Gertrude Stein (Critical Lives) (25 page)

Feeding the GIs.

And she turned once more to America.
Brewsie and Willie
is an extraordinary emulation of dialogue between the GIs she met on her tour and in Paris. It recreates conversations between American soldiers and nurses, about the future of America, demonstrating again Stein’s skill at emulating vernaculars. She had always used dialogue and conversation in her work, from ‘Melanctha’ onwards, partly as a way of remaining indefinite, exploring contradictoriness. The appeal of dialogue was also that it did not involve argument; Stein was not a practitioner of the prolonged argument. But with some polemic fervour,
Brewsie and Willie
launched a critique of what Stein saw as the spoilt American culture, from mushy food to the newly invented Gallup poll, which aroused her perennial objection to the idea of being expected to answer a simple yes or no to anything, and railed against the evils of industrialism in America.

The book was a call for individualism, and a reminder that Stein was always not only an autocrat, but an individualist. ‘How can you pioneer when there ain’t no wilderness any more’ asks Brewsie. The nurse responds: ‘you got to break down what’s been built up, that’s pioneering.’
²⁶
A fair enough summing up of Stein’s artistic goals, which were always linked to her vision for America, and an American twentieth century. One of the most characteristic lines in the book is: ‘There ain’t any answer ... that’s the answer.’ Stein’s fundamental incapability of furnishing ‘an answer’ in her work, at the very root of her style, was related to her view of the world. At the end of what was to be Stein’s last book, and the most unusual of her unusual war writings, the address ‘To Americans’ is a fairly startling farewell speech. The GIs had ‘made me come over all patriotic.’ As a valediction, it gives a strikingly different image of Stein to the one that had prospered in the public imagination, or even the one that has prospered since in the critical tradition that has sprung up around her work since the 1970s:

You just have to find a new way ... you have to learn to produce without exhausting your country’s wealth, you have to learn to be individual and not just mass job workers ... you have to get courage enough to know what you feel and not just all be yes or no men, you have to really learn to express complication ... look facts in the face, not just what they all say, the leaders, but every darn one of you ... We are Americans.
²⁷

It is a reminder of the array of contexts that feed into the arc of her career that she called herself ‘a Civil War veteran’, and ended in the age of the atomic bomb.

Since the war Stein’s understanding of the race problem in America had advanced; she wrote, in an article for the
New York
Times
, that American soldiers were now beginning to understand what imprisonment and persecution meant, and because of that they were beginning to understand that the race problem in America was also about persecution and a sense of imprisonment.
²⁸
She too had become conscious of the meaning of freedom. The war may also have made Stein, belatedly, into a feminist.
The
Mother of Us All
(1946) was a libretto (again commissioned by Virgil Thomson, and first performed to his music in 1947) about the life of Susan B. Anthony, the nineteenth-century women’s rights reformer and campaigner for female suffrage. It was a peculiar subject for Stein, who had never identified with female role models, and never aligned herself with any feminist ideologies, except that it treated a subject who was perhaps a Stein substitute. Anthony is a strong female figure who, in the end, reaches a sort of apotheosis. She is a great speaker. She is the type of the genius whose work stands above time. The play itself is filled with silences, and not with answers, it is anti-sentiment, and also quite anti-male. Its ending is bleak; the disembodied voice of Susan B. Anthony sounds out from behind a memorial statue of Susan B. Anthony; after having asked, much as Stein did during her lectures, ‘do you know’, and receiving silence and negation as the only response, the voice from behind the statue intones her final words: ‘My long life, my long life.’ If this was Stein’s memorial to herself, it was an uncharacteristically muted one.

By the time Stein wrote this, the last full-length work she would ever write, she knew she was ill. She was in some pain from what was at first thought to be a bowel infection, and later turned out to be cancer. She had lost a lot of weight and had weakened. Still dwelling on death and destruction, her ‘Reflection on the Atomic Bomb’ would be the last piece Stein ever wrote. She died on 27 July 1946, aged 72, while being operated on for the cancer. She was buried in Père Lachaise cemetery. Alice eventually joined her there, twenty years later.

A window display devoted to Stein, 1946.

Stein’s final words have achieved the status of legend all on their own. They have an entry in
The Oxford Book of Literary Quotations
. As told by Toklas, Stein was lying bewildered on a hospital bed, when she looked at Alice and asked her: ‘what is the answer?’ When Alice was silent, Gertrude continued: ‘Well, in that case, what is the question?’
²⁹
Perfect as this is, it has the ring of wishful invention. Alice’s elegant hand is in it. Alice was still controlling the image, up until the last hours and beyond. Stein had played with various versions of this construction in her writing. She had given versions of her ‘dying words’ in
Everybody’s Autobiography
, ‘Sentences and Grammar’ in
How to Write
, and
Brewsie and Willie
, as well as to reporters on board ship when she docked in New York. If these were her dying words, Stein was quoting herself. In the years that followed Alice would continue to exert as firm a grip as she was able on all interpretations of Stein. She devoted herself to bringing all the unpublished manuscripts into the light, policing the biography, guarding the portrait, polishing the legend.

