Gertrude Stein's influence on modern poets Howe and Hejinian

Gertrude Stein

Indeed. Gertrude Stein wrote for "herself" for many years prior to ever being noticed as the marvelously talented and versatile writer that she was. That fact was a reality simply because she did not have the opportunity for many years to publish the work she was so tirelessly putting out. Meanwhile, her legacy today is that of an extraordinarily insightful and respected woman of letters, an innovator, an elite member of the artistic avant garde in Europe, a prolific poet and writer, a visionary, something of a rebel, and more. Although she died in 1946 (of intestinal cancer), her work is discussed, debated, dissected and analyzed like the work of few other poets/writers. It's almost as if she were alive today.

Thesis

Certainly this paper focuses on a gifted thinker whose poetic form is sometimes misunderstood, but rarely ignored. And it also delves into the life of a courageous woman who was a lesbian at a time when there was no "gay movement," when there were no "gay rights," and in fact "gay" at the time Gertrude live meant something akin to "happily excited" or "keenly alive and exuberant" (Merriman-Webster, 2003).

This paper also examines the tremendous impact Gertrude's work and life has had on two prominent modern poets, Susan Howe, and Lyn Hejinian. It is likely true that every great writer or artist - of whatever medium and message - has been influenced by the greatness of a preceding giant or innovator. But in the case of Gertrude's influence on Hejinian and Howe, it perhaps goes beyond merely being "influenced." [Editor's note: this paper, out of deep respect and admiration for Gertrude's legacy, uses her first name throughout; the paper uses the last names of others mentioned and quoted; not to lessen their import or impact, but rather to shine a brighter light on Gertrude herself.]

Brief Gertrude Biography and Interesting Personal Facts

When Gertrude Stein's life is more fully understood, her poetry and her place in the world of literature can perhaps be more readily understood as well. Soon after Gertrude's birth (February 3, 1874), her parents left Allegheny, Pennsylvania, and lived in Austria and Paris until returning to the U.S. In 1879, settling in Oakland, California. By the time she was 17, her parents were both deceased, and she moved to the east coast to live with her aunt's family.

As a measure of just how brilliant Gertrude was, and how wonderfully adaptable were the workings of her mind, she graduated with a "magna cum laude" in philosophy from Radcliffe - albeit she had not finished secondary school, and had to be initially admitted into Radcliffe as a "special student." [Editor's note: some biographies indicate Gertrude graduated from Harvard University, not Radcliffe.] In 1903, Gertrude moved to France with her brother, Leo, who was a loyal patron of the arts; in particular he purchased Renoirs, Manets, and Cezannes. Gertrude began writing in France - eventually publishing 28 books - and in 1907, her well-chronicled relationship with Alice B. Toklas began, as Alice arrived in Paris and soon became Gertrude's typist, reader, assistant and critic. In 1910, Alice moved in with Gertrude, and Leo moved to Italy.

It is said Leo and Gertrude had a significant disagreement over Cubism, which Gertrude very much took pleasure in, and Leo despised. And indeed, Gertrude's "Tender Buttons" (1914) publication contained poems analogous to and imitative of Cubism-style paintings done by Picasso and Braque. She was an innovator in this writing style, which emulated art in crafty, creative brushstrokes.

Meanwhile, a couple years before that, her truly innovative side had begun to show (in 1912), when she created "word portraits" of Matisse and Picasso's works. Indeed, she became friends with Picasso, along with a number of literary luminaries who relocated to France from the U.S., who had become "expatriate Americans" - the likes of Ernest Hemingway, Thornton Wilder, Paul Bowles, Natalie Barney and Sylvia Beach. With all the writing she had done, she nevertheless hadn't made any money from her craft until she wrote The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas - a work that was serialized in the Atlantic Monthly and became a "Book-of-the-Month-Club" selection. Not only did she earn her first literary money on Toklas, she also made a name for herself in the world of publishing and literature.

But this was not a woman who became too "high and mighty" in her fame. In fact, during both WWI and WWII, Gertrude befriended the American soldiers she had met in Europe. She supported organizations which gave comfort to French and American soldiers. She also escaped the awful persecution and even death that most Jews were faced with during the Nazi occupation of France. On that note, it is fair to mention that Gertrude was confused about fascism in the mid-to-late 1930s: in fact, she tried to get Adolph Hitler nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. She reportedly met with him once, and spoke highly of him to friends and acquaintances.

