1913-1926
FUNNY THINGS FOR FUN
Once you’ve done away with the sentence, what is there to say? What can you say? How do you go on?
From 1913 to 1926, Gertrude Stein reaped the harvest of her radical experiments with language, in a extraordinary series of anthology texts.
The dissolution of the sentence permited a mix of observation, exclamation and quotation that celebrated everyday life. Yet Dish (1913) inaugurated a series of texts, skirting abandon, that glimpse the beyond-speech, where speech becomes a gesture, provoking and decorative. In Lifting Belly (1915) the tortured self-consciousness of Making of Americans has been replaced by the relief of discovering that, “In the midst of writing there is merriment.”
Ladies Voices (A Curtain Raiser) (Spring 1916) inaugurated a series of plays in which fairly colloquial bits of sociable chatter create Firbankian comedy. Here is the complete text of Act II:
Honest to God Miss Williams I don’t mean to say that I was older.
But you were.
Yes I was. I do not excuse myself. I feel that there is no reason for passing an archduke.
You like the word.
You know very well that they all call it their house.
As Christ was to Lazarus so was the founder of the hill to Mahon.
You really mean it.
I do.
An Exercise in Analysis (1917) consists of twenty pages of acts most of which are a single phrase long, beginning winningly with “A Play / I have given up analysis.” Most are completely conventional conversational tags. But highlighted in this way, put on display, without the context or referents, they become strange, acquiring emptiness.
Not even the 1914-1918 war, which indelibly marked the work of so many of her contemporaries, could dampen Stein’s new levity. Relief Work in France (1917) treats it as an occasion for quaint expressions of Can Do:
The right spirit. There are difficulties, and they must be met in the right spirit.
This is an illustration of the difficulties we have in many ways.
Then we go on.
In Tourty Or Tourtebattre; a story of the great war (1917-20), Stein goes about as far into darkness of the century’s defining nightmare as she will ever get, treating it as an occasion for domestic disruption: “We should not color our hero with his wife’s misdeeds.” There is a continuity here with her reportage from Occupied France decades later.
Counting Her Dresses, A Play from 1917 to 1920 is already making history out of the School of Paris. “The meaning of windows is air” sounds like Apollinaire (“Le fenêtre s’ouvre comme un orange”) and the in-joke of
Which is an illustration for Saint Matorel, a Max Jacob novel. … I re-entered the woodcut and peace reigned in the desert of art. … Then, choking back sobs of humiliation, I wrote this piece, but with lots of absurd literary flourishes.
Stein’s modernism was triumphing—but the heroic era was over. In Tourty Or Tourtebattre it has even become possible to be glib about technique:
Reflections on Sister Cecile lead us to believe that she did not reflect about Friday but about the book in which she often wrote. We were curious. She wrote this note. This is it. Name life, wife, deed, wound, weather, food, devotion, and expression. What did he ask for. Why I don’t know. Why don’t you know. I don’t call that making literature at all. What has he asked for. I call literature telling a story as it happens. Facts of life make it literature. I can always feel rightly about that.
In A Circular Play (1920), not even the discipline of writing is taken seriously:
One does not run around in a circle to make a circular play.
Do not run around in a circle and make a circular play.
It is not necessary to run around in a circle to get ready to write a circular play.
And in the same year, Photograph toys with axioms for a manifesto:
A language tires.
A language tries to be.
A language tries to be free.
Finally, also in 1920, the heroic struggle with language and writing is translated into a hiccup:
Develop Spanish.
Thoughts.
Thoughts.
Thoughts.
Thoughts.
That’s it. Four repetitions, not five. The most general form of not only literature but all writing: “This stands for a thought.” No need to write the thoughts out. No need to elaborate.
In these anthology texts, writing has come to a standstill, having revealed the conditions out of which it cannot escape. Attempts to produce a “thoughtless” writing, through automism or chance, are futile: the procedures themselves are wholly intellectual, as is the choice of presentation.
Schematicism alternates with fullness: A Sonatina Followed by Another (Spring 1921) fills thirty-two pages with the figure of a sleeping woman—one of Picasso’s perennial motifs:
Pussy said that I was to wake her in an hour and a half if it didn’t rain. It is still raining what should I do. Should I wake her or should I let her sleep longer.
