World Within The Word

by William H. Gass

  She also said: I am not I any longer when I see. Normally, as Schopenhauer first and Bergson later argued so eloquently, we see like an animal. We see prey, danger, comfort, security. Our words are tags which signify our interest: chairs, bears, sunshine, sex; each is seen in relation to our impulses, instincts, aims, in the light of our passions, and our thought about these things is governed entirely by what we consider their utility to be. Words are therefore weapons like the jaws of the crocodile or the claws of the cat. We use them to hold our thought as we hold a bone; we use them to communicate with the pack, dupe our enemies, manipulate our friends; we use them to club the living into food.

  When, for instance, we give ourselves to a piece of music—not to drink, daydream, or make love, but to listen—we literally lose ourselves, and as our consciousness is captured by the music, we are in dreamless sleep, as Hume says, and are no more. We become, in becoming music, that will-less subject of knowing of which Schopenhauer spoke so convincingly.

  Human nature is incapable of objectivity. It is viciously anthropocentric, whereas the human mind leaves all personal interest behind. It sees things as entities, not as identities. It is concerned, in the Kantian sense, with things-in-themselves. The human mind knows that men must die that others may live; one epoch go that another may take its place; that ideas, fashions, feelings, pass. The human mind neither forgets nor remembers; it neither sorrows nor longs; it never experiences fear or disappointment. In the table headed Human Nature there is, therefore, time and memory, with all their beginnings, their middles, and their ends; there is habit and identity, storms and hilly country, acting, audience, speaking and adventure, dogs and other animals, politics, propaganda, war, place, practice and its guiding truths, its directing sciences, while in the table of the Human Mind there’s contact rather than connection, plains, space, landscape, math and money, not nervousness but excitement, not saying but showing, romance rather than mystery, masterpieces moreover, and above all, Being.

  Gertrude Stein was no longer merely explaining herself. She had begun to wonder what it was inside her which had written Three Lives rather than the novels of Lew Wallace; what it was that made masterpieces. Besant’s books had sold very well and he had been admired. But he had sold to people of principally the same sort and had been read during a finger-snap of time. Masterpieces escaped both country and climate, every condition of daily life; they hurdled history; and it was not because daily life, climate, country, and history were not contents, as if in those sweetly beautiful Angelicos there were no angels. What accounted for it? in reader? writer? work? Her conclusions were not original, although their largely Kantian character is a little surprising for a student of William James and Santayana.

  It was not because she was a woman or was butch—her poodles or her Fords, her vests, her friends, her sober life, her so-called curious ways, her Jewishness, none counted. Allegheny, Pennsylvania, had nothing to do with it. Her “scientific” aim in writing The Making of Americans, her desire to define “the bottom nature” of everyone who had or could or would be living, was mistaken and had to do with human nature, not the human mind. She had gone on repeating because she thought the world did. The world did, but what the world did, did not matter. Tender Buttons was pure composition, like Cézanne, or at least one could pretend it was, but the Autobiographies and A Long Gay Book, Three Lives, The Making of Americans, many of the portraits and the plays, although they were about human nature, were fortunately written by the human mind. And it took another human mind to understand them.

  There were people who were no more than their poodles. If their little dog didn’t know them, who would they be? Like mirrors they reflected what fell into them, and when the room was empty, when the walls were removed and the stars pinched back in the sky, they were nothing, not even glass.

  Naïvely, she thought free people formed themselves in terms of an Emersonian self-reliance; she believed in the frontier, and in the ethic of the pioneer. After all she was one. Naïvely she thought that the average man, here in America, understood the spiritual significance of space, and was less a slave to human nature. Consequently here the human mind should flourish, the masterpiece emerge, the animal sleep. However, Finnegans Wake would demonstrate best the endless roundness she had in mind, and the perfect description of her ideal had long ago appeared, in 1894: Paul Valéry’s Monsieur Teste.

