Points of View (Sherman)/A Note on Gertrude Stein
Some time ago Sherwood Anderson had an article in the New Republic of the sort that every one likes to read. It was a discussion of the three or four living writers who are "really worth while." I regret that I have mislaid this article and that I have forgotten who Mr. Anderson's important writers were—all but one. I seem to remember, however, distinctly enough that the article had a climactic structure—that Mr. Anderson led us rather disdainfully up the rungs of appreciation till we emerged at a dizzying level. "And here," said our guide in a voice of utter reverence—"and here is Gertrude Stein!" I had never seen a line of Gertrude Stein's work nor had I even heard a whisper of her name. Yet here she was at the pinnacle of expression, engaged, we were assured, in marvellous experiments with English words. It was exciting.
Months went by during which I went about murmuring vainly, "Who is Gertrude Stein?" I began to think her a creature of myth, a fabulous being evoked by the idealizing imagination of the author of "Many Marriages." To-day there lies on my desk a substantial volume, 419 well-printed pages, with the haunting name on the title-page, Geography and Plays, and with a jacket full of biography: Pennsylvania birth, early years in Vienna and Paris, Radcliffe, Johns Hopkins Medical School, return to Paris and art, friendship of Matisse and Picasso, publication of two famous books—The Portrait of Mabel Dodge and Tender Buttons—war work with a Ford car, a long silence, and now Geography and Plays. It was all real.
Better still, there is an introduction by Sherwood Anderson. It is exciting, just as that article in the New Republic was. One lingers over it in breathless expectation, and, after reading the book, one returns to it in brooding retrospect. Taken by itself, it makes very good and very absorbing sense. Some of the arresting sentences are these:
[Miss Stein is] a woman of striking vigor, a subtle and powerful mind, a discrimination in the arts such as I have found in no other American born man or woman, and a charmingly brilliant conversationalist.
Since Miss Stein's work was first brought to my attention I have been thinking of it as the most important pioneer work done in the field of letters in my time.
What I think is that these books of Gertrude Stein's do in a very real sense recreate life in words.
To these sentences should be added this shy little tribute from the wrapper:
Out of her early experiments has sprung all modern writing.
Of a writer so little known yet so overwhelmingly important we had better have some specimens before us before we attempt to add anything to Mr. Anderson's appreciation. Her work, it may be said, though various in theme, form, and style, is of singularly even quality, so that we may dip in almost at random and find a perfectly characteristic bit. Let us have first the opening sentence from a nine-page Portrait of Constance Fletcher.
When she was quite a young one she knew she had been in a family living and that that family living was one that any one could be one not have been having if they were to be one being one not thinking about being one having been having family living.
To this let us add a paragraph from France:
All there is of more chances is in a book, all there is of any more chances is in a list, all there is of chances is in an address, all there is is what is the best place not to remain sitting and suggesting that there is no title for relieving rising.
Finally let us have a morsel from Scenes:
The whole place has that which it has when it is found and it is there where there is more room. Room has not that expression. It has no change in a place. It is not dirty, there is no cleaner passage and the best way to have it all express that is to cook a dinner. There is enough to get a suit that is not bad when there is no hope. That is the difference if there is much and there is much more.
As I studied Gertrude Stein's work, endeavoring to understand its purpose, I will admit that once or twice it occurred to me faintly that it might just possibly be a joke. But it is impossible to make a joke out of 419 such pages. If you set out in quest of hilarity, before you read twenty pages you are ready for hara-kiri. It is no more like a joke than the Mojave Desert or the Dead Sea. I dismissed that hypothesis.
I tried the guess that the entire book is written in a cipher of which the publishers possess a key purchasable at an enormous price, but then I thought of a man who deciphered the Etruscan inscriptions in six volumes, yet couldn't find a publisher. The notion seemed repellent—commercially; and I abandoned it.
Next I explored the assumption that Gertrude Stein's epoch-making experiment was designed to show what words can do by themselves with practically no assistance from the manipulator or with mere mechanical manipulation. I took a sheet of paper and made five columns. In the first I wrote at random fifteen or twenty adjectives; in the second the same number of nouns; in the third a job lot of conjunctions, prepositions, and articles; in the fourth, verbs; in the fifth, adverbs. I then cut up my columns and placed the separate words face downwards in five piles of parts of speech. Then I played off the words something in the style, I suppose, of Canfield (which I don't play). I thrust in a bit more punctuation than Gertrude Stein employs, and this was the result:
Red stupidity but go slowly. The hope slim. Drink gloriously! Dream! Swiftly pretty people through daffodils slip in green doubt. Grandly fly bitter fish; for hard sunlight lazily consumes old books. Up by a sedate sweetheart roar darkly loud orchards. Life, the purple flame, simply proclaims a poem.
I drew back in astonishment from the result of my own little experiment. My Hercules, what phrases!—"red stupidity," "loud orchards roaring darkly," "pretty" people slipping through daffodils in "green doubt," and then those "bitter fish" flying so grandly, and the proclamation of "life, the purple flame." "Drink gloriously" struck me as a little too close to "gloriously drunk," which is of course a cliché; but even there the hortatory note adds a kind of foaming and exuberant novelty to the concept. Life had leaped from my parts of speech in tongues of flame. By a mechanical manipulation I had recreated life in words. And when I compared my specimen of it with Gertrude Stein's exhibits, it appeared to me indisputable that the vividness, the color, and the abounding energy of my "work" made hers seem gray and protoplasmic.
It is necessary, therefore, to discard the theory that her book was written by any kind of mechanical device. It seems almost impossible by any unimpeded mechanical process to assort words in such a fashion that no glimmer of mind will flash out from their casual juxtapositions. The thing can be done only by unremitting intelligence of the first order—if it can be done at all. Now we know on the high testimony of Mr. Anderson that Gertrude Stein possesses intelligence of this order. The work before us leads me to believe that she has attempted precisely the difficult feat which my scissors and shuffled parts of speech failed to accomplish. And so far as the perfection of the enterprise is humanly possible, her efforts have been crowned with success.