What We Have Here Is a Failure to Communicate.
Few writers enjoy wider name
recognition, or a smaller core readership, than Gertrude Stein. Even avid
readers tend to know only the two easiest of her 20-odd books, the experimental
but accessible Three Lives (1908) and the gossipy Autobiography of
Alice B. Toklas (1933). After that, she's remembered as the queen scene
maker of Modernist Paris, the friend and patron of Picasso and Matisse and
later Hemingway who turned out cryptic, quotable phrases such as "a rose is a
rose is a rose" and "there's no there there." Her celebrity image is both
frivolous and terrifying: Imagine the souls of Fran Lebowitz and Yogi Berra
mingling in a woman who looked like an ancient statue, with a huge, flat face
and dark little dots for eyes.
Of
course, that image underestimates what an amazingly innovative writer Stein
was. Luckily, or so you'd think, the Library of America has galloped to the
rescue with a gigantic new edition to tout her worth. The editors, New York
University's Catharine Stimpson and independent scholar Harriet Chessman, have
done a perfectly fresh job assembling both canonical and neglected pieces to
trace the evolution of this oddest of minds. Most of Stein's phases are here:
the pioneering "continuous present" tense she invented in Three Lives ;
the abstract sketches of friends; the barely performable plays that she
compared to landscapes; the difficult holistic theory of literature that made
her a surprising star on the American lecture circuit late in life. All very
magisterial--but, at the daunting two-volume length of 1,900 pages, something
of a backhanded compliment. Other prolific writers such as Henry James and Mark
Twain usually get their stuff sorted into early period and late period and
released in dribbles. The way the library has handled Stein may make a
statement about her importance, but it certainly doesn't help in the
reader-friendliness department.
There are some neat things here, starting with the novella
Q.E.D. , which Stein wrote when she was 29. (It was never published in
her lifetime.) This was in 1903, shortly before she moved to bohemian Paris and
not too long after she studied psychology at Radcliffe with William James (the
subject of her thesis, still relevant as ever, was how undergraduates
experience fatigue during final exams). The style is naturalistic; the plot is
your basic love triangle, with a lesbian twist: Adele, whose butch
forthrightness makes her an obvious stand-in for Stein, falls for a frustrating
coquette, Helen, who returns her love but can't commit because she's already
beholden to Mabel, a rich, withered-spinster type.
Since
Stein's fans tend to fetishize all things experimental, this straightforward,
painfully autobiographical book (Stein was hurt by a failed love affair the
summer she wrote it) has generally been dismissed as wooden, of interest only
for its lesbian subject matter. But its hyperintelligence is underrated. It is
proof that Stein started out writing with perfect clarity, which means that her
later bizarre style was a choice, not the natural expression of a loon. Also,
the angry portrait of Helen shows that, all feminist claims on Stein
notwithstanding, she was as capable of misogyny as any man. (Biographies tell
us she was fascinated at the time by the ideas of Otto Weininger, a morbid
Viennese philosopher who believed women were stupid and corrupt banshees.
Ludwig Wittgenstein was another fan.)
Dominance in relationships, the question of who
has the upper hand and why, turns out to be one of Stein's favorite themes. "In
friendship, power always has its downward curve," she writes in Three
Lives , her famous portrait of three servant women. Readers have been
conditioned to study this groundbreaking work for its pioneering
technique--still beautifully readable, but eerie and fractured. Each sketch is
also a cool study of leaders and weak, grasping followers in love. (Click for
an excerpt.) Stein is shamelessly fascinated by power, and in Three
Lives she begins to dictate the terms by which we read her, even today.
Since two of the three portraits in Three Lives were based on women she
actually knew and the celebrated middle section "Melanctha" is a rehash
(brilliant, daring, but a rehash nevertheless) of the same love affair that
Q.E.D. was based on, you could even argue that Stein invented a
revolutionary new literary technique in order to disguise a weakness--her own
inability to make up a story.
What
imagination she had was almost entirely theoretical. Watching young Cubists
bring the techniques of painting to the forefront, she assigned herself to
write "portraits" of her friends that did the same thing for literature. Soon
she'd forgotten all about her subjects and begun inquiring into the very nature
of composition. Deciding that the normal rules of punctuation and grammar
promoted old-fashioned sentiment, she came up with new rules of her own
(question marks and exclamation points verboten ; evocative nouns and
adjectives dangerous; adverbs excellent, because they're about nothing more
than the relationship between words). She believed you could repeat the same
word over and over without risking boredom, because each time it appeared it
was like new. She even tried to work out a literature without fake beginnings,
middles, and ends--a literature that enters directly into the flow of
experience. (From an alleged essay, "Acquaintance With Description": "If it and
this is wild from this to the neatness of there being larger left and with it
could it might if it not if it as lead it lead it there and incorrectly which
is at this time.")
All this exploration makes for some heavy going, and I
certainly wouldn't recommend that anyone read these volumes straight through,
as I had to for review. Taking in too much Stein too fast can provoke a numb
panic, a clog in the head. At times, I felt as if I'd inhaled highly caloric
food and, just when the sugar coma hit, entered a long line at the department
of motor vehicles. Stein is far more amusing when she forgets her rules and
gets drunk on the music of words. (Click for an excerpt from "Lifting Belly," a
witty unpublished love poem she wrote to Alice B. Toklas.) She's much more
stimulating when she remembers that she's first and foremost a thinker. (Click
for her arbitrary, brilliant take on literary history.) In fact, much of her
imaginative writing seems to me a mere preparatory sketch for her real work of
genius, which is the self-promoting--but undeniably original--criticism that
explicates it.
As for the rest, her idea
about starting over and over--halting a phrase before it evokes an image, God
forbid, or reaches the dead end of clarity--is a fascinating mistake. Starting
over and over again doesn't mean you've entered the flow of experience. It
means you're starting over and over again, with all the stop-and-go frustration
this implies. : Writing deals in meaning, images, false renderings of time, and
devices to hold the reader's attention. Stein's attempt to show otherwise is a
landmark in literature, a unique episode in the history of thought. Whether
you'll want a keep a copy by your bedside to thumb through lovingly year after
year is a choice best left to the individual. My guess is a regretful no.
If you
missed the links within the review, click to read a passage from , another
from "," or an .
