Gertrude Stein (Critical Lives)
Page 18
A window display devoted to Stein, 1946.
Stein’s final words have achieved the status of legend all on their own. They have an entry in The Oxford Book of Literary Quotations. As told by Toklas, Stein was lying bewildered on a hospital bed, when she looked at Alice and asked her: ‘what is the answer?’ When Alice was silent, Gertrude continued: ‘Well, in that case, what is the question?’29 Perfect as this is, it has the ring of wishful invention. Alice’s elegant hand is in it. Alice was still controlling the image, up until the last hours and beyond. Stein had played with various versions of this construction in her writing. She had given versions of her ‘dying words’ in Everybody’s Autobiography, ‘Sentences and Grammar’ in How to Write, and Brewsie and Willie, as well as to reporters on board ship when she docked in New York. If these were her dying words, Stein was quoting herself. In the years that followed Alice would continue to exert as firm a grip as she was able on all interpretations of Stein. She devoted herself to bringing all the unpublished manuscripts into the light, policing the biography, guarding the portrait, polishing the legend.
As Janet Flanner put it: ‘Gertrude Stein did not like questions and answers. She thought one should get answers without questions.’30 She showed her disdain for a standard author questionnaire sent to her by the Little Review, with such responses as ‘more of the same’, when asked what she expected of the future, and ‘I like to look at it’, when they asked her what was her attitude to modern art. When reporters clambered aboard her ship in New York jostling for headline quotes, she responded to their questions with a far more interesting question of her own: ‘Suppose no one asked a question. What would the answer be?’31
Her love of rhetoric and mannerism aligned her more with the books she had read in the British Museum as a young woman than with those of her own generation, the Elizabethan writers like John Lyly, passages from whose Euphues she had transcribed into her notebooks back in 1903. She recognized a devotion to antithesis and contradiction, a deliberate undermining of certainties, and it was in a euphuistic spirit that she set herself stylistic constrictions and patterns and rhetorical problems throughout her life. She had tetchily tried to convey the value of her idiosyncrasy, her pluralism, her Renaissance sensibility, to her American lecture audiences: ‘“The great trouble”, she explained, “is that Americans have the idea that to understand something you must be able to immediately restate it.”’32 Stein took pleasure in open-endedness, in fact saw no other way to write or live.
She was the first to write her own life, almost incidentally becoming one of the century’s great and groundbreaking autobiographers, and there have been many since. Numerous memoirs of that heady period on the Left Bank followed hers, and most of them paid her the homage of at least a mention. Biographies began appearing with Elizabeth Sprigge’s, in 1957, which consulted Alice but of which Alice disapproved — and they continue to be written.
The papers reviewed her death using the same mixture of miscomprehension and bewildered bluster with which they had reviewed her work during life. Her obituarists praised the autobiography and suggested that the rest was nonsense, celebrated her charisma and her conversation, played up the relation with Picasso, Matisse and Hemingway. In the New York Times Toklas was described as ‘her lifelong secretary-companion’.33 Stein was bound for a long time in Wilson’s idea of her as ‘a literary personality’.34 In the end her reputation rests on her life and personality as well as on her work, and the one reputation could not really exist without the other.
One opinion of Wars I Have Seen was of Stein’s absorption in a word game while the world around her headed for catastrophe; ‘a word game that assumes no responsibility’.35 Even in the 1970s, the moral claims of Stein’s work were still disputed. Janet Hobhouse wrote in her biography of Stein, Everybody Who Was Anybody (1975) that Stein’s work is so extreme that it ‘raises the question of whether writing has the right to make such demands’.36 Such a question is implicit in the continuing marginality of much of her work, despite her fame. Perhaps no other writer has taken words to such extremes, or so flagrantly disregarded the demands of the reader, or the reader’s comfort. But that charge of irresponsibility and irrelevance was surely not deserved.
Red Grooms, Gertrude, 1975, colour lithograph and collage on paper mounted on paperboard.
