Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein (3 page)

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 of 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 sung 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?

C
ARL
V
AN
V
ECHTEN

New York, April 11, 1946

My introduction to this volume was written, and sent to the printer, a little over three months before Gertrude Stein’s death in Paris, July 27, 1946, but I feel that it is wiser, for both sentimental and practical reasons, to let it stand unchanged.

C.V.V.