Capitalists and communists alike went looking for secret messages behind tverything, and insisted they had found them. A new word for hiding specific meanings in material that seemed random and intentionless “encryption’—entered Webster's Dictionary in 1950. US Customs officials were confiscating abstract paintings sent from Paris because they thought the images contained communist messages. Ambiguities like the inkblots’ now tended to be thought of no longer as fruitful methods for exploring individual personalities but as codes to be deciphered, 

Efforts to read minds were inseparable from attempts to control them—a link clearest in the research and debates on so-called “brain. washing” that rocked American behavioral sciences around the time of the Korean War. (These were the techniques immortalized in popular culture by The Manchurian Candidate: novel 1959; movie 1962.) The US government heavily promoted efforts to plumb the recesses of “the Soviet mind,” “the African mind,” “the non-European mind,” and so on, both in anthropology and more generally. It funded ventures like the Fulbright Fellowship, promoting cultural exchange and infiltration, and the creation of Area Studies (“Latin American” or “Far East” departments in prominent universities). 

Psychology was seen as intrinsically linked to national security and the cause of democracy, and even outside of specific hotspots like Latin America or the Soviet mind, the inkblots were widely deployed to penetrate foreign psyches. Bleuler’s Moroccan farmers, Du Bois’s Alorese, and Hallowell’s Ojibwe had been just the beginning. Scholar Rebecca Lemov has counted five thousand articles published between 1941 and 1968 in what she calls the “Projective Test Movement”: research using Rorschachs and other projective methods on peoples from the Blackfoot Indians in the American West to every last Ifalukan living on coral islands in Micronesia totaling half a square mile. These studies, too, were well funded by the government. “Cold War-era look-insideyour-head fantasies flourished,” Lemov remarks. 

In this technocratic context, the collected information was likely to end up as enormous stockpiles of data in archives and university libraries. The Vicos Collection at Cornell documented how the university leased a Peruvian village in 1952, expropriated it to the sharecroppers, and managed its transition into modernity, studying it and its inhabitants with projective tests every step of the way. The Microcard Publications of Primary Records in Culture and Personality in Wisconsin, known as the “database of dreams,” contained thousands of miniaturized Rorschach protocols and life histories, slices of life such as the 

Rorschach responses of one hard drinking Mcnomince Indian from gortheastern Wisconsin who had run aground on the transition to mojecnity. Card VI, he said, “és dike a dead planet. It seems to tell the story of d pene onx great, who have lost... like something happened. All that's left is phe ambol.” 

Another Menominee, a peyote worshipper, found the inkblots more comforting: “You know, this Rorschach. . . is something like peyote in , way. It looks into your mind. Sees the things that aren’t out in the open. It is like that with peyote. At a meeting you get to knowa man in , few hours better than you would get to know him in a lifetime otherwise. Everything about him is right there for you to see.” 

Perhaps the low point of Cold War ambitions for psychology came when ARPA, the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency, sent teams of psychologists into the war-torn jungles of Vietnam. They tested more than a thousand peasants with a modified TAT (uncaptioned pictures, redrawn from the Harvard originals by a Saigon artist), looking for the values, hopes, and frustrations that motivated them. They then met with military and civilian officials eager to “convert a war of devastation into a ‘welfare war’” that would bring “peace, democracy, and stability” to the region, and wanting to tailor their counterinsurgency propaganda to win over the hearts and minds of the South Vietnamese. As one historian puts it: “The Vietnamese psyche was a crucial policy target.” 

Simulmatics Corporation was a for-profit research company originally founded in 1959 to computer-simulate voter behavior before the 1960 presidential election. It had since branched out, and in 1966 it sent Walter H. Slote, a Columbia University lecturer and psychotherapist, to Saigon for seven weeks. His mission: uncover “the Vietnamese personality.” He believed that one life could reveal the forces that shape others—the “deeper” a single person’s motivation, “the more likely it is to represent universals”—and so he drew his conclusions from four people. After duly conceding that the sample was too small to generalize from, he generalized away. 

