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The inexplicable power of Gertrude Stein
The inexplicable
power of Gertrude Stein
In her ‘What
is remembered’ (1963), Gertrude Stein’s long-standing partner Alice B.
Toklas writes that ‘Richard Wright
was another of the American writers who visited Gertrude Stein after the war.
He had long been an admirer of ‘Melanchta’, the second story in ‘Three lives’,
which he considered one of the most important influences on his own career’. Later, Susan Sontag, in her ‘Diaries’, will
write about ‘Melanchta’ being her favourite short-story – not her favourite by
Gertrude Stein, but her favourite tout-court. (‘Three lives’ was published
by Stein in 1909).
And then you have T.S.
Eliot telling three successive correspondents (‘Letters’ volume 2), in
1924:
1. ‘Miss Heap sent me two manuscripts
of Gertrude Stein; they are quite meaningless to me. It seems to me to be
nonsense’.
2. [a month later] ‘I have read
[Stein’s manuscripts] through several times and think I have grasped at least
some of the intention; and they certainly produce a peculiar hypnotic effect
upon me’.
3. [in a lecture] ‘Edward Benlowes’
(1602?-1676) verses, like those of Miss Gertrude Stein, can provide an
extremely valuable exercise for unused parts of the mind’.
It’s really
quite extraordinary that Eliot, that most exacting, high-minded of poets,
should in the space of a few months come to see what he had first missed – and come
to own up to that, too. (I can’t resist quoting Sigfried Sasson’s line in his
1920-1922 Diaries: ‘[T.S. Eliot]’s utterances are so precise –
almost constipatedly so’). And no less extraordinary to think that writers as
different as Wright and Sontag both found inspiration in the same short-story, ‘Melanchta’
– about a black girl in the American South in the 19th Century. And
while ‘Melanchta’ may not be representative of Stein’s most experimental work,
it contains many of the features that mark her work out even today.
So why that
fascination? And does it still work? (spoiler: it does, with a few caveats).
Gertrude
Stein, an American who emigrated to France before the First World War and died
there in 1946, is famous for at least three things: her extremely idiosyncratic
prose, her championing of (and friendship with) Modernist-era painters, chief
amongst whom Picasso, Picabia or Matisse, and her line: ‘Rose is a rose is a
rose is a rose’ (1913). She was also a close friend of Hemingway’s, and whenever
American and English artists came to Paris, they would make sure to go visit
her at her house, full of paintings, talk and creative spirits. She was the
focal point, the main attractor, the one you had to know; her mind, learning
and personality made a formidable package that impressed everyone who came in
contact with her. She was also a writer who couldn’t get much published, and
whose work was so demanding that it found few readers – a trend that is
unlikely to have bucked in any way.
Today, the
only work of hers that remains visible culturally speaking is the now classic ‘The
autobiography of Alice B. Toklas’, a work Alice herself admitted had been
toned-down so as to be sellable: toned-down in the sense of making it less
experimental, less radical…more readable. In terms of (auto)biographical studies
alone, this book is a landmark, as the title alludes to: Stein writes the
autobiography of someone else, which is logically impossible (something Jamaica
Kincaid will do later in her ‘Autobiography of my mother’). And indeed:
she writes her autobiography but as if narrated by Alice, her life-long partner,
so that Alice is reduced to that role of narrator only – the whole book is about Gertrude, and Gertrude
only. And it is toned-down, as shown by this passage (punctuation as in the
original):
We went up the couple of steps and through the
open door passing on our left the studio in which later Juan Gris was to live
out his martyrdom but where then lived a certain Vaillant, a nondescript
painter who was to lend his studio as a ladies dressing room at the famous
banquet for Rousseau, and then we passed a steep flight of steps leading down
where Max Jacob had a studio a little later, and we passed another steep little
stairway which led to the studio where not long before a young fellow had committed
suicide, Picasso painted one of the most wonderful of his early pictures of the
friends gathered round the coffin, we passed all this to a larger door where
Gertrude Stein knocked and Picasso opened the door and we went in.