She had very few sensible critics during her lifetime. By her death she was known for her one-liners, and was an easy reference point for all things avant garde. In the 1950s the eight-volume edition of the unpublished writings of Gertrude Stein was published, opening up a whole new cache of her serious writing.37 In 1970 Richard Bridgman’s Gertrude Stein in Pieces gave Stein’s readers a new narrative of her work; his explications, as much as his insistence that she was possible to explicate, lie behind much of Stein scholarship that followed. Meanwhile she was a hero for Beat poets; one should probably single out Lew Welch, who turned to writing after reading her work, and showed his gratitude in How I Read Gertrude Stein. Being a Californian, she was a special icon for the San Francisco Renaissance, both as an exponent of gay culture and of avant-garde writing. Her meanings proliferated as postmodernism grew, and in the 1970s her true glorification began, not just by biographers gilding the legend she bequeathed them, but by feminist and deconstructionist critics who found in her an early and abundantly rewarding figurehead. She was seen as part of a lineage of women writers providing an alternative to the masculine literary culture in which she worked. As many have pointed out, Stein devised her own ‘literary theory’ avant la lettre. As postmodern theory has fallen out of vogue, Stein has retained her stature, becoming other things to other readers. She is easily appropriated by factions.
Stein herself believed, insisted on pointing out, that she had been unfairly passed over, and that male modernists had taken the credit for many of her innovations. It is a moot point how far this was down to her gender, though it is true that she saw herself as occupying, and needing to occupy, a separate literary domain from her masculine contemporaries. Her misogyny has been well noted, but she wrote about women all her life and felt it necessary to state, late in her career in The Geographical History of America (referring of course to herself ) that ‘in this epoch the only real literary thinking has been done by a woman’.38 What a boon she has been for feminist literary history.
She was normally elaborately genial, if insistent, about the subject, but on one occasion allowed herself a small rejoinder, when reporters continued to ask if she could really be serious: ‘It’s not our idea of fun to work for 30 or 40 years on a medium of expression and then have it ridiculed’, she snapped.39 Stein insisted on calling The Making of Americans ‘the beginning of modern writing’.40 She believed (or at least stated) that she, an American woman, was the embodiment of the creative force of the century, as if she herself had given birth to the modern era in her writing. She was one of the first writers who wrote with the consciousness that the reader could no longer trust the writer to provide a coherent narrative of the world, and included that consciousness within what she wrote, made it an essential part of what she wrote. She faced the world with a William Jamesian agnosticism, and a passionate, rigorous individualism. In Useful Knowledge (another deliberately provocative title) she counted up to one hundred in the following manner: ‘one and one and one and one and one and one …’.
Gertrude Stein with teleprinter, 1934.
Stein’s true radical legacy lay in her insistence on showing how words and their meanings could be undone; she took it as her right that she had the freedom to use words exactly as she pleased, and in doing so she undermined the relation between words and the world, in the process flagging up the myriad problems — and perks — of describing consciousness using language. There are many reasons she was long consigned to irrelevance, not the least of which is her genuine difficulty but her work can also be a source of unique pleasure for the reader.41 Janet Flanner remembered:
A publisher once said to her, ‘We want the
comprehensible thing, the thing the public can understand.’ She said to him: ‘My work would have been no use to anyone if the public had understood me early and first.’42
Gertrude Stein in old age.
Perhaps it was because she was so fearful that she was always looking for praise. Her aphorism that ‘nobody really lives who has not been well written about’,43 though it sounds like a cocktail party aperçu, is, baldly, a desperate statement. Her own life, as she wrote it, witticisms and all, became part of her work. She believed her ‘personality’ was her work. In A Long Gay Book Stein wrote that most people stop up their fear of death by procreation, by continuing themselves in another generation of flesh and blood.44 Stein did it by writing — practically every day of her life from the age of 30 onwards. It was not wilfulness or thirst for celebrity that could make her continue experimenting in the face of ridicule and disinterest, from the 1890s to the 1940s: it was her obsession with language. Her peculiar eloquence resides in her belief that, as she wrote in a piece called ‘Woodrow Wilson’: ‘Words are shocks.’45 Her work is still extravagant in its strangeness. On her death there was already ‘The Legend of Gertrude Stein’, the legend of a life that intersected with the lives of hundreds of other writers and artists, the cultural creators of the twentieth century. She took her bows after the performance, and went back and pursued the perplexing, dark passageways of her difficult work.