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Precisely when Dr. Brokaw was taking his shirt to the people, the Rorschach was becoming a symbol in real life for anything that elicited different, equally valid opinions. In 1964, a reviewer confronted with ten books about New York summed up: “Composing a New York City book is a kind of projective psychological test, a Rorschach, say; the five boroughs are only a stimulus to which the observer responds according to his personality.” In the New York Times at least, this was the first of thousands of Rorschach clichés to come. Charles de Gaulle would soon be “a Rorschach test” for biographers; the loose plot ends of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: .A Space Odyssey were a Rorschach test too. 

In a culture-wide crisis of authority, it was easier for arbiters to stop claiming authority at all. Opinions differed, and calling something “a Rorschach test” meant there was no need to take a side and risk alienating anyone. Journalists and critics no longer saw it as their job to tell readers which possible reaction to New York City or 200z was correct: everyone had the right to their own opinion, and an inkblot was the indispensable metaphor for that freedom. 

A resonant metaphor alone, though, would not have been enough to save the Rorschach as an actual psychological test. The fact had to be addressed that, by this point, there was no such thing as “the” Rorschach test at all. 

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As early as 1964, four years after the term data science was coined, researchers had run the Rorschach responses of 586 healthy Johns Hopkins medical students through an early computer-indexing program and produced a 741-page large-format concordance. By the mid-1980s this corpus, plus the life histories available from long-term follow-ups with the test takers, made it possible to sidestep traditional Rorschach interpretation altogether. Computers simply counted up every occurrence of every word spoken in the tests and went looking for correlations between answers and later fates. An unnerving article from 1985, “Are Words of the Rorschach Predictors of Disease and Death?” claimed that those who mentioned “whirling” in any of the ten cards were five times as likely to commit suicide as those who didn’t, and four times as likely to have died of other causes. Exner brought computers into his own methodology as well. Beginning in the mid-1970s, he explored ways to “increase computer uti~ lization as an aid in interpreting the test,” eventually resulting in the 1968 survey of academic clinical psychologists, while showing that the Rorschach was still widely used, found that more than half the respon. dents felt that “objective,” “non projective” methods were increasing in use and importance. One of these methods, in particular, was rapidly gaining ground. 

The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, or MMPI, fire published in 1943, pulled ahead of the Rorschach in 1975. It consisted og $04 statements—567 statements in the modified MMPI-2—that sub. jects were asked to agree or disagree with, ranging from the apparently trivial (“I have a good appetite”, “My hands and feet are usually warm enough”) to the obviously alarming (“Evil spirits possess me at times’, “I see things or animals or people around me that others do not see”), It could be administered to a group by a clerical worker and was easy to score. Each MMPI scale—the Depression Scale, the Paranoia Scale~ had two lists of question numbers associated with it: the number of items from the first list that had been answered True, plus the number from the second list marked False, was the result. It was quick and ix was “objective.” 

Technically, this meant only that it was not “projective.” A person's True/False answer to “Some people think it’s hard to get to know me,” “1 have not lived the right kind of life,” or “A large number of people are guilty of bad sexual conduct” could not be objective in any meaningful sense. People are not willing or able to evaluate themselves objectively—self-descriptions were often found to correspond only partially, at best, to what friends and family said about the test taker, or to what their behavior showed. Answers were not even meant to be taken at face value: Responding “True” to a lot of depressing statements and “False” to a lot of happy statements didn’t necessarily mean a person was depressed. There were scales to measure whether a person was likely to be exaggerating or lying; there were other ways one scale could affect the others. Interpreting MMPI results, too, was an art, requiring subjective judgment. But the slanted terms odjectsve and prejecttve certainly helped the MMPI’s fortunes. 

In the decade after 1975, the Rorschach fell from being the second most commonly used personality test in clinical psychology to fifth. It was now behind both the MMPI and several other projective tests: 

REN SZ en oP ont) Human Figure Drawing (used primarily with children), Sentence Completion, and the House-Tree-Person Test. 

Results from these more limited tests were relatively self explanatory. Drawing a human figure with a big head might suggest arrogance. Leaving out key body parts was a bad sign. Completing sentences with hostile, pessimistic, or violent words: not good. These tests were thus more vulnerable to “impression management”—subjects could know how to stage the impression they wanted to make, present themselves as they wanted to be seen. One New York City cop, given the House-Iree-Person Test during his hiring process, said that his buddies had told him beforehand: “The house has to have a chimney with smoke coming out, and whatever you do, make sure you put leaves on the tree.” That’s what he did. Whatever their weaknesses, though, these tests were quick and cheap, and so increasingly preferred. Popularity rankings among tests, usually based on sporadic survevs with small and unrepresentative samples, are not as precise or reliable as they sound. But the trend lines were clear—the ink was on the wall. 

