Complete Works of Gertrude Stein Read online

  The Complete Works of

  GERTRUDE STEIN

  (1874-1946)

  Contents

  The Novels

  Q.E.D.

  The Making of Americans

  Lucy Church Amiably

  Blood on the Dining Room Floor

  Ida

  A Novel of Thank You

  Mrs. Reynolds

  The Shorter Fiction

  Fernhurst

  Three Lives

  Matisse Picasso and Gertrude Stein

  The World is Round

  Brewsie and Willie

  The Plays

  Geography and Plays

  The Poetry Collections

  Tender Buttons

  Stanzas in Meditation

  The Non-Fiction

  Useful Knowledge

  How to Write

  Portraits and Prayers

  Lectures in America

  Wars I Have Seen

  Henry James

  Patriarchal Poetry

  Reflections on the Atomic Bomb

  The Autobiographies

  The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

  Everybody’s Autobiography

  Paris France

  The Delphi Classics Catalogue

  © Delphi Classics 2017

  Version 1

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  The Complete Works of

  GERTRUDE STEIN

  By Delphi Classics, 2017

  COPYRIGHT

  Complete Works of Gertrude Stein

  First published in the United Kingdom in 2017 by Delphi Classics.

  © Delphi Classics, 2017.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form other than that in which it is published.

  ISBN: 978 1 78656 106 0

  Delphi Classics

  is an imprint of

  Delphi Publishing Ltd

  Hastings, East Sussex

  United Kingdom

  Contact: [email protected]

  www.delphiclassics.com

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  The Novels

  Gertrude Stein’s birthplace and childhood home in Allegheny West, a historic neighbourhood in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania’s North Side

  Victorian housing of Allegheny West

  Gertrude Stein as a child

  Q.E.D.

  OR, THINGS AS THEY ARE

  Q.E.D; or, Things as They Are was completed in the autumn of 1903, but was not published until 1950, four years after the author’s death. Stein wrote the novel shortly after she arrived in Paris to live with her brother, Leo. She had attended Radcliffe College during the mid-1890’s, where she was a student of the renowned psychologist, William James. He considered her to be highly intelligent and after she graduated in 1898, he encouraged her to attend John Hopkins School of Medicine. However, the author never fully engaged in her studies at medical school and during her fourth year she decided to leave the course. In 1902, she followed Leo to London and they moved to Paris the following year.

  Stein reportedly had very little memory of having composed the work and only ever showed the novel to her brother and a handful of her closest friends. Q.E.D is a roman à clef, detailing a love triangle and doomed love affair that occurred while she was at John Hopkins. It also explores Stein’s feelings about her emerging sexuality and her morals on sex and relationships. The work begins with the three main characters getting to know each other on a transatlantic journey, as Adele, a surrogate for the author, falls in love with Helen Thomas, a character based on Mary ‘May’ Bookstaver — a leading feminist and political activist of the time. However, the relationship is disrupted and stymied by Mabel, who becomes a rival for Helen’s affections. Mabel attempts to use Helen’s ambition for wealth and material comfort to prevent Helen from committing to Adele.

  Gertrude Stein (left back) at Radcliffe College with Harvard Students, c. 1905

  CONTENTS

  BOOK 1. ADELE

  BOOK 2. MABEL NEATHE

  BOOK 3. HELEN

  The renowned psychologist, William James

  PHEBE: Good shepherd, tell this youth what ’tis to love.

  SILVIUS: It is to be all made of sighs and tears; And so am I for Phebe.

  PHEBE: And I for Ganymede.

  ORLANDO: And I for Rosalind.

  ROSALIND: And I for no woman.

  SILVIUS: It is to be all made of faith and service; And so am I for Phebe.

  PHEBE: And I for Ganymede.

  ORLANDO: And I for Rosalind.

  ROSALIND: And I for no woman.

  SILVIUS: It is to be all made of fantasy, All made of passion, and all made of wishes; All adoration, duty, and observance, All humbleness, all patience, and impatience, All purity, all trial, all deservings; And so am I for Phebe.

  PHEBE: And so am I for Ganymede.

  ORLANDO: And so am I for Rosalind.

  ROSALIND: And so am I for no woman.

  PHEBE: If this be so, why blame you me to love you?

  SILVIUS: If this be so, why blame you me to love you?

  ORLANDO: If this be so, why blame you me to love you?

  ROSALIND: Who do you speak to, ‘Why blame you me to love you?’

  ORLANDO: TO her that is not here, nor doth not hear.

  ROSALIND: Pray you, no more of this: ’tis like the howling of Irish wolves against the moon.