As the fabled last words suggest, the important thing was never the answer, nor even the question. This succinct paradox became famous as Stein’s dying communication because it so fittingly summed up her life and work. This was precisely the indeterminate area of philosophical speculation, in the very formation of thought, that her writing probed throughout her life. There is nothing final about it. Her work was an exploration of indeterminacy, an extraordinary thing for a writer to take as a lifetime’s subject. Ever the provocateur, her final question, a questioning of all questions, is both mystical and humorous. It has the ring of a punchline — one can almost imagine Groucho Marx delivering it — and it is almost despairing, and almost resigned, but not quite: the hopeful wondering just about wins through. It’s a happy thought to imagine that she retained that ambiguity until the end, which is deliberately not an ending. Stein’s work, where it is comic, is seriously comic, in the way that her posing of that ultimate question, making it into her own last word, scripting her own death, is an epistemological jest: searching for that great twentieth-century white whale, authenticity, and knowing that it might not even exist.
Select Bibliography
Works by Stein
Three Lives (New York, 1909)
Tender Buttons (New York, 1914)
Geography and Plays (Boston, 1922)
The Making of Americans (Paris, 1925)
Composition as Explanation (London, 1926)
Useful Knowledge (New York, 1928)
Lucy Church Amiably (Paris, 1930)
Before the Flowers of Friendship Faded (Paris, 1931)
How to Write (Paris, 1931)
Operas and Plays (Paris, 1932)
Matisse Picasso and Gertrude Stein with Two Shorter Stories (Paris, 1933)
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (New York, 1933)
Four Saints in Three Acts (New York, 1934)
Portraits and Prayers (New York, 1934)
Lectures in America (New York, 1935)
Narration (Chicago, IL, 1935)
The Geographical History of America (New York, 1936)
Everybody’s Autobiography (New York, 1937)
Picasso (London, 1938)
The World Is Round (New York, 1939)
Paris France (London, 1938)
What Are Masterpieces (Los Angeles, CA, 1940)
Ida a Novel (New York, 1941)
Wars I Have Seen (New York, 1945)
Brewsie and Willie (New York, 1946)
Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, edited with an introduction and notes by Carl Van Vechten (New York, 1946)
In Savoy or Yes Is for a Very Young Man (London, 1946)
Four in America (New Haven, CT, 1947)
Blood on the Dining Room Floor (Pawlet, VT, 1948)
Last Operas and Plays (New York, 1949)
Two (Gertrude Stein and Her Brother) and Other Early Portraits (1908–1912), vol. I of Yale Edition of the Unpublished Writings of Gertrude Stein (New Haven, CT, 1951)
Mrs Reynolds and Five Earlier Novelettes (1931–1942), vol. II of Yale Edition of the Unpublished Writings of Gertrude Stein (New Haven, CT, 1952)
Bee Time Vine and Other Pieces (1913–1927), vol. III of Yale Edition of the Unpublished Writings of Gertrude Stein (New Haven, CT, 1953)
As Fine as Melanctha (1914–1930), vol. IV of Yale Edition of the Unpublished Writings of Gertrude Stein (New Haven, CT, 1954)
Painted Lace and Other Pieces (1914–1937), vol. V of Yale Edition of the Unpublished Writings of Gertrude Stein (New Haven, CT, 1955)
Stanzas in Meditation and Other Poems (1929–1933), vol. VI of Yale Edition of the Unpublished Writings of Gertrude Stein (New Haven, CT, 1956)
Alphabets and Birthdays, vol. VII of Yale Edition of the Unpublished Writings of Gertrude Stein (New Haven, CT, 1957)
A Novel of Thank You, vol. VIII of Yale Edition of the Unpublished Writings of Gertrude Stein (New Haven, CT, 1958)
Fernhurst, QED, and Other Early Writings by Gertrude Stein, ed. Leon Katz (New York, 1971)
Look At Me Now and Here I Am: Writings and Lectures 1909–45, ed. Patricia Meyerowitz (New York, 1971)
A Primer for the Gradual Understanding of Gertrude Stein, ed. Robert Bartlett Haas (Los Angeles, CA, 1971)
Reflections on the Atomic Bomb, vol. I of the Previously Uncollected Writings of Gertrude Stein (Los Angeles, CA, 1973)