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After all, over the course of a century spent looking at the inkblots, spent tallying, categorizing, and reframing what people see, everything you can imagine and quite a lot you can’t—one truth has remained unassailable: Card V looks like a bat. Or maybe a butterfly. 

In Rorschach tests given between 2000 and 2007 to six hundred nonpatient Brazilian men and women, 370 of those people saw a bat in Card V; most of the others saw a butterfly or moth. There were, as usual, a lot of bears in Card II. In fact, out of roughly fourteen thousand total responses, there were only 6,459 different responses, and a small pool of thirty answers were common enough to be given by fifty or more people. The inkblots objectively do look like certain things, while they also invite interpretation. It wouldn’t be much of a test if everyone saw something totally different, or if almost everyone saw the same thing. In these six hundred tests, the long tail of personal variation consisted of about a thousand answers given by two people each, and fully 4,538 answers each given only once, including the “tragically misunderstood piece of cauliflower” seen by one depressed farmer. 

If you graph the responses, the near vertical line on the Jeft shows he inkblots’ conrmon ground the obvious hats and bears while the horizontal line shows the lceway for personal idiosyncrasy. Meyer -alled this the Rorschach test’s structure and latitude. The graph alsa veils a More specific pattern: the most common answer is twice as <ommon as the second most frequent, three times as common as the chird most frequent, all the way down. 

This is what’s known as a Zipf distribution, one of the mathematical ordering principles that structure the world. Other patterns are better known—the Fibonacci sequence in a nautilus shell, the bell curve of a random distribution—but the Zipf describes phenomena from earthquake size (there are very few huge ones and lots of little ones) to city populations, sizes of businesses, and word frequencies: in English “the” is twice as common as “of,” three times as common as “and,” on down to “cormorant” and “methylbenzamide.” Rorschach answers in a large sample will follow the same pattern. The bat on Card V is the “the” of the Rorschach. 

A single test also yields more than one data point. A person typically gives twenty, thirty answers over the course of the test, and a healthy test result won't be stuck on either side of the Zipf curve. Only obvious answers would suggest you're pretty guarded or rigid, or uninterested in the task, or boring, while too many unusual or bizarre answers might mean you have a poor grip on reality, or mania, or maybe youre a rebel trying to be different. 

Finally, the Rorschach yields multiple data points in a sequence. The test is a fixed series of ten cards, but test takers have the freedom to give multiple answers per card in any order. A given person's answers move up and down the Zipf curve, so to speak, a movement that itself has structure and latitude. Do your answers fall apart in the colored cards at the end of the test, or come together? Do you start with Something obvious on every card and then get quirky, or do you arrive at popular, common answers only gradually? [ven if two test takets Somehow gave exactly the same answers to each card, but in a different Order, maybe only one of them would have a rigid compulsion to give One kind of answer first and another last on every card, a pattern meaningful to a sensitive examiner. 

Using nothing but intuition, artistic skill, trial and error, and a few ideas about the power of symmetry, Hermann Rorschach createy a set of pictures as inherently organized yet flexible as natural language or earthquakes. In this regard it is hard to imagine them bettereg_ psychologists have designed alternate series of inkblots over the yea, but all fell more or less quickly by the wayside. Rorschach’s inkblot, are like the act of seeing, which itself has both structure and latitude There’s something really there, but not anything that constrains y, completely. The visual nature of the world is objectively in thing, but we see it there; we subjectively impose our view of the world onty things, but only if that view fits what we see. We're all looking at the Same thing, even when we see it differently. 

Rorschach’s blots are unique in more than shape. The colors elicit emotion, even override the shapes, sometimes but not always. Put. ting movement into a still image is not easy—it takes an artist with real skill and, in Rorschach’s words, “spatial rhythm” (like a Michelangelo, unlike a Futurist). It is even harder to potentially convey a sense of movement, to some people and not to others. Almost anyone will See movement in pictures like Rorschach’s man struggling with a can (page 97), but, as Rorschach wrote in 1919, “A key point is that the experiment is set up to make Movement responses difficult. If you show someone good pictures, then everyone, even the intellectually disabled, will seem to be a movement type.” 

