World Within The Word

by William H. Gass

  Identities were what you needed to cash a check or pass a border guard. Identities had neighbors, relatives, husbands, and wives. Pictures were similarly authenticated. Poems were signed. Identities were the persons hired, the books and buildings bought and sold, the famous “things,” the stars. She drew the distinction very early. In The Geographical History she would describe it as the difference between human nature and the human mind.

  Gertrude Stein liked to begin things in February. Henry James has written The Golden Bowl and it will take a war to end the century, not the mere appearance of a pair of zeros on the mileage indicator. Never mind. Although the novel as it had been known was now complete, and Gertrude has meanwhile doubled her fifteen years without appreciable effect, still there was in what was being written (Nostromo, last year; The House of Mirth, just out; and The Man of Property, forthcoming), for instance, that socially elevated tone, the orotund authorial voice, the elegant drawing-room diction, that multitude of unfunctional details like flour to thicken gravy; there were those gratuitous posturings, nonsensical descriptions, empty conversations, hollow plots, both romance and Grub Street realism; and there so often remained the necessity, as Howells complained, to write with the printer at one’s heels, therefore the need to employ suspense like a drunken chauffeur, Chapter Vs and other temporal divisions as though the author commanded an army, and all of the rest of the paraphernalia required by serialization and the monthly purchase of magazines.

  She saw how the life of the model had been conferred upon the portrait. And in the central story of Three Lives (they were still stories), she captured the feeling she wanted in words.

  All that long day, with the warm moist young spring stirring in him, Jeff Campbell worked, and thought, and beat his breast, and wandered, and spoke aloud, and was silent, and was certain, and then in doubt and then keen to surely feel, and then all sodden in him; and he walked, and he sometimes ran fast to lose himself in his rushing, and he bit his nails to pain and bleeding, and he tore his hair so that he could be sure he was really feeling, and he never could know what it was right, he now should be doing.

  The rhythms, the rhymes, the heavy monosyllabic beat, the skillful rearrangements of normal order, the carefully controlled pace, the running on, the simplicity, exactness, the passion … in the history of language no one had written like this before, and the result was as striking in its way, and as successful, as Ulysses was to be.

  Neither Three Lives nor The Making of Americans eliminated the traditional novel’s endless, morally motivated, psychological analyses, though she would manage that eventually. A Long Gay Book was begun as another investigation of the relationships between people, in this case mainly pairs, but it gradually wandered from that path into pure song. “I sing,” she said, “and I sing and the tunes I sing are what are tunes if they come and I sing. I sing I sing.” For instance:

  Wet weather, wet pen, a black old tiger skin, a shut in shout and a negro coin and the best behind and the sun to shine.

  She was readying herself for Tender Buttons. But what would never disappear from her work, despite her revolutionary zeal, was her natural American bent toward self-proclamation and her restless quest for truth—especially that, because it would cause her to render some aspects of reality with a ruthlessness rare in any writer, and at a greater risk to her art than most.

  The household balance slowly tipped. Leo became enmeshed in an oddly passionless love affair, unsuccessfully underwent analysis, and looked more and more, in Mabel Dodge’s judgment, like a suspicious old ram, while Gertrude, discovering the pleasures of “lifting belly,” developed a “laugh like a beefsteak.” Although the twentieth century had begun with Grant’s massed attacks on Lee around Cold Harbor, the nineteenth had hung on despite Gertrude’s efforts, only to expire somewhere along the Marne and in the mud of the Somme; but centuries don’t end in an instant or easily, sometimes only in a lifetime. The Romantic Century took a lot of killing.

  Alice Toklas came to live, to type, to correct the proof of Three Lives, which Gertrude was printing at her own expense, to manage, companion, cook, protect, while Leo at last left to fulfill his promise as a failure, taking the Matisses and the Renoirs with him, and allowing his sister finally her leeway, her chance to define herself, which she firmly, over decades, did: as an eccentric, dilettante, and gossip, madwoman, patron, genius, tutor, fraud, and queer—the Mother Goose of Montparnasse.

  2

  Buttons fasten, and because tender buttons are the buttons we unbutton and press, touch and caress to make love, we can readily see why they fasten. These extraordinary pieces of prose, which Gertrude perversely called poems, do much more than simply resemble the buttons she liked to collect and sort, though they are indeed verbal objects, and their theoretical affinity with the paintings of advanced cubism is profound. Like many of the canvases of Cézanne, Matisse, and Braque, each piece is a domestic still. They employ many of the methods of collage, too, as well as those of Dada disassociation.

  Thematically, they are composed of the implements, activities, colors and pleasures of home life, its quiet dangers, its unassertive thrills: cooking, cleaning, eating, loving, visiting, entertaining, and it is upon this base that the embossing of these buttons takes place. Plates are broken, pots and tables polished, meat sliced, food chopped, objects are repaired, arranged, contained. The highest metaphysical categories of sameness and difference, permanence and change, are invoked, as are the concerns of epistemology, of clarity and obscurity, certainty and doubt.1

  Like a cafeteria tray, Tender Buttons has three sorting sections (Objects, Food, Rooms), but it is also built with three floors, so that its true shape is a cube. Objects are things external to us, which we perceive, manipulate, and confront. Next are the things which nourish us, which we take into ourselves: information, feeling, food. Finally, there are things which enclose us as our body does our consciousness, like a lover’s arms, or as people are embraced by rooms. If the X-axis is divided as I’ve described, the Y-axis is marked off into Work, or household chores, Love, or the complicated emotional exchanges between those who spend their daily life together, and Art, or in this case, the composition of odd, brilliant, foolish, accidental, self-conscious, beautiful, confused, or whimsical sentences.

