by Lucy Daniel
Stein with dogs.
Beyond their public image, Stein’s sexuality and her relationship with Alice had a profound effect on her work. In the early 1910s Stein was still practically unpublished, aside from the self-published Three Lives. This, however, is one of Stein’s most prolific and innovative periods. She produced her long novel, The Making of Americans (finished in 1911), numerous portraits and plays and her celebrated collection of poetry, Tender Buttons (1912, published 1914), among a host of other titles. In fact Stein was at the centre of the making of what we now see as the tradition of the avant garde. Much of this work preempts various aspects of literary modernism and postmodernism. It was as if her alternative lifestyle had freed her up to create alternative art. The two are intimately connected. The fact that she so ostentatiously proclaimed herself an artist and an avant-gardist — in her dress, her talk, her writing — also gave her the licence to live that alternative life without censure, exempted her from ordinary rules. This included producing an alternative to the masculine literary culture within which she worked, which became more deliberate and self-conscious as time went on, and her writing about women became more elaborate. Though she was capable of misogyny, Stein wrote about women all her life, and found them more interesting as subjects than men.
As she finished The Making of Americans, Stein was occupied with a number of other splinter projects. The titles of Stein’s works of the period — as well as the portraits, between 1909 and 1912 she wrote A Long Gay Book, Many Many Women and Two (a portrait of herself and her brother) — suggest that she was considering her own individuality and uniqueness, her difference and abnormality, and her relation to others. ‘The Making of an Author being a History of one woman and many others’ was one proposed title for Three Lives.9 During this period Stein was also at work on the long, experimental and radical GMP (Gertrude Matisse Picasso), designed as a sort of triptych linking herself, Matisse and Picasso.
Up until these works, she had written grammatically correct sentences, although her rhythms and repetitions had been unusual.10 Here, however, she no longer felt obliged to do that. This is where the syntax itself began to break apart. So, for example, she felt able to write verbless sentences: ‘A cushion, no fan and no rose, no cushion no fan no rose, no rose and no fan, no fan no cushion, no cushion no rose.’11 She was now free even of the rules of syntax, for the first time. In an interview given years later she said ‘words began to be for the first time more important than the sentence structure or the paragraphs.’12 (Most of Stein’s interviews and commentaries on her work are distantly retrospective, as she had only a very small readership until the 1930s.) Ironically GMP, in the very title of which she tried to promote herself as a contemporary and equal of Matisse and Picasso, was the piece in which she started to move beyond them, and art in general, as models for her writing. But the most surprising and bewildering changes were to come in the playfulness — including a new erotic mischief — of Tender Buttons.
The ways in which Stein’s relationship with Alice affected her work can hardly be overestimated. As Shari Benstock pointed out in her groundbreaking study Women of the Left Bank, after Alice Toklas moved in to the rue de Fleurus in 1910, ‘the elements of the living situation became subjects of virtually all of Gertrude Stein’s writing, not only all her openly erotic poetry — but many of the ensuing word portraits and meditations.’13 It was love, and after love her writing became ‘joyful and capricious’ in a way that it had never been before. They holidayed in Tuscany, Spain, Italy and Tangier, enjoying a romantic life together that was accompanied with lots of working. While waiting for the miracles, Stein filled mountains of notebooks with events, non-events, contentments, details, doubts, experimenting with new ways of putting words together. The domestic haven of their relationship gave her the stability that she needed, and their love, sexual, comfortable, petulant, sometimes jealous, day to day, was what furnished her ‘subject matter’, to use the term loosely.
The portrait ‘Ada’ (1910) is Alice’s first entrance into the writings, although she also appears in A Long Gay Book (1909–10). She brought a new, poetical dimension to Stein’s writing. Until Stein met Alice, she was going through a series of avatars: Hortense Sanger in the early compositions; Martha Hersland in The Making of Americans; in her early notes for Three Lives, there was to be an authorial narrator called Jane Sands. (Stein was a fan of George Sand — probably she also liked the coincidence of their initials.) But when Alice arrived, she stepped into the role of alter ego. The troubled Stein found in Alice the reader, the character and the answering voice she had coveted.
Alice had worked on the proofs of Three Lives, then typing up The Making of Americans. Then when Gertrude asked her to move in with her and Leo, she became a general factotum. As such she had hands-on involvement in the drafting and typing out of the manuscripts; she would query points in the margins, and this shifted into sometimes quite fierce editing. When she was preparing the manuscript of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (in 1932), written by Gertrude but appearing nominally in her own voice, Alice came across a passage in which Gertrude wrote that Alice had unflaggingly typed out every word of The Making of Americans. She vehemently deleted the second part of the sentence in which Gertrude had made her say: ‘and I enjoyed every minute of it’.
Living with Alice gave Stein the worldliness she longed for, and the security. Her love reciprocated and a new confidence found, with Alice she truly became Gertrude Stein. The work changed too. After The Making of Americans, there is an evolution towards the esoteric style that Stein was famous for, what the papers called ‘Steinese’. It became more discursive, less categorical. Paragraphs were abolished, and narrative was out the window. A new gamesomeness infused the work, and meaning, rather than being battened down, began to slip in and out of view. Her mature style was taking shape.