The symmetry of the blots, as Rorschach acknowledged, makes people see “disproportionately many butterflies etc.,” but he was also right that “the advantages far outweigh the disadvantages.” The blots’ horizontal symmetry helps people connect with them, even identify with them. The blots are not mathematically symmetrical—they have variations in tiny protuberances, streaks, and shading—but neither are animals or people, which is precisely why the blots are seen as balanced and alive. In addition, since groups of people we encounter in real life are next to each other, not on top of each other, horizontal symmetry creates a “social” connection between the two sides of any image. It makes different parts of the inkblots interact, like pairs of people or other creatures. The inkblot test wouldn’t have worked without horizontal symmetry: the blots wouldn’t have been personal, psychological, 

The Moon and Sixpence

The greatness of Charles Strickland was authentic. It may be that you do not like his art, but at all events you can hardly refuse it the tribute of your interest. He disturbs and arrests. The time has passed when he was an object of ridicule, and it is no longer a mark of eccentricity to defend or of perversity to extol him. His faults are accepted as the necessary complement to his merits. It is still possible to discuss his place in art, and the adulation of his admirers is perhaps no less capricious than the disparagement of his detractors; but one thing can never be doubtful, and that is that he had genius. To my mind the most interesting thing in art is the personality of the artist; and if that is singular, I am willing to excuse a thousand faults. I suppose Velasquez was a better painter than El Greco, but custom stales one’s admiration for him: the Cretan, sensual and tragic, proffers the mystery of his soul like a standing sacrifice. The artist, painter, poet, or musician, by his decoration, sublime or beautiful, satisfies the esthetic sense; but that is akin to the sexual instinct, and shares its barbarity: he lays before you also the greater gift of himself. To pursue his secret has something of the fascination of a detective story. It is a riddle which shares with the universe the merit of having no answer. The most insignificant of Strickland’s works suggests a personality which is strange, tormented, and complex; and it is this surely which prevents even those who do not like his pictures from being indifferent to them; it is this which has excited so curious an interest in his life and character. 

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She was very unhappy but to excite my sympathy she was able to make a show of her unhappiness. It was evident that she had been prepared to weep, for she had provided herself with a sufficiency of handkerchiefs; I admired her forethought, but in retrospect it made her tears perhaps less moving. I could not decide whether she desired the return of her husband because she loved him, or because she dreaded the tongue of scandal; and I was perturbed by the suspicion that the anguish of love contemned was alloyed in her broken heart with the pangs, sordid to my young mind, of wounded vanity. I had not yet learnt how contradictory is human nature; I did not know how much pose there is in the sincere, how much baseness in the noble, nor how much goodness in the reprobate. 

But there was something of an adventure in my trip, and my spirits rose as I approached Paris. I saw myself, too, from the dramatic standpoint, and I was pleased with my role of the trusted friend bringing back the errant husband to his forgiving wife. I made up my mind to see Strickland the following evening, for I felt instinctively that the hour must be chosen with delicacy. An appeal to the emotions is little likely to be effectual before luncheon. My own thoughts were then constantly occupied with love, but I never could imagine connubial bliss till after tea. 

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I had said all I had to say on the subject that had brought me to Paris, and though I felt it in a manner treacherous to Mrs. Strickland not to pursue it, I could not struggle against his indifference. It requires the feminine temperament to repeat the same thing three times with unabated zest. I solaced myself by thinking that it would be useful for me to find out what I could about Strickland’s state of mind. It also interested me much more. But this was not an easy thing to do, for Strickland was not a fluent talker. He seemed to express himself with difficulty, as though words were not the medium with which his mind worked; and you had to guess the intentions of his soul by hackneyed phrases, slang, and vague, unfinished gestures. But though he said nothing of any consequence, there was something in his personality which prevented him from being dull. Perhaps it was sincerity. 

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he was like a wrestler whose body is oiled; you sould not get a grip on him; it gave him a freedom which was an outrage. I remember saying to him: 

‘‘Look here, if everyone acted like you, the world couldn't go on.”’ 

