Stem's Way

(See front cover)

I don't like the family Stein, There is Gert, there is Ed, there is Ein; Cert's poems are bunk, Ed's statues are punk, And nobody understands Ein.

Many a writer appears on the literary horizon like a cloud no bigger than a man's hand, swells quickly to mistily gigantic proportions and--vanishes like a mist. Gertrude Stein is no such writer. Like a huge squat mountain on a distant border of the literary kingdom, obscured not only by the cloudy procession of more Aprilly authors but by the self-induced fog that hangs around her close-cropped top, she has loomed from afar over the hinterland of letters, a sphinxlike, monolithic mass. Twenty years she has squatted there; eyes accustomed to the landscape are beginning to recognize something portentous in her massive outline. By the time-honored process of getting older Gertrude Stein, though she remains as mysterious as ever, has made herself a background place in the literary panorama.

Her ponderous slopes have been visited by no picnic-parties; the journey is too far afield for weekday trippers; but some few fellow-writers have ventured into her shade and have returned with enthusiastic and grateful tales. Ernest Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, Francis Scott Fitzgerald, Carl Van Vechten, supposedly sensible and certainly popular authors, have sat admiringly at her feet. When Hemingway was 23, just married, and learning to write in Paris, he went to Gertrude Stein with a letter of introduction from Sherwood Anderson. He sat, listened, looked at her "with passionately interested" eyes, returned again & again. She read and criticized everything he had written, be- came godmother of his first child. Author Anderson went to see her. She seemed to him "an American woman of the old sort, one who cares for the handmade goodies and scorns the factory-made foods, and in her own great kitchen she is making something with her materials, something sweet to the tongue and fragrant to the nostrils."

Plain readers are not apt to go to Gertrude Stein, with or without introduction. Mahomets in their own right, they insist that Mountain Stein should come to them. And now at last the mountain has come. At one long-deferred bound she has moved from the legendary borders of literature into the very marketplace, to face in person a large audience of men-in-the-street.

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is a perfectly comprehensible, eminently readable memoir.* It has been approved by the bluestocking Atlantic Monthly (where part of it was serialized), and is sponsored by the Literary Guild. Though it is actually the autobiography of Ger- trude Stein, unwary readers might get all the way to the 310th and last page without discovering the mild hoax. For no author's name is on the title-page, and the book is written as if by Alice B. Toklas herself. But cognoscenti, even if they had not been forewarned by advance publicity, would recognize the circular motto on the book's cover--a signature as peculiar to Gertrude Stein as his famed butterfly was to Painter James Mcneill Whistler. The motto: Who & What is Gertrude Stein? "Widely ridiculed and seldom enjoyed," she is one of the least-read and most-publicized writers of the day. Her incom- prehensible sentences, in which an infuriating glimmer of shrewd sense or subacid humor is sometimes discernible, have generated the spark for many a journalistic wisecrack; except to the adventurous few who have been hardy enough to read her in the original (and to some of those) she has the reputation of a pure nonsense writer. To the man-in-the-street, she is the synonym for what Critic Max Eastman calls "the cult of unintelligibility." In man-in-the-street lingo, "Gert's poems are bunk."

Plain readers, who usually move up above street-level to do their book-reading, after reading Alice B. Toklas will find their faith in the limerick verdict sadly shaken, may begin to understand why Gertrude Stein's importance as a writer has received so many reiterated testimonials from writers of accredited sanity.

No fancy figment but a real live companion-secretary, Alice B. Toklas is a Californian (her father was a Pole) who has lived with Gertrude Stein for the last 26 years. Authoress Stein says she often urged Companion Toklas to write her autobiography, finally decided to do it for her. In the book's final sentences Gertrude Stein drops the thin disguise, says to Companion Toklas: "I am going to write it as simply as Defoe did the autobiography of Robinson Crusoe. And she has and this is it." In Robinson Crusoe Defoe does not appear, but in Alice B. Toklas Gertrude Stein is nearly the whole show. When Miss Toklas, unattached spinster with artistic leanings, met Gertrude Stein in Paris (1907) she immediately recognized a genius. "I may say that only three times in my life have I met a genius and each time a bell within me rang and I was not mistaken. . . ." (Other bell-ringers: Painter Pablo Picasso, Philosopher Alfred North Whitehead.) They set up house together, at No. 27 Rue de Fleurus, have been together ever since.

