World Within The Word

by William H. Gass

  When we try to grasp the significance of these truly peculiar pieces, it helps to remember that their composition was stimulated by a trip Gertrude and Alice made to Spain in 1912; that Robert W. Service brought out Rhymes of a Rolling Stone the same year; that Gertrude’s household was breaking up and her affections had been rearranged; that not a line of Joyce or Eliot had appeared, though there’d been some Pound and a little of the greater Yeats; that Havelock Ellis had been arguing for the equality of women with great reasonableness and little effect, though the suffragettes were out in strength; that Rilke’s thing-poems, in print, quite miraculous, quite beautiful, quite other, were in effect as invisible as the spirit of the vagina’d Spanish saints, although everywhere both writers saw sanctity’s black battledress and the southern region’s austere landscape redolent with renunciation like a vine; that in fifteen years The Well of Loneliness, genteel, inept, and as unlibidinous as beets, will still cause a scandal; that the Dadaists haven’t uttered their first da yet, let alone their second; that a play can be driven from the boards because it shows one woman giving another a bunch of violets, and that when Colette kissed Missy on the mouth in one such there was a howl of rage; that in those Andalusian towns where Jewish, Muslim, and Catholic cultures came together with a crash, their ignorant collision created buildings—rather than rubble—whose elastic functions, dubious faith, and confusing beauty, were nearly proofs, even to a Jew, of a triune god; that people in the United States are really reading Rex Beach or James Oliver Curwood; and that only Apollinaire might have preceded her in her aims, a few methods, and some effects.

  Words, of course, were tender buttons, to be sorted and played with, admired and arranged, and she felt that language in English literature had become increasingly stiff and resistant, and that words had to be pried out of their formulas, freed, and allowed to regain their former Elizabethan fluidity,9 but it is now evident, I think, that she had other motives, indeed the same ones which had driven her into writing in the first place: the search for and discovery of Gertrude Stein, and the recording of her daily life, her thoughts, her passions.10

  One does not need to speak in code of Adam and Eve, though if you are going to take Eve’s side against the serpent, God, and Adam—all—you had better begin to dip your tongue in honey; but what about the pleasures of cunnilingus or the dildo, of what she was later, as she grew more frank, to call “lifting belly”? Even Natalie Barney was less bold in print than in the dalliance and dance and undress of her notorious salons. And Gertrude had Alice to contend with, a reader who was not as eager as she was to see their intimacies in print, and who could coldly withhold her favors if she chose.

  This must not be put in a book.

  Why not.

  Because it mustn’t.

  Yes sir.

  (“Bonne Annee”, in Geography and Plays)

  She might have to disguise it, but she was damn well going to write about it: “Suppose a collapse in rubbed purr, in rubbed purr get,” for instance, a line which explodes, upon the gentlest inspection, into a dozen sexual pieces. There is ‘suppose,’ which means to place under, followed by the neck and lap of ‘collapse,’ which contains the French ‘col,’ of course (the next line begins, “Little sales ladies …” a phrase I construe as “little dirty girls”). ‘Collapse’ also yields the root, to fall (sin) together, immediately after which we must deal with ‘rub,’ ‘purr,’ ‘get in bed,’ ‘rub her,’ ‘rubber,’ and Gertrude’s pet name for Alice, which was Pussy.

  Here is the third to last button in the box labeled Objects:

  PEELED PENCIL, CHOKE

  Rub her coke.

  Remember those paper pencils you sharpened by peeling? Don’t Jews do the same to the penis? Oral sex with such will make you choke. Certainly the writing instrument is one of Stein’s household gods, as Penates are, gods of our most interior and secret parts. It’s what we reach when we peel off the leaves of an artichoke: the hairy center. But isn’t this a joke? The pencil has an eraser and a graphite core. A woman’s core is her clitoris, which one rubs to please her. With what? a rubber cock. It is a joke.11

  Let’s push the culminating button and see what buzzes.

  THIS IS THIS DRESS, AIDER

  Aider, why aider why whow, whow stop touch, aider whow, aider stop the muncher, muncher munchers.

  A jack in kill her, a jack in, makes a meadowed king, makes a to let.