‘The
autobiography’ was my first encounter with her, and a bewildering one it
was even though most of it is no more difficult than the extract above. But it
was also the beginning of that trance, that ‘hypnotic’ effect Eliot talks
about, taking hold of me. Her rhythm, her punctuation, and of course her
repetitions do create a very unique reading experience: you have to abandon
yourself to it though, and – literally – go with the flow. And a flow it is, as
evidenced by a later text, ‘Wars have I seen’, where she recounts their
flight from Paris to rural France during the German occupation in WW2 (and
certainly a very accessible text as a whole too, although making fewer concessions
than ‘Alice’):
It was all that between babyhood and fourteen,
and it was the nineteenth century between babyhood and fourteen and the
nineteenth century dies hard all centuries do that is why the last war to kill
it is so long, it is still being killed now in 1942, the nineteenth century
just as the eighteenth century took from the revolution to 1840 to kill, so the
nineteenth century is taking from 1914 to 1943 to kill. It is hard to kill a
century almost impossible, as was the old joke about mothers-in-law, and centuries
get to be like that they get to be wearing like a mother-in-law. So as I was
saying from babyhood to fourteen and of course longer much longer it was the
nineteenth century and the wars civil domestic and foreign were nineteenth century
wars, naturally enough.
Now this is
getting more like it: repetitive fragments, chunks said over and over again,
tracing back on what you said to repeat it once more, and an absence of
punctuation that at times throw you off (Is that the same sentence?), and at other
times create that hypnotic quality. The internal rhythm of such sentences is
like a train – but then an old train, where there would be that regular noise
of the wagons on the rails, a rhythmic pattern outside of time.
But I urge
you to think about the content as well, and that’s where it all becomes an
interesting problem. Stein herself recognized it as such: by being mocked for
her style (and mocked she was, mercilessly as times, see the very end of this
blog), her ideas were being ignored, yet she felt she had things to say. That’s
what she expressed in a lecture given during her lecture tour of America in 1934:
You all have seen hundreds of poems about roses
and you know in your bones that the rose is not there. Now I don’t want to put
too much emphasis on that line [a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose] because
it’s just one line in a long poem. But I notice you all know it; you make fun
of it but you all know it. Now listen! I’m no fool. I know that in daily life
we don’t go around saying ‘is a…is a…is a…’. Yes, I’m no fool; but I think
that in that line the rose is red for the first time in English poetry for a
hundred years.
She was
waging war against metaphors!
Well, yes, that
is the thing to remember about her style: she wasn’t writing any which way, she
was trying to achieve an effect. She was trying to write not so much as we speak
– although there’s a lot of that – but also as we think. She was trying to rid
literature of its affectations, its lack of naturalness, and to infuse writing
with a realism, a basic level, one could say – to bring it back to expression
and not affectation. Real, not precious. True, not mendacious. That conscious
attempt at creating something new, at using the language and writing in a
mould-breaking way, is what really matters, especially as it reminds us that’s
what the Modernists (and, really, any original artist) were doing, in
literature as in painting or music: creating a new means of expression.
And that
conflict between form and content for the readers will lead them to mock the
style while ignoring gems like this one:
Well like it or not everybody has to do
something to fill the time. After all human beings have to live dogs too so as
not to know that time is passing, that is the whole business of living to go on
so that they will not know that time is passing, that is why they get drunk
that is why they like to go to war…
Or what
about that one?
Sometimes it none of it is very real, but what
is real, what you used to do or what you do now, well I used not to sit in a
field and watch the goat eat, but I do now, which is real what you do now or
what you used to do.
Ridiculous?
Profound? Is the style literary? Is the comparison with a dog worthy of
Literature? But wait: isn’t it an echo of that discussion, through Pascal via
Hume and Searle, of what it is to be oneself? Do you mock Picasso’s style, or
admire the meaning of his ‘Guernica’?
