Silverlake Blvd.: Gertrude Stein: Beginning (1904-1914) (2007)

1904-1905

BEGINNING AGAIN AND AGAIN

About a hundred years ago, Gertrude Stein was learning how to write poetry. Which, for her, was a matter of learning how to write nonsense.

She began the 20^thCentury traveling through Europe. She lived in New York City, briefly, and then returned to Paris in 1903. There she joined her brother Leo at 27 rue de Fleurus, where she begins to write in earnest.

Her writing, from the first, was unlike anything done before. She combined the most serious kind of literary aspirations with a skepticism about conventional modes of writing that was quite complete. She could do what she wanted because a modest independent income made it financially irrelevant whether or not her writings were published or read.

Her first book, Three Lives (1903-6) is, on one hand, a conventional fin-de-siècle study of the frailty of friendship, the confinement of family life, and the impossibility of escape. And on the other hand, this is what you find on the page:

Jeff Campbell never knew why Melanctha had not come to meet him. Jeff had heard a little talking now, about how Melanctha Herbert had commenced once more to wander. Jeff Campbell still sometimes saw Jane Harden, who always needed a doctor to be often there to help her. Jane Harden always knew very well what happened to Melanctha. Jeff Campbell never would talk to Jane Harden anything about Melanctha. Jeff was always loyal to Melanctha. Jeff never let Jane Harden say much to him about Melanctha, though he never let her know that he loved her.

It is a fiction, with characters and a story, but it is a very strange fiction. Conventions as old as Homer about how a storyteller delights, and catches the sympathy of the audience are being flouted. Instead of variety there is minimalism—minimalism of vocabulary, minimalism of syntax, minimalism of incident.

The vocabulary is primitive, the most basic English. Any suggestion of allusiveness, exoticism, erudition or literary intellectualism is suppressed. As her contemporaries Maeterlinck, Jarry, and Raymond Roussel, Stein employs words and constructions that bewilder by their simplicity. As the book’s characters are German- and African-American, there is a hint of mimicking their non-standard English. But the diction goes beyond anything required by realism. The words and names that Stein uses are repeated again and again, with such insistence that, for the reader, they start to detach from their meanings. Technique, in School or Paris fashion, determines content.

The sentences are arranged with a blunt parallelism. Again there is a suggestion of mimicking colloquial speech--colloquial anaphora, epiphora, periphasis, pleonasim--but it goes beyond any kind of realism. The paragraphs have the effect of monumental inscriptions, completely indifferent to the conventional literary attempts at fluency or grace.

Rose Johnson never asked Melanctha to live with her in the house, now Rose was married.

… It could never come to Melanctha to ask Rose to let her. It never could come to Melanctha to think that Rose would ask her. It would never ever come to Melanctha to want it, if Rose should ask her, but Melanctha would have done it for the safety she always felt when she was near her. Melanctha Herbert wanted badly to be safe now, but this living with her, that, Rose would never give her. Rose had strong the sense for decent comfort, Rose had strong the sense for proper conduct, Rose had strong the sense to get straight always what she wanted, and she always knew what was the best thing she needed, and always Rose got what she wanted.

Events are presented in a way that drains them of drama: details and connections are suppressed, the import is not mentioned. Descriptions are legislative rather than vivid, taking the form of a general observation—a formula. The verbal formula is presented as the most comprehensive account of the person’s subjective and objective biography, something that does not change, but remains always the same.

And incidents are described again and again, as if the text were a sketchbook, and the whole was not a unified composition but rather a random compilation of distinct attempts at registering individual acts of perception.

It is like what Meyer Schapiro saw in Cézanne:

… by multiplying discontinuities and asymmetry, it increases the effect of freedom and randomness in the whole. It is a free-hand construction through which his activity in sensing and shaping the edge of the table is as clear to us as the objective form of the original table. We see the object in the painting as formed by strokes, each of which corresponds to a distinct perception and operation. It is as if there is no independent, closed, pre-existing object, given once and for all to the painter’s eye for representation, but only a multiplicity of successively probed sensations …

The effect is of stasis, rather than drama. Instead of narrative progress, there is theme-and-variation. The reader, deprived of the distraction of sentimentality, is left to sort out the dismal events without any hope or pity.

