A New Movement in Literature

Introducing Chiro-Simultaneity to the Readers of Vanity Fair

GEORGE S. CHAPPELL

IMPRESSIONS, impressions, impressions! Moods, moods, moods! I am so excited about it all that I can scarcely write consecutively. Ah, there is the secret—not to write consecutively. Do you realize it? Have you ever thought of it? It is what we have been doing ever since the beginning—writing consecutively. I blame it all on Genesis. And Life is not that—not that at all.

But, I seem to have begun somewhat wildly, which is natural, perhaps, for I am, literally, a man with a new-found freedom, a slave escaped from his shackles. I refer to a literary emancipation, a fresh gift of vision in the attainment of an absolutely new method of verbal expression—shown, imperfectly, in the chart above.

UP to a short time ago, reading had lost all interest for me. Why, I knew not! I had only to pick up a newspaper, a magazine, or a book, and lo! an appalling listlessness overpowered me. I was sick of it all, sick of words, descriptions, books, plays,—everything.

And then a light dawned upon me. It dawned, first, at the movies. A picture was suddenly thrown on the screen. It showed our own 27th, embarking at Brest. And I, in common with approximately eighteen-hundred total strangers, burst into wild cheers of excitement. It was all so varied, so coming-from-allsides, so confused and yet so simple;—in a word, so simultaneous.

Then and there, in the quiet of that walk home, the truth seemed to cry out to me from every twinkling star. My hatred of reading was only due to the way that things had been described to me. It was the slow, word by word, long-drawn-out method of exposition which, for me, turned all books to ashes. Books, I suddenly saw, could not reflect life, because they could never be—if you know what I mean-—simultaneous. And I saw, suddenly, that in one of its most important functions, the literature of the world was all wrong.

Yes, there is the point. By fheir consecutive, fact-after-fact, piling-up form of narrative, all authors fail to create in us the impression of the simultaneity of life. How important, how vital this is.

HAVE you ever considered that the great moments of existence, the psychological crises which stand clear and firm in one's memory are invariably, made up of a few minutes, perhaps seconds of time, in which hun' dreds of things are happening to us simultaneously. One is exalted, depressed, glorified, crushed by a perfect chorus of events, an avalanche of occurrences impinging simultaneously on one's intellectual antennae. There is the whole thing in a nutshell.

Life is simultaneous—literature is not. Instances are legion. They may be plucked at random from the routine of our daily life.

Let us take something simple, for an initial example; an incident which, though trite and homely, comes into the life of every man,— and some women.

You go to a banquet at which you have been asked to say a few words. Your toast is "The Ordnance Department," in which department you have lately been employed. You hold the little pencilled headings of your remarks crushed in the palm of a cold and clammy hand. The food has lost its savor, the all-toofleeting wine-cup passes you by. Your friend the toastmaster, who flattered you into this mess, has whispered to you that you can't say a word if you drink anything, while you know perfectly well that you can't say a word unless you do.

The coffee is served, the cigars are lighted, the toastmaster is on his feet, mid the crackling sound of applause. Your brain is desperately clinging to your opening story,—the one about the darkey and the Irishman—while a neighbor is trying to tell you the latest gem from down-town which he wants you to use in place of your little Africa-Irish morceau. . The room is a blaze of lights, glittering glasses, cordials, smoke, laughter, ladies, music, shirt-fronts, chairs. Your psychological second has arrived, —and, in that second, that tick of time which seems to separate you from eternity, the toastmaster finishes his introduction by telling your story—your opening story with which you had planned to shoe-horn your way into the main body of your remarks.

AT that very instant, when you find yourself on trembling legs, the embodiment of abysmal nothingness, you are conscious that the shirt-stud, which has been a constant source of anxiety to you during the repast, has again failed to function; you recognize a particularly loathsome relative of yours in a balcony box, your cigar is burning down the side, one of the waiters is intoxicated, and your throat is as dry as July 1st. "Gentlemen, Irishman, Ladies, and Gentlemen, Mr. Toastmaster,—Ladies, Colored Men, and Gentlemen. The Ordnance Department—is ah—the"—

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What pen—or even typewriter—can describe it? What compositor can set it up? None! In their very nature, an author's mechanical method of transcribing your multiform complex must be impotent—with its miserable tickertape writing of one little word at a time, one sentence after another—to express the intensive instance which is, to you, the side-slipping of a whole world in a sickening simultaneousness.

Yes, the old method of writing is hopelessly inadequate to portray such a confused scene as I have described, or indeed, any scene in life, in which a man's passions are at all implicated or involved.

But we must be constructive. Shall we say that literature is powerless before problems which futurist music and cubist art have attacked so courageously? Never! ,

Plainly the problem can only be solved by inventing a new form, a new method of writing, something diagrammatic, intensive, plangent.

So, I have invented chiro-simultaneity, which is a new art form and which will solve the problem perfectly. At the head of this article, I have endeavored to chart, in the new mold, the banquet scene to which I have already referred. Look well at the chart. See how it is done. You don't write it. You draw it. You draw everything in the scene— tables, studs, waiters, smells, laughter, perspiration, noises, wine-glasses, applause, draughts, cat calls—everything. See how adequate it all is—how confused, and yet how simple; how varied and yet how exquisitely synchronized.

It is unnecessary to point out to the intelligent readers of Vanity Fair that, for the more sublime moments of life this new method is particularly adapted. I shall hope, at some future date, to be allowed to present further experiments along the line indicated—calling on a lady; visiting a bank; taking a train; playing golf; and a dozen other crises in a man's daily routine. A most interesting mental synthesis has been brought to my attention in the emotions of my nephew, Harold, who has recently returned from overseas with his Bretonne bride. When Harold arrived, he saw, amid the cheering crowd on the dock, the father and brother of the* young lady to whom he had been engaged just before he became a member of the A. E. F., and to which father and brother the knowledge of his recent marriage had not yet trickled.

It is in such complicated scenes as this, involving a variety of emotions, appeals, sounds, fears, etc., that this new method of literary exposition will prove effective. I believe that my system will be generally adopted.