Village Explainers
As Fine as Melanctha. By Gertrude Stein. (0.U.P., 40s.) Three Studies in 20th Century Obscurity. By Francis Russell. (Hand and Flower, 9s. 6d.) Three Studies in 20th Century Obscurity. By Francis Russell. (Hand and Flower, 9s. 6d.) 'SHE realises that in english literature in her time she is the only one. She has always known it and now she says it.' Gertrude Stein realised it and said it. Unfortunately several people who might have/known better took her seriously, and the consequence is the Yale Edition of her Unpublished Writings, with an intro- duction in this, the fourth volume, by Natalie Clifford Barney, an old friend. Miss Barney's friendship was obviously a little strained by the book entrusted to her by the editor of the series; one can sympathise, faced by 'This is a success. Pages. Lewis a hat. And clouds. We are selected with clouds.' or a series of twenty-three questions on the order of 'Did she see her,' Did they repeat that,' ending with the affirmation 'Categorical ques- tions are answered by these answers.' Miss Barney for a brief moment talks of the risk of Gertrude Stein 'misleading us through such a wilderness of words'; but her discipleship almost immediately counters this with, 'But we must be patient with geniuses. . .
These sixteen pieces were written between 1914 and 1930; that is, the last of them was composed three years before the book which lifted Gertrude Stein out of the avant-garde magazine and into the bestseller, The Autobiography of Alice B. TMclas. They i therefore have the same relation to her later work as New Orleans jazz to the commercial variety, being primitive, spon- taneous and uncompromising. Whether they have any value is another matter. In Everybody's Autobiography (1938) she said : 'My writing is clear as mud, but mud settles and clear streams run on and disappear.' But the mud in No and Colored as Colors, a Gift and As Fine as Melanctha neither settles nor sticks. One
discovers the usual Steinean obsession with roses, negroes, buttons, grammar and food; the explained puns CA capital is a principal city and capital is possession and capital is to be very well pleased'); the submerged school primer-ese (To minister they minister 1 minister, a minister. A minister is plural. A great many songs are plural so are bells churches and admissions'); the rhyme compulsion ('Dear old Mildred dear old she. She is sweet for liberty. It is delightful of her to be fifty-three'). There is the occasional joke, of the same type, though not of the same stan-
dard, as The Goon Show: 'Please remember me to Susanne. She in his second life.' And there is the awful, monumental monotony,
with underneath it the child's fretful little whine : 'I don't mean to be singular. I don't prepare dredges. I don't see why there are oats.'
What does it all add up to? One could be .really nasty and say that it looks like a huge conspiracy cooked up by the old rue de Fleurus-Bilignin circle; and Carl Van Vechten himself— who, readers of Alice B. Toklas will remember, wore a pleated shirt and 'sent us quantities of negroes'—is the editor of the
present series, But it is not as crude as that. Gertrude Stein's reputation was engineered, not simply by the crank-ridden fringe of American university life, but by a combination of timing and pressure; and both these-came from Gertrude Stein 'herself. She seriously wanted to put something down, to explain things, to tell people that she had realised, very early, that stars are worlds
and that remarks are not literature and that a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose. Indeed, she was very much like her own descrip- tion of Ezra Pound : 'A village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not.'
Mr. Russell is also rather a village explainer, often saying the same thing twice. He has published a slim book of polemic, in which he examines and demolishes the 'esoteric writings' of Kafka, James,loyce and Gertrude Stein. With the last he is more often than not on the target, mainly because she is more obvious and therefore easier to hit. With Kafka and Joyce (he gives only half the book to both of them together) he is much less successful. this time because he is not at all sure what his target is. How ever, he has a large vocabulary of derisive and derogatory terms, ranging from the mild 'scholiast' and "obscurantist,' through 'anti-philosophy,' pseudo-epic' and 'monomaniac,' to the real stinkers—'logogriph,' logornathic' and 'hypnagogic.' This is a peevish book, and remarkably priggish about what is right and what is not in literature; but his views on the 'suburban intelle gentsia' would probably have coincided very happily with Gertrude Stein's.
ANTHONY THWAITE
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