  Just as the order of numbers in a sum makes no difference, just as there is no special sequence to towns on a map, the mind and the masterpiece may pass back and forth between thoughts as often and as easily as trains between Detroit, Duluth, and Denver, and chapter headings are, in fact, only the names of places. Oral literature had to be sequential (like music before tape), but type made possible a reading which began at the rear, which repeated preferred passages, which skipped. As in an atlas, the order was one of convenience, and everything was flat. A geographical history rolls time out like that. Of course, there are stories still; an evening’s entertainment, that’s all human nature asks for; but masterpieces have to bear repeating and repeating. There are no surprises, no suspense, no tears, no worries in them. We know what will happen to Ahab. Duncan’s dead, and Anna’s under her train. I can tell you the page. The Wings of the Dove lies spread before us now as openly as Iowa. Literature in the eyes of the human mind is like land seen from a plane. And so is Gertrude Stein when we find her. Macbeth shall murder sleep again, Tom Jones receive a beating, Heathcliff … ah, well … “Oblige me,” she says, “by not beginning.” Netherfield Park is let at last. Mr. Gradgrind is still proceeding on the principle that two and two are four, and nothing over. Bloom is carrying a piece of soap about. The next century is approaching like a distant train. John Barth has just written Chimera, Beckett has brought out The Lost Ones, Nabokov a book called Transparent Things. And they are reissuing The Geographical History of America almost a hundred years from the author’s birthday. Oblige me, she says, “Also by not ending.”

  1 Opinions about the methods, meaning, style, purpose, nature, sources, influence, or value of Tender Buttons vary wildly, though a consensus may be slowly emerging as time passes and tempers cool. To sample the range, for both bewilderment and profit, I suggest the reader consult: Richard Bridgman, Gertrude Stein in Pieces (New York: Oxford, 1970); John Malcolm Brinnin, The Third Rose (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1959); B. L. Reid, Art by Subtraction (Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1958); Allegra Stewart, Gertrude Stein and the Present, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967); Donald Sutherland, Gertrude Stein: A Biography of Her Work (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951); and Edmund Wilson, Axel’s Castle (New York: Scribner’s, 1931). Gertrude Stein talks about her intentions in Lectures in America (New York: Random House, 1935).

  2 Anyone interested in Gertrude Stein’s attitude toward names and their relationship to the thing named should consult the Wilbur Wright and Henry James sections of Four in America (New Haven: Yale, 1947).

  3 I have chosen this one not only because it is first, but because it has been heavily commented upon. Compare the treatment in Bridgman and Stewart.

  4 “I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagraming sentences … I like the feeling the everlasting feeling of sentences as they diagram themselves. In that way one is completely possessing something and incidentally one’s self.” (“Poetry and Grammar”) These simple spatial pictures (hardly diagrams) are designed to reveal the functional rhetorical forms of her sentences.

  5 If this is what she meant, she was of course mistaken, because the principles by which Tender Buttons was composed are only narrowly understood.

  6 In LUNCH she splits an acorn: “a corn a corn yellow and green mass is a gem.” The title of the last Object, THIS IS THIS DRESS, AIDER must be read “this is distress, aid her,” among other things, as we shall see. That poem contains the phrase, “make a to let,” in which the rent sign is missing its toy. Allegra Stewart has nice notes on these. There
are innumerable others.

  7 Allegra Stewart’s essay on Tender Buttons (in Gertrude Stein and the Present), perhaps the most complete we have, not only sees the importance of the light imagery, and correctly names the central subject: purification, it also stresses the search for roots. Unfortunately she frequently pushes past the operable derivations into Sanskrit. You cannot usefully explain tomorrow’s murder by citing yesterday’s creation of the world. The encoding, the disguising, the circular imagery, which she again locates beautifully, is soon smothered in Jungian obfuscation. The neglect of surface sense also lames her account, as well as an inexplicable reluctance to spell out the sexual references. Tender Buttons is an in-private, sub-rosa, discussion of the “marriage” of Gertrude (who, after all, is “dear spear”) and Alice Toklas (probably, “child-less”).

  8 To see what happens when you don’t resort to etymology, compare the reading to follow with Harry Garvin’s in “The Human Mind and Tender Buttons,” The Widening Circle, Fall, 1973, p. 13.

