Getrude Stein: "wait while I hasten slowly forwards..."

some good, intelligent responses to Mallarme's work last week.

This week we will read and discuss a little of Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons. Some information on Stein and her methods are below (there are many many more resources on the web).

Read the info/quotes below and respond.

As well as responding to the comments below, post part or all of the in-class imitation exercise:

("Once a woman has forgiven her man, she must not reheat his sins for breakfast."-- Mariene Dietrich)

Aim for two solid paragraphs (or more) in response to the info below then post your imitation of Stein.



Gertrude Stein - a brief biography

[adapted from an entry in the (c)Encyclopedia Britannica] (b. Feb. 3, 1874, Allegheny, Pa., U.S.--d. July 27, 1946, Paris),

avant-garde American writer, eccentric, and self-styled genius, whose Paris home was a salon for the leading artists and writers of the period between World Wars I and II.

Stein spent her infancy in Vienna and Paris and her girlhood in Oakland, Calif. At Radcliffe College she studied psychology with the philosopher William James. After further study at Johns Hopkins medical school she went to Paris, where she was able to live by private means. From 1903 to 1912 she lived with her brother Leo, who became an accomplished art critic; thereafter she lived with her lifelong companion Alice B. Toklas (1877-1967).

Stein and her brother were among the first collectors of works by the Cubists and other experimental painters of the period, such as Pablo Picasso (who painted her portrait), Henri Matisse, and Georges Braque, several of whom became her friends. At her salon they mingled with expatriate American writers, such as Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway, and other visitors drawn by her literary reputation. Her literary and artistic judgments were revered, and her chance remarks could make or destroy reputations. In her own work, she attempted to parallel the theories of Cubism, specifically in her concentration on the illumination of the present moment and her use of slightly varied repetitions and extreme simplification and fragmentation. The best explanation of her theory of writing is found in the essay Composition and Explanation, which is based on lectures that she gave at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge and was issued as a book in 1926. Among her work that was most thoroughly influenced by Cubism is Tender Buttons (1914), which carries fragmentation and abstraction beyond the borders of intelligibility.

Her first published book, Three Lives (1909), the stories of three working-class women, has been called a minor masterpiece. The Making of Americans, a long composition written in 1906-08 but not published until 1925, was too convoluted and obscure for general readers, for whom she remained essentially the author of such lines as "A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose." Her only book to reach a wide public was The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), actually Stein's own autobiography. The performance in the United States of her Four Saints in Three Acts (1934), which the composer Virgil Thomson had made into an opera, led to a triumphal American lecture tour in 1934-35. Thomson also wrote the music for her second opera, The Mother of Us All (published 1947), based on the life of feminist Susan B. Anthony.

Stein became a legend in Paris, especially after surviving the German occupation of France and befriending the many young American servicemen who visited her. She wrote about these soldiers in Brewsie and Willie (1946).


Guy Davenport on Stein:

"Those who, like William Carlos Williams, saw Gertrude Stein as a revolutionary shaking-up of writing, claimed that she was scrubbing words clean, so that we can see them anew. She was, to her own mind, being a Cubist. That is, she was making a fractal sketch of things, the way Picasso and Braque could draw a mandolin with a few suggestive lines. Her most successful technique was teasing, making us guess, alerting us to the traps in language that we normally avoid or can’t be bothered to think about. Here Stein moves parallel to Wittgenstein, who saw that language is a game with agreed-upon rules.

We realize that we are in the presence of a sophisticated and cunning technique, of an achieved style. Stein is, with her array of styles, asking to be put beside Picasso. Stanzas in Meditation, read aloud in a good voice, is eerily like Shakespeare’s sonnets for sonority and majesty of line. These poems say something, but what? It’s like overhearing an actor two rooms away. You can feel the cadences and the power, but you can’t hear it well enough to know if it’s Donne, Milton, or Marlowe. It’s like watching a photograph develop in the tray before it is recognizable.

My sense is that Stein began with what in another writer would be an idea. She does not, however, propose to develop the idea into a plot, a poem, or an essay, but to submit it to the chemistry of her considerable intellect. One day she must have heard, or herself remarked, that Byron’s life would make an interesting play. She is not going to write the play; she is going to think about the intricacies of historical figures in plays, and what a play is. So, in 1933, she wrote “Byron A Play,” which seems to be about Byron, plays, and the problem of what we mean when we say a famous name. Seems. To read it we need to find a part of our brain that we have never used, where the synapses are differently designed. It is the very literate equivalent of children playing in a sandbox. They are happy, busy, purposeful in their own way, but only angels know what they think they’re doing."




W. G. Rogers, who wrote his recollections of Stein in the book When This You See, Remember Me (1948), made the following point in a review of a posthumous volume of Stein's writings in 1955:

"As always when at her best, she uses double talk to arrive at plain meanings: she adds nothing and nothing and gets something; her sum is an emotional impact; an excitment, an undeniable deep stirring. This is the marvel and the mystery of her language; it can be an incantation, and like the lingo of the medicine man, it can say little while accomplishing a lot. You don't blame it for what it is, you credit it for what it does."




In a review of Stein's posthumously published Stanzas in Meditation (1956)--a review published in Saturday Review (December 22, 1956, pp. 20-1)--Wallace Fowlie wrote:

"She never relinquishes the strictest, most intimate relationship between her words and her thought. I would say that her poetry comes not from her words but from the intimacy of this contract. The experience of the reader is an awareness of this contract which grows until it becomes an obsession. The poems prepare and create in a strangely powerful way the reader who is destined to read them. He will find himself involved in a relationship far different from the habitual relationship of reader and poem. For this is poetry about poetry.... A word used by Gertrude Stein does not designate a thing as much as it designates the way in which the thing is possessed, or the way in which the thing is destroyed, or the way whereby the poets has learned to live with it."



Robert Grenier on Tender Buttons

In his essay on Tender Buttons Robert Grenier argues that Stein was concerned with language not "as object-in-itself" but as "composition functioning in the composition of the world."