World Within The Word

by William H. Gass

  The profession of letters had been wide open to women for perhaps seventy years. Many of the best-selling novelists had been and were women, just as nearly all of any novel’s readers were. If there were genders to genres, fiction would be unquestionably feminine. Swashbuckling historical romances were liked, Gothic scares, and folksy up-with-country sagas too. Irving Bacheller’s Eben Holden, a pale copy of that great success of two years before, David Harum, would still sell 250,000 copies in 1900. But above all by the turn of the century the domestic novel, in which the war on men was waged relentlessly right under their innocent noses, had become as necessary to female life as Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound.

  For some time Gertrude Stein had been absorbed, she claimed, in Shakespeare (of course), and in Wordsworth (the long dull late and densely moral poems particularly), Scott’s wonderful Waverley, which made novel reading acceptable and popular in the United States, in the clean poems of Burns, Bunyan’s allegories, Crabbe’s country …

  Fled are those times, when, in harmonious strains,

  The rustic poet prais’d his native plains …

  in Carlyle’s Frederick the Great, Fielding, Smollett, and even Lecky’s formidable Constitutional History of England: eminently heavy and respectable works of the sort I’d cite, too, if I were asked.

  Prognostications of doom were also common, and increasing. Arks were readied, mountaintops sought out. Number for some was still number: a mark on a tube was magical … a circled day … a scratch on a tree … layer in a rock. The International Date Line runs like a wall through the ocean.

  We can only guess whether the calendar had any influence on her, although later no one was to champion the new century more wholeheartedly, or attempt to identify America with modernity. The United States was the oldest country in the world, she said, because it had been in the twentieth century longer. In any case, Gertrude Stein, at age fifteen, thought frequently of death and change and time. Young girls can. She did not think about dying, which is disagreeable, even to young girls, but about death, which is luxurious, like a hot soak. The thought would appear as suddenly as moist grass in the morning, very gently, often after reading, on long reflective walks; and although it distressed her to think that there were civilizations which had perished altogether, she applauded the approaching turn. It was mostly a matter of making room. “I was there to begin to kill what was not dead, the nineteenth century which was so sure of evolution and prayers, and esperanto and their ideas,” she said. It would be a closing, as the opening of puberty had been. A lid. Her own ending, even, did not disturb her. Dissolution did—coming apart at the seams—and she had, as many do, early fears of madness, especially after reading The Cenci or attending a performance of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. She held little orgies of eating, liked to think and read of revolutions, imagined cruelties. She consumed anything, everything, as we have seen, and then complained that there was “nothing but myself to feed my own eager self, nothing given to me but musty books.”

  Scribner’s Magazine was serializing A London Life. It contained plot, customs, characters, moral issues, insight, endless analysis, a little description, and went over its chosen ground often like an elephant in mittens. There was another of those essays on the decline of the drama in a recent Harper’s. This one was quite decent really, by Brander Matthews, and in it he argued that one reason for the apparent death of the drama was the life of the novel—the present art form of the public—in particular, the immense early success of Scott’s Waverley novels. Scribner’s July issue of 1888 catches up A London Life at the beginning of Chapter V:

  “And are you telling me the perfect truth when you say that Captain Crispin was not there?”

  “The perfect truth?” Mrs. Berrington straightened herself to her height, threw back her head and measured her interlocutress up and down; this was one of the many ways in which it is to be surmised that she knew she looked very handsome indeed. Her interlocutress was her sister, and even in a discussion with a person long since under the charm she was not incapable of feeling that her beauty was a new advantage.

  In “Composition as Explanation” Gertrude Stein would argue that between generations and over time, the “only thing different … is what is seen and what is seen depends upon how everybody is doing everything.” “Everything is the same except composition.”

  She became, as she grew, increasingly unsure of who she was, a situation now so normal among the younger members of the middle class as to seem an inevitable part of middle-human development, like awkwardness and acne. Gertrude was a bit of a gawk already, aloof, cool, heavy, more and more alone. Her mother was an ineffectual invalid, gradually draining in her bed until, even before she died, she was emptied out of the world. Her father was a nuisance: stocky, determined, uneducated, domineering, quarrelsome, ambitious, notional, stern. When she was seventeen her father died, and “then our life without father began a very pleasant one.”

  Chapter V. In the old books there were chapters and verses, sections, volumes, scenes, parts, lines, divisions which had originated with the Scriptures (“chapter,” for instance, a word for the head like tête and “title”); there were sentences, paragraphs, and numbered pages to measure the beat of each heart, the course of a life, every inference of reason, and the march, as they say, of time.

  In Four in America she exposed the arbitrary conventionality of these often awkward cuts of meat.

  I begin to see how I can quiver and not quiver at like and alike.

  A great deal can be felt so.

  Volume XII

  HENRY JAMES one.

  Volume XIII

  The young James a young James was a young James a James. He might be and he might be even might be Henry James.

  Volume XIV

  Once upon a time there was no dog if there had been a dog nobody wept.

  Once upon a time there was no name and if any one had a name nobody could cover a name with a name. But nobody except somebody who had not that name wept.