  AS YOU LIKE IT 5:2

  BOOK 1. ADELE

  THE LAST MONTH of Adele’s life in Baltimore had been such a succession of wearing experiences that she rather regretted that she was not to have the steamer all to herself. It was very easy to think of the rest of the passengers as mere wooden objects; they were all sure to be of some abjectly familiar type that one knew so well that there would be no need of recognising their existence, but these two people who would be equally familiar if they were equally little known would as the acquaintance progressed, undoubtedly expose large tracts of unexplored and unknown qualities, filled with new and strange excitements. A little knowledge is not a dangerous thing, on the contrary it gives the most cheerful sense of completeness and content.

  “Oh yes” Adele said to a friend the morning of her sailing “I would rather be alone just now but I dare say they will be amusing enough. Mabel Neathe of course I know pretty well; that is we haven’t any very vital relations but we have drunk much tea together and sentimentalised over it in a fashion more or less interesting. As for Helen Thomas I don’t know her at all although we have met a number of times. Her talk is fairly amusing and she tells very good stories, but she isn’t my kind much. Still I don’t think it will be utterly hopeless. Heigho it’s an awful grind; new countries, new people and new experiences all to see, to know and to understand; old countries, old friends and old experiences to keep on seeing, knowing and understanding.”

  They had been several days on the ship and had learned to make themselves very comfortable. Their favorite situation had some disadvantages; it was directly over the screw and they felt the jar every time that it left the water, but then the weather was not very rough and so that did not happen very frequently.

  All three of them were
college bred American women of the wealthier class but with that all resemblance between them ended. Their appearance, their attitudes and their talk both as to manner and to matter showed the influence of different localities, different forebears and different family ideals. They were distinctly American but each one at the same time bore definitely the stamp of one of the older civilisations, incomplete and frustrated in this American version but still always insistent.

  The upright figure was that of Helen Thomas. She was the American version of the English handsome girl. In her ideal completeness she would have been unaggressively determined, a trifle brutal and entirely impersonal; a woman of passions but not of emotions, capable of long sustained action, incapable of regrets. In this American edition it amounted at its best to no more than a brave bluff. In the strength of her youth Helen still thought of herself as the unfrustrated ideal; she had as yet no suspicion of her weakness, she had never admitted to herself her defeats.

  As Mabel Neathe lay on the deck with her head in Helen’s lap, her attitude of awkward discomfort and the tension of her long angular body sufficiently betrayed her New England origin. It is one of the peculiarities of American womanhood that the body of a coquette often encloses the soul of a prude and the angular form of a spinster is possessed by a nature of the tropics. Mabel Neathe had the angular body of a spinster but the face told a different story. It was pale yellow brown in complexion and thin in the temples and forehead; heavy about the mouth, not with the weight of flesh but with the drag of unidealised passion, continually sated and continually craving. The long formless chin accentuated the lack of moral significance. If the contour had been a little firmer the face would have been baleful. It was a face that in its ideal completeness would have belonged to the decadent days of Italian greatness. It would never now express completely a nature that could hate subtly and poison deftly. In the American woman the aristocracy had become vulgarised and the power weakened. Having gained nothing moral, weakened by lack of adequate development of its strongest instincts, this nature expressed itself in a face no longer dangerous but only unillumined and unmoral, but yet with enough suggestion of the older aristocratic use to keep it from being merely contemptibly dishonest.

  The third member of the group had thrown herself prone on the deck with the freedom of movement and the simple instinct for comfort that suggested a land of laziness and sunshine. She nestled close to the bare boards as if accustomed to make the hard earth soft by loving it. She made just a few wriggling movements to adapt her large curves to the projecting boards of the deck, gave a sigh of satisfaction and murmured “How good it is in the sun.”

  They all breathed in the comfort of it for a little time and then Adele raising herself on her arm continued the interrupted talk. “Of course I am not logical,” she said “logic is all foolishness. The whole duty of man consists in being reasonable and just. I know Mabel that you don’t consider that an exact portrait of me but nevertheless it is true. I am reasonable because I know the difference between understanding and not understanding and I am just because I have no opinion about things I don’t understand.”

  “That sounds very well indeed” broke in Helen “but somehow I don’t feel that your words really express you. Mabel tells me that you consider yourself a typical middle-class person, that you admire above all things the middle-class ideals and yet you certainly don’t seem one in thoughts or opinions. When you show such a degree of inconsistency how can you expect to be believed?”

  “The contradiction isn’t in me,” Adele said sitting up to the occasion and illustrating her argument by vigorous gestures, “it is in your perverted ideas. You have a foolish notion that to be middle-class is to be vulgar, that to cherish the ideals of respectability and decency is to be commonplace and that to be the mother of children is to be low. You tell me that I am not middle-class and that I can believe in none of these things because I am not vulgar, commonplace and low, but it is just there where you make your mistake.

