A Guide to Gertrude Stein

The Evolution of a Master of Fiction into a Painter of Cubist Still-Life in Prose

EDMUND WILSON

THERE is, perhaps, no other American writer of importance who has been so badly underestimated as Gertrude Stein. And this critical neglect would seem chiefly to be due to an unfortunate accident. The earlier half of Miss Stein's literary work has never really had a fair chance of recognition: it was one of her most advanced and most daring experiments which first attracted public attention. The first most of us heard of Gertrude Stein was when Tender Buttons was published in 1914 and was greeted with raucous guffaws as an example of exotic Greenwich Villagism. Yet Miss Stein had already published at this time, besides two curious and interesting brochures, one of the most distinguished works of fiction by any living American author—a book which had far more claim to serious recognition than the works of most of the Hergesheimers and the Cathers which followed it and which were raised to the dignity of masters by the eagerness of the new literary generation to discover authentic American talent. It was a little as if Henry James had first attracted attention with The Wings of the Dove or George Meredith with One of Our Conquerors. No one realized that the strange looking stuff which diverted him as a form of literary lunacy was really only a comparatively late phase of a genius extraordinarily conscientious and sane, which had been working steadily for many years to express itself in prose.

"Three Lives"

GERTRUDE STEIN'S first book, Three Lives, appeared, in 1909, at a time when there was little audience, either popular or critical, for serious American fiction. If Three Lives were published today we should probably hear much more about it. Indeed, have we not done honor to Sherwood Anderson, who is essentially a disciple of Miss Stein and whose very best stories, I think, are no better than Three Lives?

Three Lives was a work of realism but realism of rather a novel kind. There had come to be a sort of realistic formula for writing about domestic servants, invented perhaps by Flaubert and fostered, I suppose, by the Goncourts. But Miss Stein, though she shared with these writers their ironic sense and their detachment, had discovered a technique of her own. When we read Un Coeur Simple of Flaubert we are continually thinking about Flaubert—of his technical virtuosity, of his tour dc force of the imagination in being able to put before us so lowly a creature at all—his researches into her simple heart are like a last triumph of sophistication. But Gertrude Stein, in her treatment of her servant girls, occupies no such acrid literary altitudes. Her portraits, though no less ruthless than Flaubert's, are far closer to the originals. Indeed they are not dazzling feats of ingenuity like Flaubert's, at all, but rather the projection of three actual human beings as complex and as complete as life. The style itself, which seems to owe nothing to that of any other novelist, takes on the very accents and the rhythms of the minds whose adventures it is recording. We have ceased to see the nurse-girl as an insect to be examined at arm's length; we find ourselves living in her own world and watching it through her own eyes. And far from proving sordid or boring, it becomes extraordinarily beautiful and noble.

In Three Lives the style, though extremely individual, is not yet especially eccentric— though some of the author's characteristic tricks have already begun to appear. You have the rhythmic repetitions, like the refrain of a ballad, which we find imitated in Sherwood Anderson, and you have the strange stringing together of present participles which seems at first merely an attempt to reproduce some mannerism of Negro conversation, but which was afterwards to grow on Miss Stein as a mannerism of her own. "I never did use to think I was so much on being real modest, Melanctha, but now I know really I am, when I hear you talking. I see all the time there are many people living just as good as I am, though they are a little different to me. Now with you, Melanctha, if I understand you right what you are talking, you don't think that way of no other one that you are ever knowing."

The Beginnings of Eccentricity

THREE Lives and the gigantic History of a family constitute Miss Stein's first period. The latter found no publisher when it was first written and has remained in obscurity ever since, though those who have read it in manuscript consider it her most important work and, with the example of Proust and Ulysses, it is to be hoped that some publisher will undertake it. Her middle manner—a logical elaboration of the earlier style of Three Lives—first appears in 1912 in the portraits of Matisse and Picasso, published by Mr. Stieglitz in Camera Work, and in a sketch of the Galeries Lafayette, in a defunct magazine called Rogue. I shall quote the beginning of the portrait of Matisse: "One was quite certain that for a long part of his being one being living he had been trying to be certain that he was wrong in doing what he was doing and then when he could not come to be certain that he had been wrong in doing what he had been doing, when he had completely convinced himself that he would not come to be certain that he had been wrong in doing what he had been doing he was really certain then that he was a great one and he certainly was a great one. Certainly every one could be certain of this thing that this one is a great one." This was a little queer but still intelligible; but, about this time another "portrait" appeared which presented far greater difficulties. It suddenly became evident that Gertrude Stein had abandoned the intelligible altogether.

The Portrait of Mabel Dodge of the Villa Curonia, printed privately in Florence, retained the flowing manner of the other portraits but hadTegun speaking in a strange and disturbing language, rather like Mallarme's language of Symbolism; and finally, in Tender Buttons Miss Stein abandoned even her long limpid sentences and began expressing herself in fantastic strings of words without syntax or connection. This was the sort of thing that astonished the world in 1914:

Red Roses. A cool red rose and a pink cut pink, a collapse and a sold hole, a little less hot.

A Sound. Elephant beaten with candy and little pops and chews all bolts and reckless reckless rats, this is this.

