Reprinted from Contempo, Oct. 25, 1933, Chapel Hill, N.C., Vol. III. Number 12.

The Plain Edition of Gertrude Stein

Lucy Church Amiably, By Gertrude Stein.
Before the Flowers of Friendship Faded Friendship Faded. By Gertrude Stein.
How to Write. By Gertrude Stein. 1931.
Operas and Plays. By Gertrude Stein. 1932.

These four books are the first of the Plain Edition which is to publish “all the work not yet printed of Gertrude Stein.” Until this year the public has steadfastly refused to read Miss Stein, preferring to deride her at a safe distance; but during recent months the tide has turned with a vengeance, and it is apparent that the reading public, having thoroughly digested the works of her followers and imitators, are turning their attention, at long last, to the far more impressive original. And so to review these four books of hers, which a year ago would have been a defensive and forensic task, is now, quite simply, a pleasure.

Lucy Church Amiably is a novel without narrative. Those who are distressed by this will do well to consider the description which the author has placed upon the title page. It is, she says, “A novel of romantic beauty and nature and which looks like an engraving.” Now of a painter we ask only that he paint. Some apples on a plate are enough, if he knows his business. We do not ask for implications or connotations; and we turn with relief from the picture of a comely youth receiving his diploma, painted over the auditorium of the City College of New York, to an apple by Ceazanne; not because the animal kingdom is less important or interesting than the vegetable kingdom, but simply because we are interested in good painting. But of a writer we do not ask only that he write. There is thus a curious duality in the art of writing, due to the accident that speech, rather than line or color, is our medium of communication. Because we use language to write to our mothers, to make engagements over the telephone, and to say “Good morning” to the janitor, we are hurt and resentful if a novel does not describe something, does not say “Good morning” to us. “Oh, dear,yes,” says E.M. Forster in his book on the novel, “Oh, dear, yes, the novel has to tell a story.” But such elegaic acceptance is not for Miss Stein. She insists upon being a writer and nothing else, and those who care greatly for writing will sooner or later come to her books and read them for pleasure.

The heroine of this novel is both the church at Lucy, and a woman, Lucy Church. This ambiguous creature changes (somewhat in the manner of Orlando) so impertinently back and forth that her identity is never quite captured; and the other characters are as vague and androgynous as their names; John Mary, for example, and Simon Therese. “Oh, dear,no,” as Mr. Forster would say, “this novel does not tell a story.” But having read it, the sensitive reader will not soon forget the nebulous reprobate who “has three illegitimate children and he had been frequently married as well.” Nor will he forget that “there is a church in Lucy and it has a steeple,” and for a long time he will be hearing the soft vibration of the church bells over the Rhone, where Lucy Church stood, and where “with a nod she bent her head in the direction of the falling water.”

Although Miss Stein has generally devoted herself to prose, Before the Flowers of Friendship Faded Friendship Faded is a poem, thirty-three pages in length. The poet, unlike the prose writer, has frequently been allowed to dispense with “meaning;” Kubla Khan is, of course, the routine example. But Miss Stein’s poetry is not meaningless as so much of–for example–Swinburne’s is, where the meaning is obscured under an avalanche of words; it is meaningless only because the words are themselves their own meaning. The bare branches of a tree, between us and the sky, “mean” winter more movingly than the notations in an almanac. And when Miss Stein says,
In the one hundred small places of myself my youth,
And myself in if it is the use of passion,
In this in it and in the nights alone
If in the next to night which is indeed not well
I follow you without it having slept and went,
does she touch us less deeply, is she less explicit than,
What though the radiance which was once so bright
Be now forever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower?

In How to Write we find Miss Stein up to her old trick of elucidating herself by example, rather than by precept. In this collection of essays she summons, as it were for review and parade, her literary resources. “Here,” she might say, “are my crack troops, the participles. See how smartly their uniforms shine, how quickly they step. And here are my auxilliary forces, the prepositions. Did you ever see such discipline? And here is my first aid corps. Watch them resuscitate these wounded sentences, straighten the mangaled limbs, and pump breath into the exhausted lungs,” as she sits, pleased and proud, in the reviewing stand. This is no doubt a civilized diversion; but I am sure that there are more civilized men and women than are at present enjoying Miss Stein.

I have not meant to convey the idea that Miss Stein has nothing to say to us. She has a great deal to say, and she frequently says it with charm and simplicitly. She can laugh at herself and at her readers. She can say, “I think the reason I am important is that I know everything,” and exclaim, with mock despair, “At last I am writing a popular novel. Popular with whom?” But what she has chiefly to give us is a Bergsonian sense of the integrity and intrinsic value of things in themselves. Things, to use a favorite word of hers, are “nice;” they are tender buttons, fastening us to a pleasant and a homely world. Sometimes, she confesses, “it takes courage to buy the kind of clock or handkerchiefs you are loving when everyone thinks it is a silly thing. It is a very difficult thing to have the courage for something no one is thinking is a serious thing.” But Miss Stein always has the courage. “Metaphysics,” said Bergson, “is the science which claims to dispense with symbols,” and Gertrude Stein is as far from a symbolist as it is possible for a writer to be.

It was Carl Van Vechten who said, some ten years ago, that when people get through laughing at Miss Stein they can still laugh with her. This is charmingly illustrated in Operas and Plays, which is perhaps her funniest book. In these little closet-dramas (some of which have been set to music by Virgil Thomson) people, places, and things take part in some of the most delightfully inconsequential dialogue that has been recorded since Theocritus wrote his Fifteenth Idyl. This book gives us Miss Stein in her gustiest mood; and, quite aside from the austerities of literary taste, I am sure that no one who enjoys the drawings in The New Yorker could fail to be amused by it.

After many years of neglect and contumely Miss Stein bids fair to become not only widely-read but smart. Too few people have read her in the past; now it is possible that for a while too many people may read her. But that is really not important. For whether her work is read or not, it remains what it is: the mountain from which two generations have quarried for their lesser structures.

This review appeared side by side with one by Samuel D. Schmalhausen that begins, “If Gertrude Stein is a genius, then I’m a Checko-Slovakian. [sic] But if I’m a genius, then Gertrude Stein is a Schizophrenic….”

Thanks to Yoko Danno for the copy of the review!