And domestic bliss:
Can we count a nightingale. Can we escort one another. Can we feed on artichokes and olives and may we sell anchovies. No we may buy eggs. And now often do you say, I argue often about words and houses. … How can I thank you enough for holding me on the ladder for allowing me to pick roses, for enjoying my fireside and for recollecting stars.
The next year, Objects Lie On a Table / A Play offers a more general account of contented domesticity:
Do you like to see funny things for fun.
Objects lie on a table.
We live beside them and look at them and then they are on the table then.
Objects on a table and the explanation. …
Now then read for me to me what you can and will see. I see what there is to see. You want to show more effort than that. And now how do you do. I have done very well. The objects on the table have been equal to the occasion. We can decorate walls with pots and pans and flowers. I question the flowers. And bananas.
In the summer of 1923, no longer based in a Paris atelier, but in a house in Bilignin, in the country, she began revising earlier portraits of essential Others in her life: Toklas (As a Wife Has a Cow, A Love Story) of Picasso (If I Told Him) One (Carl Van Vetchen / Van Or Twenty Years After). A Novel of Thank You, the extended work of the first half of the Twenties, seems to be an extended portrait of Alice:
To really make a story true this must be you. What did she do for me. She thought of arranging something so that I asked and so it came about that it was nearly at last and afterwards it meant more. What else did she do for me. She suggested that it would be just as well as many more have held it. It held very well. What did I do for her. I arranged that she had a friend and that that friend would show to advantage.
Much of Stein’s writing between the Wars evokes a long summer of contentment. Like Matisse at Nice, the struggle is rewarded with ease.
1915-1933
OH YES I ORGANIZE THIS
But Stein never stopped struggling; she never became complacent. She ceaselessly questioned her tools and technique and, in the way of modernism, discovered new subject matter, new moods, new effects.
One of the things Stein struggled with between the Wars was the challenge of the extended work.
This was a problem Stein shared with her avant-garde contemporaries: How to scale-up their earlier intimately-scaled experiments? The Soviet avant-garde made, for a while, art, propaganda, theater, products, and movies for a whole revolutionary state. The Bauhaus attempted to make modern design a commodity like any other. Schoenberg systematized free tonality into serialism. Painters from Rivera and Siqueiros to Matisse and Dufy found opportunities to paint public murals on an architectural scale. The Ballets Russes enabled Picasso, Gontcharova and other painters to create unified theatrical environments.
What about Stein’s long works of this period? Are they compositions—to use her word—or just collections of shorter works?
The results are mixed. Natural Phenomena (1925) revives mechanical repetition. A Birthday Book (1924) and An Instant Answer or A Hundred Prominent Men (1928) employ numerical schemes. The results are tedious, though the later includes an extraordinarily graphic paragraph:
The forty-sixth prominent man is the one who connected them to their country. My country all the same they have their place there. And why do you tell their names. I tell their names because in this way I know that and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one make a hundred. It is very difficult to count in a foreign language.
The most immediately accessible longer works achieve a unity through uniformity of tone. Lifting Belly (1915) sails along for fifty pages on high spirits. An Exercise in Analysis (1917) and A Sonatina Followed by Another (1921) are similarly unified through a lightheartedness, where Patriarchial Poetry (1927) is unified by faux belligerence. Lend a Hand or Four Religions (1922) employs repeition to the point of incantation, evoking an old-time call and response, in which the musical, the numerical, the religious are fused.
Another kind of extended work is a collection, and during the Twenties and Thirties Stein published the books of shorter pieces that made her notorious—Geography and Plays (Christmas 1922), Useful Knowledge (1929), How To Write (1931), and Operas and Plays (1932). The first and last are relevant to Stein’s sense of composition, in that they collect pieces in very different modes and moods, and make a unity out of diversity.
The two novels of the Twenties, A Novel of Thank You (1920-6) and Lucy Church Amiably (1927) pretend to have the structure of conventional novels by playful allusion and pastiche.