When she died in 1946, her estate was left to her loving companion, Alice, who published most of Gertrude's manuscripts over the next 15 years.

Digging into Gertrude's Poetry

The first thing many beginning poetry students often hear with reference to Gertrude Stein is that she is "difficult" to read and comprehend. Plus, for some students and poetry aficionados, Gertrude's eroticism, feminism and lesbianism might be a bit much to swallow. But, the alert instructor can lead a student past those little speed bumps emerging from the difficulties of Gertrude's work, and into the light of day, to see that she really was presenting two abiding concerns through her artistry: a portrayal of the woman's experience, and the exploration of how it is we see and organize what we see. And as for the portrayal of life through the eyes of a woman, one cannot become bogged down in the rut of believing that everything womanly or remotely feminine that Gertrude wrote about was "about herself" or even "about women," any more than a Bob Dylan song about love lost is necessarily about his own lamentable personal experience. For Gertrude, writing through a style - a changing, adapting style - was just another way to convey something, about life, about humanity, about the paradoxes and ironies and juxtapositions of life, as seen through the eyes of a female poet.

Her forms are radical critiques of the relation between content and form in American naturalism, romanticism, and realism," writes editor/instructor Cynthia Secor (Secor, 2002). "T.S. Eliot and James Joyce add layers of meaning and mythic reference; she seems bent on stripping meaning away and living in a literal present represented as fully as possible." And speaking of Eliot and Joyce, there are an abundance of materials available as background into their work and their styles of approaching art and life. But, Secor wonders, "what does it mean that over 50 years after her death, we still do not have major editions of her letters; her notebooks; scholarly editions of her works; adequate representation in teaching anthologies; study guides that would make her obscurity as clear as we find that of Eliot, Joyce, and Ezra Pound?"

Indeed, much has been made of the fact that, whereas Eliot's poem "Prufrock" became, by the twenties, a celebrated work, Gertrude's "prose" sequence didn't come into its own until after WWII. Even today it remains largely unread - because it is allegedly an eccentric passage that cannot be made sense of. Yet once we begin to understand Gertrude's sometimes bizarre way of writing sentences, her utilization of sound play and pun, the way she employs ellipsis and asyntacticality, metonymy and synecdoche, rather than metaphor and symbol, we begin to see her light.

Likewise, her attraction to the use of parody rather than irony (which many poets use as commonly as they breathe in and out), and especially her sometimes slightly annoying use of repetition, not of key nouns, but of words like "notwithstanding," when we become more familiar with her style, she now seems not so very unusual, after all.

Form, in her brilliant book of poetry, Tender Buttons, as in Eliot's "Prufrock" becomes a part of the meaning of the work. And when Eliot reluctantly published Gertrude's poem, "The Fifteenth of November" in the New Criterion, some things were not the same with Gertrude:

Entirely a different thing. Entirely a different thing when all of has been awfully well chosen and thoughtfully corrected.

He said we, and we.

We said he.

He said we.

We said he, and he.

He said.

We said.

We said it. As we said it. (72)

Also from Tender Buttons, published in 1914, is the first poem in this much-discussed, much-debated work: "A Carafe, that is a Blind Glass" kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing.

All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling.

The difference is spreading.

What makes Tender Buttons so vital is not the strategies by which meaning is avoided or encoded but how each piece points at possibilities for meaning," writes poet Michael Davidson (Hartley, 1996).

Gertrude as Modernist

Gertrude has always taken great pains and great pride in breaking with the past. She, above almost everything else she did, is credited with embracing and perhaps even inventing modernism. What is modernism? According to Professor John Lye, of Brock University (Ontario, Canada), modernism is a "re-structuring of literature and the experience of reality it re-presents. (Art always attempts to 'imitate' or re-present reality; what changes is our understanding of what constitutes reality, and how that reality can best be re-presented, presented to the mind and senses most faithfully and fully.)" Lye also states that modernist literature "...is marked by a break with the sequential, developmental, cause-and-effect presentation of the 'reality' of realist fiction, toward a presentation of experience as layered, allusive, discontinuous; the use, to these ends, of fragmentation and juxtaposition, motif, symbol, allusion." And even in a cursory reading of Gertrude's poetry and essays, her modernist propensities are apparent.