  9 See Brinnin, pp. 164—65.

  10 Bridgman’s discussion of all these points is very useful. See especially Chapter 7 of Gertrude Stein in Pieces. He says, however, that “Physical passion had been virtually absent from Gertrude Stein’s work since The Making of Americans, or at least sufficiently disguised to be invisible.” I think the latter is the case.

  11 William Wasserstrom has the right gloss on this in his fine essay, “Gertrude Stein: Sursymamericubealism,” in Twentieth Century Literature, XXI, No. 1 (1975), p. 103.

  12 From Bee Time Vine. Gertrude is one of the Caesars. “Cows are very nice,” she says. “They are between legs.” See Bridgman, pp. 149—54. The connection is in any case nearly inevitable, as, for example, in Cummings’s famous “anyone lived in a pretty how town.”

  13 Allegra Stewart flails away at this passage, mentioning every Jack she can think of but missing Jill, and because she does not play her jacks on the page, misses the scatological and sexual connotations. The poem, consequently, does not come apart for her.

  14 Edmund Wilson, The Shores of Light (New York: Farrar, Straus & Young, 1952), p. 581. I also came to that conclusion in 1958. See “Gertrude Stein: Her Escape from Protective Language,” in Fiction and the Figures of Life (New York: Knopf, 1970).

  15 Wilson couldn’t find much evidence of it when he read Two: Gertrude Stein and Her Brother, after it had been posthumously published by Yale, so he ascribed the extremely abstract quality of that work to “an increasing remoteness in her personal relationships.” The subject naturally led her already dry style into mathematical meditations (“If one is one and one is not one of the two then one is one …”) which were transparently about the position of the self in a family of two. James Mellow points out that Wilson must have missed the portrait in that volume called “Men,” which is very obviously about homosexual behavior. The Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein & Company (New York: Praeger, 1974), p. 134. Two was written at about the same time as Tender Buttons (which hid its luridity under a bushel but was nevertheless lurid enough to require the basket), and was concerned about the cementing of her relationship with Miss Toklas as well as the breakup of the one with her brother. The subject was full of potentially dangerous material. Leo, who had served as a father replacement, was replaced in turn by Gertrude herself, who, as husband to Alice, became her own father figure. If the appropriate joke about the women’s movement is that it needs a good man to direct it, the attitude of Gertrude Stein was that although the male role was the one worth playing, the only good man was a woman.

  16 Watch out for unattached flattering floozies.

  Three Photos of Colette

  First

  PhotoThere is a much-folded photograph reproduced in Yvonne Mitchell’s charming and richly illustrated biography of Colette which shows Monsieur Willy and his wife at lonely table.1 A white rail of the sort you might find in a baroque church divides the dining room from the rest of the apartment. This rail passes in front of us, opening only to provide an entrance to the space, and we can easily imagine taking a rising or descending step toward the chalk-white cloth, which, in the photograph, advances to occupy the railing’s compositional place; but whether the step should be up or down, it is difficult, and even undesirable, to say.

  Colette was always able to project an expressive image upon the photographer’s plate, just as her own style gave the objects it described a lively face: the grass snake coiled like a snail shell by her hand or the heath spiders she says are pink and round as pearls; indeed, the quality of every quality, the rhythm of every contour, is rendered as by a composer, so that, with the immediacy of music and thus as suddenly as Marguerite is brought before Faust by the magic of Mephistopheles, we are seated in a country schoolroom in company with Claudine or on the big embarrassed bed of her girlfriend, Luce, who has fallen from the provinces to Paris like the fruit she chews, and now serves her fat “uncle” in return for silks. The camera, too, has brought us to a flat on the rue de Courcelles, and put us in front of this frozen tableau, the gray domestic world of women: full of cosmetics and clutter, yet ordered and empty, expensively utensiled, but patently futile, noisy and corseted and fussy, deathly still.

  To the right on that white rail squats a cut-glass decanter which appears nevertheless to contain a candle, and on the left rests a large, probably brass, bell. Two half-full Burgundy bottles, well-corked, clearly white and red, flank Willy’s plate. He is eating fruit, and a basket of apples draped with grapes sits on the table in front of him. A Persian rug embarrasses the edges of the luncheon linen like a poorly fitting petticoat. When the meal is removed (… the bell does not look rung, though perhaps once it rang …), the rug remains to enliven the table top and disguise its scars.

