Gertrude Stein: life and literary significance

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 - Susan Howe

As for Susan Howe, the considerable collection of scholars and critics who know her work and respect her work - and probably unfairly, she is considered an apprentice, or disciple, of the great Emily Dickinson - bring her into the category of "language poets." "Apprentice" is unfair, but when you title a book of poetry My Emily Dickinson, you are opening yourself up for that comparison. Still, Howe's brilliance both in prose and poetry stands on its own, even if she did pattern some of her work after giants. "A poet is never just a woman or a man," Howe writes in My Emily Dickinson. "Every poet is salted with fire. A poet is a mirror, a transcriber." A transcriber. That has a nice ring to it. And it's true with every journalist, every novelist, every songwriter and playwright, every high school student writing a creative paper for a class. Transcribing in the written word, and being influenced by greats in that act of transcription, is the heart of the creative process.

Howe, of course, has her feminist side, which is not only natural; it's expected, for a female powerhouse in the arts. "Emily Dickinson and Gertrude Stein are clearly among the most innovative precursors of modernist poetry and prose," Howe writes in My Emily Dickinson, "yet to this day canonical criticism from Harold Bloom to Hugh Kenner persists in dropping their names and ignoring their work. Why these two pathfinders were women, why American - are questions too often lost in the penchant for biographical detail that 'lovingly' muffles their voices." Is this why modern poets like Howe give so much attention and homage to the work of Gertrude and Dickinson? Because the likes of Stein and Dickinson were women, and American, and had fascinating biographies?

Meantime, Howe has heroes other than Dickinson and Gertrude. "When Thoreau wrote his Introduction to A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, he ended by remembering how he had often stood on the banks of the Musketaquid, or Grass-ground River English settlers had re-named Concord," she writes, also in My Emily Dickinson. "The Concord's current followed the same law in a system of time and all that is known. He liked to watch this current that was for him an emblem of all progress," she continues, showing, instructing, and advising readers as to how much attention to detail the poet must pay. "Weeds under the surface bent gently downstream shaken by watery wind. Chips, sticks, logs, and even tree stems drifted past," she goes on, "watery wind" helping the mind's eye of the reader to see that wave in the stream which ruffles that beneath it. "There came a day at the end of the summer or the beginning of autumn, when [Thoreau] resolved to launch a boat from shore and let the river carry him. Emily Dickinson is my emblematical Concord River." If anyone needed an explanation of why Susan Howe admires Dickinson's work, they have it right here, and by using the images she gleaned from Thoreau, Howe shows us again that a poet is never "just a woman or a man."

Howe, however, in defining terms of what is right and what is wrong in poetic devices, vigorously denies that she, or her esteemed and legendary predecessors, in their pursuit of what is generally known as "Language Poetry," attempted to lay down the law.

Emily Dickinson and Gertrude Stein," Howe writes (Hartley, 1996).".. conducted a skillful and ironic investigation of patriarchal authority over literary history. Who polices questions of grammar, parts of speech, connection, and connotation? Whose order is shut inside the structure of the sentence? What inner articulation releases the coils and complications of Saying's assertion? In very different ways the countermovement of these two women's work penetrates to the indefinite limits of written communication. "

Gertrude Stein," writes Howe, "influenced by Cezanne, Picasso and Cubism, verbally elaborated on visual invention," which of course is among the leading reasons Gertrude stands out from the pack of great poets. "She reached in words for new vision formed from the process of naming, as if a first woman were sounding, not describing, 'space of time filled with moving'." And here Howe plays the role of critic and analyst, with reference to Gertrude's work, as she describes the form of Stein: "Repetition, surprise, alliteration, odd rhyme and rhythm, dislocation, deconstruction. To restore the original clarity of each word-skeleton [Gertrude and Dickinson] lifted the load of European literary custom. Adopting old strategies, they reviewed and re-invented them." And it is entirely appropriate to say that all great poets, and writers, are doing nothing if not re-inventing what has been written before them - and that includes Susan Howe.

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 [...]