The explanation for the transition from sadness in QED, Three Lives and The Making of Americans to ebullience and confidence in Tender Buttons and the poetical works that followed lay with Alice. After 1910 Gertrude’s work became full of Alice. Her writing about Alice is tender and thoughtful and philosophical.
A Long Gay Book contains this shift. It begins in the plodding methodology of The Making of Americans and bursts into poetry,14 as she conjugates words and conjures with syntax, rhythm, the look of words on the page. Their senses splinter, re-intertwine and fall apart again. They elongate into columns. They sputter into abrupt, morse code-like admonitions: ‘Notes. Notes change hay, change hey day. Notes change a least apt apple, apt hill, all hill, a screen table, sofa, Sophia.’15 She puns, uses half-rhyme, homonyms and near-homonyms, edging outwards from intelligibility into some other work of consciousness, imaginatively questioning the meanings of words. She moves from exactness to open-endedness:
A lake particular salad.
Wet cress has points in a plant when new sand is a particular.
Frank, Frank quay.
Set of keys was, was.
Lead kind in soap, lead kind in soap sew up. Lead kind in so up.
Lead kind in so up.
Leaves a mass, so mean. No shows. Leaves a mass cool will.
Leaves a mass puddle.
Etching. Etching a chief, none plush.16
In A Long Gay Book Stein is in love: so obsessed with couples and coupling that she wants to pair up ‘everybody I can think of ever’.17 In it she seemed to recognize that this is a new start. As it concludes there is the joint soberness and exuberance of the line: ‘All I say is begin.’18 In it Stein has given in to non sequitur and lyrical patterning; gone are the diagrams and lists; she is alive again to beauty in a way that she had not been since her college compositions. Her apparent docility was changing into assurance — even if it did mean taking on a masculine role. On the other hand, she was moving into a world of subjectivity and ambiguity, and this, if one were to take a feminist-deconstructionist point of view about it, could be connected to the fact that she was also writing more and
more about women. Alice was a mistress and a muse. She became a presence, an addressee and a questioning voice in the work.
Over the years Tender Buttons has been seen to require an extraordinary amount of explication for such a short text. The idea behind it was that her literary portraits had become too difficult because, being of people, they necessarily involved memory and storytelling of a sort, however abstracted. So she began this book of still lifes as an attempt to render the visual perception and the experience of each of these commonplace things: objects, food and rooms. As with Picasso’s use of found objects in his still lifes, Stein removed words from ordinary usage and allusiveness, showing the way in which words become overused props — or rather preventing the reader from unthinkingly relating them to their usual associations. For example, the whole of the piece called ‘Dining’ (a favourite of Jean Cocteau’s) reads: ‘Dining is west.’
Tender Buttons was a transitional work, releasing Stein into compositions in which she could be without a plot or direction, amoral, idle, contemplative, evasive and untrustworthy, in which nouns were not even a way of naming things. It was an indirect, implicitly transgressive discourse that gave the parts of speech that were normally ignored more prominence. In the lecture ‘Poetry and Grammar’ she called it her Leaves of Grass.
One critic said it was like having an egg beater applied to his brain. But the urge to decode it all, to find answers, as if the pieces are riddles, is misleading. Deliberately elliptical, never conclusive, it is designed not to be ‘understood’ in the traditional sense. This is the most radical aspect of Stein’s radical work. In the ‘Food’ section, in a piece called ‘Orange In’ when she wrote: ‘real is, real is only, only excreate, only excreate a no since’,19 she was punning on the words ‘realize’ and ‘realism’. What is real? What is created /excreted, and what is nonsense? And who is the judge of this? When contemporary critics called it ‘nonsense’, because it could not be understood, they were unaware that this was her point. Rather than a single truth, there must now be a variety of subjective truths.
In the final section of Tender Buttons, ‘Rooms’, she asks: ‘does silence choke speech or does it not[?]’. Stein begins to play with the uses of the word ‘lying’ — not telling the truth and lying down (with Toklas), and ‘giving it away’ — or letting the truth be known:
Lying in a conundrum, lying so makes the springs restless, lying so is a reduction, not lying so is arrangeable.
Releasing the oldest auction that is the pleasing same still renewing.
Giving it away. Not giving it away, is there any difference. Giving it away. Not giving it away.
Almost very likely there is no seduction, almost very likely there is no stream, certainly very likely the height is penetrated, certainly certainly the target is cleaned. Come to sit, come to refuse, come to surround, some slowly and age is not lessening … No breath is shadowed, no breath is painstaking and yet certainly what could be the use of paper, paper shows no disorder, it shows no desertion.20
The edges of silence, and what elements of seduction and lying can be put on paper, are addressed in a lyrical, open-ended, non-literal diction that becomes part of the dissimulation it describes; it becomes a way round the ‘silence’ that can ‘choke speech’. But — for instance in the chiming of the words ‘reduction’ and ‘seduction’ — it also seems to ask what is lost as well as what could be gained by making the erotic life public.