Custard. Custard is this. It has aches, aches when. Not to be. Not to be narrowly. This makes a whole little hill.

It is better than a little thing that has mellow real mellow. It is better than lakes whole lakes, it is better than seeing.

Chicken. Alas a dirty word, alas a dirty third alas a dirty third, alas a dirty bird.

It appeared that Miss Stein had decided to try using words for the values which she believed them to possess apart from those inherent in their actual meanings. We are told that she used to shut herself up at night and try utterly to banish from her brain all the words ordinarily associated with the ideas she had fixed upon. Concentrating upon the given image she would make her mind a blank to its ordinary vocabulary, invoking other, more subtly relevant words to render it anew.

But the real key to understanding Tender Buttons is to be found in Miss Stein's preoccupation with modern painting. Long a friend of Matisse and Picasso, and one of the earliest of their admirers, she has for many years been living in Paris in the full excitement of the new movement and has accumulated a collection of modern paintings, which is one of the most remarkable in Europe. It is not surprising that she should have come to wonder whether analogous effects might not be produced in literature. We are all more or less familiar by this time with the theory of cubism and its sister genres—that violent reaction from naturalism, which holds that by splitting up or distorting an object you can give a far truer impression of its effect on the beholder than by any literal representation— and it is not difficult to see how Miss Stein's later work attempts the same fresh rendering in prose.

The Progress of Aesthetic Thrills

THE Portrait of Mabel Dodge was merely a portrait in the manner of Picasso, and the sketches in Tender Buttons, of which the subtitle was Objects, Food, Rooms were simply a series of cubist still-lifes in the manner of Gleize or Braque. She had cut down her long repetitive ruminations to telegraphic economic strokes; instead of turning the object over and over, like the ocean lapping a pebble, she had begun dropping the pebble in a well and recording only the ripples on the surface, when the pebble itself had disappeared and sunk many yards out of sight. It is not the object which we see but the vibrations caused by the object —not a focussing of something outside the artist, but the consciousness of the artist herself.

Her next publication, a small pamphlet called, felicitously, Have They Attacked Mary. He Giggled—A Political' Satire (1917), and her most recent book Geography and Plays (1922) which contains also specimens of almost all her other manners, seem to apply the method of the still-lifes in Taider Buttons to more complicated subjects. You have travel, anecdotes, conversations, all splintered up and reduced to their essentials, a queer selective stenography of life. Some of this is recognizable and amusing; more is completely incomprehensible; and all is tantalizing with the suggestion of a fine artist just out of reach. For the chief strength of Miss Stein's genius still appears to be her grasp of character. In spite of her excursions into still-life, she has always been preoccupied with portraits, The three women of Three Liven, besides being three accurately reported individuals, achieved an almost Shakespearean significance as the representatives of Certain salient human types; and the essays on the modern painters seemed excellent criticism of artistic personality. Now, in her latest writings—though with a lighter irony—we have the portrait painter again: Miss Furr and Miss Skeene are plain—and incomparable— but what of Tourtebattre and Johnny Grey? We have the feeling that we have somehow been cheated out of the masterpieces of a first-rate writer of fiction.

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And is it right that we should lose Gertrude Stein? That is a difficult question to answer; but I am inclined to think we should not. It is not that I object to experiments—however bold— with language and form, nor that I deny Miss Stein's partial success—it may well be, as Mr. Anderson suggests, that she has made a contribution of importance to modern prose; but that I believe her complete literary success has been prevented by her unfortunate analogy with the plastic arts. I am told by her friends that for many years she has seen almost no literary people but only sculptors and painters; and it is a fact that there is scarcely a literary reference to be found in any of her works. It would seem that Miss Stein has cut herself off so completely from the tradition and experience of other writers that she has ceased not only to recognize the limitations of literature but even to understand its aim.

I will admit as much as you please that in the plastic arts one need not be representational, that one should avoid especially being "literary", as the modern painters say; but, though painting ought not to be literary, I do not see why literature should not. In painting, though you may have eliminated everything else, you have at least a shape or a pattern and this is no doubt all you need; but it seems to me that literature is inevitably founded on ideas. Human speech is a tissue of ideas-— however forms and colors may not be-— and it seems more or less impossible for a work of literature to be anything but an arrangement of ideas, .

Gertrude Stein and Joyce

COMPARE the scene in the "pub" in Ulysses, in which a somewhat similar use of language is made, with one of Gertrude Stein's "plays": in the former the queer devices are effective because we know what the author is trying to describe; but in the latter they go for nothing because we do not know what the "play" is all about. Miss Stein no longer understands the conditions under which literary effects have to be produced, There is sometimes a genuine music in the most baffling of her works, but there are rarely any communicated emotions, When Gertrude Stein succeeds in her newmanner it is as any other poet succeeds, through coining an idea miraculously into words. But it is not, in the long run, I believe, as a painter of cubist still-lifes after Braque. And, in any case, it is in her thought that we arc chiefly interested, and it is precisely her thought which we now rarely get. We figure her as the great pyramidal Buddha of Mr. Jo Davidson's statue, ruminating eternally on the ebb and flood of life, registering impressions like some august seismograph, And we cannot but regret that the results of her meditations are communicated to us in oracles.