As Janet Flanner put it: ‘Gertrude Stein did not like questions and answers. She thought one should get answers without questions.’
³⁰
She showed her disdain for a standard author questionnaire sent to her by the
Little Review
, with such responses as ‘more of the same’, when asked what she expected of the future, and ‘I like to look at it’, when they asked her what was her attitude to modern art. When reporters clambered aboard her ship in New York jostling for headline quotes, she responded to their questions with a far more interesting question of her own: ‘Suppose no one asked a question. What would the answer be?’
³¹

Her love of rhetoric and mannerism aligned her more with the books she had read in the British Museum as a young woman than with those of her own generation, the Elizabethan writers like John Lyly, passages from whose
Euphues
she had transcribed into her notebooks back in 1903. She recognized a devotion to antithesis and contradiction, a deliberate undermining of certainties, and it was in a euphuistic spirit that she set herself stylistic constrictions and patterns and rhetorical problems throughout her life. She had tetchily tried to convey the value of her idiosyncrasy, her pluralism, her Renaissance sensibility, to her American lecture audiences: ‘“The great trouble”, she explained, “is that Americans have the idea that to understand something you must be able to immediately restate it.”’
³²
Stein took pleasure in open-endedness, in fact saw no other way to write or live.

She was the first to write her own life, almost incidentally becoming one of the century’s great and groundbreaking autobiographers, and there have been many since. Numerous memoirs of that heady period on the Left Bank followed hers, and most of them paid her the homage of at least a mention. Biographies began appearing with Elizabeth Sprigge’s, in 1957, which consulted Alice but of which Alice disapproved — and they continue to be written.

The papers reviewed her death using the same mixture of miscomprehension and bewildered bluster with which they had reviewed her work during life. Her obituarists praised the autobiography and suggested that the rest was nonsense, celebrated her charisma and her conversation, played up the relation with Picasso, Matisse and Hemingway. In the
New York Times
Toklas was described as ‘her lifelong secretary-companion’.
³³
Stein was bound for a long time in Wilson’s idea of her as ‘a literary personality’.
³⁴
In the end her reputation rests on her life and personality as well as on her work, and the one reputation could not really exist without the other.

One opinion of
Wars I Have Seen
was of Stein’s absorption in a word game while the world around her headed for catastrophe; ‘a word game that assumes no responsibility’.
³⁵
Even in the 1970s, the moral claims of Stein’s work were still disputed. Janet Hobhouse wrote in her biography of Stein,
Everybody Who Was Anybody
(1975) that Stein’s work is so extreme that it ‘raises the question of whether writing has the right to make such demands’.
³⁶
Such a question is implicit in the continuing marginality of much of her work, despite her fame. Perhaps no other writer has taken words to such extremes, or so flagrantly disregarded the demands of the reader, or the reader’s comfort. But that charge of irresponsibility and irrelevance was surely not deserved.

Red Grooms,
Gertrude
, 1975, colour lithograph and collage on paper mounted on paperboard.

She had very few sensible critics during her lifetime. By her death she was known for her one-liners, and was an easy reference point for all things avant garde. In the 1950s the eight-volume edition of the unpublished writings of Gertrude Stein was published, opening up a whole new cache of her serious writing.
³⁷
In 1970 Richard Bridgman’s
Gertrude Stein in Pieces
gave Stein’s readers a new narrative of her work; his explications, as much as his insistence that she was possible to explicate, lie behind much of Stein scholarship that followed. Meanwhile she was a hero for Beat poets; one should probably single out Lew Welch, who turned to writing after reading her work, and showed his gratitude in
How I
Read Gertrude Stein
. Being a Californian, she was a special icon for the San Francisco Renaissance, both as an exponent of gay culture and of avant-garde writing. Her meanings proliferated as postmodernism grew, and in the 1970s her true glorification began, not just by biographers gilding the legend she bequeathed them, but by feminist and deconstructionist critics who found in her an early and abundantly rewarding figurehead. She was seen as part of a lineage of women writers providing an alternative to the masculine literary culture in which she worked. As many have pointed out, Stein devised her own ‘literary theory’
avant la lettre
. As postmodern theory has fallen out of vogue, Stein has retained her stature, becoming other things to other readers. She is easily appropriated by factions.

Stein herself believed, insisted on pointing out, that she had been unfairly passed over, and that male modernists had taken the credit for many of her innovations. It is a moot point how far this was down to her gender, though it is true that she saw herself as occupying, and needing to occupy, a separate literary domain from her masculine contemporaries. Her misogyny has been well noted, but she wrote about women all her life and felt it necessary to state, late in her career in
The Geographical History of America
(referring of course to herself ) that ‘in this epoch the only real literary thinking has been done by a woman’.
³⁸
What a boon she has been for feminist literary history.