From the hints at her erotic life in the book, it has now become a critical commonplace to say that the evasiveness of its style, coupled with its effusiveness, seems to have been born partly out of a desire to cover up and encode her relationship with Toklas. It was the beginning of a fascination with obliqueness to which she would ascribe various artistic reasons, but it began perhaps as a strategic dissimulation, a concealment: and yet it gave her the key with which to enter another literary space in which she could write to her heart’s content about her love for another woman.
After the long gestation of The Making of Americans — she referred to it as a ‘difficult birthing’ — she had come to terms with one of her most enduring subjects: her own style. And her style was like nobody else’s. It is a style that embraces tautologies and koans as the route to understanding in a way that plot and narrative, character, allusiveness, myth or just plain story could not do for Stein. The realization had come that she wasn’t about reaching verdicts or definitive answers. She was a mistress of a fine anecdote, but her true work, that closest to her heart, could not have been a more intricate and ardent rejection of that as the basis for literature.
Her detractors were partly right in calling her a mystical writer — she did have a mystical sense of the power of words — she had a fanciful wish, in Tender Buttons, to create the whole world in its present moment as Shakespeare had created the Forest of Arden: without ever describing it directly. But she was a scientist too, and rejected sentiment. Stein’s preference was to use a straitened, constrained vocabulary (the actual words of which, the limits of which, changed through phases in her career) in order to show up what goes on between words, among words, as the words are read and as they reach us as readers.
When she finished Tender Buttons she understood that it was a strange new beast. Finding a publisher for it was, then, a coup. It came about via a colleague of Carl Van Vechten’s at the New York Times, who had launched the small Claire Marie Press, dedicated to avant-garde literature. A thousand copies were printed in June 1914. A less auspicious moment to be published could hardly be imagined.
Tender Buttons was met with bafflement far and wide. One reviewer summed up the general response by saying that Stein was ‘either a colossal charlatan or mad’.21 She was seen as Futurist, Cubist, anarchist. But it did also give her a serious reputation among the cognoscenti. Its importance was heightened in America, where the ‘avant-garde’ literature being produced in French in Paris was scarcely available, and Tender Buttons gained a small, devoted following for Stein. Nothing comparable had yet reached America. For many readers, it was the first encounter with such radical uses of the written word. Many who later wrote about its effect on them remembered that it had changed, or ‘blown apart’ the way they looked at words. Sherwood Anderson said it made him fall in love with words.22 (That said, he was also a little in love with Gertrude Stein.)
The force of her American reception also had another outcome. With Tender Buttons, according to Stein, the papers began their ‘long campaign of ridicule’ against her.23 Though it still smarted twenty years later, she did not want to paint herself as too grand to laugh at their jokes. When they parodied her, she asked them to print her work instead, because she was funnier than her parodists. Indeed there is humour in works like Tender Buttons and Lifting Belly, of a playful, convivial, teasing sort, an enjoyment in the non-literal resonances of putting words together strangely, in the open-endedness and indeterminacy of life. She could also be sharply witty in the naming of her pieces. When she offered T. S. Eliot The Making of Americans for publication in The Criterion and he tersely and evasively suggested he would need something more recent from her, she went home and wrote a piece whose title was ‘A Description of the Fifteenth of November’, the date they had met.
Tender Buttons (1912, published 1914) gave rise to a slew of other works including ‘No, One Sentence’ (1914), ‘Possessive Case’ (1915), and ‘Lifting Belly’ (1915–17), in which snippets of domestic conversation, endearments and chastisements showed that her works were no longer soliloquies, but addressed to Alice. From this point on Stein begins to speak to a lover in her writing, and there are often two voices to be heard in her work now — one pleading, one commanding, though the conversation (as Richard Bridgman pointed out in his seminal study Gertrude Stein in Pieces, the work begins to sound like a secret recording of a conversation) stops short of being sadomasochistic, as it has sometimes been called. The colloquies with Alice sometimes appeared in Alice’s own hand, and there is some question about wh
ether the two women were carrying on a real conversation, or a sort of collaboration.24 Later, in 1932, Alice began writing more extensively in the manuscripts.
Throughout these works Stein was investigating, still, the gap between consciousness and writing. The decade between 1912 and 1922 was the period in which she gave fullest expression to her theory of the ‘continuous present’, in works such as ‘Bee Time Vine’, ‘Pink Melon Joy’, ‘Possessive Case’ and ‘Lifting Belly’. Many of these works were not published in her lifetime. They are erotic pieces. Still more extreme in their dissociations than Tender Buttons, they are filled with private jokes, baby-talk, and pillow-talk. ‘Kiss my lips. She did./ Kiss my lips again she did. / Kiss my lips over and over and over again she did.’25 Echoing through the words are the moments of their life together: personal references that would not and could not be intelligible to others, which is what gave her work its famed sibylline quality. Stein brings the detail of Alice’s life — cooking and cleaning — from insignificance into significance by enshrining it as literature, by calling it that. Unlike her masculine modernist contemporaries, Stein gave domestic themes a central place in the vast majority of her writing, up until and including her war writing.