  Naturally the young James did not know, with William around, that he was or would be the Henry James, and Gertrude Stein had not yet covered her name with a name. In this same book, she imagines what kind of novelist George Washington would have made. She does not fail to observe that he was born in February.

  Any autumn day is different from any summer day or any winter day.

  George Washington is pleased to come that is all who are ready are ready to rule.

  Page 7

  PLEASE do not let me wander.

  Page 8

  SHE is very sleepy. George Washington.

  She is very sleepy. The autumn scenery when seen at a distance need not necessarily be tempted by wind. They may clear skies. But not a new moon. In autumn a new moon is well advanced. And a cloud can never cover it partly or be gracious rather to like red and blue all out but you. George Washington is famous as a nation.

  Books contained tenses like closets full of clothes, but the present was the only place we were alive, and the present was like a painting, without before or after, spread to be sure, but not in time; and although, as William James had proved, the present was not absolutely flat, it was nevertheless not much thicker than pigment. Geography would be the study appropriate to it: mapping body space. The earth might be round but experience, in effect, was flat. Life might be long but living was as brief as each breath in breathing. Without a past, in the prolonged narrowness of any “now,” wasn’t everything in a constant condition of commencement? Then, too, breathing is repeating—it is beginning and rebeginning, over and over, again and again and again.

  After all, what is the breath-before-last worth?

  The youngest, she had been pampered as a baby, and she took care to be pampered all her life. “Little Gertie,” her father once wrote, “is a little schnatterer. She talks all day long and so plainly. She outdoes them all. She’s such a round little pudding, toddles around the whole day and repeats everything that’s said or done.” Yet s
he became, as she grew, increasingly unsure of who she was. Her eldest brother, soon off to college and career, seemed distant in his age, while the next, named Simon, she thought simple—as, indeed, he was. “My sister four years older simply existed for me because I had to sleep in the same room with her. It is natural not to care about a sister, certainly not when she is four years older and grinds her teeth at night.”

  She loved her brother, Leo, but she had no trust of men. It becomes a central theme. “Menace” was the word they went around in. Still, she and Leo were invariably “two together two,” although Leo always led, and when Leo went to Harvard, Gertrude later came to Radcliffe, and when Leo began to study biology at Johns Hopkins, a regular tag-along, Gertrude enrolled in medicine there, and when her brother went to Italy finally, she soon abandoned her studies to join him. They were together for a while in London, shared a flat in Paris, gathered paintings almost by not moving, like dust.

  She shared something else with this brother, something deeply significant, something fundamental: an accidental life. When they thought about it, Gertrude said, it made them feel funny. The Steins had planned on having five children, and then, efficiently, had had them. However, two of these children died early enough they never “counted,” and this made room for Leo, first, and then for Gertrude, so that when, at the beginning of The Geographical History of America, she writes: “If nobody had to die how would there be room enough for any of us who now live to have lived,” she is not merely paraphrasing Hume’s famous reply to Boswell, who, as the philosopher lay becalmed on his deathbed, injudiciously asked if it was not possible that there might be a future state: “It is also possible that a piece of coal put on the fire will not burn,” Hume answered, meanly remaining in the realm of matter. “That men should exist forever is a most unreasonable fancy.… The trash of every age must then be preserved and new Universes must be created to contain such infinite numbers.”

  I do not believe she had any knowledge of Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier hypothesis, but her understanding of American history was based on something very like it: “In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is.” There is no question that she, like Turner, thought human behavior was in great part a function of the amount of free land available. On the frontier, Turner believed, civilization was regularly being reborn. When westward the course of empire no longer took its way, Americans moved “in” and went east to Paris in order to go west within the mind—a land like their own without time. And Gertrude Stein believed Americans were readier than Europeans, consequently, to be the new cultural pioneers. The mind … The human mind went on like the prairie, on and on without limit.

  It is characteristic of her method by and large that every general thought find exact expression in the language of her own life; that every general thought in fact be the outcome of a repeated consideration of solidly concrete cases—both wholly particular and thoroughly personal—and further, that these occasions be examined, always, in the precise form of their original occurrence, in which, then, they continue to be contained as if they were parts of a sacred text that cannot be tampered with substantially, only slightly rearranged, as a musician might lengthen the vowels slightly or repeat the words of a lyric to compose a song, skip a little now and then, or call for an extensive reprise. “I was there to begin to kill what was not dead.… ”

  And what is Mrs. Berrington doing as we come to the end of this month’s episode?

  “Where are you going—where are you going—where are you going?” Laura broke out.

  The carriages moved on, to set them down, and while the footman was getting off the box Selina said: “I don’t pretend to be better than other women, but you do!” And being on the side of the house, she quickly stepped out and carried her crowned brilliancy through the long-lingering daylight and into the open portals.

  (To be continued.)

  Much must go, however good, for Gertrude Stein to be. A place must be made. But much of Gertrude Stein would have to be subtracted once she discovered who she was.

