This essay, as well as the “100 Word Poem” have been reprinted from the handsome, CD-Rom version of The Works of Lindley Williams Hubbell, available from The Iris Press/ Makoto Ozaki/ 185-5 Motoyama Kamigamo, Kita-ku/ Kyoto 603-8047, Japan. 3,000 Yen ($30.00) e-mail contact veg00441[at]nifty.ne.jp

Gertrude Stein (c. 1967)

Literary reputations are notoriously unstable and Gertrude Stein’s reputation has had more vicissitudes than most. When her first book, Three Lives, which some critics still consider her best, appeared in 1909, it went almost unnoticed. She remained unknown until in 1914 Tender Buttons achieved a succes de scandale. From that time until 1933 she occupied a prominent but extremely equivocal position in the literary world. A few people―Sherwood Anderson, Edmund Wilson, Carl Van Vechten, Virgil Thomson―recognized her as an important literary artist, and a whole generation of young American writers―of whom Ernest Hemingway was destined to become the most celebrated―sat at her feet and learned their trade from her. But for the most part criticism was derisive and hostile, and the general public simply considered her either crazy or a fake. And then in 1933 came her autobiography, slyly entitled The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, which became a best seller. From that time until her death in 1946 she enjoyed success and popularity. The effect of this on her writing was not entirely salutary. She was a warm-hearted and out-going woman, and it gave her great pleasure to discover that she could write books that would be liked and enjoyed by many people. Everything that she wrote up to 1933 was of the highest distinction. After that date she relaxed her exactions on her readers and on herself and more and more came to rely upon her humor, her charm, and her warm humanity, with the result that the books of this last period are charming but less important. After her death the inevitable posthumous slump set in, but that has run its course, and she is now coming into her own. Book after book by her is being reissued, book after book about her is being published, and she is finally taking her place, beside Joyce and Proust, as one of the greatest writers of the century.
James Joyce and Gertrude Stein represent two diametrically opposite tendencies in modern art and literature: the tendency toward extreme complexity and the tendency toward extreme simplicity. This can best be seen by comparing Finnegans Wake and Tender Buttons, in which their respective techniques are carried to their logical extremes. In the former every word is so charged with associations, overtones, suggestions, every phrase is so loaded with nuances, puns, assonances, echoes, and borrowings from other languages, that to thoroughly understand it one would have to have the erudition of a hundred scholars and the memory of a hundred centenarians. In the latter, on the other hand, the words have been completely purged of any discursive content whatever. They exist in absolute autonomy, like music or abstract painting. And indeed it is no coincidence that Gertrude Stein wrote Tender Buttons at the same time that her friend Picasso was in the middle of his cubist period. Just as the cubist painters broke up the object into its planes and then redistributed the planes in the interests of formal design, so Gertrude Stein broke up the logical formulations of the intellect and reassembled them as a pure music of words. Joyce is difficult because he means so much. Stein is difficult because she means so little. To understand Joyce requires enormous erudition. To understand Gertrude Stein requires nothing except imagination and sensitivity. So perhaps she is the more difficult of the two, after all.
The epic novels of Joyce and Stein are both based upon the new time-concept which has resulted from the post-Newtonian physics and the post-Euclidean geometry of Einstein and his contemporary scientists. If time is a dimension of matter, as it is in Einstein’s space-time continuum, then it is no longer a duration, as we have always thought of it, but a simultaneity. Hence in Ulysses we have two time-levels―the journey of Odysseus and a day in 20th century Dublin―superimposed upon each other, while in Finnegans Wake we have literally all levels of time existing simultaneously in the unconscious of the hero H.C.E. (“Here Comes Everybody.”) It is hardly necessary to mention that the same method of temporal juxtaposition is employed by Eliot in The Waste Land and by Pound in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley and the Cantos. Gertrude Stein goes about it differently. Her mind did not have the tremendous range of Joyce’s, but it was subtler. She set about getting what she called a “continuous present” by the use of a gerundive style. The gerund, as Bridgman says, “at once represents an entity and a continuous action. Unity and movement are fused . . . . These [gerunds] became the basic components of the abstract style of The Making of Americans.”
But it is not fair to give the impression that all of her writing is so austere. There is no such thing as “Gertrude Stein’s style.” She had many styles. The Geographical History of America is one of the most hilariously funny books in the English language. Her novel, Lucy Church Amiably, is filled with a lyric beauty that caused Donald Sutherland to call it “the purest and best pastoral romance” of this century, and it has often been compared to Daphnis and Chloe. Her long poem, Stanzas in Meditation, is the only long poem written in English in the 20th century that can stand beside the Cantos, the Four Quartets, and Patterson. Two generations of children have been delighted by her charming juvenile, The World is Round. She was one of the most voluminous writers of her time and it is impossible to even list her varied production in a short review.
