Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein Read online

  One might say that the essence of this passage is the phrase “as well”—a sort of welcome to anything that is there to come into the composition, such a welcome being the genius of France and as often as not of America. The coherence of the passage, which consists in a sort of melodic progress of consideration, is between the rational French discursiveness and the rambling American sympathy as Whitman had it. But more important is the kind of existence expressed here. The existence of the woman in the passage is intimately involved with the existence, growth, and movement of things in the landscape. Her kneeling and the water flowing and the grass growing four times yearly and the caring for Italians are all part of the same slow natural living of the place and the world.

  In serious literary circles, as distinguished from the large public, Gertrude Stein’s real accomplishments were always known. There, her influence was at one time considerable, though it worked in very different ways and degrees on different individuals. It was known that her writing had influenced, in certain respects, Sherwood Anderson and, later, Hemingway. It was supposed that Steinese had found echoes in Don Marquis’ archy and mehitabel as well as in the difficult poetry of Wallace Stevens, who once wrote “Twenty men crossing a bridge,/ Into a village,/ Are/ Twenty men crossing a bridge/ Into a village.” Her insistence on the primacy of phenomena over ideas, of the sheer magnificence of unmediated reality, found a rapturous response in Stevens, a quiet one in Marianne Moore. In Axel’s Castle, Edmund Wilson’s discriminating study of modern literature published as early as 1931, she had a chapter to herself, as had, in each case, Yeats, Valéry, Eliot, Proust, and Joyce. Axel’s Castle was a decisive event in the history of modern reputations. Wilson had some doubts as to Gertrude Stein’s readableness in certain books but few doubts as to her general importance. Steinese and its inventor had become reputable.

  By the time she died, in 1946, at the age of 72, Gertrude Stein had become something she wanted still more to be, historical (see “A Message from Gertrude Stein,” which precedes). Beginning with The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (written in 1932) she had developed unsuspected capacities for writing intelligibly and charmingly. The universal surprise at this fact, combined with the intrinsic fascination of the book, made it a best seller. And dire though the Autobiography is with special pleading, it remains one of the best memoirs in American literature.

  The improvement in her literary status disturbed for a while her firm sense of herself and her place in the world. “Money is funny,” she said quizzically as the royalties poured in. But she soon embraced her new role and played it with good-humored dignity. Returning to America for the first time since 1903, she lectured to sizable audiences across the country. And following World War II she became a kind of oracle and motherly hostess to American military personnel in liberated Paris. Just before her death her sayings and doings over there were much in the news in America, and her later writings, cast in a much modified Steinese, were sought by the popular magazines. The present volume, edited by Mr. Carl Van Vechten, her friend for over thirty years, was in the press when she died and was published later in the same year. Its aim was to make examples of her more difficult writing available along with examples of that more popular writing, and thus to demonstrate, as far as possible, the unity of her life and work. She seems to have died at peace with herself, her natural craving for recognition to some extent satisfied. At least she died firmly in character, having delivered from her hospital bed the last specimen, and one of the most searching and comical specimens, of Steinese. “What is the answer?” she inquired, and getting no answer said, laughing, “In that case, what is the question?”

  F. W. DUPEE

  February, 1962

  A Stein Song

  Gertrude Stein rings bells, loves baskets, and wears handsome waistcoats. She has a tenderness for green glass and buttons have a tenderness for her. In the matter of fans you can only compare her with a motion-picture star in Hollywood and three generations of young writers have sat at her feet. She has influenced without coddling them. In her own time she is a legend and in her own country she is with honor. Keys to sacred doors have been presented to her and she understands how to open them. She writes books for children, plays for actors, and librettos for operas. Each one of them is one. For her a rose is a rose and how!