The supreme extended anthology text is Stanzas in Meditation (1929-33), in which Stein avoids all the usual literary ways of whining, nagging, preaching, confessing, swaggering, lecturing, seducing. She limits herself to function words, filler words, numbers, mid-century turns of phrase—everything that “good writing” edits out. And the result is an august strangeness. It is a surprising stunt and exhilarating. It is not just music, but the pleasure of the connotations being free: a freedom and simplicity that is not merely literary:
Oh yes I organize this. But not a victory
They will spend or spell space
For which they have no share
And so to succeed following.
This is what there is to say.
Once up a time they meant to go together
They were foolish not to think well of themselves …
1923-1933
PRACTICE OF ORATORY
Besides the lyrical short and long anthology texts Stein produced in the productive year 1923, she also started writing anthology texts which were largely made up of allusions to syntax, language, words and her own writings, treated variously with introspection, amusement, doubt, and mock-scientific sobriety.
An Elucidation (1923) explains that,
If I say I stand and pray. If I say I stand and I stand and you understand and if I say I pray I pray to-day if you understand me to say I pray to-day you understand prayers and portraits.
You understand portraits and prayers.
And Practice of Oratory (1923) demonstrates that
Practice of Orations.
Four and their share and where they are.
Practice of Orations.
A.
B.
C.
D.
A. b c and d.
Practice of orations.
A.
Which seems the cheerful older sister to Louis Aragon’s Suicide (1924)
A b c d e f
g h i j k l
m n o p q r
s t u v w
x y x
Stein is including her responses to language as she is writing. She is treating it as part of the landscape.
Even portraits like Edith Sitwell and Her Brothers the Sitwells (1926), become the occasion for a a meditation on fundamentals:
Description is relating reinstating. Description is reinstating really really really more reinstating. Reinstating connecting description. Description connecting reinstating. Description how do you do description. How do you do description.
… A poem makes chances. What is a description. A description allows after all allows, after all after all allows. Back to their name.
The tea party has been interrupted by Parmenides. But of course Paramenides has never really been away.
That same year the Sitwells and England prompted Stein to lecture at Cambridge and Oxford, resulting in Composition as Explanation, Stein’s first popular lecture. A decade after her destruction of the sentence it’s a shock to come across this conventional apology for her work—conventional both in ideas and expression. It has the air of table-talk, and it most of it had been aired many times at Rue des Fleurs. Her main trope is cycles of taste for modern art:
For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling. When the acceptance comes, by that acceptance the thing created becomes a classic.
… Of course it is beautiful but first all beauty in it is denied and then all the beauty of it is accepted. If every one were not so indolent they would realise that beauty is beauty even when it is irritating and stimulating not only when it is accepted and classic.
The argument and the presentation can be seen as Stein’s version of the various revivalist and pastische modes in circulation among the 1920s Parisian avant-garde: neo-classicism, Cocteau’s Call to Order and Les Six, neo-romanticism, even Stein’s advocacy of the paintings of Frances Rose.
She went on to produce a series of popular lectures. They are sucessful entertainments and explore a novel voice. She not only writes in fairly conventional sentences—which she had never entirely abandoned, at least in her plays—but also employs argument, hence continuity. The result is a kind of sophisticated simplification, imposing by insistant repeition key words and slogans—direct and indirect writing, description, the continuous present, “what is the use of telling another story,” “a play was exactly like a landscape,” “a sentence is not emotional a paragraph is,” “remarks are not literature,” “I am I because my little dog knows me,” … etc.
It is a revival of the primitivizing style of Three Lives. It can be very compelling—it’s Stein, after all—but unreliable as a guide to her work.
It’s important that these apologies were written to be performed. An invitation to lecture in England, and subsequently in the U.S., provided occasions and Stein responded avidly. Which raises the whole question of performance.
When Stein started writing plays, she meant them for the theater. When Mabel Dodge proposed to publish some of them in 1914, Stein refused emphatically, “I do not want the plays to be published. … They are to be kept to be played.”
