A Perilous Advantage: The Best of Natalie Clifford Barney

by Natalie Clifford Barney

  Their Cakes

  The discovery of cakes had always been a peace-time pursuit of Gertrude and Alice. Meeting them by chance at Aix-les-Bains, I enquired what happened to be on this opposite bank of the Lac du Bourget, and was informed of a new sort of cake created in one of the villages on a mountain beyond. But first obliged to go on other errands, they descended from the lofty seat of their old Ford car, Alice bewildered as an idol and Gertrude with the air of an Indian divinity. As they disappeared around a corner, not without causing wonderment, the only appropriate offering seemed to me one of those long, house-stemmed lotus flowers of dark pink, which I purchased and stuck between the spokes of Gertrude's steering wheel—with a card of explanation: "A wand to lead you on."

  Another meeting with this inseparable couple took place in their jardin de cure at Bilignin, on another summer afternoon. It somewhat resembled the book-cover Cecil Beaton designed for Gertrude Stein's Wars I have Seen, only a huge parasol replaced the parachutes and we sat peacefully on gayly striped canvas chairs. The four of us—for Romaine Brooks had come along with me,—and Basket, all curves and capers, lent a circus effect to the scene. As China tea was being served, Alice placed on the round outdoor table a fluffy confection of hers—probably a coconut layer cake which only Americans know how to make—and eat. Its white icing, edged with ornamental pink, matched Basket's like coating and incidental pinks. Gertrude sat in the favorite position in which Picasso portrayed her, clothed in rough attire with moccasined feet, knees apart, reminiscent of the gypsy queen under her tent in my old Bar Harbor days.

  Meanwhile Romaine Brooks contemplated our group and finding it "paintable", wished to start a picture of it then and there, before the light of her inspiration should fade. But, I the disturbing element of the party, because of a clock in my mind and in duty bound to pleasures, insisted that Romaine and I were due elsewhere. So this picture of us all was left unpainted: mea culpa!

  Gertrude's and Alice's flair for cakes makes me conclude that while poets are left to starve in garrets—or, as here in France, in chambres de bonnes, living only in the past and future, with the hope of an aftermath of fame, an author such as Gertrude Stein, admitting of nothing but a "continuous present", must be sustained on sweetmeats and timely success—this being the surest way of taking the cake and of eating and having it too.

  Faith In Herself

  Her belief in herself never failed her. Even when still a child, she and her brother Leo used to discuss who would prove to be their family's genius. Leo thought himself that predestined genius; but Gertrude, turning to us—her two visitors were that afternoon Madame de Clermont- Tonnerre and myself—emphatically declared: "But, as you know, it turned out to be me!"

  Indeed, such a faith in oneself "passeth understanding," and what a poor thing is understanding, compared to such a faith!

  As faith is far more exulting than reason, she once deplored Ezra Pound's becoming "the village explainer," which led so great a poet, and discoverer of poets, to his present standstill.

  Her Lecture At Oxford

  From the crest of Gertrude Stein's tidal wave of success, she was persuaded by Harold Acton to lecture a class of students at Oxford University, and she managed to hold them spellbound without a single concession to meet their understanding. Her lecture soared above theirs as they sensed something that surpassed them, but which neither freed their laughter nor their judgement, so that nothing was left to them but to uproariously applaud.

  She afterwards consented to meet them on their level, and both their questions and her answers were reported: inspiring and inspired.

  With Our G.l 's

  The same democratic spirit made her popular with our G.I.'s of the second world war. They also gathered something unique from her presence amongst them, and so she led them, as a sort of vivandière de l'esprit, from war into peace, and to realize their own, instead of their collective, existence. But in some cases this change was hard to bring about, loathe as they were to be "separated from," no longer "club together, be part of, belong to," etc. This fact was brought to even my notice in Florence by a big G.I. who confessed to me that "the urge to join his comrades was so strong that he couldn't even stop a moment to brush his teeth!" The disbanding of the herd instinct—to re-become individual and perhaps a nobody instead of leaving it to a chief in command with everything settled for you (death included), to take off a uniform to become uniform—all of this was more than some of them could stand.

  And how not feel homesick for their regiment when forced homeward, perhaps to intrude on a family, or face hostile businessmen? At such a moment a Gertrude Stein met them with her invigorating affirmations and cheered them up.

  It must have been about this period that she was photographed against our Stars and Stripes.

  Becoming Singular

  Patriotic as Gertrude Stein seemed, she certainly dispelled our discouraging axiom that "one man's as good as another". No one has dared to say this of the American woman!

  From her Making of Americans, I translated into French some of her most significant pages on our "progress in becoming singular". These pages were read—between the wars—in my salon, at meetings destined to bring about a better entente between French, English and American authors.

  On my "Friday" celebrating Gertrude Stein, Mina Loy addressed them by explaining her admiration for this innovator who "swept the literary circus clear for future performances."

  Many examples, including her own, were read to this effect—and a zeal for translating seized upon many of us from then on.

  We doubt if she ever thought of her readers at all.