  I composed this strictly factual account of Miss Stein and her activities for a catalogue of the Gotham Book Mart in 1940, but all that I said then seems to be truer than ever today. Gertrude Stein currently is not merely a legend, but also a whole folklore, a subject for an epic poem, and the young GIs who crowded into her Paris apartment on the rue Christine during and after the Greater War have augmented the number of her fans until their count is as hard to reckon as that of the grains of sand on the shore by the sea. During the war I frequently received letters from soldiers and sailors who, with only two days’ furlough at their disposal and a long way to travel, sometimes by jeep, spent all of their free hours in Paris with the author of Tender Buttons. Other GIs bore her away on a flying tour of Germany and still others carried her by automobile to Belgium to speak to their comrades there. In Paris she gave public talks to groups of them too large to fit into her apartment. Life and the New York Times Magazine contracted for articles from her pen. Her play of existence in occupied France, Yes Is for a Very Young Man, was presently produced at the Community Playhouse in Pasadena, California. Some of these tributes, naturally, were due to her personality and charm, but most of them stem directly from the library shelves which hold her collected works. Furthermore, as she once categorically informed Alfred Harcourt, it is to her so-called “difficult” works that she owes her world-wide celebrity.

  There is more direct testimony regarding her experiences with the GIs in her letters to me. On November 26, 1944, after the coming of the Americans, an event excitingly described in this Collection, she cabled me: “Joyous Days. Endless Love.” In 1945, she wrote, “How we love the American army we never do stop loving the American army one single minute.” If you will recall Alexandre Dumas’s motto, J’aime qui m’aime, you will be certain they loved her too. Still later she wrote me: “Enclosed is a description of a talk I gave them which did excite them, they walked me home fifty strong after the lecture was over and in the narrow streets of the quarter they made all the automobiles take side streets, the police looked and followed a bit but gave it up.” Captain Edmund Geisler, her escort on the Belgian excursion, said to me, “Wherever she spoke she was frank and even belligerent. She made the GIs awfully mad, but she also made them think and many ended in agreement with her.”

  II

  In Everybody’s Autobiography, Gertrude Stein confesses: “It always did bother me that the American public were more interested in me than in my work.” Perhaps this statement may be affirmed justifiably of the anonymous masses, but it would be incorrect to apply it generally to the critics, novelists, and reviewers who frequently have considered her writings worth discussing seriously. It has occurred to me that a brief summary of the opinions of a few of these distinguished gentlemen might serve to reassure the reading world at large and Miss Stein herself on this controversial point.

  André Maurois, for example, says of her: “In the universal confusion (the war years and after) she remains intelligent she has kept her poetic sense and even her sense of humor.” Of Wars I Have Seen he writes: “The originality of the ideas, the deliberate fantasy of the comparisons, the naïveté of the tone, combined with the profundity of the thought, the repetitions, the absence of punctuation, all that first irritates the reader finally convinces him so that more orthodox styles appear insipid to him. Gertrude Stein is believed to be a difficult writer. This is false. There is not a single phrase in this book that cannot be comprehended by a schoolgirl of sixteen years.”

  Here is Ben Ray Redman’s testimony: “Few writers have ever dared to be, or have ever been able to be, as simple as she, as simple as a child, pointing straight, going straight to the heart o
f a subject, to its roots; pointing straight, when and where adults would take a fancier way than pointing because they have learned not to point.… In the past, perhaps wilfully, she has often failed to communicate, and it was either her misfortune or her fun, depending on her intention.”

  Or perhaps you would prefer Virgil Thomson’s capsule definition: “To have become a Founding Father of her century is her own reward for having long ago, and completely, dominated her language.”

  An earlier, sympathetic, and highly descriptive view is that of Sherwood Anderson: “She is laying word against word, relating sound to sound, feeling for the taste, the smell, the rhythm of the individual word. She is attempting to do something for the writers of our English speech that may be better understood after a time, and she is not in a hurry.… There is a thing one might call ‘the extension of the province of his art’ one wants to achieve. One works with words and one would like words that have a taste on the lips, that have a perfume to the nostrils, rattling words one can throw into a box and shake, making a sharp jingling sound, words that, when seen on the printed page, have a distinct arresting effect upon the eye, words that when they jump out from under the pen one may feel with the fingers as one might caress the cheeks of his beloved. And what I think is that these books of Gertrude Stein do in a very real sense recreate life in words.”