The arrival of Virgil Thomson in Stein’s circle in the Twenties created new opportunities for performance. First in Thomson’s settings of Susie Asado (1926), and in 1927 Preciosilla, and Capital Capitals and Four Saints in Three Acts.
Thomson’s setting of Four Saints the foundational work of Stein criticism. The text was such that it could have been set in the style of William Walton or Anton Webern, but Thomson adheres to the contours of conversation—such contours of conversation as are present in the text. The words are articulated, not subjected to abstraction in the manner. The result is an amplification of the text analogous to Debussy’s musical evocation of Mallarmé’s Faun. It is delicious, funny, moving and eminently playable. John Cage praised how “It does not clutter up the memory, but it elevates the spirit.” When it was produced in 1934, it transformed Stein’s notoriety to celebrity.
But Thomson’s setting has proved dangerous, in the sense that it has authorized and popularized a reading of Stein’s work as campy School of Paris Americana. While those things are certainly present, they’re far from the whole story.
Thomson’s Missouri hymn tunes and parlor songs filtered through Nadia Boulanger are subtle and effective, and make an indellible impact. Along with the photographs of Carl Van Vetchen and George Platt Lynes, Thomson’s music has authorized the pop image of Stein as the Casey Stengel of Montparnasse, spouting zany non sequitors to a celebrity-packed salon—an image that defined Stein for the rest of her life.
Not that Stein did anything to live it down. During her lecture tour of the U.S. in the Thirties, on the contrary, she started writing on politics. In A Political Series (1935) she thows up her hands over the economy and the New Deal:
Is Franklin Roosevelt trying to make money be so that it has no existence that it ceases to be a thing that anybody can count, so that nobody can any longer believe in it or is it all electioneering.
Having opinions about radically reforming the economy was normal in the Thirties, and quite understandable. Stein’s sense of the incomprehensibility and unreality of the modern economy mirrors that of her fellow vanguard expatriate Ezra Pound, as in his Canto 52 (1939):
And of the true base of credit, that is
the abundance of nature
with the whole folk behind it …
This popular culture image of Stein, created through music, photographs, quips and lectures has probably done more damage to her reputation than her work’s difficulty. However through the murk of Lectures in America shines one of Stein’s comic masterpieces, Poetry and Grammar (1934):
A noun is a name of anything, why after a thing is named write about it. A name is adequate or it is not. If it is adequate then why go on calling it, if it is not then calling it by its name does no good.
Articles are interesting … They are interesting because they do what a noun might do if a noun was not so unfortunately so completely unfortunately the name of something.
Poetry is concerned with using with abusing with losing with wanting with denying with avoiding with adoring with replacing the noun. It is doing that always doing that, doing that and doing nothing but that. … So I say poetry is essentially the discovery, the love, the passion for the name of anything.
Ultimately what’s exasperating about the apologies is that their popularity has obscured her more significant meditations on language and writing, realized in the analytic anthology texts written between 1928 and 1933.
How to Write (1928-30) contains things that look like assertions, but might not be assertions. For example:
There is no use in finding out what is in anybody’s mind.
OK, fine: Stein rejects psychology. But in the original context of Saving the Sentence this actually appears as:
There is no use in finding out what is in anybody’s mind. There is no use in finding out what is in anybody’s mind.
Stein’s beloved device of repetition has a way of draining the assertive force out of the words. Likewise, in Arthur A Grammar:
Supposing she was ready.
Supposing she was ready before I was.
Supposing she was ready before I was before they came.
Supposing she was ready after they came.
Supposing she was ready before I was after they came.
Supposing she was ready before I was before they came after they came. Supposing she was ready before I was before they came.
Grammar before announcement.
Foliage is in the trees.
Grammar. Thought far out.
What is the difference between resemblance and grammar. Think. What is the difference between resemblance and grammar.
Resemblance is not a thing to feel. Nor is grammar.
Language and the inevitable bafflements of language, are taken with easy humanity as part of the landscape Title, Sub-Title (1930), proposes:
Grammar in relation to a tree and two horses a title a sub-title. Grammar in relation to a tree and horses. Grammar in relation to a tree and two horses. I have invented many titles and I have invented many subtitles. What is in this sense the meaning of invention. In grammar have to think why a fugue and also why exercises are expected and delay nothing.