  In going over my impressions of her—de vive voix, de vive mémoire—in these fragmentary evidences, I find that I have somewhat replaced the essential by the superficial. I suppose that to want to enjoy and know such a personage without going into their more original ambitions and works is like seizing chance reflections from a water-mirror regardless of its depth; this is what I find myself doing here, and avoiding the significance of her under-sea mysteries. Yet I have tried to dive deeper, and only touched rock-bottom to be ejected up again to the surface, suffocating with too much salt water, in search of too rare a pearl.

  Being a writer of pensées, I like to find a thought as in a nut or sea-shell, and while I make for a point, Gertrude seems to proceed by avoiding it. And this I am told, in order to create an atmosphere, "a picture," not through connections but disconnections. And her rotative system consists in getting at a subject by going not for but around it, in snowball fashion, gathering up everything she meets on her rounds.

  She also has a marked preference for "similarity" as opposed to “contrast”--a method which has long proved effective in rituals and incantations. As for her repetitions, they seem to me just a way of making time before finding out what to say next, and remind me of those long sermons bringing about a retarded comprehension to audiences under the mixed fumes of incense and music. But I also remember how glad we were, as children, on the "merry-go-round," of a second and third chance to catch onto the golden ring.

  And did not the child-woman, Mélisande, by saying “Je ne suis pas heureuse" (which is human) gain an echo's magic by repeating it—aided by Debussy's accompaniment?

  Her System of "Hide And Go Seek"

  Is not Gertrude Stein's example most stimulating, until she goes too far in the practice of it? Systems are apt to run away with their inventors, or else someone else catches on to them and uses them to a better effect. While, as in this instance, the inventor remains either monotonous or bewildering. Here Gertrude warns us that "Bewildering is a word that carried no weight". But what of monotonous? And why must she, who can be so startlingly inventive, risk misleading us through such a wilderness of words?

  If her meaning were only obscured by density, as in Joyce's Work in Progress or Ezra Pound's Cantos, I could be all for it—as for other breakers of routine, such as Rémy de Gourmont's "dissociation of ideas;" but I cannot see where
so simple a dissociation of words from their subject leads us.

  However I suppose that there comes a transition period in civilization, where words as well as ideas need to be divorced in order to regain new vitality and freer associations.

  And indeed one must not be too bent on understanding or one misses essential results. So I must either play this writer's "hide and seek," or stand by my preference for her more comprehensible publications.

  Still envying her knights errant: Thornton Wilder, Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Carl Van Vechten, Bernard Fay, Max White etc., for being initiated and able to spin, un-dazed, around her circles, closing us out from:

  Thoughts hardly to be packed

  Into a narrow act,

  Fancies that broke through language and escaped.

  (Robert Browning: Rabbi Ben Ezra)

  Yet why must her fancies prove so discouraging? But we must be patient with artists, as they are most patient with themselves, and follow themselves even where we cannot follow them.

  Struggling Towards A Conclusion

  My idle hands are stained with ink,

  And still I don't know what I think!

  And this remains my state of mind even now, when the manuscript shipped across the ocean for my introduction has at last arrived.

  Must I confess, at once, much to the amusement of Paul Valéry, “J'ai peur de lire”—and should I not all the more fear to read, lest my commenting results in betrayal either so near a neighbor or myself?

  How shrink such a responsibility—which Carl Van Vechten and Donald Gallup so imprudently entrusted to me? By arguing that a long preface would misrepresent a book of short stories—and especially of these stories without a story! Besides agreeing with whomever first apologized for writing at too great a length—not having taken pains to make it short. I have always had a predilection for what is short, and especially novels and long stories often seem to me much longer than life, and far less interesting.

  Up Against Volume IV

  But here is that big white block of a manuscript awaiting my hazardous inscriptions—as though this fourth cornerstone of Gertrude Stein's unpublished works were not better without. Even so must I, after so much hesitation vainly expressed to the sponsors of these posthumous works, pursue? And now, as I start turning over this typewritten manuscript, Gertrude sympathetically comes out to meet me with such consoling phrases as:

  Nobody knows what I'm trying to do, but I do, and I know

  when I succeed.

  What can be expected of paragraphs and sentences by the

  time I'm done.

  That is a sentence but two words cannot make a preface.

  It was exasperating, we were patient, we said it again and

  meant everything.

  I have often remarked that invention—and there is a great

  deal of invention—I have often remarked that invention

  concerns itself with inventing, and I, I feel no responsibility.

  Are not such phrases self-explanatory? But it is hard not to resent a method which allows its author to write so many dull pages on purpose. And then again one is suddenly awakened to remarkable remarks, such as:

  A sentence speaks loudly.

  A noun is nature personified.

  How many Saints are irreligious?

  I feel the value of religions—all religions.

  And such glimpses into her unwritten novels:

  Always she knew she would be everything—he always knew

  he was becoming.

  She is his second life.

  How can you be so radiantly far?...

  Hurry to me restfully.

  Eclipsing my feeling.

  I did not think I ever could be cross again with love.

  How dearly is she me, how dearly is she me, how

  dearly how very dearly am I she.

  And what a fresh beauty in such definitions as:

  Civilization begins with a rose.