But yes, I
admit: she’s difficult to read in most of her works, and I simply cannot get
through most of them. This goes for her enormous, gigantic ‘The making of
Americans’ (1925), where this is the easiest bit you’ll find:
Then there were others of them who had all the
sweetness in them that had turned to dreary trickling in the mother who had
born all them, and one of those who had this sweetness in her dignity and
gentleness and generous ways and so was a power to them was the one that the
father lived with after his dreary wife had died away and left them.
With these who had sweetness in them, with
those who had changed into sweetness the dreary trickling of the mother that
had born them, many of them, strongest in them after the sweetness and gentle
dignity that made them, had it as the strongest thing inside them to be hurt
not angry when any bad thing happened to them, they would be hurt then and
their mouths would be drooping.
And it most
certainly goes for her weird, and to me completely obscure, ‘Tender buttons’
(1925):
A LITTLE CALLED PAULINE.
A little called anything shows shudders./ Come
and say what prints all day. A whole few watermelon. There is no pope. / No cut
in pennies and little dressing and choose wide soles and little spats really
little spices. / A little lace makes boils. This is not true. / Gracious of
gracious and a stamp a blue green white bow a blue green lean, lean on the top.
/ If it is absurd then it is leadish and nearly set in where there is a tight
head. / A peaceful life to arise her, noon and moon and moon. A letter a cold
sleeve a blanket a shaving house and nearly the best and regular window. / Nearer
in fairy sea, nearer and farther, show white has lime in sight, show a stitch
of ten. Count, count more so that thicker and thicker is leaning./ I hope she
has her cow. Bidding a wedding, widening received treading, little leading
mention nothing. / Cough out cough out in the leather and really feather it is
not for. / Please could, please could, jam it not plus more sit in when.
[the slashes indicate where she starts a new line in the original]
And that’s
not even the weirdest, wildest lines you’ll find in this and other texts by
her - try Geography and play (1922) on for size!
But here’s
the thing: that trance you can get into when reading her, that hypnotic quality
her (more accessible) works have, it all remains unique, rich, and rewarding. Rewarding
not only for the effect but because it then leads you into what she is actually
saying, much of it interesting and relevant. (and yes I do know about her
dubious political affiliations later on – not as bad as Ezra Pound by far but
not quite right either).
And it
reminds us that the Modernists were never doing things for no reason: painters,
musicians, playwrights, dancers and writer were all looking for new ways to
communicate, to represent, to make it possible to say what was personal – to express
the inexpressible (Beckett’s L’innommable?). Do have a look at my blog
on the majestic, magical Machado de Assis here.
Her Alice
remains a fantastic, fresh, novel and extremely rewarding read, if only for its
portrait of the cultural life in Paris at the time, but really also for its
style, its voice, its power. Give it a go, don’t give up after two pages but
stick with it, and with a bit of luck that train will take you on-board, that
trance will take hold of you and then you’ll be in for a wild, unique and
exhilarating ride!
Parting
gift: the response
a publisher made to Gertrude Stein in rejecting her manuscript:
Dear Madam,
I am only
one, only one, only one. Only one being, one at the same time. Not two, not
three, only one. Only one life to live, only sixty minutes in one hour. Only
one pair of eyes. Only one brain. Only one being. Being only one, having only
one pair of eyes, having only one time, having only one life, I cannot read
your manuscript three or four times. Not even one time. Only one look, only one
look is enough. Hardly one copy would sell here. Hardly one. Hardly one.
Many
thanks, I am returning the MS by post. Only one MS by one post.
Sincerely
yours
A.C.
Fifield.
- Eliot, T.S. Letters 1923-1925 (vol. 2), 2009
- Sassoon, S. Diaries 1920-1922, 1981.
- Stein, G. The autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 1933
- “ Wars I have seen, 1945
- “ Three lives, 1909
- Stenhal, R. Gertrude Stein in words and pictures, 1989.
- Sontag, S. As consciousness is harnessed to flesh, 2013
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