  For example, clinging to objects and dulling their glitter is dirt:

  That is, objects are either clean, so that they shine and glitter, gleam and dazzle, or like the tarnish on copper pots, the grayness of dusty glass, the dinginess of soiled pillows, they are dull and dirty, as our lives become when we are left unloved and unemployed.

  Throughout, the crucial word is change. Some processes, like cleaning and mending, are basically restorative. They remove the present in order to return to and conserve the past. Others, like sewing, decorating, and cooking, principally through operations which alter quantity (by shaping, enlarging, reducing, juxtaposing, mingling, and so on), create qualities which have not previously existed. Many times these qualities are positive, but naturally not always. In the human sphere, to which these activities are precisely proportional, similar consequences occur. Finally, both these areas are metaphorically measured against the art of writing and found to be structurally the same. Words can be moved about like furniture in their sentences; they can be diced like carrots (Stein cuts up a good number); they can be used in several different ways simultaneously, like wine; they can be brushed off, cleaned and polished; they can be ingeniously joined, like groom and bed, anxiety and bride. Every sentence is a syntactical space (a room) in which words (things, people) act (cook, clean, eat, or excrete) in order to produce quite special and very valuable qualities of feeling. Cleaning a room can be a loving or a vengeful act, a spontaneous tidying, mere routine, or a carefully planned Spring Scrub, and one’s engagement to the task can be largely mindless or intensely meant. Similarly, not a few of these buttons are as accidental as kicked stones (my typewriter writes “spoiled cushions” instead of “soiled” and I won
der whether I shouldn’t leave the phrase that way), others are painfully self-conscious and referential, as planned as a political coup, while a few seem wholly momentary whims whose consequences have been self-indulgently allowed to stand.

  Although the “poems” do not avoid nouns, as their author suggests she was trying to do, and have nice tasty titles (“SINGLE FISH,” “SAUSAGE,” “CELERY,” “VEAL”), they avoid naming. Picasso’s hermetic The Clarinet Player, for instance, painted during the same period Tender Buttons was being composed, offers no comment, visual or otherwise, on clarinet playing, players, or the skill of playing. After the motif has been analyzed into its plastic elements, these are modified and recombined according to entirely abstract schemes in which colors and forms predominate and respond solely to one another. The world is a source of suggestions, nothing more, and every successful work supersedes its model and renders the world superfluous to it.

  Yet we are already in a tangle of terminology, because Gertrude Stein was always doing “descriptions,” and she furthermore felt that naming was the special function of the poet. Tender Buttons is, she insists, a book of poems; poems are based, she claims, on the noun; and tender buttons are portraits, as she puts it, not of living people like Mabel Dodge and Sherwood Anderson, but of ordinary objects and common processes and simple spaces. Naming and not naming, describing and not describing, subject or sign: can we straighten this out?

  In the first place, nouns are full of remembrance since they represent collections of past experience, and although it may seem reasonable to encounter the present well-padded by the past, this tends to give to every meeting of bell and clapper the same dull clonk: ah, there you are again, Socrates. We cease to listen, cease to see. So we must rid ourselves of the old titles and properties, recover a tutored innocence, and then, fresh as a new-scrubbed Adam, reword the world.

  I began to wonder at at about this time just what one saw when one looked at anything really looked at anything. Did one see sound, and what was the relation between color and sound, did it make itself by description by a word that meant it or did it make itself by a word in itself …

  I became more and more excited about how words which were the words that made whatever I looked at look like itself were not the words that had in them any quality of description. This excited me very much at that time.

  (“Portraits and Repetition”)

  When she did her portraits, Gertrude Stein spent a great deal of her time listening, because each of her subjects was, as we all are, a talking machine, and of course what she listened to was in part a response to herself, to her talking. Now she wanted to stress seeing, because, of course, though frying pans speak and one might mutter to one’s knitting, objects mainly spangled space with color and reflection.

  We have bought a poodle. What shall we name it? We can, of course, confer upon it a name we idly like, and force it to conform, or we can study the beast until it says “Basket.”2 Yet the poet seeks the names of things because she loves the names. Al-ci-bi-a-des, we call out. Ai-e. Ai-e. Alcibiades.

  … you can love a name and if you love a name then saying that name any number of times only makes you love it more, more violently more persistently more tormentedly.

  (“Poetry and Grammar”)

  To denoun and undenote, then to rename, and finally to praise the old world’s raising of the new word out of the monitoring mind:

  Poetry is concerned with using with abusing, with losing with wanting, with denying with avoiding with adoring with replacing the noun. It is doing that always doing that, doing that and doing nothing but that. Poetry is doing nothing but using losing refusing and pleasing and betraying and Caressing nouns.

