Going on being BOOKS
ASHLEY BROWN
Gertrude Stein's place in modern letters is a curious one. For many years before her death in 1946 she was a legendary mother-figure seated in state among her Picassos in the famous studio at 27 rue de Fleurus. The young literary Americans who made their way there were sometimes impressed by her pronouncements. `The true American genius ... is unique in being able to dispense with experience,' she used to tell them. But the young men included Heming- way and Sherwood Anderson (not so young by this time), who were intensely devoted to the cult of experience. What did Miss Stein have to teach them? She assured them that European writers were handicapped by the density of their social experience and that the 'American thing' could be achieved only by cutting loose from this burden. The literary art for her in- evitably became a matter of style, and this is where she is still interesting. She had no real subject except herself, but it was a long time before she could bring this personality into the open (in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 1933).
The matter of style did not originally occur to Gertrude Stein as merely a literaty manoeuvre. In her youth she had studied psychology with William James at Radcliffe College. (She was his best woman student, he said.) From him she acquired the idea that the mind is not an abstract entity but a `stream of consciousness.' Reality is a constant becoming. The expression of this, he thought, is through the gerund rather than the simple noun. Pur- suing this principle further, Miss Stein decided to eliminate commas (which would break up the flow of consciousness) and to repeat words in patterns. In her earliest work, Things As They Are (written in 1903, published in 1950), she has not yet arrived at her method, and even Three Lives (written in 1904-1905) is a kind of half-way point.
Almost everybody agrees that Three Lives is one of the 'seminal' works in American litera- ture, or at any rate that it represents something important. This triptych of stories was written with one eye on Flaubert's Un Coeur Siittpk and the other on Cezanne's portrait of Madame C.kzanne, which Gertrude and her brother Leo had just purchased. Many years later in The Autobiography she paid homage to the Cdzanne, and we should not deny the stimulus that paint- ings had for her, but it is the mutations of the literary art (what can be done with language) that concern us here.
A brief comparison of her stories with Flaubert's is instructive. Flaubert presents the restricted world of a bourgeois household through the sensibility of a servant girl. It is a world rendered in precise physical details (the bourgeois love of objects), and it is in a sense Flaubert's vision of the nineteenth century. But the language is his; all his great resources of style are brought together in this miniature; he never wrote better. Gertrude Stein, in taking up the stories of three servant girls in America, restricts herself mostly to the language of her subjects, and the effect is novel. Undoubtedly we get a closer 'feel' of their world than yip do of Felicite's in Un Coeur Simple. The author is fascinated by the rhythms of their conscious- ness, and her repetitions are cunningly devised towards that end. At the same time an im- poverishment has set in. We are never really located in time or space, and physical objects hardly exist on the pages at all. But it was some- thing that fully deserved to be done as a literary procedure, and its influence has been consider- able. It very likely reached beyond (or through) Sherwood Anderson and Hemingway to Faulkner. Could the first part of The Sound and the Fury (which presents the idiot Benjy) have been written without Miss Stein's example? On the other hand, Flaubert's story was read (indeed almost memorised) by Joyce and Pound and Ford Madox Ford, and in the end they transmitted it even more effectively. The last part of The Sound and the Fury (which presents the servant Dilsey) proves that.
It was The Making of Americans that carried Miss Stein's method almost to its conclusion. This was written between 1906 and 1908 and is now being published (by Peter Owen at 75s) for the first time in England. Its publishing history elsewhere has been sporadic enough. The original limited edition was brought out by Contact Editions in Paris in 1925, and it was said to have been proof-read by Hemingway (who in those days did odd jobs like work on Ford's Transatlantic Review; this must have been a labour of love). In 1934 Miss Stein's publishers in New York brought out a greatly abridged edition, which fared somewhat better. (This fol- lowed the unexpected popular success of The Autobiography.) In the late 1960s the complete text is available again in both Europe and America. But the literary world has not really made it a classic like Ulysses or even Finnegans Wake, despite the fact that during the 1920s Miss Stein's fame was as great as Joyce's. Writers as different as Wyndham Lewis, Katherine Anne Porter, and Conrad Aiken have been quite hostile towards it; and Edmund Wilson (in Axel's Castle, 1931) confessed that he had not read it all through. It was never re- commended by Joyce or Pound or Eliot, who are the great modernist writers of Gertrude Stein's generation. The reasons why it has had
Gertrude Stein, from 'The Best of Beaton,' published by Weidenfeld and NicolsOn.
Glair an 'underground' reputation might be worth investigating.
The Making of Americans is based on the career (one can hardly say the experience) of Gertrude Stein's own family over three genera- tions. Her grandparents, German-Jewish imini. grants, had done well in America, and her parents, thus settled in prosperity, encouraged their children in the life of intellect and art. (Gertrude's brother Leo was one of the best an critics of his day.) She was genuinely devoted to the memory of her forebears, though she did not know some of them, and she wanted to analyse every aspect of their being. She worked 'passionately and desperately' on this book for two years. From William James she had in- herited a character typology (for his `tough minded' and `tender minded' she substituted 'dependent independent' and 'independent de- pendent') which she had already tried out in Three Lives. While she was writing The Making of Americans she actually worked from charts and diagrams. The method, now applied to a large subject, seemed to promise much.
As I have already stated, Miss Stein's method is in effect the 'expression' of a state of con- sciousness. But the trouble with the method by the time she has taken it this far is that it is difficult to modulate, and this is a novel of 925 pages. In the early chapters of this family chronicle the characters almost emerge 'in the round,' but we are quickly aware that their minds are presented as flowing into each other. There is only one way of talking, as it were. One hesitates to quote at random from such a context, but this paragraph is fairly representa- tive of the way of talking: 'Julia was one as I was saying one needing to be one being going on being living. Julia was such a one all her living. All her living she was one needing to be going on being one being living. All her living she was one as I have been saying one needing to be one going to be going on being living.'
For hundreds of pages this voice talks in much the same tone. The sentences vary only in their length. Fortunately Miss Stein does not ,toppress the periods along with -the commas, and at least we have little guideposts through the forest of words. All the same, one does have the constant experience of Mel vu, and presently the words begin to close in on one. There is something rather touching about the way in which Miss Stein tries to get at the total psychic economy of the race: 'I would like to la.e sometime some in love with every one.' But surely this generosity is misplaced. Long before the end the author has smothered her char- acters with language even as she has tried to emancipate -them from their physical restric- tions. They are also emancipated from time, because she thought of her book as being written in a continuous present We cannot object to the 'one way of talking' in novels. The voice of Henry James—just to Anention a writer whom Gertrude Stein rather liked—completely takes over the narration in his late novels, which he dictated to his secre- tary. But the opening paragraph of The Wings of the Dove, for instance, is remarkable in its rendition of the mind of Kate Croy, indeed for its psychological penetration. One reason why James is more successful than Miss Stein is that he still has his few physical objects in the scene as 'reflectors' of a state of mind. Another reason -is that his sentence rhythms correspond more closely to the patterns of thought that he allows his characters. Miss Stein's characters cania. be distinguished from her voice. In trying to portray their essential being she finally merges them into a kind of collective unconsciousness.- Certainly we must respect her intentions. Her admirers, such as Mr Donald Sutherland, some- times justify her method by comparing it to cubism, where the natural object is flattened out to two dimensions something like her 'con- nowt's present.' Mr Sutherland's comparison. of The Maing of Americans to the Pentagon building Ca self-contained labyrinth of simple essential abstractions') suggests even more, and I leave the last word to him.
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