Gertrude Stein hates to be called an expatriate, in spite of the fact that she has lived most of her adult life in France and seems to be settled there. Born in Allegheny, Pa. (then a suburb of Pittsburgh) "of a very respectable middle class family" of German Jews, she was taken abroad at an early age, spent her youth in California and Baltimore. At Radcliffe she studied under Psychologist William James, was one of his star pupils. At the final examination in his course she turned in a blank paper, with a note explaining that she did not feel like writing an exam that day. Next day came a postcard from James saying: "I understand perfectly how you feel. I often feel like that myself"; and giving her the highest mark in the class. At Johns Hopkins Medical School she also had a resounding reputation as a student, but medicine bored her ("she dislikes the abnormal, it is so obvious"). When she failed to take her degree she was glad to be rescued from a career that interested her so little.

In Paris the purchase of a Matisse picture started a friendship with Matisse; soon she was in the midst of the pre-War Paris art world. She and Picasso hit it off from the first: with the interlude of one bad quarrel they have remained best friends. Both of them acknowledge that they are geniuses. Gertrude Stein "realizes that in English literature in her time she is the only one. She has always known it and now she says it." Though she does not believe in popular success she would like to have had a little more recognition. For years she could not get even a part of her magnum opus (The Making of Americans) printed; her influence has been largely vicarious, and she has not always approved of the writers (notably Ernest Hemingway) whom she has influenced. But she has never stopped writing. "One of the things that I have liked all these years is to be surrounded by people who know no english. It has left me more intensely alone with my eyes and my english. . . . And they none of them could read a word I wrote, most of them did not even know that I did write."

During the War, Friends Toklas & Stein tried to live in Paris as if nothing was happening ; when that became impossible they went to Mallorca. The attack on Verdun brought them back to Paris, where they decided to equip and drive a Ford truck for the American Fund for French Wounded. Miss Stein did the driving, with fair success. (She never learned how to back very well.) The War over, they settled down again to Art. By this time Gertrude Stein's Three Lives (published in 1909) had given her a reputation among young U. S. writers. "Gertrude Stein and Sherwood Anderson are very funny on the subject of Hemingway. . . . Hemingway lad been formed by the two of them and they were both a little proud and a little ashamed of the work of their minds. . . . They admitted that Hemingway was yellow, he is. Gertrude Stein insisted, just .ike the flatboat men on the Mississippi river as described by Mark Twain ... he looks like a modern and he smells of the museums. But what a story that of the real Hem. and one he should tell himself but alas he never will. After all, as he himself once murmured, there is the career, the career." Gertrude Stein once told him: "Hemingway, after all you are 90% Rotarian. Can't you. he said, make it 80%. No. said she regretfully. I can't.'' Of Ezra Pound her criticism is even more cavalier: "She said he was a village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not. not." Glenway Wescott "at no time interested Gertrude Stein. He has a certain syrup but it does not pour." But she thinks F. Scott Fitzgerald "will be read when many of his well known contemporaries are forgotten."

The Writer. Alice B. Toklas tells who and--to a certain extent--what Gertrude Stein is. but it will leave pedestrian readers still puzzling their heads over why this obviously shrewd and salty old lady, whose sentences may seem rather primer-like but are just as lucid as a primer's, should have gathered such a lurid reputation as murderess of the King's English. Such readers should remember that in Alice B. Toklas Authoress Stein is on her best behavior. If they are sufficiently curious to look up some of her wilder work, this is the kind of thing they may find:

A PATRIOTIC LEADING

Verse I

Indeed indeed Can you see. The stars And regularly the precious treasure. What do we love without measure. We know.

Verse II

We suspect the second man.

Verse III

We are worthy of everything that happens. You mean weddings. Naturally I mean weddings.

Verse IV

And then we are, Hail to the nation. Verse V Do you think we believe it.

Verse VI

It is that or bust.

Verse VII

We cannot bust.

Verse VIII

Thank you.