  (“Poetry and Grammar”)

  Suppose then that I have a carafe of wine in front of me. My aim is to peel language from it like a label, and I shall then allow these words, put in attractive proximity, to draw other senses, sounds, and sentiments, from one another. A CARAFE, THAT IS A BLIND GLASS is the name of the first Object (if these titles indeed are names),3 and we observe at once (1) that, although the Object is an occasion for these words, it is the author who accounts for their singular character; and (2) that the heading possesses a maliciously ambiguous structure. The single comma is a kind of curiosity, and only one will appear in the first sentence of text which lies beneath it. Shall we read: “A carafe, that is to say, a blind glass,” as if we were being given a definition; or shall we think of it as a carafe which happens to be a blind glass, in which case its blindness is not defining; or is it an exclamation, and should we come down hard as a hammer on ‘that’: “A carafe, wow, is that a blind glass!”? Obviously the order runs from exclamation back through accident to necessity like a wound which leaves a scar.

  The rest of the button is finished off as follows:

  A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading.

  Not every decanter is made of glass, but this is one of the glass kind. (The word ‘kind’ will reappear.) Its opaqueness makes it a cousin to the clear. Blind people wear dark glasses because they do not desire us to see they cannot see and be disconcerted by rolling pupils or the glaze of a sightless eye. Thus this glass is not made for seeing but for being seen: it is not a pair of spectacles but a spectacle. A spectacle is normally something grand and extraordinary, however here there is nothing unusual, nothing strange.

  A bruise varies in color from purple through pale green and yellow, and as it ages, fades. I cannot say directly which of these colors the glass is, but each hue is one which wine has: apple clear or straw or ruddy. The blind person’s tinted glasses signify a hurt too, and it is of course an irony when glasses are used to say that someone cannot see. Everything in a carafe flows up the neck like a pointing finger or a fountain. As we shall see. Words, as well, appear to point or fountain. Though these poems do not point, they have one. As asparagus.

  Now I (the poet, the perceiver, the namer, the praiser) reflect: not upon the Object but upon the pattern I’ve made of my words and how they space themselves, for their space is inside them, not openly disposed upon the page as poetry normally is. I notice that my verbal combinations are, on that account, unusual (I shall brag about it), and that, although they resemble nothing else which passes for poetry, they are nevertheless not without their own system and order … these sentences which form triangles, crowds, or squares, go verbless as one goes naked, or which wind around Being like a fateful spindle.4

  Gloss 1: These poems are like a wine-colored glass carafe. Their most common shape is that of a truncated hour-glass (an anticipatory interpretation).

  Gloss 2: The carafe is like a blind person’s glasses.

  So these poems are opaque containers. They have been made to fasten us through pleasure together, as indeed wine does … and most household objects and the acts which center on them: pots, pans, pillows, cooking, cleaning, love. The difference between these buttons and other swatches of language is going to deepen, she says, and there are going to be more and more of them, not only because the book will pour them out on us, but because the principles of their composition will be widely imitated.5

  The next button, GLAZED GLITTER, continues the theme of change with a first line which is immediately followed by a commentary:

  Nickel, what is nickel, it is originally rid of a cover.

  The change in that is that red weakens an hour. The change has come. There is no search. But there is, there is that hope and that interpretation and sometime, surely any is unwelcome, sometime there is breath and there will be a sinecure and charming very charming is that clean and cleansing. Certainly glittering is handsome and convincing.

  Let us attempt to answer that initial question. Responses rise like hungry fish. Many household utensils are nickel-plated because the metal they’re made of may wear, rust, redden, or otherwise become unw
holesome to use. Nickel is naturally shiny and easy to maintain (i.e., is a benefit without labor, a sinecure). Nickel has, in short, an impermeable surface, a glaze, which has a glitter.

  But had the question been: nickels, what are nickels? we might have replied: small change.

  However, if we listen intently, we shall hear inside the word two others of woeful association: ‘Nick,’ the name of the Devil himself, and ‘Hell,’ his hot location. Our license for following this procedure is, first, that Gertrude Stein regularly requests us to find other words within her words in exactly this way6; second, that a little research into the history of the term tells us that the original nickel was a German coin called Kupfernickel because, although it was a copper color, it yielded none of the metal, and for this deceit, like fool’s gold, was accused of being the devil’s ore; and third, that the lines which immediately follow, as well as all of the remaining poems, require it.

  Snuffling at roots gives us another method for finding words in words, as well as another fundamental sense of what a tender button is: a swollen, underground stem or bud, a truffle.7 That is, these poems are buds based on hidden roots. The fourth poem, A BOX, is explicit about this.

  She often permits ‘this,’ ‘there,’ ‘they,’ and ‘it’ to float free of any single reference because she wants so many. These terms are like holes in buttons through which the threads pass. And in the opening line that bewildering ‘it’ stands for all original nakedness and exposure. Stainless steel souls, one imagines, need no cleansing, no catharsis, no cover. They are the ultimate solution to the problem of sin.