The attitude towards the reader has changed. Instead of a sense of serious collaboration with the reader, there is a sense of provocation—the attitude of Whitman, of Laforgue, of Rimbaud, of modernism. And after this, came Ernest Hemmingway, Samuel Beckett, Natalia Ginzburg, the absurdists, the existentialists, the New Novel.

But already in Three Lives, Stein is more radical than the writers who subsequently learned from her. In Three Lives the primitivism, the repetition, the parallelism, the embedded alternative accounts comprise an entirely new kind of writing. Writing whose construction is not dramatic but additive, discrete units arranged one after another. In this kind of writing, the individual units don’t have any sense, only the whole. The sense of individual words, phrases and sentences is ironic or doubtful. Already in her first book it is impossible to take any individual sentence Stein writes at face value. She has begun to untie her words from conventional sense.

1903-1911

THE DIFFICULTY OF PUTTING IT DOWN

But radical as her experiment was, Three Lives was still grounded in the English sentence. Sentences provided a structure and stability within the experiment, like academic figure drawing grounded the experiments of her painter colleagues. In Stein’s next extended composition, The Making of Americans, (1903-11) she strains the English sentence to the breaking point.

It begins in the style of Three Lives, but after 150 pages, it takes a turn. The narrator promises to present a complete system of character-types that will explain every possible kind of person:

There are many kinds of loving in men, more and more this will be a history of them, there are many ways for women to have loving in them this will come out more and more in the history of women as it is here to be written, there are many ways for men to have loving in them, there are many ways that loving comes out from them, there are many ways for women and for to have loving in them, this is a history of some of them, sometime there will be a history of all of them. There are many kinds of men and many millions of each kind of them, there are many ways of loving that men have in them and their way of loving makes their kind of man, there are many ways of loving in men and having loving come out from them and this comes in many of them from the nature of them their bottom nature in them that makes their kind of men, sometimes from the bottom nature in them mixed with the other nature or nature in them nature that are the bottom nature, the way of having loving in them, of other kinds of men. There are many ways of having loving in them in men, there are many ways of having loving in them in women, more and more there will be a history of them, sometime there will then be a history of all of them.

The bluntness has become inscrutability. The effect of theme-and-variation has become even more insistent. Attention has shifted from “a” and “that” and “the” and “this.” Or, as Bertrand Russell would, write a couple years later in his Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, “We dealt in the preceding chapter with the words all and some; in this chapter we shall consider the word the in the singular, and in the next chapter we shall consider the word the in the plural.”

In the third section, Mrs. Hersland and the Hersland Children, the narrative and fictional elements have shrunk to bare names. And the narrator increasingly interrupts the narration to address the reader directly, commenting on her struggle to understand and to express all she knows. But neither the philosophical passages nor the literary passages are composed as arguments. Statements are presented, repeated with additional clauses, restated, repeated in different tenses, and repeated again. The effect is not of discursive prose, but of a work of music composed of words. Nothing is argued. In the end, it’s not clear that anything has even been asserted, even though Stein never abandons grammar or the sentence.

Here, Stein inaugurates the practice of inserting literary and linguistic observations in her writings, which she will continue for the rest of her career. Many commentators mine these remarks, and cite them as evidence of Stein’s view of her work and practice. I can’t imagine anything more absurd. Stein was too clever to ever perpetrate a manifesto. And if she did compose an ars poetica, she was too cheeky to leave it anyplace obvious. Even in her later lectures she was engaged in creation, not argument. None of her statements mean anything in isolation. That Stein wrote it does not equal she believed it. But it does indicate the depth and breadth of her anticipation of your, mine, anybody’s readings, and how toying with us was a large part of what her writing was. By the seventh section of Making of Americans (Alfred Hersland and Julia Dehning) the fiction is barely a pretext. It becomes less and less like a novel about the families of Gossols:

I am not knowing anything being different from what it is. Very many are knowing everything being different from what it is. Once this was to me an astonishing thing. Now it is not to me at all an astonishing thing. …

And more and more like Parmenides, in the translation of Kirk, Raven & Schofield:

It never was nor will be, since it is now, all together, one, continuous. For what birth will you seek for it? How and whence did it grow? I shall not allow you to say nor to think from not being: for it is not to be said nor thought that it is not; and what need would have driven it later rather than earlier, beginning from the nothing, to grow? …

By the eighth section, the assertions become tautologies: “When one is a young one one is a young one.”

Which is to say, irrefutably and absolutely true, but empty of signification.

What to make of it? It might be a philosophical joke: the author assures us she is engaged in expounding a universal history of humanity, but, after a thousand pages, never gets around to explaining the system, and actually presents only a few random illustrations. It’s too much like George Eliot’s Chausabon, promising but never delivering a universal history of all mythologies.

The repetition, schematization, suppression of anecdote, nuance, variety, and color are stupefying. It is notoriously the first of the grand follies of literary modernism—an unreadable lump. But if you are willing to go along with it, the heavy cadences have a grave beauty. As the sentences ring changes, tiny variations spark glimpses of scenes, characters, and actions. The effect anticipates by three years the paintings of Picasso and Braque, where a shimmering surface is interrupted, here and there, by hints of figures, volumes. It radiates a massiveness that is also weightless, meditative, solitary, still. It was as if she were trying to write a fiction that was irrefutable.

And Stein is not just anticipating Cubism, but anticipating art of four decades hence. In 1961 Andy Warhol compiled a marathon film Sleep of short bits of footage repeated over and over. It is a kind of sketchbook, a view of the same take over and over again. As the repetitions multiply, the image of John Giorno begins to disintegrate: the head, torso, arms become strange, unfamiliar independent objects. The repetitions continue. You grow to hate that image. You start to get dizzy. The film is going on and on with or without you. It just keeps coming. The silence is absolute. It creates a dream-state, a sense of elevation, otherworldliness.

Similarly, The Making of Americans begins with the striving of the characters, but becomes, by repetition and tautology, the story of the striving of people in general, and finally the story of the striving of the narrator, operating within a shimmering, opaque operations of their art.

1907-1912

PORTRAITS OF ANYBODY AND ANYTHING

Susan Sontag made a case for Stein as a fundamentally comic writer, which is attractive but only partially true. There is no getting around the darkness of her first works. If Stein discovered a way to lightness—and she undoubtedly did—the question is, how?

Between 1905 and 1910, Stein became intensely involved with the two leaders of the School of Paris, Matisse and Picasso.

And in 1907 Alice Toklas began to be part of Stein’s life, and her brother Leo began to leave it. Toklas revolutionized her life, providing not only support for her experiments, but a structure to facilitate the transformation of sketches into drafts, and drafts into typed manuscripts.

Picasso painted Stein’s portrait while she was working on The Making of Americans, from 1905 to 1906. The portrait is one of the essential documents of Modernism, and inescapably part of Stein’s persona.

In terms of Picasso’s development, the portrait documents the exact moment he abandoned the pastel sfumato of his earlier Blue and Rose manners (the treatment of the Stein’s body), in favor of bluntly delineated totems, confrontational, severe and opaque (Stein’s face).

The deliberate primitivization may be a recollection of a polychrome wood 12^th century Madonna, with owl eyes, he had seen while in Gósol (whose name appears as “Gossols” in Making of Americans).

He may have also had in mind Gauguin, who had a retrospective at the 1906 Salon d’Autumne.

By 1907 Picasso was exploring even more extreme schematization. He painted a Mother and Child—a motif laden with sentiment—that consists of red ovals on a navy circle, and a brown circle on emerald. An experiment in simplicity, it asks How severe can a picture be, and still register familiar feelings?