Verse IX

Thank you so much.

What can the plain reader make of all this? If he is in a good humor he will doubtless laugh, but at what? Sober-sided Critic Edmund Wilson gives as his opinion that: "Miss Stein is trying to superinduce a state of mind in which the idea of the nation will seem silly, in which we shall be conscious of ourselves as creatures who do not lend themselves to that conception." Still puzzled, the plain reader dips into another Stein volume (Tender Buttons), to his astonishment brings up these:

"Red Roses. A cool red rose and a pink cut pink, a collapse and a sold hole, a little less hot.

"A Sound. Elephant beaten with candy and little pops and chews all bolts and reckless rats, this is this.

"Custard. Custard is this. It has aches, aches when. Not to be. Not to be narrowly. This makes a whole little hill.

"It is better than a little thing that has mellow real mellow. It is better than lakes whole lakes, it is better than seeing.

"Chicken. Alas a dirty word, alas a dirty third, alas a dirty bird."

Some readers laugh, some are annoyed; some snort with disgust or indignation. Gertrude Stein, writer for posterity ("I write for myself and strangers'") does not mind. Says she slyly: "My sentence: do get under their skin. . . ."

"Sentences not only words but sentences and always sentences have been Gertrude Stein's life long passion." The only teacher she acknowledges is her poodle, Basket. "The rhythm of his water drinking made her recognize the difference between sentences and paragraphs, that para- graphs are emotional and that sentences are not."

Critical consensus, while it writes off Gertrude Stein's less comprehensible utterings as a public loss, grants that she has been a private gain to more intelligible writers, and that her influence on contemporary literature has been vicariously potent. Serious critics take her seriously, even when they cannot understand what she is doing. Says Critic Wilson: "Most of us balk at her soporific rigmaroles, her echolaliac incantations, her half-witted-sounding catalogs of numbers; most of us read her less & less. Yet, remembering especially her early work, we are still aware of her presence in the background of contemporary literature--and we picture her as the great pyramidal Buddha of Jo Davidson's statue of her, eternally and placidly ruminating the gradual developments of the processes of being, regis- tering the vibrations of a psychological country like some august human seismograph whose charts we haven't the training to read." Such esoteric experiments as Have They Attacked Mary He Giggled--A Political Satire, Lucy Church Amiably, Tender Buttons and her monumental The Making of Americans may have to wait for a doubtful posterity to be properly appreciated; but her first and best-known book, Three Lives, will be reprinted this month by the Modern Library, whose editors' ears are close to the ground.

The Woman. If posterity understands present-day art. it is likely that the future will have a pretty good idea what Gertrude Stein looked like. Picasso has painted her, Picabia has drawn her. Jo Davidson has done a joss-like statue of her. Never a beauty, she is now massive, middleaged, 59, would strongly resemble a fat Jewish hausfrau were it not for her close-cropped head. (When her old friend Mme de Clermont-Tonnerre had her hair bobbed, Gertrude Stein decided to cut her hair short too. Alice Toklas did it for her.) Very democratic, proud of being a plain American, she likes people, is always ac- cessible to strangers. She confesses to inertia and a poor memory. An omnivorous reader, she was haunted in early life by the fear that some day she would have nothing left to read; nowadays she no longer worries about it. Though she lives in France (summers she spends in her house at Bilignin) she never reads French, even so much as a newspaper. She ''feels with her eyes," says she sometimes used to rest them by staring "straight up into a summer noon sun." If somebody asks her a question suddenly it upsets her, drives everything out of her head. She swears when she is upset. She likes food but does not mind letting it get cold.

Though she has lived among artists and pictures all her life there is nothing precious or arty about her. Two subjects which bulk large in ordinary lives--money and love--she hardly mentions in Alice B. Toklas. It is a strangely impersonal book. Her only reference to her interior life is the admission that when she was 17 ''the last few years had been lonesome ones and had been passed in an agony of adolescence." If curious readers wonder why she passes over these matters so lightly, they may answer themselves by reflecting that no doubt Gertrude Stein, like everybody else, has autobiographical passages which she does not choose to run.

*Harcourt. Brace ($3.50).

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