Authors: William H. Gass
I wonder if the visitors to the fair saw how directly the Shakers translated moral qualities into principles of craftsmanship: spare, straight, upright, plain, simple, direct, pure, square, tight, useful, orderly, unaffected, neat, clean, careful, correct. For every chair
there was a peg on the wall from which it would hang while the floor was thereby more swiftly swept, and every peg was perfect. Since the chair was hung by its heels, as it were, what dust there was would settle on the bottom of the seat and not on the side where one sat. Beds folded up into the wall, and drawers drew out of anywhere. A sewing box might be fitted into a rocker, shutters slid up and down instead of swinging out into the room, and boxes were invariably nested. Every space was made of appointed places, and the tools that cleaned those hard-to-reach corners were hooked alongside a horsehair sieve sometimes, or a fluted tin mold for maple sugar.
Yet the Shakers used only the finest maple, the truest oak and clearest pine, the best slate. Grooves and pegs which were internal to a piece, and therefore never seen, were finished as finely as if they would live their whole lives out-of-doors. Drawers not only slid out smoothly; they said they slid, in the look of them, in the shush of their sliding; and the ingenious nesting of things, the creation of objects which did double duty, the ubiquitous ledges and holders and racks and pegs, spoke of order, and neatness, and fit—the Godliness of Utility; for though their chairs were stiff and forthright, their tables were wide and unencumbered, and their solutions to problems quite evidently inspired by necessity; there was nothing humble about their materials, pure and as prized as silver and gold. There was nothing humble about the days of careful labor that obviously went into them. There was nothing humble and spare about houses with double doors and double stairs—one for each sex. Nor is there anything humble about a building built to stand a thousand years, or in some handmade things so supremely finished they provoke us to exclaim: “Handmade, maybe, but what careful fingers, what holy hands!” There is nothing humble about perfection.
And the hidden joints, the concealed beds, the matched grains, the boxes which live their carefully concealed lives in other boxes: these are habits of the High Baroque.
Unlike pioneer simplicity, which was perforce crude and incomplete,
Shaker simplicity spoke eloquently about its moral ideals. Every room was as much God’s place as a church. Every object was, in its fealty to spirit, in its richness of refinement, in its strenuous demands on occupants and employers, a symbol of Divinity and Divine Law.
Simplicities, in short, are not all the same. When, in her masterpiece called “Melanctha,” a story of black people and the problems of love, Gertrude Stein resorts to the plainness of the pioneer style, she does so to render the rhythms of black Baltimore speech, and to convey the handmade quality of such talk as it struggles to express powerful and complex feelings through the most ordinary of words and by the social patterns implicit in its echoes, rhymes, and repetitions.
Melanctha told Rose one day how a woman whom she knew had killed herself because she was so blue. Melanctha said, sometimes, she thought this was the best thing for herself to do.
Rose Johnson did not see it the least bit that way.
“I don’t see Melanctha why you should talk like you would kill yourself just because you’re blue. I’d never kill myself Melanctha just ’cause I was blue. I’d maybe kill somebody else Melanctha ’cause I was blue, but I’d never kill myself. If I ever killed myself Melanctha it’d be by accident, and if I ever killed myself by accident Melanctha, I’d be awful sorry.”
Although Ernest Hemingway’s style gets some of its substance from Gertrude Stein (it is even more deeply indebted to Sherwood Anderson), its aim is less complex than hers. He borrows a bit of machismo from the pioneer, some of his ostentatious simplicity from the Shaker, and sharpens this by means of a selectivity which is severe and narrow. If Adolph Loos, architecture’s enemy of ornament,
felt we should sweep walls free and wipe planes clean, Hemingway’s purpose was to seize upon the basics right from the beginning and therefore be in a position to give an exact description of “the way it was.” He would remove bias and cliché, our conception of how things had always been, our belief in how things ought to be, and replace them with the square-shouldered resoluteness of reality.