“‘That’s a damned silly thing to say. Everyone doesn’t want to act hike me. The great majority are perfectly content to do the ordinary thing.’’ 

And once I sought to be satirical. 

‘You evidently don’t believe in the maxim: Act so that every one of your actions is capable of being made into a universal rule.’’ 

‘‘I never heard it before, but it’s rotten nonsense.”’ 

‘Well, it was Kant who said it.”’ 

‘I don’t care; it’s rotten nonsense.”’ 

Nor with such a man could you expect the appeal to conscience to be effective. You might as well ask for a reflection without a mirror. I take it that conscience is the guardian in the individual of the rules which the community has evolved for its own preservation. It is the policeman in all our hearts, set there to watch that we do not break its laws. It is the spy seated in the central stronghold of the ego. Man’s desire for the approval of his fellows is so strong, his dread of their censure so violent, that he himself has brought his enemy within his gates; and it keeps watch over him, vigilant always in the interests of its master to crush any half-formed desire to break away from the herd. It will force him to place the good of society before his own. It is the very strong link that attaches the individual to the whole, And man, subservient to interests he has persuaded himself are greater than his own, makes himself a slave to his taskmaster. He sits him in a seat of honour. At last, like a courtier fawning on the royal stick that is laid about his shoulders, he prides himself on the sensitiveness of hig conscience. Then he has no words hard enough for the man who does not recognise its sway; for, a member of society now, he realises accurately enough that against him he is powerless. When I saw that Strickland was really indifferent to the blame his conduct must excite, I could only draw back in horror as from a monster of hardly human shape. The last words he said to me when I bade him good-night were: ‘Tell Amy it’s no good coming after me. Anyhow, I shall change my hotel, so she wouldn’t be able to find me.”

 ‘My own impression is that she’s well rid of you,” I said. My dear fellow, I only hope you'll be able to make her see it. But women are very unintelligent.” 

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I could not believe that Strickland had fallen in love with Blanche Stroeve. I did not believe him capable of love. That is an emotion in which tenderness is an essential part, but Strickland had no tenderness either for himself or for others; there is in love a sense of weakness, a desire to protect, an eagerness to do good and to give pleasure—if not unselfishness, at all events a selfishness which marvellously conceals itself; it has in it a certain diffidence. These were not traits which 1 could imagine in Strickland. Love is absorbing; it takes the lover out of himself; the most clear-sighted, though he may know, cannot realise that his love will cease; it gives body to what he knows is illusion. and, knowing it is nothing else, he loves it better than rea ity. It makes a man a little more than himself, and at the same time a little less. He ceases to be himself. He is no longer an individual, but a thing, an instrument to some purpose foreign to his ego. Love is never quite devoid of sentimentality, and Strickland was the least inclined to that infirmity of any man I have known. I could not believe that he would ever suffer that possession of himself which love is; he could never endure a foreign yoke. 

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‘“Why do you seek my acquaintance?’’ I asked him. ‘‘You know that I hate and despise you.’’ 

He chuckled good-humouredly. 

Your only quarrel with me really is that I don’t care a twopenny damn what you think about me.’’ 

I felt my checks grow red with sudden anger. It was impossible to make him understand that one might be outraged by his callous selfishness. I longed to pierce his armour of complete indifference. I knew also that in the end there was truth in what he said. Unconsciously, perhaps, we treasure the power we have over people by their regard for our opinion of them, and we hate those upon whom we have no such influence. I suppose it is the bitterest wound to human pride. But I would not let him see that I was put out. 

“is it possible for any man to disregard others entirely?’’ I said, though more to myself than to him. ‘‘ You’re dependent on others for everything in existence. It’s a preposterous attempt to try to live only for yourself and by yourself. Sooner or later you’ll be ill and tired and old, and then you’ll crawl back into the herd. Won’t you be ashamed when you feel in your heart the desire for comfort and sympathy? You’re trying an impossible thing. Sooner or later the human being in you will yearn for the common bonds of humanity.’’ 

**Come and look at my pictures.”’ 

**Have you ever thought of death?”’ 

‘Why should I?"

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“I wonder if you haven't mistaken your medium,” I said. 

