Literature
Art
Life

The Radical Gertrude Stein (1996)

Though Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) died more than a half-century ago, her books have survived her; so that even those published at her own expense, such as The Making of Americans (1924) or Geography and Plays (1922) are being reprinted in the 1990s, just as they were offset in the 1960s. Though she has never been a popular writer in the tradition of her sometime protégé Ernest Hemingway, she is customarily ranked among the greatest literary inventors, whose best writings still seem very, very contemporary. Indeed, it is hard for a reader today to believe that Stein, born near Pittsburgh in 1874, belongs by birth to the generation of Theodore Dreiser (b. 1871), Stephen Crane (b. 1871), and H. L. Mencken (b. 1880).

Back in 1926, she wrote, in her inimitable style, “For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in arts and literature the rapidity of change is always startling. Now the only difficulty with the volte face concerning the arts is this: When the acceptance comes, by that acceptance the thing created becomes a classic.” She continued, “And what is the characteristic quality of a classic. The characteristic quality of a classic is that it is beautiful. . . . Of course it is beautiful but first all beauty in it is denied and then all the beauty of it is accepted.” In her familiarity with the career of avant-garde art, Stein implicitly predicted that her own much-scorned scribblings would be eventually regarded as beautiful and, yes, classic.

It is common to divide Stein’s books into two classes—the simple ones and the more difficult ones—although these terms are too simplistic to provided much critical insight. The “simple” ones are those enjoyed by moderately sophisticated readers of realistic fiction—not only Three Lives (1909) and Q.E.D. (1950, but written nearly a half-century earlier) but such memoirs as The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), Everybody’s Autobiography (1937), Paris, France (1941), and Wars I Have Seen (1945). Quite simply, nearly everything written between “Three Lives” and Toklas can be considered difficult. Indicatively, most were self-published, not only during her lifetime but after her death by the Yale University Press. (A selection from the latter is my own The Yale Gertrude Stein [1980], whose few remaining copies can sometimes be found in Barnes & Noble.)

Early in her career, Stein assimilated a primary strategy of experimental art—doing the opposite of convention. If most writers strive for variety in expression, she repeated certain words and phrases in numerous slightly differing clauses. (“It is not all repetition,” she once told a reporter. “I always change the words a little.”) If literate writers customarily strive to display a rich vocabulary, along with allusions and other literary connotations, she confined herself to common words and their immediate meanings. She avoided myth and most kinds of metaphor. In lieu of balanced sentences, she decided to explore imbalance. Instead of instilling emotion through rhetoric and flowery language, she kept her prose generally free of adjectives and adverbs. Typically, she eschewed not only the naturalism then fashionable in fiction writing but the symbolism favored by French poets. As an American individualist, she was neither a Surrealist nor a Dadaist, neither a Futurist nor a Constructivist, to cite several European terms that are erroneously applied to her work. Always, Gertrude Stein was something else.

Essentially, she was a literary inventor who reworked many dimensions of creative literature. She was continually shifting the order of words so that the syntactical parts of a sentence fall in unusual places. Adverbs that conventionally come after their verbs now appear before; ditto with prepositional phrases. The object of a clause becomes the subject (i.e., “the ink write it down”) and both adjectives and prepositions have ambiguous references. Some parts of speech are omitted, while others are duplicated. Some of her sentences are unusually short, while others are alarmingly long. From sentences of every length she customarily removed all internal punctuation, thus increasing the possibility of ambiguous comprehension; and she favored participles as well, in part to create a sense of interminable continuity.

Texts often have no apparent relation to their titles or subtitles, even though the rhythm of the words or their taste (especially if read aloud) relates to the experience of that subject. “Custard,” for instance, never mentions food but evokes a sensual experience that “has mellow, real mellow.” She wrote prose in which adjacent words have minimal syntactic or semantic relation to each other: “Lily wet lily wet while. This is so pink so pink so pink in stammer, a long bean which shows bows is collected by a single curly shady, shady get, get set wet bet.” Especially if this passage is read aloud, one can hear unities in diction, rhythm, and alliteration, as well as coherences in more subtle qualities like timbre, density, and other non-syntactic kinds of relatedness.

What she was approaching was scrupulously nonrepresentational prose—language that is intended to be appreciated simply as language, apart from anything else. One principle to remember is that reading Stein is the best preparation for reading more Stein, for nobody teaches readers how to read Stein better than Stein herself. Thanks to her experimental attitude toward the mechanics of prose, she created not one original style but a succession of styles, all of which are highly personal and thus eventually inimitable. What all her departures ultimately accomplish is a reinvention of English.

What she also did was recapitulate in language the history of modernist painting. Her initial scrambling of syntax could be considered an appropriate literary analogy for painterly cubism, which likewise scrambled the viewer’s perspective upon an identifiable subject. As in painting, such techniques not only distort the representation of worldly reality but they also flatten the work’s form (by diffusing the traditional ways of focusing its space and time). As cubism brought the reorganization of visual space, so Stein reorganized the frame of literature. Another analogy is the history of atonal music, as composers who avoided the tonics and dominants of classical harmony found other ways of organizing musical sound. All these developments gave mediumistic qualities more prominence than they had before. Just as cubist painting forces the viewer to pay closer attention to two-dimensional composition, so Stein’s sentences always call attention to themselves as language. Like the modernist painters, Stein was interested not in new ideas and new subjects but new perspectives, new perceptions, and new formal possibilities. What you read is most of what there is.

Perhaps because Gertrude Stein did not proclaim her Jewishness, she is rarely mentioned in most histories of Jewish-American writers and never included in the anthologies parading that epithet. The publicists for Jewish-American writing scarcely acknowledge her, perhaps because, unlike their favorites, her origins were old German, rather than Eastern European; she was educated at Harvard and Hopkins, rather than, say, Chicago, Columbia, or City College; she was homosexual, though “married” for most of her life; her work remains difficult, rather than sellable to large audiences. Most of her best and loyal critics have been gentile, beginning with Carl Van Vechten, Sherwood Anderson, and Donald Sutherland. She was also an avid self-publisher, which has always discredited her with “critics” self-consciously beholden only to commercial produce.

However, to my mind she reflects Judaism in her interests in abstraction and in mantric writing (also favored by Allen Ginsberg, who identified the connection in an essay reprinted in my Gertrude Stein Advanced [1990]). The French among whom she lived and died were not deceived. Special arrangements had to be made to protect her from the occupying Nazis during World War II; and when she died, she was buried where her body still remains—in a section of the famous Pere Lachaise (Paris) Cemetery reserved exclusively for Jews.