  This poem contrasts male and female love-making. There is disgust for the former, joy in the latter. The word ‘aider’ is not only a sound shadow for aid her and a muffled form of ‘Ada,’ one of Gertrude’s code names for Alice, it is also the original Old French root, meaning to give pleasure to. I have already claimed that we must read the title as THIS IS DISTRESS, AID HER, but the distress is partly explained by the twice-hidden ‘his,’ by the fact that ‘distress,’ itself, gives us ‘strain,’ which immediately yields ‘stretch,’ as in the various expansions consequent to begetting. ‘Dress,’ in turn, has its roots in the Latin directus and the French drecier, and these extend toward ‘make straight,’ or ‘put in proper position,’ ‘prick up.’ Hence, we have (1) Ada, help me take off this dress (dis dress), and give me pleasure, for I am in sexual need, and (2) it is his doing, this stress and strain of begetting, save her from him. In short, Gertrude is to save Alice from men, while Alice is to save Gertrude from sexual want. In this passage, the square-off of male vs. female, and the balance of pleasure and pain with rescue and reward, is perfect.

  Stein now imitates, perhaps too predictably, the stop/don’t stop alternation of sexual excitement, but this allows her, at the same time, to render the resistance of the female and the painfulness of male penetration.

  (1) Ada, why what are you doing? wow, how, wow, stop, oh touch, Ada, wow, Ada stop … and Ada, of course, is grazing, a cunnilingual metaphor.

  (2) Help, help, ow, ow stop ouch, help, ow, stop the muncher …

  (3) Aid her. Why aid her? how to stop the touching and help her, how?

  The relation of ‘how’ and ‘cow’ (hence ‘munch’ and ‘meadowed king’) is not infrequent in Gertrude Stein. “A Sonatina” (written in 1921) is only one poem which makes the connection explicit:

  A fig an apple and some grapes makes a cow. How. The Caesars know how. Now.12

  A similar ambivalence governs the construction of the final sentence. Shadowing ‘A jack in kill her’ are at least three other Jacks: Jack the Giant Killer, Jack and Jill, and Jack in the Box.13 Jack is normally any male, a knave, a jakes or John, and a penis, both real and artificial, while ‘a jack in’ imitates the pump and rock of sexual stimulation. The dildo imagery, which some readers may wish to resist, becomes increasingly explicit. For instance, in “A Sonatina” again:

  Do you remember that a pump can pump other things than water … Yes tenderness grows and it grows where it grows. And do you like it. Yes you do. And does it fill a cow full of filling. Yes. And where does it come out of. It comes out of the way of the Caesars.

  So: (1) if a man gets hold of her, he can kill her as a consequence of rape or pregnancy, to say nothing of the pain, the shame and humiliation. When Jack and Jill go up the hill together, Jack falls down and breaks his crown, but Jill comes tumbling after. Men merely rent the body anyway, and make the woman a toilet for their secretions; (2) when there is a dildo in her, however, she will know pleasure (die), and this jack will kill the giant one, and let in instead the meadowed king (the bull). ‘Let,’ which means both permit and hinder, perfectly represents the alternating currents here. The same toy and toying sound which seduces Ada pleasantly when she is mastered by the meadowed king, would turn her into a toilet bowl if she were jacked by a man.

  Strong stuff. Not a joke.

  In 1951 Edmund Wilson conjectured

  … that the vagueness that began to blur [Gertrude Stein’s writing] from about 1910 on and the masking by unexplained metaphors that later made it seem opaque, though partly the result of an effort to emulate moder
n painting, were partly also due to a need imposed by the problem of writing about relationships between women of a kind that the standards of the era would not have allowed her to describe more explicitly. It seemed obvious that her queer little portraits and her mischievously baffling prose-poems did often deal with subjects of this sort …14

  but he later felt he might have overestimated the motive of sexual concealment.15 If the reading I have given the Object section of Tender Buttons is even somewhat sound, however, Wilson will have been right the first time.