Modern Poets Gertrude has Influenced - Lyn Hejinian

How much influence has the work of Gertrude Stein had on the poetry and writing and thinking of the highly acclaimed California poet, essayist, translator and historical scholar, Lyn Hejinian? One very practical measure of Hejinian's respect and admiration for Gertrude is to log the number of citations Gertrude receives in the critically lauded Hejinian book, The Language of Inquiry. Seventy-five themes, allusions, and specific quotes from the life and works of Gertrude appear in the Index; and to count the page numbers in Hejinian's index, which direct readers to specific places in the text that reference a Gertrude Stein poem, or statement, or issue, or encounter, is to pass 200 and still be counting. And though Hejinian's home - in Willits, a gloriously pastoral community in northern California, where the roots of giant redwood trees have been digging deep into the earth for up to 2,000 years - is a far cry esthetically from the Paris, France that Gertrude called home much of her adult life, their hearts and intellect would appear to live next door to one another. Not to mention their common desire to flush out language for purposes of innovation and expression of strongly held feminine values.

Meanwhile, The Language of Inquiry is an extremely enjoyable and easily readable collection of twenty essays, written over a period of nearly twenty-five years. Like many of the "Language Poets" she has been - rightly or wrongly, intentionally or unintentionally - strongly associated with since the 1970s, Hejinian uses her brilliant language to create a new and fresh social space. And to read Hejinian is to discover quasi-daring political and philosophical investigative literature - not unlike that of Gertrude, although Gertrude was clearly the pathfinder in this "language poet" genre. Central to Hejinian's essays are the themes of time and knowledge, consciousness and perception. Hejinian embraces Gertrude through the influential "Two Stein Talks" work, as well as two more recent essays on Stein's writings. Included among the Gertrude-influenced work in The Language of Inquiry is Hejinian's own "composition as explanation," culminating in her new long Steinian poem, appropriately called "Happily." "Three Lives," and "A Common Sense," are also so-called "Steinian" poems to be found and devoured in the text. According to retired professor of humanities at Stanford University, now a writer / critic / editor, Marjorie Perloff, Hejinian's Happily is distinctly a Steinian work because it is written in exactly 250 sentences, "...ranging from one word to eight lines, and divided into irregular 'stanzas,' perhaps on the model of Stanzas in Meditation. In her headnote, the poet talks about her 'accordioning' sentences: 'ones with solid handles (a clear beginning and a clear end) but with a middle that is pleated and flexible' so as 'to allow for the influx of material that surges into any thought, material that is charged with various and sometimes even incompatible emotional tonalities'." In Hejinian's The Language of Inquiry, Happily is preceded by "A Common Sense," which is Hejinian's deliberation on the meaning of the commonplace in Gertrude's Stanzas in Meditation. "It was through participation in the everyday with its 'inevitable repetition,'" writes Hejinian (Perloff, 2002), "that Gertrude Stein first came to understand the metaphysical as well as compositional force of habit." To illustrate her point, Hejinian alludes to Portraits and Repetition, where Gertrude says, "No matter how often what happened had happened any time anyone told anything there was no repetition. This is what William James calls the Will to Live." (It should not go unnoticed here that Gertrude studied psychology and philosophy with William James at Radcliffe.)

And on the subject of repetition, and root words utilized in myriad forms, which Gertrude immersed herself in on a multitude of poetic occasions, Hejinian's Happily is "...clearly motivated by the fact that happy and happen both derive, as I mentioned earlier, from the root hap, and that even the word habit, which has so much to do with happening, begins with the letters ha," Perloff writes. "Indeed, the poetic sequence orchestrates these words, together with a carefully plotted set of synonyms. Happen gives us take place, arrive, come, recur; hap generates chance, accident, hazard, event." Perloff continues, striking at the heart of what makes Happily wondrously inventive and fresh. "The word happily -- "the adverbial form is preferable to the noun happiness, since modification is much more likely to produce contingency than is nominalization, which suggests a state of being -- "is always just happily, and it appears only three times in the sequence as compared to some twenty-odd uses of happen. No synonym, it seems, can do happily justice."

Below, the first stanza of Hejinian's Happily helps develop the point a bit further:

Constantly I write this happily

Hazards that hope may break open my lips

What I feel is taking place, a large context, long yielding, and to doubt it would be a crime against it

I sense that in stating "this is happening"

Waiting for us?

It has existence in fact without that

We came when it arrived

Here I write with inexact straightness but into a place in place immediately passing between phrases of the imagination

Flowers optimistically going to seed, fluttering candles lapping the air, persevering saws swimming into boards, buckets taking dents, and the hands on the clock turning -- "they aren't melancholy [...]