Out through the front of the tent he watched the glow of the fire when the night wind blew on it. It was a quiet night. The swamp was perfectly quiet. Nick stretched under the blanket comfortably. A mosquito hummed close to his ear. Nick sat up and lit a match. The mosquito was on the canvas, over his head. Nick moved the match quickly up to it. The mosquito made a satisfactory hiss in the flame. The match went out. Nick lay down again under the blankets. He turned on his side and shut his eyes. He was sleepy. He felt sleep coming. He curled up under the blanket and went to sleep.
Brevity may serve as the soul for wit, but it is far from performing such a service for simplicity. The economy of most of Hemingway’s writing is only an appearance. To shorten this passage, we could have encouraged the reader to infer more, and said: “The fire brightened when the night wind breathed upon it. The swamp was as quiet as the night.” If images, implications, and connectives are allowed, a condensation can be sought which is far from simple. “A mosquito sang in his ear so he sat and lit a match.” Matches do go quickly out. No need to mention that. Moreover, Nick could be put to sleep far less redundantly. But Hemingway needs to state the obvious and avoid suggestion, to appear to be proceeding step by step. He needs the clumsy reiteration. It makes everything seem so slow and simple, plain, even artless, male.
Hemingway’s search for the essential was characteristically American; that is, it was personal; he sought a correct account of his own experience, because anything less would be fraudulent and insincere. The simplifying came prior to the writing; it was to be
built into the heart and the eye, into the man—hunting or fishing, running with the bulls, going to war, mastering his woman. On the whole, Hemingway’s work has not held up very well, and that is perhaps because he didn’t see or feel any more than he reports he felt or saw, because the way it was was really only Heming’s way.
According to Democritus, the atom was so simple it could not be divided, and that simplicity, Plato thought, was the source of the soul’s immortality. Only if you had parts could you come apart, and only if you came apart could you decay and die and disappear. Change itself, Parmenides argued, depended upon such minuscule divisions, but it required, in addition, the space to come apart in, for when separation occurred, something (which was a swatch of Nothing, in most cases) had to fill the breach in order to ensure that the cut would continue and not heal around the knife. So the atom remained an atom because it was a plenum and contained not even a trace of the real agent of decay: empty space.
Behind the search for the simple is a longing for the indivisible, the indestructible, the enduring. When a noun is reified, its elements fuse. It obtains an Essence. It becomes One, Primitive, Indefinable. Or, rather: any definition will be analytic. “God is good” is a version of “God is God.” A rose is a rose. Business is business. And that is that.
These ultimate simples were invisible, not because they were very, very small, but because they were very, very pure. Purity is a property of simplicity. It is often what is sought in seeking the simple. Atoms had no qualities. Atoms had nothing to say to the senses. Atoms were geometries. They had shapes; you could count them; they weighed; they fell through the Void like drops of rain; they rebounded; they combined; and when these combinations came undone, they remained as unaffected by their previous unions as any professional Don Juan.
Visibility is impurity. Invisibility belongs to the gods, to the immaculate Forms, to the primeval seeds. It is not morally pure, ethereal spirits but those ghosts clotted with crime who hang about like frozen smoke in the still air. The soul, as a penance, is encumbered
with flesh. Thought is brought to us in terms that can’t help but demean it, as if our sincerities were written in neon. Sin and sensation together veil the truth. Simplicity serves the essential, so the simple style will stick to the plainest, most unaffected, most ordinary words; its sentences will be direct and declarative, following the basic grammatical forms; and to the understanding, it will seem to disappear into its world of reference, more modest than most ministers’ wives, and invisible as a perfect servant.
Memory, too, is a polluter. The purity of the maid lies not in an untorn hymen, which is simply a symbol, but in the fact that she brings to her husband’s embrace the memory of no other arms. The purity of the maid guarantees the purity of her husband’s line: that his son is his; no uncertified seed has fertilized her first, been there ahead of him to father the future with a past. A fair maid has no past. Her husband will form her, as though her breasts grew beneath his hands. So she shall wear white as a sign she is unsullied, suitable, and as ready as a turkey to be carved.
