BOOKS

Gertrude Stein is a Nice Story

COLEMAN

BY JOHN ualtAtt for gloire 1 ' said Gertrude Stein, a - "man of peculiar ambition who finally icqiPosed an image of herself on the public con- r'l°usness that had little to do with her forthright ,Y aims. She came to Paris with her brother In 1903 and didn't return to ner native land valid then only to visit and lecture—till 1934, cti the fantastic success of the Autobiography va len4lice B. Toklas encouraged .her to make the eaitiure• That was when the larger, public legend BArt grew. GERTY GERTY STEIN STEIN IS head7; HOME HOME BACK, cried the subtle bt;,-"nes. Miss Stein grew into a universal cele- b America's lady Cham and the GI's Aunt of (/1,' wars. tiuutut another kind of legend had been accruing tftcthose decades of voluntary exile. She was, pat", all, the first of the twentieth-century ex- (al rLuLates. BY the time Hemingway came to call h4t1e suggestion of Sherwood Anderson), she is been sitting there at 27 Rue de Fleurus, solid disa boulder among her Picassos and Cezannes, tk,1),,e,nsing tea and talk to visitors, for a good itt-v,“`Y Years. This side of Gertrude Stein's exis- k ,,,e—the richly anecdotal—is well brought out Brinnin's valiant, voluminous essay in ik„g,r,aPbY•* We hear the story of Hemingway's z;" uefeetion, of his attack on Anderson (in The pi?..''s of Spring) and on Gertrude herself Can ion is an onion is an onion,' says Robert Jor- in POP Whom the Bell Tolls) in greater detail ki„ anywhere before; and also of Gertrude's y"_,ate retaliation—waving a handkerchief at her `)nie toreador-fashion, 'Play Hemingway,' she 11 d cry, 'be fierce.' Mr. Brinnin tells us more out strange Leo, the itinerant failure, who ]Ped

to determine his sister's taste in paint-

armHe gives us a pleasant excursion into he ()I Alfred Jarry, the mad writer whose chief to a • place in French literary history is to PUt an 'r' into its commonest swear-word. 'p Yen furnishes a full account of the surrealist dinner „scribes chez Picasso for the downier Rousseau. He „scribes how a posse of Spaniards rushed for- ard kiss Gertrude's ring in Cuenca, mistaking jtir.for a bishop. He is drily humorous about the 1)1„ri°''slY girlish backslappings of Mabel Dodge, fie''St terrible of friends. Gertrude had written an iir?etic Prose 'portrait' of Mabel while staying

her in Italy, and the suggestion was made

• she become a sort of social troubadour, 'Nil 1 The al..), hymning others of her acquaintance. lar" ii&htheartedness of much of this is con- il°'°11s and Mr. Brinnin sums up that salon in tre°dd lapse into Steinery:, 'Since everybody was turn up.' 44 Y failed ring someboy, nobdy who was any- ed to As marginal comment on excited period in the arts, this in the main is heerellent entertainment—`a nice story,' in one of (ns'n pet phrases.

keIden fell Thu anmd RE. By John Malcolm Brinnin. N OSicolson, 35s.)

But Gertrude Stein was a serious writer. There

is not only every sign that she was trying to do something new; there is even positive proof that. in her early days, she was, succeeding. 1 give my bias away at this stage by suggesting that Three Lives, the second of her books to be completed and the first to be published .(written between

1904 and 1905, and published in 1910 at her own expense), , not only seems one of her most ap- proachable books, but may have claims to be con- sidered as an original achievement in its own right. Finished in the same year as The Golden Bowl, it gets inside the minds of three servant-class girls, one of them a Negro, by a series of looping simple descriptions and dialogues, cleverly catching the dead, confused, recurring rhythms of their speech. This book is probably the main reason why Gertrude Stein has a chapter to her- self in Wilson's Axes Castle. It is properly, and rather astonishingly, promising. But it wasn't to be repeated. Miss Stein's theories moved heavily into the saddle and her r.ext work was the strictly unreadable The Making of Americans. a thousand-page attempt to encompass human variety in a handful of 'slipshod. generalised types: the repetitions (which were to become Miss Stein's comic hall-mark) positively prevent attention. Why, one asks, should one accept such a deliberately slowed pace when this is one's reward?