  It is a long way from the much-loved landscape of Colette’s childhood, the woods which she described in perhaps the first pages she ever wrote:

  No small creatures in those great woods; no tall grasses; but beaten earth, now dry, and sonorous, now soft on account of the springs. Rabbits with white scuts range through them and timid deer who run so fast that you can only guess their passage. Great heavy pheasants too, red and golden, and wild boars (I’ve never seen one) and wolves. I heard a wolf once, at the beginning of winter, while I was picking up beech-nuts— those nice, oily little beech-nuts that tickle your throat and make you cough. Sometimes storm-showers surprise you in those woods; you huddle under an oak that is thicker than the others and listen to the rain pattering up there as if on a roof. You’re so well-sheltered that when you come out of those depths you are quite lost and dazzled and feel ill at ease in the broad daylight.

  (Claudine at School)

  In a mirror beyond the married pair, who sit in profile to us, the room behind our backs floats like a world on water. There is a lamp, a corner cupboard like a standing corpse, and in the distance, deeply submerged, a dark frame shorelining something that looks like a boarded-up lake. I don’t see Willy’s image, though over the low mantel the mirror seems well placed to perceive him. His attention is fixed on some book we cannot see, or on perhaps a bit of biscuit, crumb of cheese, or sheaf of notes. A white collar obliterates his throat. He is absorbed, composed. He wears a dark suit and a second beard behind his ears. He is distinguished and sits well forward on the caned seat of his chair.

  Across from him, Colette is held firmly inside her clothes the way her napkin lies rolled and ringed beside her. A silk blouse, gray in the photograph as stone, grasps each wrist; a beaded collar closes about her neck; and a satin belt is cinched about her waist. To make room for her elbows and remove her life, she has pushed away a plate on which there remains the indistinct skin of a grape, and she is leaning forward now to rest her breasts on the table and her right cheek heavily on the peak of her clasped hands.

  Her stare is nowhere, and her unnaturally pale face seems fastened to her head like a mask. Above the black velvet bow in her flattened hair there is a ghostly photo of Willy, top-hatted, hanging on the
wall, while on the oriental rug at her skirt-covered feet is a white blob like a darning egg—a toy, one supposes, a ball for Toby-Chien. The creases in the photograph appear as cracks in the plaster, as broken glass, as lines of worry on the walls, ill fortune in the furniture, as judgments, omens, anger.

  Who but Willy, who adored his image and desired its presence everywhere; who had a thousand depictions of himself— including caricatures and paintings—made and printed and posted about in Paris like the herald of a social cure; who even persuaded Colette to dress herself like Polaire, the Algerian actress then playing Claudine to full loud houses, in order to enhance certain lesbian allusions, and who dared to have himself photographed standing behind his “twins” as though he were their evil Svengali, not merely their benevolent Papa; who but Willy would have posed for such a domestic picture, or permitted Colette’s unhappiness or his own indifference—their total estrangement—to be so nakedly stated? Perhaps it was his own fist which folded their images together in a kiss—a curse—when he saw more than boredom in her emptied gaze, but in addition how his young wife’s eyes had fallen like early apples onto a hard and distant interior earth.

  It is not difficult to see ourselves what the Parisian public saw and enjoyed in these novels about Claudine which Colette had written almost accidentally, first at the suggestion and then the insistence of her greedy usurious Monsieur; but what can we find in them now but Colette? for we have read Violette Leduc since then, among others, and have played all the schoolgirl games; we have had quite enough of lewd and giggling innocence, of unaimed spite and wide-open ego, of coltish spirits, silly presumption, ignorant courage, or naïve trust. Natural wit’s old hat; sweet fears, fresh hope, we’ve had instance after instance of; and the contrast between mistress and maid, cynicism and faith, the unripe and the spoiled, cannot strike us any more with tragic weight or moral force. What worms we are, like Willy, to have forsaken the fruit to cannibalize its grubs!