Gertrude Stein (Critical Lives) (26 page)

She was normally elaborately genial, if insistent, about the subject, but on one occasion allowed herself a small rejoinder, when reporters continued to ask if she could really be serious: ‘It’s not our idea of fun to work for 30 or 40 years on a medium of expression and then have it ridiculed’, she snapped.
³⁹
Stein insisted on calling
The Making of Americans
‘the beginning of modern writing’.
⁴⁰
She believed (or at least stated) that she, an American woman, was the embodiment of the creative force of the century, as if she herself had given birth to the modern era in her writing. She was one of the first writers who wrote with the consciousness that the reader could no longer trust the writer to provide a coherent narrative of the world, and included that consciousness within what she wrote, made it an essential part of what she wrote. She faced the world with a William Jamesian agnosticism, and a passionate, rigorous individualism. In
Useful Knowledge
(another deliberately provocative title) she counted up to one hundred in the following manner: ‘one and one and one and one and one and one ...’.

Gertrude Stein with teleprinter, 1934.

Stein’s true radical legacy lay in her insistence on showing how words and their meanings could be undone; she took it as her right that she had the freedom to use words exactly as she pleased, and in doing so she undermined the relation between words and the world, in the process flagging up the myriad problems — and perks — of describing consciousness using language. There are many reasons she was long consigned to irrelevance, not the least of which is her genuine difficulty but her work can also be a source of unique pleasure for the reader.
⁴¹
Janet Flanner remembered:

A publisher once said to her, ‘We want the comprehensible thing, the thing the public can understand.’ She said to him: ‘My work would have been no use to anyone if the public had understood me early and first.’
⁴²

Gertrude Stein in old age.

Perhaps it was because she was so fearful that she was always looking for praise. Her aphorism that ‘nobody really lives who has not been well written about’,
⁴³
though it sounds like a cocktail party aperçu, is, baldly, a desperate statement. Her own life, as she wrote it, witticisms and all, became part of her work. She believed her ‘personality’ was her work. In
A Long Gay Book
Stein wrote that most people stop up their fear of death by procreation, by continuing themselves in another generation of flesh and blood.
⁴⁴
Stein did it by writing — practically every day of her life from the age of 30 onwards. It was not wilfulness or thirst for celebrity that could make her continue experimenting in the face of ridicule and disinterest, from the 1890s to the 1940s: it was her obsession with language. Her peculiar eloquence resides in her belief that, as she wrote in a piece called ‘Woodrow Wilson’: ‘Words are shocks.’
⁴⁵
Her work is still extravagant in its strangeness. On her death there was already ‘The Legend of Gertrude Stein’, the legend of a life that intersected with the lives of hundreds of other writers and artists, the cultural creators of the twentieth century. She took her bows after the performance, and went back and pursued the perplexing, dark passageways of her difficult work.

As the fabled last words suggest, the important thing was never the answer, nor even the question. This succinct paradox became famous as Stein’s dying communication because it so fittingly summed up her life and work. This was precisely the indeterminate area of philosophical speculation, in the very formation of thought, that her writing probed throughout her life. There is nothing final about it. Her work was an exploration of indeterminacy, an extraordinary thing for a writer to take as a lifetime’s subject. Ever the provocateur, her final question, a questioning of all questions, is both mystical and humorous. It has the ring of a punchline — one can almost imagine Groucho Marx delivering it — and it is almost despairing, and almost resigned, but not quite: the hopeful wondering just about wins through. It’s a happy thought to imagine that she retained that ambiguity until the end, which is deliberately not an ending. Stein’s work, where it is comic, is seriously comic, in the way that her posing of that ultimate question, making it into her own last word, scripting her own death, is an epistemological jest: searching for that great twentieth-century white whale, authenticity, and knowing that it might not even exist.

Three Lives
(New York, 1909)

Tender Buttons
(New York, 1914)

Geography and Plays
(Boston, 1922)

The Making of Americans
(Paris, 1925)

Composition as Explanation
(London, 1926)

Useful Knowledge
(New York, 1928)

Lucy Church Amiably
(Paris, 1930)

Before the Flowers of Friendship Faded
(Paris, 1931)

How to Write
(Paris, 1931)

Operas and Plays
(Paris, 1932)

Matisse Picasso and Gertrude Stein with Two Shorter Stories
(Paris, 1933)

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
(New York, 1933)

Four Saints in Three Acts
(New York, 1934)

Portraits and Prayers
(New York, 1934)

Lectures in America
(New York, 1935)

Narration
(Chicago, IL, 1935)

The Geographical History of America
(New York, 1936)

Everybody’s Autobiography
(New York, 1937)

Picasso
(London, 1938)

The World Is Round
(New York, 1939)

Paris France
(London, 1938)

What Are Masterpieces
(Los Angeles, CA, 1940)

Ida a Novel
(New York, 1941)

Wars I Have Seen
(New York, 1945)

Brewsie and Willie
(New York, 1946)

Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein
, edited with an introduction and notes by Carl Van Vechten (New York, 1946)

In Savoy or Yes Is for a Very Young Man
(London, 1946)

Four in America
(New Haven, CT, 1947)

Blood on the Dining Room Floor
(Pawlet, VT, 1948)

Last Operas and Plays
(New York, 1949)

Two (Gertrude Stein and Her Brother) and Other Early Portraits (1908–1912)
, vol. I of
Yale Edition of the Unpublished Writings of Gertrude Stein
(New Haven, CT, 1951)

Mrs Reynolds and Five Earlier Novelettes (1931–1942)
, vol. II of
Yale Edition of
the Unpublished Writings of Gertrude Stein
(New Haven, CT, 1952)