‘What the hell do you mean?” 

“I think you’re trying to say something, I don’t quite know what it is, but I’m not sure that the best way of saying it is by means of painting.” 

When I imagined that on seeing his pictures I should get a clue to the understanding of his strange character I was mistaken. They merely increased the astonishment with which he filled me. I was more at sea than ever. The only thing that seemed clear to me—and perhaps even this was fancifulwas that he was passionately striving for liberation from some power that held him. But what the power was and what line the liberation would take remained obscure. Each one of us is alone in the world. He is shut in a tower of brass, and can communicate with his fellows only by signs, and the signs have no common value, so that their sense is vague and uncertain. We seek pitifully to convey to others the treasures of our heart, but they have not the power to accept them, and so we go lonely, side by side but not together, unable to know our fellows and unknown by them. We are like people living in a country whose language they know so little that, with all manner of beautiful and profound things to say, they are condemned to the banalities of: the conversation manual. Their brain is seething with ideas, and they can only tell you that the umbrella of the gardener’s aunt is in the house. 

The final impression I received was of a prodigious effort to express some state of the soul, and in this effort, I fancied, must be sought the explanation of what so utterly perplexed me. It was evident that colours and forms had a significance for Strickland that was peculiar to himself. He was under an intolerable necessity to convey something that he felt, and he created them with that intention alone. He did not hesitate to simplify or to distort if he could get nearer to that unknown thing he sought. Facts were nothing to him, for beneath the mass of irrelevant incidents he looked for something significant to himself. It was as though he had become aware of the soul of the universe and were compelled to express it. Though these pictures confused and puzzled me, I could not be unmoved by the emotion that was patent in them; and, I knew not why, I felt in myself a feeling that with regard to Strickland was the last I had ever expected to experience. I felt an overwhelming compassion. 

“I think I know now why you surrendered to your feeling for Blanche Stroeve,”’ I said to him. 

“Why?” 

“I think your courage failed. The weakness of your body communicated itself to your soul. I do not know what infinite yearning possesses you, so that you are driven to a perilous, lonely search for some goal where you expect to find a final release from the spirit that torments you. I see you as the eternal pilgrim to some shrine that perhaps does not exist. I do not know to what inscrutable Nirvana you aim. Do you know yourself? Perhaps it is Truth and Freedom that you seek, and for a moment you thought that you might find release in Love. I think your tired soul sought rest in a woman’s arms, and when you found no rest there you hated her. You had no pity for her, because you have no pity for yourself. And you killed her out of fear, because you trembled still at the danger you had barely escaped.”’ 

He smiled dryly and pulled his beard. 

“You are a dreadful sentimentalist, my poor friend.”’ 

A week later I heard by chance that Strickland had gone to Marseilles. I never saw him again. 

Penguin Island

 “An audacious spirit unceasingly disquieted him, and his mind harboured great thoughts, but alas! his rudeness and ignorance displayed the triumph of barbarism. He knew neither poetry, nor science, nor even the tongue of the Greeks, and he was ignorant, too, of the ancient traditions concerning the origin of the world and the nature of the gods. He gravely repeated fables which in my time would have brought smiles to the little children who were not yet old enough to pay for admission at the baths. The vulgar easily believe in monsters. The Etruscans especially peopled hell with demons, hideous as a sick man’s dreams. That they have not abandoned their childish imaginings after so many centuries is explained by the continuation and progress of ignorance and misery, but that one of their magistrates whose mind is raised above the common level should share these popular illusions and should be frightened by the hideous demons that the inhabitants of that country painted on the walls of their tombs in the time of Porsena—that is something which might sadden even a sage. My Etruscan visitor repeated verses to me which he had composed in a new dialect, called by him the vulgar tongue, the sense of which I could not understand. My ears were more surprised than charmed as I heard him repeat the same sound three or four times at regular intervals in his efforts to mark the rhythm. That artifice did not seem ingenious to me; but it is not for the dead to judge of novelties. 

Hollywood

 Oral History

HAL MOHR: You couldn’t dream about being in a business that didn’t exist yet. 

TAY GARNETT: As a matter of fact, I don’t think it ever occurred to anybody that the movies would ever be a business. 

