1935-1946
NO OBJECT TO BE OBTAINED
Stein’s last writings are often seen as something apart from the rest of her work—as either a failure to live up to her earlier, more difficult, work, or as a triumphant discovery of an accessible voice.
On one side is Ulla Dydo’s invaluable Stein Reader which includes nothing after 1938 because, it “concentrates on experimental work written ‘from inside’ and excludes her late public works written ‘from outside.’”
On the other side is Janet Malcolm, who picks up in Wars I Have Seen (1944) and decides that after forty years of goofing around Stein finally started writing: “When Stein finally finds her true voice, when she no longer needs to struggle against the here and now by retreating into silliness, the book becomes almost unbearably exciting and moving.”
Both views frame the works the last eight years of her life are assumed to be unrelated to what came before.
Which is wrongheaded, but not surprising. Something happened in the late Thirties and Stein’s work changed. The free-for-all of domestic trivia, fantasy, analysis and wordplay that had been her characteristic manner since 1913 was replaced by a new technique, and hence, a new content.
For one thing, the range of reference within each work narrowed. Instead of variety and collage, there was a stress on incantatory repetition and sophisticated simplicity. Of course these qualities have been present in her work since Three Lives, but they acquire a new edge.
Geographical History of America (1935) like Basho’s journal, passes from the didactic into the lyric, and the outcome of argumentation is not a conclusion but a cry:
… the newspapers tell about events but what have events to do with anything nothing nothing I tell you nothing events have nothing to do with anything nothing …
And in the word games of Listen to Me (1936), the absurdity acquires a sinister edge:
The second character. There is a second character.
The third character. There is a third character.
The fourth character. There is a fifth character.
The fifth character. There is no fifth character.
In Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights (1938) the repetitions become rhymes, and the darkness becomes dread:
They all sleep in the dark with the electric light all bright, and then at the window comes something.
Is it the moon says the dog is it the moon says the boy is it the moon do not wake me is it the moon says Faustus.
No says a woman no it is not the moon, I am not the moon, I am at the window Doctor Faustus do not you know what it is that is happening.
No answer.
Doctor Faustus do not you know what is happening.
… Here we know because Doctor Faustus tells us so, that he only he can turn night into day but now they say, they say, (her voice rises to a screech) they say a woman can turn night into day, they say a woman and a viper bit her and did not hurt her …
Though Stein’s Faust is closer to Beckett than Gounod, it’s still startling to see her take up such a heavily-weighted literary archetype. But then Stein’s work had always been populated with archetypes. The characters in Making of Americans were representatives rather than individuals.
Then the practice of writing portraits dissipated this weight, making a game of consciousness and identity. And during the period between the wars, when she took up saints and other historical figures, she treated them as static icons with fixed attributes. She saw them fixed in eternity, beyond struggle and change, delighting like angels in paradise, in contemplating their being.
But in the late Thirties identity became something serious again.
The characters of Stein’s late works—Faustus, Rose, Ida, Susan B., Brewsie and Willie—do not exist blissfully outside of time contemplating their felicity. The story of their lives is not a meditation on a continuous present of contentment, but a meditation on a continuous present of struggle with hardship, fear, futility, discomfort, anxiety alternating with joy and awe.
And this struggle occurs in isolation. In Everybody’s Autobiography, Stein touches on a sense of alienation bleaker and more total than anything in her earliest books:
… but now since the earth is all covered over with every one there is really no relation between any one and so if this Everybody’s Autobiography is to be the Autobiography of every one it is not to be any connection between any one and any one because now there is none. That is what makes detective stories such good reading, the man being dead he is not really in connection with any one. If he is it is another kind of a story and not a detective story.
… the only thing that really bothers me is that the earth now is all covered over with people and that hearing anybody is not of any particular importance because anybody can know anybody. That is really why the only novels possible these days are detective stories, where the only person of any importance is dead.
In Picasso (1938) Stein recasts the argument in Composition as Explanation between struggle and classicism, and insists on the necessity for unpleasantness in art. For Stein, The value of the discoverer-artist like Picasso is that he rejects his culture’s complacency in the most radical manner--by rejecting the identity imposed upon him. This enables him to produce master-pieces, i.e. works radically outside nature, culture, identity. The methodology is not predetermined, but comes out of the practice of making. Later the discoveries can be exploited for the uses of culture, i.e. the production of decoration, prettiness. But the first result cannot be pleasant:
In the effort to create the intensity and the struggle to create this intensity, the result always produces a certain ugliness, whose who follow can make of this thing a beautiful thing because they know what they are doing, the thing having already been invented, but the inventor because he does not know what he is going to invent inevitably the thing he makes must have its ugliness.
The great adventure of Modernism reflects a fundamental homelessness. When she writes about the past Heroic Age of cubism her words more relevant to the future—to pictures that Pollock would paint or music that Cage would compose ten years later:
Really the composition of this war, 1914-1918, was not the composition of all previous wars, the composition was not a composition in which there was one man in the centre surrounded by a lot of other men but a composition that had neither a beginning nor an end, a composition of which one corner was as important as another corner, in fact the composition of cubism.