  Evasiveness, of course, becomes a habit, a style, a method which overreaches its original excuse and must seek another justification, just as the quadriplegic, who must paint with his teeth, will eventually find reasons why the bite is superior to the squeeze. Although, in a few works—the popular public ones like Alice’s and Everybody’s autobiographies, Brewsie and Willie, and Wars I Have Seen—Stein’s style is as simple and open and even giddy as we might imagine the letters of a young girl to be, much of her work is written, like Tender Buttons, in a kind of code, even when, as in How to Write, the subject does not appear to require it; and there is no question whatever that the coding dangerously confounds the surface; for even if a passage effects a concealment, as when a body is covered by clothing, from the artistic point of view, those clothes had better dazzle us as much as the truth would, unless the concealment is only gestural and temporary, and we are expected to penetrate it at once, because the object of art is to make more beautiful that which is, and since that which is is rarely beautiful, often awkward and ugly and ill-arranged, it must be sometimes sheeted like a corpse, or dissolved into its elements and put together afresh, aright, and originally. Stein is painfully aware of the problem. Coming clean is best. “Certainly glittering is handsome and convincing.”

  The manifest text of Tender Buttons is only one segment of its total textual surface. That CHOKE is ‘joke’ is a surface phenomenon, as is AIDER’s ‘aid her.’ In a swirl of lines a horse’s head may be hidden, some clouds do in fact look dragonish, and a drawing may turn itself inside out before our very eyes; thus ‘get in bed’ lies disguised in ‘rubbed purr get,’ and an unseen ‘i’ will fit between the words ‘to let.’ The problem is that in Tender Buttons the unconcealed surface usually makes no sense. AIDER, for instance, is not an active English verb, and might as well be a word in the Wake or in “Jabberwocky.” Occasionally, instead of the word being wounded, the syntax will be: “Please a round it is ticket.” Most often, however, the confusion in the surface is semantic. “This is no authority for the abuse of cheese,” she will suddenly say severely, and we think we are listening to the Red Queen. “Suspect a single buttered flower,” we are warned, but what is the warning?16 In contrast, the other segments of the surface are usually fairly clear. “Aid her” is plainly what we are being asked to do.

  Some covert texts are hidden like the purloined letter, others are concealed the way the family portrait hides the safe, still others the way the safe contains its money. That ‘color’ is a cover, or that ‘cow’ is cunt or that ‘a white way of being round’ refers to immaculate conception, is nothing that can be read directly off the page. Since many of the meanings of Tender Buttons are etymological, the covert text can be said to be sometimes inside the surface text. We have only to enter the word on these occasions. However, the idea that the innocent dust which makes up Adam and Eve is a ‘blind glass’ can be safely said to lie beneath its covering phrase.

  We are familiar with the before and after of words and sentences because that is the way they are read and written, but now we must learn to diagram them differently.

  The manifest surface of A BOX is represented by the idea, container. There is a covert surface, too, that of contest or blow. Each such covert text adds to the width of the surface, just as its length is determined by the basic unity of the verbal series chosen for examination (A BOX, in this case, rather than merely BOX). In this example, we have a surface two words long and two texts wide. Inside A BOX is its root, ‘tree.’ Behind it is the slang meaning, womb or vagina. Pandora is beneath, while hovering above, though not like an angel, is its characterization as the label of a button. Because A BOX is set up as a title, it has no immediate before or after; there is to be imagined, before the opening of each book, an endless preceding silence, just as an equally endless one follows its close; but these are the silences of one text alone, not the quiet of all texts, for the whole of literature surrounds every work like water.

  Here, then, is a notable explosion of language out of time into space. Although the button which follows A BOX makes sense, and is even funny (if the labor of reaching the punch line does not itself supply the reel which should result), it is, by and large, without the swift sensuous intake which is essential, since our response, as readers, must always run even with, if not ahead of, understanding. Basically, our knowledge of a poem serves simply to explain why we were shaken. It will never, alone, do the shaking.

  In Tender Buttons the conflict between concealment and expression is especially intense. This kind of contest can sometimes lead to the most beautiful and powerful of consequences, so long as the victory of concealment remains incomplete, so long as the drapery leads us to dream and desire and demand the body we know it covers, so long as passion speaks through rectitude, so long as impulse laughs with the lips of duty. We can, of course, rip the clothing off anyway, as I have; but it is the promise of the nipple through the slip, the tender button, which matters to us here, and is the actual action of art; it is the hint of the hollow which holds us, and the way a stone arm encircles nothing but atmosphere so lovingly we want to believe in our being there, also surrounded, and only then as alive in our life as that stone.