  You don’t realise the important fact that virtue and vice have it in common that they are vulgar when not passionately given. You think that they carry within them a different power. Yes they do because they have different world-values, but as for their relation to vulgarity, it is as true of vice as of virtue that you can’t sell what should be passionately given without forcing yourself into many acts of vulgarity and the chances are that in endeavoring to escape the vulgarity of virtue, you will find yourselves engulfed in the vulgarity of vice. Good gracious! here I am at it again. I never seem to know how to keep still, but you both know already that I have the failing of my tribe. I believe in the sacred rites of conversation even when it is a monologue.”

  “Oh don’t stop yourself,” Mabel said quietly, “it is entertaining and we know you don’t believe it.”

  “Alright” retorted Adele “you think that I have no principles because I take everything as it comes but that is where you are wrong. I say bend again and again but retain your capacity for regaining an upright position, but you will have to learn it in your own way, I am going to play with the sunshine.” And then there was a long silence.

  They remained there quietly in the warm sunshine looking at the bluest of blue oceans, with the wind moulding itself on their faces in great soft warm chunks. At last Mabel sat up with a groan. “No,” she declared, “I cannot any longer make believe to myself that I am comfortable. I haven’t really believed it any of the time and the jar of that screw is unbearable. I am going back to my steamer chair.” Thereupon ensued between Helen and Mabel the inevitable and interminable offer and rejection of companionship that politeness demands and the elaborate discussion and explanation that always ensues when neither offer nor rejection are sincere. At last Adele broke in with an impatient “I always did thank God I wasn’t born a woman,” whereupon Mabel hastily bundled her wraps and disappeared down the companion-way.

  The two who were left settled down again quietly but somehow the silence now subtly suggested the significance of their being alone together. This consciousness was so little expected by either of them that each was uncertain of the other’s recognition of it. Finally Adele lifted her head and rested it on her elbow. After another interval of silence she began to talk very gently without looking at her companion.

  “One hears so much of the immensity of the ocean but that isn’t at all the feeling that it gives me,” she began. “My quarrel with it is that it is the most confined space in the world. A room just big enough to turn around in is immensely bigger. Being on the ocean is like being placed under a nice clean white inverted saucer. All the boundaries are so clear and hard. There is no escape from the knowledge of the limits of your prison. Doesn’t it give you too a sensation of intolerable confinement?” She glanced up at her companion who was looking intently at her but evidently had not been hearing her words. After a minute Helen continued the former conversation as if there had been no interruption. “Tell me” she said “what do you really mean by calling yourself middle-class? From the little that I have seen of you I think that you are quite right when you say that you are reasonable and just but surely to understand others and even to understand oneself is the last thing a middle-class person cares to do. “I never claimed to be middle-class in my intellect and in truth” and Adele smiled brightly. “I probably have the experience of all apostles, I am rejected by the class whose cause I preach but that has nothing to do with the case. I simply contend that the middle-class ideal which demands that people be affectionate, respectable, honest and content, that they avoid excitements and cultivate serenity is the ideal that appeals to me, it is in short the ideal of affectionate family life, of honorable business methods.”

  “But that means cutting passion quite out of your scheme of things!”

  “Not simple moral passions, they are distinctly of it, but really my chief point is a protest against this tendency of so many of you to go in for things simply for the sake of an experience. I believe strongly that one sho
uld do things either for the sake of the thing done or because of definite future power which is the legitimate result of all education. Experience for the paltry purpose of having had it is to me both trivial and immoral. As for passion” she added with increasing earnestness “you see I don’t understand much about that. It has no reality for me except as two varieties, affectionate comradeship on the one hand and physical passion in greater or less complexity on the other and against the cultivation of that latter I have an almost puritanical horror and that includes an objection to the cultivation of it in any of its many disguised forms. I have a sort of notion that to be capable of anything more worth while one must have the power of idealising another and I don’t seem to have any of that.”

  After a pause Helen explained it. “That is what makes it possible for a face as thoughtful and strongly built as yours to be almost annoyingly unlived and youthful and to be almost foolishly happy and content.” There was another silence and then Adele said with conviction “I could undertake to be an efficient pupil if it were possible to find an efficient teacher,” and then they left it there between them.

  In the long idle days that followed an affectionate relation gradually grew between these two. In the chilly evenings as Adele lay at her side on the deck, Helen would protect her from the wind and would allow her hand to rest gently on her face and her fingers to flutter vaguely near her lips. At such times Adele would have dimly a sense of inward resistance, a feeling that if she were not so sluggish she would try to decide whether she should yield or resist but she felt too tired to think, to yield or to resist and so she lay there quite quiet, quite dulled.