Stanzas in Meditation (1929-33) freely mixes the analytical, sentimental and sensuous:
Think of anything that is said
How many times have they been in it
How will they like what they have
And will they invite you to partake of it
And if they offer you something and you accept
Will they give it to you and will it give you pleasure
And if after a white they give you more
Will you be pleased to have more
Which in a way is not even a question
Because after all they like it very much.
It is very often very strange
How hands smell of woods
And hair smells of tobacco
And leaves smell of tea and flowers
Also very strange that we are satisfied
Which may not be really more than generous
Or more than careful or more than most.
This is the mode in which Stein is a serious thinker on writing, not in the platform slogans.
1927-1937
DEATH STARTS HISTORY AND FEARS
According to Ulla Dydo—who knows more about Stein’s work than anybody—the writings of the end of the Twenties register a new sensibility caused by her new home-base:
Bilignin was not only about work and private life in the pastoral setting. Here Stein entered a community that changed her life, her perceptions, and her work. Between 1924 and 1927 she had composed the landscape that echoes lyrically through Lucy Church Amiably and the landscape plays. Now, however, she was no longer a private person meditating in the landscape but a resident in a house and a part of the social landscape.
This is the context in which Juan Gris died.
In the first decade of the century, in Making of Americans, Stein wrote about mortality impersonally: “Any one has come to be a dead one.” In the second decade of the century, in Counting Her Dresses, she had playfully suggested that the heroic era was dead.
In 1924, Stein wrote Pictures of Juan Gris, an appreciation suitable for an exhibition catalog. It is notable in that, for the first time in almost twenty years she not only writes in sentences, but plays with continuity of argument:
Looking out what do I see, I see rains greens hills houses and their moon. What does he see. He sees he says so too. What does he see. He sees that he says so too.
This can be felt and as his.
Do you see it looks like that.
Now this happened. She wrote The Life of Juan Gris / The Life and Death of Juan Gris. It was her first attempt at eulogy.
Stein begins her commemoration of Gris’s death with a continuity unheard in her writing since Three Lives:
Juan Gris was one of the younger children of a well-to-do merchant of Madrid. The earliest picture he has of himself is at about five years of age dressed in a little lace dress standing beside his mother who was very sweet and pleasantly maternal-looking. When he was about seven years old his father failed in business honorably and the family fell upon very hard times but in one way and another two sons and a daughter lived to grow up well educated and on the whole prosperous.
Like the popular lectures, Juan Gris attempts to create a mythology. Stein presents a sophisticatedly simplified narrative of the subject and his—and her—vanished world. Juan Gris marks a new sense of herself as part of history.
That same year, Stein wrote Three Sitting Here, which Ulla Dydo argues is a portrait of Gertrude Stein (the author), Gertrude Stein (the portrait by Picasso), and Gertrude Stein, the resident of Paris.
Eulogy and history and mythology are on Stein’s mind. In 1930 she writes a text History, or Messages From History, the plays An Historic Drama in Memory of Winnie Elliot and Louis IX and Madame Giraud, and The Pilgrims. Thoughts About Master Pieces, and We Came, A History:
What is history. Believe them it is not for their pleasure that they do it. History is this anything that they say and that they do and anything that is made for them by them such as they they do and anything that is made for them by them such as not speaking to them in case that he is turned away from them. This is historical. What did they do. … How do you like what you have heard. = History must be distinguished = From mistakes. = History must not be what is = Happening. History must not be about = Dogs and balls in all = The meaning of those = Words history must be = Something unusual and = Nevertheless famous and = Successful.
In the Thirties this discovery of history resulted in two of Stein’s most engaging extended works. The first, Four in America (1932-3) begins with a declaration of its premise:
If Ulysses S. Grant had been a religious leader who was to become a saint what would he have done.
If the Wright brothers had been artists that is painters what would they have done.
If Henry James had been a general what would he have had to do.
If General Washington had been a writer that is a novelist what would he do.