  William Carlos Williams’s opinion is correlated to the above: “Having taken the words to her choice, to emphasize further what she has in mind she has completely unlinked them (in her most recent work: 1930) from their former relationships to the sentence. This was absolutely essential and unescapable. Each under the new arrangement has a quality of its own, but not conjoined to carry the burden science, philosophy, and every higgledy-piggledy figment of law and order have been laying upon them in the past. They are like a crowd at Coney Island, let us say, seen from an airplane.… She has placed writing on a plane where it may deal unhampered with its own affairs, unburdened with scientific and philosophic lumber.”

  Edmund Wilson feels compelled to admit: “Whenever we pick up her writings, however unintelligible we may find them, we are aware of a literary personality of unmistakable originality and distinction.”

  Julian Sawyer contends: “If the name of anything or everything is dead, as Miss Stein has always rightly contested, the only thing to do to keep it alive is to rename it. And that is what Miss Stein did and does.”

  Pursuing these commentators, I fall upon Thornton Wilder who asserts: “There have been too many books that attempted to flatter or woo or persuade or coerce the reader. Miss Stein’s theory of the audience insists on the fact that the richest rewards for the reader have come from those works in which the authors admitted no consideration of an audience into their creating mind.”

  And as a coda, allow me to permit Joseph Alsop, Jr., to speak: “Miss Stein is no out-pensioner upon Parnassus; no crank; no seeker after personal publicity; no fool. She is a remarkably shrewd woman, with an intelligence both sensitive and tough, and a single one of her books, Three Lives, is her sufficient ticket of admission to the small company of authors who have had something to say and have known how to say it.”

  III

  If Picasso is applauded for painting pictures which do not represent anything he has hitherto seen, if Schoenberg can pen a score that sounds entirely new even to ears accustomed to listen to modern music, why should an employer of English words be required to form sentences which are familiar in meaning, shape, and sound to any casual reader? Miss Stein herself implies somewhere that where there is communication (or identification) there can be no question of creation. This is solid ground, walked on realistically, as anyone who has been exposed to performances of music by Reger, for example, can readily testify. However, it must be borne in mind that composers and painters are not always inspired to absolute creation: Schoenberg wrote music for Pelléas et Mélisande and the tuneful Verklaerte Nacht, while Picasso had his rose and blue and classic periods which are representational. Like the composer and painter Miss Stein has her easier moments (The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, for instance, is written in imitation of Miss Toklas’s own manner) and even in her more “difficult” pages there are variations, some of which are in the nature of experiment. One of the earliest of her inventions was her use of repetition which she describes as “insistence.” “Once started expressing this thing, expressing anything there can be no repetition because the essence of that expression is insistence, and if you insist you must each time use emphasis and if you use emphasis it is not possible while anybody is alive that they should use exactly the same emphasis.… It is exactly like a frog hopping he cannot ever hop exactly the same distance or the same way of hopping at every hop. A bird’s singing is perhaps the nearest thing to repetition but if you listen they too vary their insistence.” Then she began to find new names for things, names which were not nouns, if possible, and, renaming things, became so enchanted sometimes with her own talent and the music of the words as they dropped that she became enamored of the magic of the mere sounds, but quickly she sensed this was an impasse and began more and more to strive to express her exact meaning with pronouns, conjunctions, and participial clauses. After a while she came back to nouns, realizing that nouns, the names of things, make poetry, “When I said, A rose is a rose is a rose, and then later made that into a ring, I made poetry and what did I do I caressed completely caressed and addressed a noun.” She had another period of exciting discovery when she found that paragraphs are emotional and sentences are not. Finally, it came to her that she could condense and concentrate her meaning into one word at a time, “even if there were always one after the other.” “I found,” she has told us, “that any kind of book if you read with glasses and somebody is cutting your hair and so you cannot keep the glasses on and you use your glasses as a magnifying glass and so read word by word reading word by word makes the writing that is not anything be something.… So that shows to you that a whole thing is not interesting because as a whole well as a whole there has to be remembering and forgetting, but one at a time, oh one at a time is something oh yes definitely something.” But do not get the idea that her essential appeal is to the ear or the subconscious. “It is her eyes and mind that are important and concerned in choosing.” Perhaps the most concrete explanation of her work that she has ever given us is the following (from The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas): “Gertrude Stein, in her work, has always been possessed by the intellectual passion for exactitude in the description of inner and outer reality. She has produced a simplification by this concentration, and as a result the destruction of associational emotion in poetry and prose. She knows that beauty, music, decoration, the result of emotion should never be the cause, even events should not be the cause of emotion nor should emotion itself be the cause of poetry or prose. They should consist of an exact reproduction of either an outer or inner reality.” She says again, this time in What Are Masterpieces, “If you do not remember while you are writing, it may seem confused to others but actually it is clear and eventually that clarity will be clear that is what a masterpiece is, but if you remember while you are writing it will seem clear at the time to any one but the clarity will go out of it that is what a masterpiece is not.”