And that same year Picasso painted a Woman in Yellow with an impossible torso and arms, the first of decades and decades of Picassoesque monsters. The figure is torqued, flexing under terrific stress. Power radiates out of her, but the face is impassive. The background drapery has become a spiky crystal cavern. Everything soft is banished.

For years already, Stein’s other painter acquaintance, Matisse, had been simplifying forms into flat patches of un-modeled color, with deliberately primitive drawing, and acid harmonies. His paintings were without anecdote, emotionally blank, uncanny, and emphatic. They were stoutly constructed works designed to hold their own against the world, against distraction.

In 1906 Leo Stein bought Matisse’s Joy of Life, whose title suggests a poster for utopia, which it is not. After 101 years it still might be the work of a lunatic. Matisse had the audacity to appropriate motifs from Titian and the Impressionists, but with all the “life” left out. Some figures blend into the landscape and some figures jut abruptly out, between broad patches of moss, rose pink, sulfur.

The next year, 1907, Leo Stein bought Matisse’s Blue Nude/Memory of Biskra, with a fingerless upraised paw, a grotesque ribcage, a tubular stomach, an expressionless mask of the face. An anthology of female anatomy rendered with unlovely violence. It is as if Matisse had heard of the subjects of conventional painting, without ever seeing one. It is untouched by any tradition of drawing, color, characterization, composition. The same year he painted an apotheosis of crudity and violence, and titled it Luxe.

Stein observed the painters in her life replace facility with crudity, nuance with schematization, dreaminess with bluntness.

These paintings of Picasso and Matisse have become familiar enough to blunt their strangeness. Stein’s writing in a primitivist manner remain outrageous.

With the example of the painters and the encouragement and practical assistance of Toklas, Stein turned from universal histories to the here and now, in writings she called “portraits.”

They are not character sketches, encyclopedia entries, or eulogies, but literary analogies to the portraits of Matisse and Picasso.

The first portrait, Ada (December 1910), was significantly of Toklas. It begins in the continuous tense idiom—“being one being living”—of Making of Americans, but Stein lines the tautologies with incidental details, the epiphenomena the novel suppressed. And it tells young Stein’s favorite story—a woman enduring suffocating family. But this time it ends literally happily: “And certainly Ada all her living then was happier in living than anyone else who ever could, who was, who is, who ever will be living.”

The portraits sometimes contain characteristic details, but many do not. Or the allusions may be so private as to be unknowable for readers. Most of the portraits could be assigned to different subjects. I don’t know that too much weight should be given to their status as likenesses.

Stein was certainly aware of the tradition of literary portraiture from Theocritus and La Bruyère, down to the profiles of journalism—but it doesn’t seem relevant. She created her own genre, by appropriating it from the visual artists around her. Like her subsequent appropriations of painterly genres of still-life and landscape, the portrait gave her a pretext and a format, within which she could write.

The early portraits recapitulate her tautological mode, but with a different. In the portrait of Harriet (1910), nothing happens, but lively happenings are hinted at:

She said she did not have any plans for the summer. No one was interested in this thing in whether she had any plans for the summer. That is not the complete history of this thing, some were interested in this thing in her not having any plans for the summer.

Stein employs modifications of her tautological mode in a series of portraits from early 1911 Two Women, Orta, or One Dancing, Matisse, Picasso. In Bon Marché Weather, the stern narrator of Three Lives and Making of Americans is displaced by other voices, less earnest and less tongue-tied:

Very pleasant weather we are having. Very pleasant weather I am having. Very nice weather everybody is having. Very nice weather you are having. …

Very nice eating everybody is having. Very nice eating I am having. Very nice eating they are having. Very nice eating you are having. …

Very comfortable traveling they are having. Very comfortable traveling you are having. Very comfortable traveling I am having. Very comfortable traveling everybody is having.

Alternately, Stein pushed the severity of tautological mode to extremes. As in Four Dishonest Ones (1911):

They are what they are. They have not been changing. They are what they are.

