Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein (2 page)

But Gertrude Stein’s family background was not the only source, or even the principal one, of her prodigious and largely good-humored will to power. The same background failed to supply her brother Leo with any such determination to make himself at home in the world. Brilliant, erratic, eternally unfulfilled, Leo Stein became an early advocate and perennial patient of psychoanalysis, finding a sort of fatherland only in Freud. In Gertrude Stein’s case, obviously, it was her involvement in the profession of literature, and the exacting mysteries attending it, that made the difference. The profession was the more engrossing because of the variety of influences she brought to bear on it. If her conception of literature included elements of Naturalism, it also anticipated the literary Modernism that was to culminate in the chief works of Joyce, Eliot, Yeats, and others. To her as to them (up to a point), literature in the twentieth century presented itself as a problem in the reconstruction of form and language. But where the solution of this problem was a means to an end for these writers, it became, for her, on the whole, a pursuit worthy in itself of her best efforts. She had no quarrel, as they did, with culture, with history, with the self. Culture in her terminology becomes “composition,” an aggregate of institutions, technologies, and human relations which the artist, as artist, accepts as it is, eliciting its meanings primarily through eye and ear rather than through mind, memory, or imagination. And words, like the other materials of the literary medium, become useful to the artist, assume a character purely aesthetic, in proportion as they can be converted from bearers of established meaning and unconscious association into plastic entities.

Such was the theoretical basis of her work, a basis to which she added many refinements as she sought to find literary equivalents for the various experiments conducted by the Cubists. Her theories have been admirably expounded and criticized in a number of recent books. The usual conclusion is the common-sense one. Literature is a temporal art rather than, like painting, a spatial one; and in using words as plastic entities, as things in themselves, words become not more but less alive, indeed peculiarly inert. Mr. Kenneth Burke has called Gertrude Stein’s practice “art by subtraction,” a phrase that expresses well the literal and merely negative aspect of her work at its least effective. Mr. B L. Reid has made Burke’s phrase the title of a hostile study of Gertrude Stein; and Mr. John Malcolm Brinnin, in
The Third Rose
, the best biography of her, sums up his investigations into her methods as follows:

All this applies to darkest Stein. Mr. Brinnin and many others, including the present writer, find this territory difficult of access. Nor, of course, is one helped by having learned one’s way around in, say,
Finnegans Wake
and
Four Quartets.
On the contrary, a knowledge of Joyce’s or Eliot’s methods sets one to looking in Gertrude Stein for meanings and values according to the principle of association. But this is the wrong principle to apply to, for example,
Tender Buttons.
Gertrude Stein was insistent that she was not practicing “automatic writing” or working in any literary convention, such as Surrealism, related to automatic writing. No release of unconscious impulses, her own or those of fictional characters, is intended. She must, in fact, have devoted much labor to eliminating such suggestions. Thus the body of her theory and writing at its most advanced occupies an anomalous position among the various modern schools.

The usual theoretical objections to her work are persuasive; yet between them and her work there is always a certain accusing margin of doubt. Poets have found her work exciting, however inexplicably so, as if words in themselves might in certain circumstances appeal to some receptive apparatus in man that is comparable to what people call extrasensory perception. This is not, on the whole, the experience of the present writer in the farther reaches of Gertrude Stein. Yet, read aloud, certain passages in, say,
Tender Buttons
, do make their effect, especially if read in the company of people prepared to laugh. The silent reader expects familiar rewards for his efforts. The
viva voce
reader is more apt to take what comes and make the most of it. To the ear, when it is lent freely to a given passage, the contrast stands out between, on the one hand, the perpetual flow of
non sequiturs
in the passage and, on the other, the air of conviction conveyed by the very definite words, the pregnant pauses, the pat summary phrases (“This is this,” “It is surely cohesive,” “It is not the same.”); and the mingling of apparent conviction with transparent nonsense throughout such a passage takes on its own kind of momentary sense, giving rise (if the reader is lucky) to a wondering laugh. As one of her pat phrases suggests, “It shows shine.” Does it also
show Stein
? If so, reading these tongue-twisting words aloud helps to bring the pun to light. So too with the occasional rhymes and jingles strewn through this prose: they also come alive better when spoken.

Tender Buttons
is probably Gertrude Stein’s most “private” performance. The verbal still-lifes in that book defy even Mr. Donald Sutherland, the critic who, in
Gertrude Stein: A Biography of Her Work
, has made more headway than anyone else in interpreting her. Here is a passage, surely very beautiful, from “Lend a Hand or Four Religions” (published in
Useful Knowledge
, 1928), followed by Mr. Sutherland’s comment:

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. D
UPEE

February, 1962

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.