How Writing Is Written, vol. II of the Previously Uncollected Writings of Gertrude Stein, ed. Robert Bartlett Haas (Los Angeles, CA, 1974)
A Stein Reader, ed. Ulla E. Dydo (Evanston, IL, 1993)
Works about Stein
Armstrong, Tim, Modernism, Technology and the Body: A Cultural Study (Cambridge, 1998)
Bay-Cheng, Sarah, Mama Dada: Gertrude Stein’s Avant-Garde Theater (New York, 2004)
Berry, Ellen E., Curved Thought and Textual Wandering: Gertrude Stein’s Postmodernism (Ann Arbor, MI, 1992)
Bloom, Harold, ed., Modern Critical Views: Gertrude Stein (New York, 1986)
Bowers, Jane Palatini, ‘They Watch Me as They Watch This’: Gertrude Stein’s Metadrama (Philadelphia, PA, 1991)
Bridgman, Richard, Gertrude Stein in Pieces (New York, 1970)
Brinnin, John Malcolm, The Third Rose: Gertrude Stein and her World (Boston, MA, 1959)
Burns, Edward, ed., ‘Gertrude Stein Issue’, Twentieth Century Literature, XXIV/1 (Spring 1978)
Caramello, Charles, Henry James, Gertrude Stein, and the Biographical Act (Chapel Hill, NC, 1996)
Chessman, Harriet Scott, The Public Is Invited to Dance: Representation, the Body, and Dialogue in Gertrude Stein (Stanford, CA, 1989)
Curnutt, Kirk, ed., The Critical Response to Gertrude Stein (Westport, CT, 2000)
Damon, Maria, The Dark End of the Street: Margins in American Vanguard Poetry (Minneapolis, MN, 1993)
––, ‘Gertrude Stein’s Jewishness, Jewish Social Scientists, and the “Jewish Question”’, Modern Fiction Studies, XLII/3 (Fall 1996), pp. 489–506
Dearborn, Mary V., ‘Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans as an Ethnic Text’, in Pocahontas’s Daughters: Gender and Ethnicity in American Culture (New York, 1986), pp. 159–93
Dekoven, Marianne, A Different Language: Gertrude Stein’s Experimental Writing (Madison, WI, 1983)
Doane, Janice, Silence and Narrative: The Early Novels of Gertrude Stein (Westport, CT, 1986)
Dydo, Ulla E., with William Rice, The Language that Rises 1923–1934 (Evanston, IL, 2003)
Fifer, Elizabeth, Rescued Readings: A Reconstruction of Gertrude Stein’s Difficult Texts (Detroit, MI, 1992)
Giroud, Vincent, Picasso and Gertrude Stein (New Haven, CT, 2006)
Hejinian, Lyn, ‘Two Stein Talks’, ‘Three Lives’ and ‘A Common Sense’, in The Language of Inquiry (Berkeley, CA, 2000)
Hobhouse, Janet, Everybody Who Was Anybody: A Biography of Gertrude Stein (New York, 1975)
Hoffman, Michael J., ed., Critical Essays on Gertrude Stein (Boston, MA, 1986)
––, The Development of Abstractionism in the Writings of Gertrude Stein (Philadelphia, PA, 1965)
––, ed., Gertrude Stein (Boston, MA, 1976)
Katz, Leon, ‘The First Making of The Making of Americans: A Study Based on Gertrude Stein’s Notebooks and Early Versions of her Novel (1902–8)’, PhD dissertation, Columbia University (1963)
Kellner, Bruce, ed., A Gertrude Stein Companion: Content with the Example (New York, 1988)
Kostelanetz, Richard, Gertrude Stein Advanced: An Anthology of Criticism (Jefferson, NC, 1990)
Malcolm, Janet, Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice (New Haven, CT, 2007)
Mellow, James R., Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company (New York, 1974)
Meyer, Steven, Irresistible Dictation: Gertrude Stein and the Correlations of Writing and Science (Stanford, CA, 2001)
Miller, Rosalind S., Gertrude Stein: Form and Intelligibility (New York, 1949); contains Stein’s college themes.
Museum of Modern Art, Four Americans in Paris: The Collections of Gertrude Stein and her Family, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York (New York, 1970)
Neuman, Shirley, Gertrude Stein: Autobiography and the Problem of Narration (Victoria, BC, 1979)
––, and Ira B. Nadel, eds, Gertrude Stein and the Making of Literature (London, 1988)
North, Michael, The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-century Literature (New York, 1994)
Perelman, Bob, The Trouble with Genius: Reading Pound, Joyce, Stein and Zukofsky (Berkeley, CA, 1994)
Perloff, Marjorie, The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (Princeton, nj, 1981)
Ryan, Betsy Alayne, Gertrude Stein’s Theatre of the Absolute (Ann Arbor, MI, 1984)