And, at least in the Grant section, the voice of the popular lecturer rediscovers song: “The silence and the silence comes the silence is not there.”
The old question of identity—Who am I?—is now complicated by fame: Am I the person everybody knows? And it isn’t such a leap from the question of fame to the question of biography: What does this famous Historical Name represent? What could he represent? She?
Hence the memoirs, starting with The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1932). It’s popularity and status as a classic does not mean that it is a settled thing. It still provokes questions: Is it true? Is it fiction? Is it charming? Is it exasperating?
Well, yes.
It is not all that exceptional from her other writing—it is a synthesis of several elements:
Like a lot of her work between the wars, it is a pastische. It assumes the persona of Alice Toklas, whose bemused voice provides unity. The mask permits Stein to talk about herself in a way that seems not quite earnest. She can both play the part of her pop public persona and distance herself from it—pretend it isn’t really her. It also situates the book as both a kind of portrait and a kind of a play.
The poetry of everyday life is displaced by celebrity gossip and the riot at the Banquet for Rousseau. After decades of abstract austerity, Stein unleases a torrent of stories and anecdotes as a kind of Acts of the Apostles of the Avant-Garde. The mythogizing of the popular lectures becomes a general mythography of the School of Paris. Chapter 5, covering the years 1907-1914 really evokes paradise. But already it starts to pall. As in Proust, there is an orgy of snubbing of celebrities (Berenson, Gide, Pound) while the favorites are petted with an insistance that is exasperating. Stein’s importance to Picasso is stressed with an insistance so undignified that it makes her sound like a desperate groupie.
From discovering herself of self as actor in history, Stein takes up the writing of history to guarantee her place in it. Without doubt she succeeded. Only she didn’t realize that history, for her, had not ended.
Stein’s sequel to the Autobiography, the 1937 Everybody’s Autobiography, should probably be even exasperating but isn’t. While ostensibly about her triumphal tour of America, it is actually a collage of aphorisms. It is a return to the self-interrogation and doubt that inform her best writing. She begins to worry about identity. She begins to worry about the value of intelligence, the value of genius:
It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.
I did not care for anyone being intelligent because if they are intelligent they talk as if they were preparing to change something.
Something rawer than doubt comes out: disquiet. At first she dismisses it with a bit of the old panache:
About an unhappy childhood well I never had an unhappy anything. What is the use of having an unhappy anything.
And when she revists her childhood haunts in Oakland, at first she responds with one of her most quoted quips:
… what was the use of my having come from Oakland it was not natural to have come from there yes write about it if I like or anything if I like but not there, there is no there there. …
But then comes an atypical outburst:
… and I asked to go with a reluctant feeling to see the Swett School where I went to school and Thirteenth Avenue and Twenty-fifth Street where we lived which I described in The Making of Americans. Ah Thirteenth Avenue was the same it was shabby and over-grown the houses were certainly some of them those that had been and there were not bigger buildings and they were neglected and, lots of grass and bushes growing yes it might have been the Thirteenth Avenue when I had been. Not of course the house, the house the big house and the big garden and the eucalyptus trees and the rose hedge naturally were not any longer existing, what was the use
… I did not like the feeling, who has to be themselves inside them, not any one and what is the use of having been if you are to be going on being and if not why is it different and if it is different why not. I did not like anything that was happening.
… I did remember that but it did look like that and so I did not remember that and if it did not look like that then I did not remember that. What was the use.
Stein hasn’t evoked such dark feelings since, as she says, Making of Americans.
After the American tour, after Everybody’s Autobiography, Stein returned to Biligin and, in 1937, wrote La Baronne Pierlot. It is a bit of drollery, but also a portrait of a garden, and the keeper of a garden.
We had a friend with us he was an American. Madame Pierlot found him charming. He is. He is New England and he fought for France and he is sweet and she liked him. . She decided to arrange a marriage for him. He had left by then. I wrote to him and told him. He wrote back and said yes if she could find any one as fascinating as she was and had been. I told Madame Pierlot what he had written. Ah ça was all she had to say to him.
It is a valedictory piece, a final “landscape,” but one infused by Stein’s new sense of people and places, their history and pathos.