Bee Time Vine and Other Pieces (1913–1927)
, vol. III of
Yale Edition of the
Unpublished Writings of Gertrude Stein
(New Haven, CT, 1953)

As Fine as Melanctha (1914–1930)
, vol. IV of
Yale Edition of the Unpublished
Writings of Gertrude Stein
(New Haven, CT, 1954)

Painted Lace and Other Pieces (1914–1937)
, vol. V of
Yale Edition of the
Unpublished Writings of Gertrude Stein
(New Haven, CT, 1955)

Stanzas in Meditation and Other Poems (1929–1933)
, vol. VI of
Yale Edition of
the Unpublished Writings of Gertrude Stein
(New Haven, CT, 1956)

Alphabets and Birthdays
, vol. VII of
Yale Edition of the Unpublished Writings of
Gertrude Stein
(New Haven, CT, 1957)

A Novel of Thank You
, vol. VIII of
Yale Edition of the Unpublished Writings of
Gertrude Stein
(New Haven, CT, 1958)

Fernhurst, QED, and Other Early Writings by Gertrude Stein
, ed. Leon Katz (New York, 1971)

Look At Me Now and Here I Am: Writings and Lectures 1909–45
, ed. Patricia Meyerowitz (New York, 1971)

A Primer for the Gradual Understanding of Gertrude Stein
, ed. Robert Bartlett Haas (Los Angeles, CA, 1971)

Reflections on the Atomic Bomb,
vol. I of the
Previously Uncollected Writings of
Gertrude Stein
(Los Angeles, CA, 1973)

How Writing Is Written
, vol. II of the
Previously Uncollected Writings of
Gertrude Stein
, ed. Robert Bartlett Haas (Los Angeles, CA, 1974)

A Stein Reader
, ed. Ulla E. Dydo (Evanston, IL, 1993)

Armstrong, Tim,
Modernism, Technology and the Body: A Cultural Study
(Cambridge, 1998)

Bay-Cheng, Sarah,
Mama Dada: Gertrude Stein’s Avant-Garde Theater
(New York, 2004)

Berry, Ellen E.,
Curved Thought and Textual Wandering: Gertrude Stein’s
Postmodernism
(Ann Arbor, MI, 1992)

Bloom, Harold, ed.,
Modern Critical Views: Gertrude Stein
(New York, 1986)

Bowers, Jane Palatini,
‘They Watch Me as They Watch This’: Gertrude Stein’s
Metadrama
(Philadelphia, PA, 1991)

Bridgman, Richard,
Gertrude Stein in Pieces
(New York, 1970)

Brinnin, John Malcolm,
The Third Rose: Gertrude Stein and her World
(Boston, MA, 1959)

Burns, Edward, ed., ‘Gertrude Stein Issue’,
Twentieth Century Literature
, XXIV/1 (Spring 1978)

Caramello, Charles,
Henry James, Gertrude Stein, and the Biographical Act
(Chapel Hill, NC, 1996)

Chessman, Harriet Scott,
The Public Is Invited to Dance: Representation, the
Body, and Dialogue in Gertrude Stein
(Stanford, CA, 1989)

Curnutt, Kirk, ed.,
The Critical Response to Gertrude Stein
(Westport, CT, 2000)

Damon, Maria,
The Dark End of the Street: Margins in American Vanguard
Poetry
(Minneapolis, MN, 1993)

––, ‘Gertrude Stein’s Jewishness, Jewish Social Scientists, and the “Jewish Question”’,
Modern Fiction Studies
, XLII/3 (Fall 1996), pp. 489–506

Dearborn, Mary V., ‘Gertrude Stein’s
The Making of Americans
as an Ethnic Text’, in
Pocahontas’s Daughters: Gender and Ethnicity in American
Culture
(New York, 1986), pp. 159–93

Dekoven, Marianne,
A Different Language: Gertrude Stein’s Experimental
Writing
(Madison, WI, 1983)

Doane, Janice,
Silence and Narrative: The Early Novels of Gertrude Stein
(Westport, CT, 1986)

Dydo, Ulla E., with William Rice,
The Language that Rises 1923–1934
(Evanston, IL, 2003)

Fifer, Elizabeth,
Rescued Readings: A Reconstruction of Gertrude Stein’s
Difficult Texts
(Detroit, MI, 1992)

Giroud, Vincent,
Picasso and Gertrude Stein
(New Haven, CT, 2006)

Hejinian, Lyn, ‘Two Stein Talks’, ‘Three Lives’ and ‘A Common Sense’, in
The Language of Inquiry
(Berkeley, CA, 2000)

Hobhouse, Janet,
Everybody Who Was Anybody: A Biography of Gertrude
Stein
(New York, 1975)

Hoffman, Michael J., ed.,
Critical Essays on Gertrude Stein
(Boston, MA, 1986)

––,
The Development of Abstractionism in the Writings of Gertrude Stein
(Philadelphia, PA, 1965)

––, ed.,
Gertrude Stein
(Boston, MA, 1976)

Katz, Leon, ‘The First Making of The Making of Americans: A Study Based on Gertrude Stein’s Notebooks and Early Versions of her Novel (1902–8)’, PhD dissertation, Columbia University (1963)

Kellner, Bruce, ed.,
A Gertrude Stein Companion: Content with the Example
(New York, 1988)

Kostelanetz, Richard,
Gertrude Stein Advanced: An Anthology of Criticism
(Jefferson, NC, 1990)

Malcolm, Janet,
Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice
(New Haven, CT, 2007)

Mellow, James R.,
Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company
(New York, 1974)

Meyer, Steven,
Irresistible Dictation: Gertrude Stein and the Correlations of
Writing and Science
(Stanford, CA, 2001)