The ultimate simples which the early philosophers revered were near enough to numbers as to make the move from Materialism to Idealism a small step. The logician, in an exactly similar fashion, seeks the supreme, unfactorable unit to begin with, and to that unit he then applies his intuition of the first fundamental logical operation, namely addition. One, and then one more. One. And one. And one. Adam did no less. Like Roman numerals or a prisoner’s day. One. And one. Bars, mars, nicks, accumulating in the direction of an unapproachable infinity. Others argue that anything either Is (like a light switch, On) or it Isn’t (like a light switch, Off); that a yes or a no suffices. To build a machinelike mind. Plato’s Demiurge lets the right triangle flop about like a stranded fish, and in that way it forms squares, cubes, and other polyhedrons, or it spins itself into a cone (for a cone is a triangle revolving like a door), while this shape, pivoting on its peak, will turn itself, in turn, into a sphere. With every essential figure drawn and every atom formed, the remainder of the universe is easy.
At one extreme, then, we find mathematicians, logicians, and
those quantitative scientists who shave with Occam’s razor; whose concepts have one (and only one) clear meaning; whose rules are unambiguous, and conclusions rigorously drawn; while, on the other hand, there are the pious craftsmen who think with their hands, reverence their materials, and build their own beds.
Simple as the simple is, and basic as butter is to French cuisine, it never seems to be nearby or abundant but has to be panned, like silver or gold, from a muddy stream. Surfaces have to be scrubbed, disguises divested, impurities refined away, truths extracted, luxuries rejected, seductions scorned, diversions refused, memories erased. Because if some things in life are simple, quite a lot is not; quite a bit is “buzzing, blooming confusion.” There is, of course, deception’s tangled web. There are the many mysteries of bureaucracy, the flight path of bees, the concept of the Trinity; there are the vagaries of the weather, the ins and outs of diplomacy, business, politics, adultery; there is poetry’s indirection, the opacity of German metaphysics, the ornamentation of Baroque churches, and the cast of the Oriental mind.
Simplicity is not a given. It is an achievement, a human invention, a discovery, a beloved belief.
In contrast to the bubbling stew we call our consciousness (and to reprise), there are the purities of reason, which require clear rules of inference and transparent premises; there are the invisible particles of matter, those underlying elements out of which the All is made Universal by the Few; there are nascent conditions of existence, unsullied by use or age or other kinds of decay; there are definitions brief and direct as gunshots; there are modes of being that streamline the soul for its afterlife flights. Consequently, beneath simplicity itself, whenever it serves as an ideal, lie moral and metaphysical commitments of considerable density. There are Hume’s simple impressions. There are Leibnitz’s monads. There are Lucretius’ jumpy atoms. Yet we do not behold the simple simply. If our gaze is direct, its object open, our climb to the mountain’s top is circuitous, the path perilous. If the foundations of Reality are simple, the grounds of Simplicity are complex.
Those who champion simplicity as a way of life are aware of the political and moral statement they are making. Gustav Stickley, who contributed so substantially to the Arts and Crafts Movement in America around the turn of the century, certainly was. For him, simplicity was not a Spartan lunch of caviar and champagne, or a lazy day sunning on the deck of the yacht. In his first collection of
Craftsman Homes
, Stickley writes:
By simplicity here is not meant any foolish whimsical eccentricity of dress or manner or architecture, colonized and made conspicuous by useless wealth, for eccentricity is but an expression of individual egotism and as such must inevitably be short-lived. And what our formal, artificial world of today needs is not more of this sort of eccentricity and egotism, but less; not more conscious posing for picturesque reform, but greater and quieter achievement along lines of fearless honesty; not less beauty, but infinitely more of a beauty that is real and lasting because it is born out of use and taste.
For Stickley, his movement’s heroic figure was an Englishman, Edward Carpenter, whose writings he much admired and frequently cites.
England’s Ideal
(which is the title of one of Carpenter’s books) appears to be agrarian, anticolonial, puritan, roundhead, and reformist. Our labor should not be a stranger to all that sustains us; our culture should be of our own contriving, and not something we have purchased in a shop; the true character of life ought not to be shamefully concealed; the head must have a hand, both to help it and to hold it in check. Possessions, in particular, are like unwanted immigrants—the first family to arrive is soon followed by boatloads of their relatives. Carpenter is vivid: