If genius is the quality of doing by instinct, without great thought or labor, obeying the commands of a _something_ outside of one's self, Eugene Walter is certainly a genius. If it is, as some philosopher has said, "an infinite capacity for taking pains", he is nothing of the sort. He works by fits and starts, idling unconscionably for months at a time, and then completing a play in a fortnight. "The Easiest Way" was written in ten days. Mr. Walter's method of composition really is nothing more nor less than improvisation--the method children employ when they "make things up" as they "go along."
The tools necessary to the process are one large room, one outfit of furniture, and one exceptionally rapid stenographer. Mr. Walter and the stenographer enter the room. The door is locked, and work is begun by placing the furniture as it is to be placed on the stage--in other words, by setting the scene. Then the young dramatist begins to act. He is all the characters in his play. He rushes about the apartment, quarreling with himself, making love to himself, now standing here as one person and then racing to the opposite end of the apartment to be another. All the time he is speaking the words that come into his mind as natural under the circumstances, and the stenographer is taking them down at top speed. At the end of an hour or two an act is finished, an invisible curtain is rung down, and, if the amanuensis hasn't fainted, as two did in one day of labor on "Paid in Full", the stage is set for the next act.
Of course, you understand that, before the play reaches this point, the story, the situations, and even some details of dialogue must have been carefully thought out. In connection with Mr. Walter, I _should_ say that they must have had time to assemble in his mind, having popped in, like Topsy, already grown. He goes about with what he himself described to me as "a seething mass of stuff in my head" until the "seething mass" cries for release, and then--the impromptu performance before the audience of one. The quickness of Mr. Walter's conception, the instantaneousness with which drama is formed for him, is illustrated by an experience of last winter.
We had been to witness a bad play--one doomed to close the following Saturday. "Hopeless!" I said, as we left the theater.