And the Twentieth Century, far from a triumph
… is a time when everything cracks, where everything is destroyed, everything isolates itself, it is a more splendid thing than a period where everything follows itself.
The World is Round (1939) has the pretext of being written for a specific child, Rose Lucy Renée Anne d’Aiguy (1928-1988). Typically, Stein approaches the task unlike anybody else.
Stein’s account of Rose, as she climbs up a hill are a hybrid of Pooh and Parsifal. Rose is struggling to reach a meadow at the top of the mountain, where she wants to sit in her blue garden chair. She climbs day and night. Along the way she is frightened by a dwarf, suffers from loneliness. Behind a waterfall:
It was written three times just how it looked as if it was done with a hair on a chair, and it said, oh dear yes it said, Devil, Devil Devil, it said Devil three times right there.
It is a book about nature, fear and awe—and the sublime. Rose’s assent becomes an evocation of the implacable silence and strangeness of the world.
Rose grew up to be Ida (1941). She even kept her dog named Love. But instead of Nature, grown-up Ida dealt with the World. It is a world in which everything is a bit off: “Ida lived with her great-aunt not in the city but just outside.”
Ida is urgent, anxiously awake, animated by disquiet.
So Ida was born and a very little while after her parents went off on a trip and never came back. That was the first funny thing that happened to Ida.
Sometimes the strangeness anticipates Southern Gothic:
An old woman who was no relation and who had known the great-aunt when she was young was always telling that the great-aunt had had something happen to her oh many years ago, it was a soldier, and then the great-aunt had had little twins born to her and then she had quietly, the twins were dead then, born so, she had buried them under a pear tree and nobody knew.
Nobody believed the old woman perhaps it was true but nobody believed it, but all the family always looked at every pear tree and had a funny feeling.
But more than anyone in Flannery O’Connor, Ida seems to anticipate the laconically annihilated heroines of Natalia Ginzburg, Marguerite Duras, and Joan Didion:
So Ida settled down in Washington. This is what happened every day.
Ida woke up. After a while she got up. Then she stood up. Then she ate something. After that she sat down.
That was Ida.
… They were married, it was not exciting, it was what they did. They did get married.
… She ate soft-shell crabs, she had two servings of soft-shell crabs and she ate lobster à la newburg she only had one helping of that and then she left.
Meanwhile, Stein found herself living under the Occupation.
Janet Malcolm finds it utterly incomprehensible that Stein and Toklas didn’t take advantage of their opportunities to flee to the U.S.; but what could be more natural than for old folks to prefer to stay put, not quite realizing the consequences?
If Stein didn’t see in advance the consequences of the Occupation, living through it led to a new kind of witnessing in her writing, a new genre.
The voice of the popular lectures becomes reportage on battles, rumors, exploits. Where previously she made a mythology of her School of Paris milieu, now she makes a mythology of her country neighbors.
In The Winner Loses: A Picture of Occupied France (published in the Atlantic Monthly, November 1940) , when Stein notes that the Occupation “was not like the last war, when all the men were dead or badly wounded,” you realize that she almost never mentioned any of the dead or badly wounded, for all her talk about the cultural upheaval of World War I. She notes this only now, twenty-six years later, in passing.
Where Stein the chronicler of Ida doubts the value of everyday existence, Stein the reporter is fired by accounts of her neighbors’ retenenue, the exaggerated correctness of behavior by which they defied the shame of defeat. All the more heroic because the end the end is unknown: “Well, then he had saved France and everything was over. But it wasn’t, not at all--it was just beginning for us.”
Stein’s big book about the war came three years later. Janet Malcolm is right about one thing—Wars I Have Seen (1944) is exciting and moving. Though once again Stein refuses to comply with our expectations. It begins with fifty-seven pages of reminiscences and musing:
I do not know whether to put in the things I do not remember, as well as the things I do remember. To begin with I was born, that I do not remember but I was told about it quite often.
… Well all this time I went to school and school in California meant knowing lots of nationalities. And if you went to school with them and knew about their hair and their ways and all you were bound later not to be surprised that Germans are as they are and French and Greeks and Chinamen and Japs. There is nothing afterward but confirmation confirmation of what you knew, because nobody changes, they may develop but they do not change and so if you went to school with them why should you not know them.
… What is there inside one that makes one know all about war. Death starts history and fears. And that begins very soon and dies out little by little or not at all or all.
As always, Stein is struggling to find the voice. When will she get to the story? But it’s of a piece with her other work—she is profoundly, deeply, thoroughly profane about everything. Things other people treat with great seriousness she does not. Not even Bataille could bring himself to be impious about the war; but for Stein such irreverence was who she was.
Then at page fifty-eight comes “To-day August 1943,” and the real reportage begins. And what does it consist of? Housekeeping, gossip, idle speculation about History and Humanity, and then bulletins from the front.