Each one is what that one is. Each is what each is. They are not needing to be changing.

One is what she is. She does not need to be changing. She is what she is. She is not changing. She is what she is.

The tautologies become emptier, and sense becomes an incantation in Galeries Lafayettes (1911):

Each one is one and is that one and is especially that one and is that especial one and is accustomed to being that one, is used to being that one, is quite used to being that one, is very well accustomed to be that one, is certainly very well accustomed to be that especial one, is very well accustomed to be especially that one, is very well accustomed to be the one that one is being, is one that is being one and each one is one and there are many of them and each one is any one and any one is one, is an especial one, and each one is one, and there are many of them and each one is any one of them and any one of them is an especial one, and each one is one, each one is the one that is being that one, and each one is one, and each one is being the one each one is being, and each one is one, and each one is being each one, and each one is being the one each one is being and each one is one is the one that one is being, each one is being one is one being the one that one is being. Each one is one. There are many of them. Each one is one. Each one is one being the especial one that one is being.

Again painterly analogies seem relevant. During the summer of 1911 Picasso’s torqued monsters began to dissolve into a shimmer of glints and sharp edges (e.g. The Accordionist). During that same year Matisse painted his Red Studio, in which figure and scene interpenetrated and became indistinguishable.

The following year, Stein synthesized the tautological portrait mode in Two, which is a kind of ars poetica and double portrait of her brother and herself:

She would not have a decision and deciding that she would not be saying, she would be having a decision in meaning that reflection is interpretation and interpretation is decision and decision is regarding meaning and regarding meaning is acting and acting is expression and expression is not resisting winning and not resisting winning is submitting and submitting is leading and leading is declaration and declaration is beginning and beginning is intending and intending is deciding and deciding is creating and creating is not contending and not contending is destroying and destroying is submitting and submitting is decision …

1909-1914

USING EVERYTHING

While Stein was writing the first portraits, she was also working on two extended compositions that she had begun in 1909: A Long Gay Book and G.M.P. Matisse, Picasso and Gertrude Stein. Both begin the tautological mode:

Loving is something. Not loving is something. Loving is loving. Something is something. Anything is something. (A Long Gay Book)

They stayed when they stayed. They all stayed when they stayed. They all respected what they said when they said what they said. They all said what they said. They all stayed. (G.M.P. Matisse, Picasso and Gertrude Stein)

In both books, a couple dozen pages later, the tautologies become more like inventories:

Standing and expressing, opening and holding, turning and meaning, closing and folding, holding and meaning, standing and fanning, joining and remaining, opening and holding. It is a way the way to say that being finished is all of waking, it is a way to say that not doing again what is being done again is a way of intending to assist an only one. (A Long Gay Book)

The time that is lost is the time that is german, the time that is lost is the time that is american, the time that is lost is the time that is american, the time that is lost is the time that is bulgarian, the time there is lost is the time that is russian, the time that is lost is the time that is hungarian, the time that is the time that is norwegian, there is a time that is japanese and it has that way of being the time that is lost and the chinese way is all of that way and the swedish way is anyway of that way and there is an english way. (G.M.P. Matisse, Picasso and Gertrude Stein)

Then, in A Long Gay Book, even the pretence of an inventory breaks down:

All the pudding has the same flow and the sauce is painful, the tunes are played, the crinkling paper is burning, the pot has a cover and the standard is excellence.

And the books end:

Etching. Etching a chief, none plush. (A Long Gay Book)

If the best full lead and paper show persons and the most mines and toys show puddings and the most white and red show mountains and the best hat shows lamp shades, if it is the sterns are sterner and the old bites are bulging and the best the very best of all is the sunshine tiny, is the hollow stone grinding, is the homeless wedding worrying. (G.M.P. Matisse, Picasso and Gertrude Stein)

Ulla E. Dydo dates this shift “from abstract, patterned, rhythmical repetitions to a vocabulary of short, concrete, and even broken words and brief, sharp, declarative sentences that do not follow habitual grammatical order and paragraphing” to the first half of 1912, when Stein and Toklas explored Spain.