LEO MCCAREY: I planned to be a lawyer. I even practiced. I started out very young, and they mistook me for the office boy. I wae a very poor lawyer. A discouraging factor in my legal career is that I lost every case. One day a client was chasing me down the street. I saw a friend of mine who called out, “What are you doing, Leo?” And I said, still running, “Practicing law.” 

RAOUL WALSH: I was an actor. I was terrible. Just terrible. It’s a wonder I wasn’t shot. 

CHARLES LEMAIRE: I was a song plugger. I was a soda jerk. I did all kinds of things. 

GERTRUDE ASTOR: I was kind of silly when I was young. I learned to play the trombone, first on a valve trombone and then on a slide trombone. And then I was told by everyone that ladies didn’t do that. Ladies didn’t play, you know, wind instruments, or they weren’t ladies. « 

HENRY HATHAWAY: To think about being in movies, first you had to see a movie. My mother sang for illustrated slides in Sid Grauman’s first theater in San Francisco. If they had slides with river scenes and riverboats, for instance, she'd sing “Down upon the Swanee River.” Sometimes she went out on the road, and once she was in San Diego with some company and they went broke and she was on her own with no way to get home. That was in about 1908. She looked in the want ads and saw an ad for a motion picture company that was forming. She applied for the job and got it. It was working with Broncho Billy [Anderson] . . . he was making those westerns, so my mother was suddenly in the movies, and the first motion picture that I ever saw was down on what they called the Promenade in Long Beach. They had two theaters there. There was a concession on that you paid a nickel or a dime to go into, and there was a little platform that resembled the observation car on a train. And it had a fence, and you're sitting on the chairs like on the rear end of train . .. you know, on the back end they had an observation car where you could sit and look at the scenery. There were eight chairs, and you went into the little theater and sat in those chairs. You were facing a screen in front of you, about eight feet across. You kind of sat up close to it. From behind you they projected on the screen a train trip. So you're sitting there on the observation train, and you're seeing a shot they took of going through woods and going through trees and going through gullies and going through gaps. You're sitting on the train watching what’s going away from you as you pass by. And they had the sound of clicketyclack. J don’t know how they got it, cause they didn’t have sound in those days, of course. That was the first motion picture I ever saw. 

HAL MOHR: The first movie I ever saw was a shot of a railroad train coming towards the camera and passing the camera. Now, I was twelve years old, and I'd had magic lanterns and all that sort of thing, and I was an inquisitive kid, J wanted to know how everything worked. So when I saw this magic lantern on the screen and saw the train actually coming by with smoke coming out of the smokestack and everything, that was a miracle 

SIDNEY FRANKLIN: In those days, you didn’t have doubles, Any star did what they were told. They were obedient in those days. It wasn’t like to day, where the star tells the director what to do. But when I think of wha we did with some of those people! We were all young and foolish, and we didn’t think. HOOT GIBSON: I became a western star because I could ride and rope and do stunts. in fact, I was the first stuntman in California. I doubled the stars, rode for them, and when we played Indians, why we’d put a feather im our wig on our head, and we'd put the makeup all over us with a breechcloth ea—we'd play Indian in the morning. We got two and a half dollars for falling off a horse, if we got shot off one playing an Indian. In the afternoon, 4 we'd put our western clothes on, became cowboys, and chase ourselves all afternoon, and if we got shot off of a horse in a saddle, that was five dollars, because it was harder to fall out of a saddle. That’s how I became the first stuntman in Hollywood—or at that time Edendale. They hadn't gotten to Hollywood yet. 

We used to have real cowboys as western stars. I was a rodeo champion. They stick a big hat on anybody today and an old pair of run-down miner's boots instead of cowboy boots on them, and boy, they’re cowboys. Most of them won't get on a horse. That’s your difference in the TV cowboy of today and the western star of yesterday. If you want to see some jokes, they've got ‘em on TV. 