  In whatever style it pleases Miss Stein to write, however, it is her custom to deal almost exclusively with “actualities,” portraits of people she knows, descriptions of places, objects, and events which surround her and with which she is immediately concerned. This quality, true of almost all of her writing since Three Lives and The Making of Americans, her perpetual good humor, and her sense of fun, which leads her occasionally into intentional obscurantism, all assist in keeping part of her prospective audience at a little distance behind her. There is, for instance, in Four Saints at the close of the celebrated Pigeons on the Grass air (an air the meaning of which has been elucidated both by Miss Stein and Julian Sawyer) a passage which runs Lucy Lily Lily Lucy, etc., beautifully effective as s
ung to the music in Virgil Thomson’s score. Those who believe this to be meaningless embroidery, like Hey, nonny nonny in an Elizabethan ballad, are perfectly sane. Miss Stein enjoyed the sound of the words, but the words did not come to her out of thin air, as is evidenced by a discovery I made recently. Lucy Lily Lamont is a girl who lives on page 35 of Wars I Have Seen and from the context one might gather that Miss Stein knew her a long time ago. Another example of this bewildering kind of reference is the “October 15” paragraph in As a Wife Has a Cow in the current collection. In my note to that idyl I have referred the reader to the probable origin of this passage. The books of this artist are indeed full of these sly references to matters unknown to their readers and only someone completely familiar with the routine, and roundabout, ways of Miss Stein’s daily life would be able to explain every line of her prose, but without even mentioning Joyce’s Ulysses or Eliot’s The Waste Land, could not the same thing be said truthfully of Shakespeare’s Sonnets?

  No wonder Miss Stein exclaims pleasurably somewhere or other: “Also there is why is it that in this epoch the only real literary thinking has been done by a woman.”

  IV

  The material I have selected for this Collection contains at least a sample of practically every period and every manner in Gertrude Stein’s career from the earliest to the latest. Her five earliest works (with the exception of Cultivated Motor Automatism, which she wrote as a student) are included, all but one complete, and it is significant that none of them resembles its neighbor in style. Melanctha, in manner, differs from The Making of Americans and the same may be said of Tender Buttons, the Portrait of Mable Dodge at the Villa Curonia, and the portraits of Matisse and Picasso published in Camera Work in 1912. Definite dates do not mark her various modes into periods as they do those of Picasso. Her very latest books, Wars I Have Seen and Brewsie and Willie, are not written in perplexing prose. I have, I think, included a sample of most of the forms in which she has worked. Not only the famous Four Saints, but also two other plays from an earlier period are to be discovered herein. Examples of her poetry, of her lectures, and essays may be examined in these pages. Lack of space has prevented me from including either of her novels, Ida or Lucy Church Amiably. Miss Furr and Miss Skeene and Melanctha, however, give sufficient indication of her talent for fiction. Of her two books for children, The World Is Round and the unpublished (except in French translation) First Reader, nothing is offered either. On the other hand, every element of her so-called “difficult” manner is represented together with two essays attempting to explain this manner and, of course, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas explains pretty nearly everything to everybody. Dear Gertrude, may I do a little caressing myself and say truthfully A Collection is a Collection is a Collection?