We spend our Friday afternoons with friends reading Shakespeare … and what is so terrifying is that it is all just like what is happening now … it is all just violence and there is no object to be attained, no glory to be won, just like Henry the Sixth and Richard the Third and Macbeth …
It covers the same topics as Anne Frank. And Stein and Toklas could have easily met Frank’s fate. If they had, the book would have been unbearable. Wars is a picture of European civilization in a moment when it really did break down. What was left was nature and ruins:
… the nineteenth century believed in progress and permanence, permanence and progress. And now. Well now there is neither the one or the other.
Even so, Stein didn’t include real horrors. Toklas, in her 1954 cookbook, includes a chilling anecdote from those times:
The Italians stayed until their country accepted the Armistice. When they heard the news, they tore up their military papers and left singing. There were about six hundred Italian soldiers in the neighborhood and the frontier was only 125 kilometers away. We hoped they would cross it safely. Later we heard that they had all been killed by the Germans.
Stein was not content with reportage. In 1945 she wrote a play, Yes is for a Very Young Man, in which much of Winner Loses and Wars I Have Seen recast as dialogue. The story of the curiously polite German interpreter is dramatized. The character Henry has the best lines: “I tell you all here and now, now and here, solemnly I tell you, if I ever again hear a Frenchman or a Frenchwoman pronounce that word discipline I’ll punch their head ….”
The wordplay and repetition give the dialog a orotund unreality, but it is in earnest, and it’s a presentation of genuine conflict. It was an experiment in conventionality.
In her next and final play, The Mother of Us All (1946), the urgency has already mellowed a bit. The 19th century pretext frees Stein to play. History once again becomes a historical pageant. Or, rather, history considered as a salon filled with historical figures arguing with each other, teasing each other, flirting.
What was Susan B. Anthony to Stein, who famously declared she was too bored to help the cause of women circa 1906? Or justice? Or sacrifice? Did Stein ever vote once in her life? The heart of it isn’t feminism, but the dilemma of a private person playing a role on a public stage. It flows along divertingly, avoiding solemnity until the very end. Susan B.’s words enhanced by Virgil Thomson’s music:
We cannot retrace our steps, going forward may be the same as going backwards. We cannot retrace our steps, retrace our steps. All my long life, all my life, we do not retrace our steps, all my long life, but.
(A silence, a long silence)
But—we do not retrace our steps, all my long life, and here, here we are here, in marble and gold, did I say gold, yes I sad gold, in marble and gold and where—
(A silence)
Where is where. In my long life of effort and strife, dear life, life is strife, in my long life, it will not come and go, I tell you so, it will stay it will pay but
(A long silence)
But do I want what we have got, has it not gone, what made it live, has it not gone because now it is had, in my long life in my long life .
(Silence)
Life is strife, I was a martyr all my life not to what I won but to what was done.
(Silence)
Do you know because I tell you so, or do you know, do you know.
(Silence)
My long life, my long life.
(Curtain.)
It provides a beautiful conclusion to the opera, and is perhaps appropriate to the character, but it doesn’t work as a conclusion to Stein’s career. To the very end she had questions rather than convictions.
Her last novel, Brewsie and Willie (1945) is an attempt to expand the idiom of Ida to deal with all sorts of novel topics—industrialization, racism, religion—in an exclusively male milieu. Besides Ida, it combines something of the recent war reportage and the anthology texts of the previous war.
Stein’s heroes are archtypical American blowhards, venting about what they see in destroyed Europe, what awaits them back in the U.S. Their observations translate many of Stein’s longtime beliefs into a new idiom:
It used to be fine, said Willie, before the war when we used to believe what the newspapers and the magazines said, we used to believe them when we read them and now when it’s us they write about we know it’s lies, just lies, just bunches of lies, and if it’s just bunches of lies, what we going to read when we get home, answer me that, Brewsie, answer me that.
Nothing happens but talk. But it is not a drama of ideas; it’s a portrait of the repose that comes after catastrophe. That sense of clear-sightedness, when the future is radically unknowable, but open. The open landscape is not full of the promise of pleasure, as in her landscape plays of the Twenties. Instead, Stein senses a disconnect that will continue to haunt America, from Korea to Afghanistan:
While they were talking they did not know what country they were in.
And at the same time, as if in restitution for her assertion in Picasso about the necessity of ugliness, she was moved to write about Raoul Dufy (1946). It is a short text but dense with provocatively mixed elements. It contains reminiscences of the School of Paris after World War I. It contains stories about the Occupation and the Liberation. It argues that all art—painting, music, literature—is abstract, and hence calling some works abstract and others not is ridiculous.
Ultimately it is about reconciliation. Stein returns again and again to the fact that the two significant encounters she has had with Dufy’s work both took place in the context of war. She first encountered Dufy’s art of triumphant décor, just after World War I. Then, during an especially comfortless moment of the Liberation, she encounters his work again, and experiences it as a vision of hope. She begins and ends with the phrase:
One must meditate about pleasure.
Admonition? memorandum? encouragement? ethos?