Perloff examines the lines like a physician inspecting a healthy new baby's fingers. "Constantly in the first line immediately provides us with a key to this complex meditation. Its primary meaning -- "continuously,' 'always' -- "gives way to the secondary sense of 'faithfully,' 'unwaveringly'. The writing is happy because it is dedicated, committed: 'to doubt it would be a crime against it' (line 3). But 'happily' in line 1 is followed by 'hazards,' so as to remind us how 'hap-hazard' these moments of writing, these 'Hazards that hope may break open my lips' really are."

It should be noted, too, that Hejinian wrote "Happily" not too long after recovering from a bout with cancer, although that fact is not meant to be a compelling reason for the poem's existence.")

What kind of a Person was Gertrude Stein to meet for the First Time?

There is no doubt that Gertrude was eccentric, not only in her way of writing sentences, her use of sound play and pun, but as a person to meet for the initial time, she was quite a character. It might be informative and illuminating to peek into her life and times, as seen by those who actually met her, spent time with her, and later wrote about their meetings. The following excerpts from meetings with Gertrude and Alice were collected and edited by Canadian scholar Dana Cook, who collects "literary encounters." Noted American writer Bennett Cerf (Cook, 2002) spent an hour in Gertrude's famous studio ("surrounded by countless paintings of Picasso and Matisse") in 1934. Cerf, author of limericks, riddles and humor, founder of Modern Library, Inc. And Random House in the 1920s, and a popular game show panel member ("What's My Line?") wrote that Gertrude tried to sell him "the 4 or 5 hundred copies" of her early books. During the sales pitch, Cerf said, "Miss Toklas' imposing mustachio quivered with emotion, the while she interposed nervous comments intended to help drive the bargain home..."

Edna Ferber, Pulitzer-Prize-winning novelist, on numerous occasions, witnessed Gertrude trudging through the streets of Paris during WWII (Cook 2002). Ferber recalled that Gertrude looked "like a massive ambulatory Buddha. Accompanying her, on a leash, was a gray-white sheepdog the size of a pony." Ferber said Gertrude "had adopted the entire U.S. Army. "As the striking and somewhat macabre duo of massive woman and monster dog roamed the Paris streets...Gertrude stopped and talked with every man, young or old, in the uniform of the United States." Ferber continued: "She argued that the cure for war was love...if everybody loved everybody there would be no war...[and] as we stood talking on a street corner I agreed that her theory was a highly reasonable one but that it might be difficult to make it realistically workable. Miss Stein didn't see why, and I'm glad she didn't."

Ernest Hemingway was struck by Gertrude's room full of paintings ("...like one of the best rooms in the finest museum...") and was made to feel at home. Hemingway, known to tip a cocktail or two in his time, said "[Gertrude and Alice] gave you good things to eat and tea and natural distilled liqueurs made from purple plums, yellow plums or wild raspberries." He described Gertrude as "very big but not tall and was heavily built like a peasant woman. She had beautiful eyes and a strong German-Jewish face..." He described Alice's hair as "cut like Joan of Arc...and had a very hooked nose."

Former CBS correspondent and editor Eric Sevareid said Gertrude impressed him with her "remarkably lucid and germinal mind and disguises a profound understanding by a simplicity of rapidly flowing speech that misleads the casual listener...and walked heavily up and down her study in front of her dark Picassos and read the [Faust] script aloud to me, carried away by her own words and breaking off into ringing laughter which so overcame her at times that she would stop to wipe her eyes. She was a warm and wonderful person."

Lillian Hellman, noted playwright, was invited by Gertrude to a dinner party while Gertrude visited California in the late 1930s. Also in attendance were Charlie Chaplin, Alice, and another couple. Hellman said "there was this magnificent china and lace tablecloth...[and] Chaplin turned over his coffee cup, nowhere near Stein, just all over this beautiful cloth, and the first thing Miss Stein said was, 'Don't worry, it didn't get on me'. She was miles away from him. She said it perfectly seriously."

Author and reporter William Shirer thought Gertrude looked like "a full-blown Irish washwoman" when he met with Gertrude in Paris in 1925. He recalled hearing her say she was the last in line of the "big four in American literature." There is a "natural line of descent," she stated authoritatively. "Poe to Whitman to Henry James to myself. I am the last. The only living one." "My God, I suddenly thought," he remembered, "I have landed in the presence of a megalomaniac..."