  “Celery tastes tastes where” (she asks) “in curled lashes and little bits and mostly in remains.” It is a careful observation. “A cup is neglected in being full of size.” It is a rich saying. Many of these buttons are as tender as tusks, but Gertrude Stein also wrote densely and brilliantly and beautifully and perversely and with intense contrivance and deep care and a skill which no one could recognize. In the Food section, for instance, there are passages like this one which escapes through honkytonk and even Blake into true feeling:

  Lovely snipe and tender turn, excellent vapor and slender butter, all the splinter and the trunk, all the poisonous darkening drunk, all the joy in weak success, all the joyful tenderness, all the section and the tea, all the stouter symmetry.

  Or consider this extraordinary conclusion to ROASTBEEF, a passage which only she could have written, at first glance on a commonplace theme (the cycle of the seasons), yet as dense and transformational as fog, and like a chant in Latin, lovely before, during, and long after, comprehension.

  There is coagulation in cold and there is none in prudence. Something is preserved and the evening is long and the colder spring has sudden shadows in a sun. All the stain is tender and lilacs really lilacs are disturbed. Why is the perfect reestablishment practiced and prized, why is it composed. The result the pure result is juice and size and baking and exhibition and nonchalance and sacrifice and volume and a section in division and the surrounding recognition and horticulture and no murmur. This is a result. There is no superposition and circumstance, there is hardness and a reason and the rest and remainder. There is no delight and no mathematics.

  3

  I write for myself and strangers. The strangers would go—eventually, even the self.

  It took many years; she had to bring out most of her books herself; usually they appeared long after they’d been written, in silence, to indifference, incomprehension, jeers; but in time there were too many strangers: curiosity seekers, sycophants, opportunists, disciples. She hugely enjoyed her growing celebrity, but she noticed what she thought was a change in herself, and she began, vaguely, to be alarmed. In 1933 The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas was published in the U.S.A. with great success, portions of it appearing in The Atlantic Monthly. Suddenly there was mo
ney she had earned. Three Lives went into the Modern Library. She was nearing sixty, 4 X her 15 yrs. It seemed like a good time to go back.

  Gertrude Stein would return to the United States like a lion, she said, and word of her arrival did run in lights around the Times Building, reporters met her boat and filled twelve columns of the city papers with news and mostly friendly comment about her.

  … we saw an electric sign moving around a building and it said Gertrude Stein has come and that was upsetting … I like it to happen … but always it does give me a little shock of recognition and non-recognition. It is one of the things most worrying in the subject of identity.

  She had come home but, although she was recognized in the streets of New York by strangers, she could not find again the San Francisco of her childhood.

  … it was frightening quite frightening driving there and on top of Nob Hill where we were to stay, of course it had not been like that and yet it was like that, Alice Toklas found it natural but for me it was a trouble yes it was …

  Along with the face of Gracie Allen, she was caricatured by Covarrubias in Vogue; in Chicago she had a chance to see her own Four Saints in Three Acts; at Princeton police were used to hold back the crowd which came to hear her lecture. “Americans really want to make you happy.” And she would plunge into traffic with a child’s trusting unconcern. “All these people, including the nice taxi drivers, recognize and are careful of me.”

  Queerly companioned and oddly dressed, deep-voiced, direct, she loved being a celebrity and was consequently charming, her autograph was sought, and she and Alice met old friends, publishers, passers-by and tradesmen, students, journalists, teachers, many who were rich and famous from all parts of a country they were both seeing from the air for the first time, the mountains subsiding like a fountain, the desert like a waterless floor of the sea, the whole land lying in lines which Masson, Braque, or Picasso might have drawn. She saw the same flatness, after so much European brick and tile, in the wooden buildings of America, but it was the map in the air which delighted her most because it taught her what the human mind was capable of: flying without wings, seeing without eyes, knowing without evident data. Yet in East Oakland, on the shabby streets where she had played as a child, experience proved empty. What is the point of being born a little girl if you are going to grow up to be a man?