  This is the flower of my leaf.

  And what she must have had with:

  I have invented many titles and sub-titles:

  Please prepare the bed for Mrs. Henry. Dear dear this is a

  title!

  My Attempts At Imitation

  I wondered if I could make up Steinean sentences, and succeed in breaking sense away from sense. It's hard to get something to mean nothing and nothing to mean something. I have tried and this is the result:

  Did I like it? Did I like liking it? Or I dislike liking it or did I dislike it or dislike disliking it? Or did I dislike liking to dislike it? Or did I like disliking to like it?

  You see it is harder than one thinks not to make sense. And we are never sure of being foolproof. For example:

  Did Tom fool? Did Tomfoolery fool? Did fool foolery fool Tom?

  I have written a whole page full of this sort of things, but feel it would be inappropriate to quote more of it here. For, enough is already more than enough of this sort of juggling with words.

  "Enter These Enchanted Woods"

  I have examined many of the leaves of this forest of words and lost myself in their midst, missing not only my way but hers. Perhaps there are signs and paths through it which I fail to sense, so I prefer to stay on its border and hunt for the wild flowers amongst the leaves. Leaving the author's knights errant to penetrate her mysteries. The spirit of them invites trespassers more adventurous than I have proved.

  "Enter these enchanted woods, ye who dare."

  (George Meredith)

  Alice B. Toklas having intimated to me, in her mild but persuasive way, to cease beating around the bush and picking up only the chance plums that fall from it, I have read steadily through Did Nellie and Lilly love you. Though I can't make out whether they did or didn’t—the chances being two against one they didn't.

  I like this kind of novel, but that's perhaps because I don't like novels. This chapter contains none of the usual or unusual subjects, intrigues, or relations and sequences, not a climax to a more or less fictitious end. Certain words acting as highlights lead the way, but to no conclusions, or to conclusions left to the reader and interchangeable enough to suit more cases than one, more love affairs than one, and to more marriages giving no clue. If clue there be, it is left to our discretion: the clue is perhaps you. Our approach remains that of the eavesdropper on situations to which we have not been initiated. At least this discretion spares us the embarrassing complexity through which we have too often witnessed the love-scenes in book, play, and film—especially in those moving-pictures where the sexually-starved feed their emotions on the hero and heroine's uniting in that culminating inevitable and prolonged kiss (a kiss which should, in natural sequence, precipitate the couple off to bed).

  The subjects of this book are divertingly different: in A Third it must be very interesting for the three concerned, that is if no one of the three remains the third.

  Equally so. A Description of all the Incidents which I have Observed in Traveling and on my Return, leaves open the question "Whether one receives more letters at home or abroad?”—One of the determining questions as to whether to travel or not to travel.

  The portrait of Miss Cruttwell was taken from the life of a real person, but she is treated so that no one would recognize her—not even Miss Cruttwell herself!

  In No—if "Yes is for a very young man," No should be for a very old man and wise one.

  The Background of a Detective Story—if the best detective story is the one whose mystery remains complete and the crime undiscovered, this one would win!

  In One Sentence, how well its author has imitated the cacklings of an "elderly couple talking much much or much talking too much too much!"

  And "She means nothing wrong but the love of talking is so strong in her that I think it necessary to check it whenever I can."

  "A little example does make it thin it makes it very colored very colored white."

  What One Sentence says has as much relation to speech as when a
parrot first tries to vocalize part of a conversation just overheard!

  It is obvious that in A history of having a great many times not continued to be friends, her friendships ceased from the causes already detected in their beginning.

  Other pieces are so much less comprehensible that I can make neither head nor tail of them, but nevertheless feel something like the first principles of life interestingly astir in their middle.

  Then again I find many treasures in this version of As fine as Melanchtha—as though she, Melanchtha, had fled from giving herself a rival self, but not without leaving behind for us her jewel-case, containing such gems as—but these, as the rest, I must now leave Gertrude's readers to discover. With my apology for detaining them—if I have detained them—so long.

  17th January, 1954

  (*Preface to As fine as Melanchtha)

  When Poets Meet

  Hazardous as it may seem to try and bring about a meeting between poets, the 'animatrice' of Shakespeare and Company in Paris attempted such a feat. In the lull between wars, when the turtle dove was again to be heard in the land, Sylvia Beach gathered us together in her bookshop at 12 Rue de l'Odéon for an evening lecture, where we were to listen to what Edith Sitwell had to say about Gertrude Stein—and in Miss Stein's expectant presence.

  These two interesting women had already met, down in their intervening valley, and become friendly, and had even exchanged messages to one another from their respective hill-tops. But this reunion was to be more than a brief 'expose' of mutual understanding and admiration—more like a sort of pact for probing, 'séance tenante,' the mysterious vaults of another's mind, and that might bring to light yet un-minted treasures. Much as a fellow miner invited to prospect the property of his neighbor might hit upon a lucky vein to exploit. So at the appointed hour of 9 p.m. we waited in confident silence that some such miracle should be performed before us, and Miss Stein's much-disputed effigy cleared and coined into never-to-be-forgotten words.