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WALTER PLUNKETT: At the door of the stage, we had to take off our shoes l like entering the door of a Japanese temple and put on felt things to walk in. We stood there trembling for fear we'd sneeze and there would be some kind of a sound. We couldn't move a muscle. The jewelry we made for actors to wear—a lot of the jewelry had to have net wrapped around it, backed with velvet, so that it wouldn’t be heard moving against the fabrics. Fabric! Taffeta was out almost completely. Oh, the rustling, rustling sound of that fabric. The early hoopskirts that we made, which should have had crinoline underneath, had, as I recall, felt petticoats instead because felt was the only thing that would deaden the sound of those starched dresses, Dance costumes all were made of soft fabric, 

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GEORGE SEATON: When I was an innocent beginning screenwriter, I was working with a bunch of writers, sitting around in a motel, although they f_ didn’t call them motels in those days. It was a little bungalow court. M room cost $5 a week. But a big screenwriting problem came up, and in my innocence I said it wasn’t that big a problem and I’d think about it. So 1 did and came up with two solutions and brought them to the team. When I told the first one, Herman Mankiewicz, God bless him, said, “That’s it” 

Everybody agreed, so they took it to Selznick. (By the way, it was a forgot. ten film called Meet the Baron. The picture was miserable.) Selznick calleq me in to talk to me, and he said, “Young man, do you know the reason you got the solution?” I said, “No, sir.” He said, “Because you didn’t know how difficult it was.” I thought that was a pretty silly statement at the time, but over the years I’ve learned he was absolutely right. You can get yourself so involved with the don’ts of writing a screenplay . . . until somebody comes along with a very simple solution. Of course, the picture was horrible, but Mr. Selznick was right. 

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LEONARD ROSENMAN: When I first started in films, I worked at Warner Bros., and at that time their films had wall-to-wall music. If the film wag an hour and a half long, the score was an hour and a half long. If you see an old Warner Bros. movie like Anthony Adverse with wall-to-wall music, after a while you're saying “Stop the music!” Historically this came from silent films, where the function of music was to add sound effects and also cover up all kinds of realistic sounds in the theater, like popcorn, the toilet flushing, the projection machine, and so on. The music helped remove the idea of reality so the audience would be able to suspend disbelief. Jack Warner evidently felt that music had this magical mystery power to make people feel things or make something palatable which didn’t seem palatable. Basically they knew nothing about whether the music was good or bad, so they began to use it indiscriminately. 

Through the thirties and forties there was a transition whereby you had a film with sound, dialogue, special effects, and everything else, but the filmmakers weren’t quite sure about the role of music. It seemed to work in silent films in a certain fashion, with wall-to-wall music, so they just continued to do it. They didn’t realize that diminishing returns set in, and if you had music from frame alpha to frame omega, people wouldnt listen to it after a while. It was like an enema in the Jewish family traditica. The idea was that it couldn’t hurt you. 

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MITCHELL LEISEN: Cutting is of vital importance. Six frames in a cut can make a great deal of difference, whether the film is smooth or jerky. You must always cut on a movement, not a static scene. I mean, cut on a movement of the person you're cutting away from to the other person you're cutting to. It need only be the lift of an eyebrow or a suspended motion, but as long as there is movement going on, you are less conscious of the cut. Directors need to know this, and you’d be surprised how many don’. But editors know it. They’re there to help. The old system gave the producer or director editors to help you, to carry out what you'd planned. 

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GORE VIDAL: You tell me somebody’s favorite actor when they were ten years old, and I’ll tell you who they are. Could Norman Mailer have existed without John Garfield? He’s been playing Garfield ever since. And he doesn’t really know it, but it’s part of him. I’ve been doing George Arliss ever since. You know, you get hung up with an image. Now, it’s interesting that your generation has come along and you’ve been brought up on ninety-second TV commercials. Now, what kind of images are Boing t come out of that I don’t know. I can suddenly see twenty years from now some girl breaking down and really discovering that she’s a Salem commercial at heart. Or a detergent. 

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ROBERT ROSEN: I mean, one may be shooting in Italy, immediately afrer the war; and obviously have difficulties getting hold of soundstages and good film stock and a range of other things. You’re shooting in a way that’s quick and dirty. And you have that grainy quality to the film. Here, the logic of production led to a particular product. But then that particular product becomes emblematic for a certain kind of reality. And so, then, we’ve changed our film language. And now one strives for, for example, some of those quick-and-dirty techniques and that grainy look as a way to convey the meaning of a certain kind of realismf! the dialectic between industrial conditions and a change in [film] language.