Page:Points of View (1924).pdf/279

 lisher. The notion seemed repellent—commercially; and I abandoned it.

Next I explored the assumption that Gertrude Stein's epoch-making experiment was designed to show what words can do by themselves with practically no assistance from the manipulator or with mere mechanical manipulation. I took a sheet of paper and made five columns. In the first I wrote at random fifteen or twenty adjectives; in the second the same number of nouns; in the third a job lot of conjunctions, prepositions, and articles; in the fourth, verbs; in the fifth, adverbs. I then cut up my columns and placed the separate words face downwards in five piles of parts of speech. Then I played off the words something in the style, I suppose, of Canfield (which I don't play). I thrust in a bit more punctuation than Gertrude Stein employs, and this was the result:

I drew back in astonishment from the result of my own little experiment. My Hercules, what phrases!—"red stupidity," "loud orchards roaring darkly," "pretty" people slipping through daffodils in "green doubt," and then those "bitter fish" flying so grandly, and the proclamation of "life, the pur-