Old ones come to be dead. Any one coming to be an old enough one comes to be a dead one. Old ones come to be dead ones. Any one not coming to be a dead one before coming to be an old one comes to be an old one and comes then to be a dead one as any old one comes to be a dead one.

The next, clearly distinct stage of her writing

was the wilfully 'personal' collection of pieces written between 1910 and 1912 and known as Tender Buttons. In The Making of Americans, language is still recognisably referential; it may be, and is, supremely boring and therefore unpur- suable, but it has a content, however diffused. And she has always had a handful of readers prepared to go after this content. By Tender Buttons we are down to an arbitrary assemblage of words around a title, nothing more. Here is 'A Method of a Cloak,' which Donald Sutherland quotes (ap- provingly) in his fanatically ingenious Biography of Her Work:

. A single climb to a line, a straight exchange to a cane, a desperate adventure and courage and a clock, all this which is a system, which has feeling. which has resignation and success, all makes an attractive black silver.

Edmund Wilson dealt with that thirty years ago more succinctly than I can: 'We see the ripples expanding in her consciousness, but we are no longer supplied with any clue as to what kind of 'object has sunk there.' A cloak, yes, but other sunken objects haye come between us and Miss Stein's communication.

What I am moving to is the other part of Mr. Brinnin's biography:- the discussion of the writ- ings. Because Gertrude Stein can be demonstrated as displaying a lively intelligence (under pressure, she had a swift way with hecklers) and because of that oddly original book Three Lives, a cult has grown up about the most manifestly nonsen- sical of her works that could as well be turned to justifying murder and mutilation. In fact, that is exactly what, in the field of language, it sets out to do. The procedd follows Miss Stein's own irresponsible thinking. Some sort of analysis of Cubism (Picasso, Braque) is offered—the break- down of 'naturalistic' plastic description into new compositions, self-subsisting, in terms of colour, line and form—and a literary, parallel is then invited. Words are to be rid of their clogging con- tent and left free for new associations. In het initial experiments, Miss Stein has an arguable point, 'Rose is a rose is a rose' (I stop at three) might niggle one into conjuring up a fresh image of a flower, but the fourth and fifth roses lull one into a coma. It seems so obvious: language is content, communication is its function, and parallels between the arts have no meaning at this point They led Miss Stein into the silly assonantal torpor of This is not the same. Mrs. Gassette.

This is not the same The rain.

Other things eased her passage, too She hardly brooked criticism : the door at '27' had a way of shutting, if necessary under the gentle, devoted hand of Alice Toklas, on those who raiser.' objec- tions. And although Mr. Brinnin does, quite toughly and neatly, make the crippling points himself, he surrounds them with so much genetic inquiry into the aims of his subject that they lose all force. There would seem to be seductive undercurrents in Miss Stein's work that disarm common sense. Among the millions of words that she was always fighting to get published--eight large posthumous volumes have been put out by Yale, under her will—some do link together into sentences of great charm or humour or both. She had a knack for amusing titles. And she had some wonderfully faithful friends. Further, for all her massive egotism, she emerges from all the bio- graphies (Elizabeth Sprigge's, and W. G. Rogers's memoir as well as this one) as a person of direct and compelling simplicity,. and even rather gay. Explanations of this order are needed to account for Mr. Brinnin's question-begging observation in his Epilogue: '. . . I have always responded to the work of Gertrude Stein with instinctive pleasure and without any distracting urge to "understand."' But what can conceivably be 'dis- tracting' about the urge to understand language? Can Mr. Brinnin really be content with the sound and shape of words—all that is left when meaning goes? Gertrude Stein went wrong in trying to experiment with the semantic counters: it was new ways of looking and feeling she was after— as Three Lives showed—not tricks of punctua- tion and syntax. But there is always the idiot fringe whose eyes roll and nostrils flare at the cry of 'experiment.' My favourite example of this kind of chichi self-abandonment is Virgil Thom- son's comment on Stein's Sonnets That Please: `They read like sonnets, feel like sonnets, sum up the sonnet by avoidance of all its conventions save that of being expressions in the first person.' Here is one of them: HoW pleased are the sonnets that please.

How very pleased to please.

They please.

As Miss Stein was so fond of saying, 'Thank you very much.'