  Born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania. It does seem unlikely, but in American letters the unlikely is not unusual: Hart Crane came from Garretsville, Ohio; Pound was born in Idaho; neither Michigan nor Mississippi has any prima facie promise; Wallace Stevens saw exquisite light in Reading; Katherine Anne Porter in Indian Creek, Texas; Edward Arlington Robinson in Tide Head, Maine; and for T. S. Eliot even St. Louis is odd. They mostly moved anyway. Who thinks of Robert Frost as a tyke in San Francisco? And the Steins left almost immediately for Vienna, where her father hoped that family connections there might help him in his wool business. He really did write back that little Gertie “toddles around the whole day and repeats everything that’s said or done.” After a period in Paris, the Steins returned to Baltimore, but soon they swapped houses, climates, coasts again, and crossed the country to live in Oakland, California, where Gertrude’s father became successfully connected with, for god’s sake, a cable railway company.

  To be hoist up a hill. And with certain exceptions modern American writing has been overwhelmed by space: rootlessness, we often say, that’s our illness, and we are right; we’re sick of changing house, of moving, of cutting loose, of living in vans and riding cycles, of using up and getting on (that’s how we age), until sometimes one feels there’s nothing but geography in this country, and certainly a geographical history is the only kind it can significantly have; so that the strange thing is that generally those years which both Freud and the Roman Catholic Church find crucial to our character are seldom connected to the trunk, except perhaps as decals: memorials of Mammoth Cave, ads for Herold’s Club. Well, what’s the point of being born in Oak Park if you’re going to kill yourself in Ketchum? Our history simply became “the West” where time and life went. So what’s the point in St. Paul if you are going to die in Hollywood of an alcoholic heart? Like Henry James we developed an enlarged sense of locale, but we were tourists. And Gertrude Stein lived in hotels, shops, trains, rented rooms, at aunts’, with friends, in flats, with chums, and grew up with her books, her body, and her brother—nothing more, and no one else.

  Of course, you could say that democracies have never had a history; that they cannot run in place; they must expand; they must have space. In New England, in the South, life went sometimes in another direction, and it was, naturally enough, one of the lures of Europe: to be in the presence of people who had lived for a long time alongside things and other people who had been allowed to live for a long time alongside them; consequently to observe objects and relations come into being, alter, age, fade, disappear, and to see that process rather constantly; to feel in things one’s own use of them—like old clothes, maybe, streets, shops, castles, churches, mills—as one’s own person felt one’s self—in hills, paths, lakes, fields, creeks—since we seldom gawk at our own changes as though passing by on a bus, but learn to live them with the unconscious ease which daily life and custom gradually confer, like the wear of water and the growth of grass; still Gertrude Stein blew “the American trumpet as though it were the whole of Sousa’s band” and always spoke European brokenly; she was perhaps the last of our serious writers to, in the square sense, love her country, and she moved her writing even through her own enthusiasms (Henry James and Richardson and Eliot), as painfully as through a thicket, straight into the present where it became, in every sense of this she understood, “American” and “measureless.”

  But not in a moment was this accomplished. In a life. The resolution required would be heroic. Shortly after she began living in Paris with her brother, she completed a manuscript which was not published for nearly fifty years: a curiously wooden work of relentless and mostly tiresome psychological analysis which she called, with crushing candor, Quod Erat Demonstrandum. However, in this brief novel about the personal relationships between three depersonalized paper women, plotted as a triangle on which the lines are traveled like a tramway, the points incessantly intersected
—in which, though much is shown, nothing’s proved, and everyone is exhausted—Gertrude Stein’s sexual problem surfaces. Clearly, she has had a kind of love affair with another woman. Clearly, too, the circumstances of her life were now combining against her, compelling her to rely more and more upon a self she did not have. She lacked a locale which might help to define her and a family she could in general accept; she had grown into a hulksome female and become a bluestocking, yet she remained professionless and idle; in fact, she was a follower at present, fruit fly, gnat, silent in front of Leo while he lectured to their friends on his latest fads and finds: she was a faithless Jew, a coupon clipper, exile anyhow, and in addition, she was desperately uncertain of her own sexuality. The problem of personal identity, which is triumphantly overcome in The Geographical History, would occupy her henceforth, particularly in the most ambitious work of her career, The Making of Americans.

  Furthermore her brother was beginning to ridicule her writing.

  Still she listened to Leo; she looked at Cézanne; she translated Flaubert; and this subordination of ear, eye, and mind eventually released her, because Flaubert and Cézanne taught the same lesson; and as she examined the master’s portrait of his wife, she realized that the reality of the model had been superseded by the reality of the composition. Everything in the painting was related to everything else in the painting, and to everything else equally (there were no lesser marks or moments), while the relation of any line or area of color in the painting to anything outside the painting (to a person in this case) was accidental, superfluous, illusory. The picture was of Mme. Cézanne. It had been painted by her husband. It was owned by the Steins. Thus the picture had an identity. But the painting was an entity. So a breast was no more important than a button, gray patch, or green line. Breasts might be more important than buttons to a vulgar observer, but in biology, where a mouse and a man were equal, in art, in our experience of how things are presented to us in any present moment, in mathematics—indeed, in any real whole or well-ordered system—there was a wonderful and democratic equality of value and function. There was, she said, no “up” in American religion either, no hierarchy, no ranking of dominions and powers.