Since her death at least ten full-length books have been written about Gertrude Stein and her writings but they are all dwarfed by Gertrude Stein in Pieces by Richard Bridgman. To produce this monumental (in every sense of the word) study, he has analyzed the entire corpus of Gertrude Stein’s work, amounting to thousands of pages, from three points of view: the biographical, the psychiatric, and the literary. He has probed for the sources of all her literary devices and methods, tracing them to facts in her life, to betrayals of her psyche, and to cultural influences. I do not know of any other interpretation of contemporary literature which is at all comparable except Espey’s study of Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. But Mauberley is a poem of four hundred lines. Bridgman has read and analyzed at least five thousand pages, for Gertrude Stein was a tremendously prolific author: the Yale check-list of her work contains 571 items. From all this, including her enormous correspondence in the Yale Library, he has produced such a richly documented exegesis of her work as a whole that from now on no one can pretend to a knowledge of Gertrude Stein without profound indebtedness to Bridgman. It is not likely to be superseded and will continue to be the indispensable reference work on Stein. Perhaps his greatest contribution to Stein studies is the chapter on The Making of Americans. This huge novel, comparable both in size and in importance to Ulysses and A la recherche du temps perdu, has been called “the least read and the most influential novel of the century.” Even Edmund Wilson, who always recognized her distinction as an artist, has said that this novel seemed to him impossible to read. And yet generations of writers, from Hemingway down, have modelled their style on it. (It was Hemingway who persuaded Ford Madox Ford to publish it serially in his transatlantic review although the project was never completed, quite understandably as the book is a thousand pages long.) Under Bridgman’s illuminating analysis this supposedly forbidding novel becomes as compellingly interesting as a detective story. (Gertrude Stein, by the way, wrote a delightful detective story, Blood on the Dining Room Floor.) After years of being out of print The Making of Americans has recently, like so many other of her books, been reissued, and if it is eventually accepted as easily as the epic novels of Joyce and Proust and Dorothy Richardson, some of the credit will certainly belong to Bridgman.
But magnificent as Bridgman’s achievement is, I do not think that his book will supersede those of his predecessors. In order to survey her entire work as a consistent development he has preserved throughout an objective and scientific attitude and has avoided value judgements. At the end of the book, however, he says, “Whatever else she may have been, she has proved herself master of the telling phrase, of the memorable and haunting assessment reached when the tide of her persistence carried her to a spontaneous height.” This verdict is excellent as far as it goes, but it will hardly satisfy those readers for whom Gertrude Stein’s books have been an inexhaustible store of beauty and wit. For such readers I would recommend as an antidote The Third Rose by John Malcolm Brinnin. This was, until the appearance of Bridgman’s book, the most thorough study of Stein’s life and work as a whole, but it is more than that. It is a sensitive appreciation of her writing by one　who is himself a poet of distinction. Another useful book to read in connection with Bridgman’s, particularly in its analysis of Tender Buttons, is Gertrude Stein and the Present by Allegra Stewart. This is a rather difficult book (much more difficult than anything by Gertrude Stein) but its treatment of Stein’s work from the Jungian point of view makes an interesting comparison with Bridgman’s more orthodox Freudian method. Another important book, which remains more explicitly within the confines of literary criticism, is The Development of Abstractionism in the Writing of Gertrude Stein by Michael J. Hoffman.
But it is much more important to read Gertrude Stein than to read about her. Fortunately two of her most admired books are, or will soon be, available in Japanese translations. Three Lives has been translated (under the title San nin no onna) by the Japanese poet, Taeko Tomioka. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas will soon be published in a translation by Hisao Kanaseki. I might also mention that Louise Bogan’s Achievement in American Poetry, which is also available in Japanese translation, contains two poems from Tender Buttons.
Best of all, of course, is to read her in English. For anyone who wants to do that the best volume is The Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein in the Modern Library. This inexpensive book really has “Infinite riches in a little room,” for it contains Tender Buttons, a generous selection from The Making of Americans, the complete Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, one of the Three Lives, several of her plays, including Four Saints in Three Acts, which served as the libretto of Virgil Thomson’s enchanting opera, her famous portraits of Cézanne, Picasso, and Matisse, and many other things, including this reviewer’s favorite, As A Wife Has A Cow.
A half century ago (in 1922, to be exact) Sherwood Anderson wrote an article on Gertrude Stein for The Little Review which concluded with these words: “Would it not be a lovely and charmingly ironic gesture of the gods if, in the end, the work of this artist were to prove the most lasting and important of all the word slingers of our generation!”
Well, it has. And it is.