No more theme-and-variation, no more tautology, no more inventory. There words are arranged typographically in the form of a sentence, but the words have no coherent syntactical structure. Stein has achieved nonsense.

Nonsense but not meaninglessness.

These texts are anthologies, each one a selection of words of various tones and registers, combining the descriptive, analytical, sensual, sentimental, allusive, pastiche.

The disestablishment of narrative and disestablishment of description intensifies into a disestablishment of the sentence, which would not necessary result in nonsense. There’s plenty of ways of making fragments cohere. But here Stein eludes assertion. These anthologies are paratactic: the words and phrases are composed in outside of the sentence. They are not abstract, not a response, not descriptions.

In other texts Stein wrote about that time, the inventories reappear, but transformed into lyric flights:

Cap and corn, auditor, interest and exertion, aim and audience, interest and earnest, and outset, inside in inside. (Braque, 1910-13)

Clinch, melody, hurry, spoon, special, dumb, cake, forrester. Fine, cane, carpet, incline, spread, gate, light, labor. (IIIIIIIIII, 1910-13)

It is often possible to tease out concrete biographical or historical referents. There are often puns, place-names and other details that can be read as clues. But this is forgetting that the obscurity is intentional. It is not meant to be removed by research into Stein’s life, study of the manuscripts, inventories of furnishings. The texts are not codes to be decoded. Stein found a way around significance (importance, seriousness) by deflecting signification (coherence, communication).

During a trip to Granada in the spring of 1913, Stein embarked on a series of still-lifes, which she continued through the fall, as her brother Leo moved out of 27 rue de Fleurus. It as not a genre she would pursue afterwards, but it gave rise to the most perennially popular of her difficult books, Tender Buttons.

Tender Buttons contains single lines or phrases that seem to be perfectly ordinary colloquial English discourse. But which, on closer examination, are completely extraordinary in import.

Water astonishing and difficult altogether makes a meadow and a stroke. …

Dining is west. …

There are paragraphs, which—in the guise of perfectly ordinary blocks of English prose—provide the reader with, a vast plain of discourse rigged with trap doors, impossible ladders to vertiginous perspectives, vistas couched behind the props, … a whole landscape, furnished with improbable equipment, posted with caution signs, billboards, paintings, and the air thick with unseen parties in animated conversation.

Is there an exchange, is there a resemblance to the sky which is admitted to be there and the stars which can be seen. Is there. That was a question. There was no certainty.

The tone is not confrontational, but tranquil bemused, affectionate.

Act so that there is no use in a centre. A wide action is not a width. A preparation is given to the ones preparing.

It is suffused with the presence of homely beauty. From chronicler of familiar angst Stein became a seer of the everyday. Nothing could be more tonic for an age drowned in cheap fantasy:

Claiming nothing, not claiming anything, not a claim in everything, collecting claiming all this makes a harmony, it even makes a succession.

Around the same time, Wittgenstein remarked in his Notes on Logic, “Distrust of grammar is the first requisite for philosophizing.”

Possibly, but Stein delighted in grammar, the gravitational tug of conventional syntax.

The reason that nothing is hidden is that there is no suggestion of silence. No song is sad. A lesson is of consequence.

She even imitates Apollinaire or Max Jacob:

A single image is not splendor.

Or maybe it’s also a taunt directed at Ezra Pound, who, around the same time, defined “An ‘Image’ is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.”

After inventing literary analogies to the painterly genres of the portrait and the still-life, in April 1913 Stein appropriated the landscape with her first play What Happened / A Five Act Play. She called them plays or operas and they occupied her for the rest of her life. The spatial motif also seemed to free her from the remaining vestiges of syntax:

Six.

Twenty.

Outrageous.

Late.

Weak.

Forty.

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Gertrude Stein: Beginning (1904-1914) (2007)