"HOW DO YOU SPELL CRITICAL ELOQUENCE"T INVESTIGATIONS of POETRY and PROSE in the THEORETICAL WRITINGS of GERTRUDE STEIN
"HOW DO YOU SPELL CRITICAL ELOQUENCE"t INVESTIGATIONS OF POETRY AND PROSE IN THE THEORETICAL WRITINGS OF GERTRUDE STEIN
by CRISPIN DENNIS NICOLAS ELSTED B.A., University of British Columbia, 1973
A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS
in the Department of English
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THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA May, 1975 In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make it freely available for reference and study.
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Date June 23. 1975 ii.
ABSTRACT
Gertrude Stein's writing has not received an accurate critical reading. Critics have contented themselves with biographical studies, with attacks on her obscurity, and with philosophical or psychological theorizing which treats the writings as phenomena rather than as literature.
A central preoccupation of Stein's writing is the dif• ference between poetry and prose. Critics and readers have looked to Lectures in America, particularly to "Poetry and Grammar," for the clarification of her theories, but the complete answer to the problems of reading Stein cannot be found in the popular theoretical writings. In these she writes about her difficult work; Stein soon saw that she could only explain her most difficult writing in its own terms. In contrast to the "exegetical" Lectures in America and Narration, Stein created a remarkable body of "exemplary" writings, works which themselves exemplified the writing style they set out to explore. These "exemplary" works are concerned with the essential natures of poetry and prose.
These works were written from 1923 to 1932, beginning with An Elucidation and ending with Stanzas in Meditation. The pieces collected in How To Write (1931) are concerned with prose. Through vocabulary, grammar, sentences and paragraphs, Stein explored the structural elements which make up prose. Her discovery that prose was inherently linear led her to suppose that the primary difference between prose and poetry might be that prose was progressive, and poetry, static. Her first attempt to "stop" poetry, in "Winning His Way," was mechanical and unsuccessful. It was only when she realized the use to which prepositions could be put that she was enabled to write Stanzas in Meditation, her greatest poem. In this, through her use of the relational elements of language, the sense of the writing moves between and among groups of objects, rather than from a beginning through a middle to an end, which is the basic movement of prose because of the linear quality of sentences and paragraphs. The poem's form, in closed stanzas, contributes to its non-linear effect. In Stanzas in Meditation, Stein unequivocally states her belief that the essence of the artistic object -- in this case, the poem itself -- can be realized by writing it "as a thing in itself without at all necessarily using its name."
The struggles with language and form which make up the "exemplary" writings of Gertrude Stein enabled her to create a perfect marriage of technique and intention. Through this, she came to realize the importance of seeing that her subject x^as always in control"* of its form, that her writing was "organic." Her final position on the subject was that "poetry and prose is not interesting. What is necessary now is not form but content." TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
PART Ii The American Lectures (i) A Preliminary Survey (ii) Theories of Prose (iii) Theories of Poetry (iv) Summary
PART II» The Exemplary Prose Works (i) Introduction (ii) Approaches to How To Writ (iii) "Arthur a Grammar" (iv) "Sentences and Paragraphs (v) "Forensics"
PART IIIi The Exemplary Poems (i) "Winning His Way" (ii) Stanzas in Meditation V.
CONCLUSION 171 FOOTNOTES 176 BIBLIOGRAPHY 198 APPENDIX 202 vi.
And here was the question if in poetry one could lose the noun as I had really and truly lost it in prose would there be any difference between poetry and prose. 1
A stanza should be thought And if which can they do Very well for very well And very well for you.2
What is a sentence for if I am I then my little dog knows me. Even if it is all tenderness, What is tenderness. First there must be a way of going without waiting. There are two things a dictionary and the country.3
In the past present future and arranged to come I • say it with the same descent. I say it with the same good nature that characterizes men of the great waters. Waters art gallery. Dismiss all thought of eloquence. Critical eloquence. How do you spell critical eloquence.4
Nobody knows what I im trying to do but I do and I know when I succeed. 1.
INTRODUCTION
No one has examined Gertrude Stein's work from a technical point of view. She spent the first part of her writing life attempting to perfect a style, or a variety of styles, which would suit her artistic intentions; yet critical writing has focused on the intentions themselves rather than on the methods used to carry those intentions forward, failing to realize that the method of Stein's writing carries much of the weight of her contribution as an artist.
Critics of Gertrude Stein have always had an uphill struggle. Those who wrote during her lifetime, especially those who had met her or who knew her personally, had to avoid the temptation to write about her rather than about her work and few succeededi hers was a personality which overpowered the critical faculties of all but the most acerbic philistines. Some of the most perceptive of her friends, notably Thornton Wilder and Sherwood Anderson, rationalized this tendency until it seemed that they viewed Stein's presence as an essential part of her work, an error which weakened their defence of her as a writer by apparently suggesting that her writing could not stand without her character to support it. 2.
Anderson's only criticism was the introduction to Geography and Plays and this was largely an appreciation; at the time it was written it served as a valuable testimonial for Gertrude Stein at the beginning of her maturity as an artist. Wilder's criticism was both more perceptive and more direct, taking the form of introductions to three of her books, Four in America^. The Geographical History of America or the Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind 8 , and Narration 9.
Wilder makes many valuable points in his comments upon the three books he introduces, and in his essay introducing Four in America he produces one of the most persuasive introductions to Miss Stein that anyone could want. It is, however, just that* an introduction to Miss Stein; although he does deal perceptively with the work, one comes away with a sense of knowing more about Gertrude Stein than about Four in America . I have no wish to deplore this fact about Wilder's writing, only to cite it as a tendency he shares with many others. It makes for pleasurable reading, and for a warmth and humanity rarely found in critical writing, but having read it, one can never quite approach the book on its own terms. 3.
There is another critical fashion which has persisted throughout Stein criticism, and which one still encounters today. Both Wilder and Anderson are guilty of it, but it is perhaps most amusingly represented in Bennet Cerf's note for the dust wrapper of the first edition of The Geographical History of America»
This space is usually reserved for a brief description of the book's contents. In this case, however, I must admit frankly that I do not know what Miss Stein is talking about, I do not even understand the title. I do admire Miss Stein tremendously, and I like to publish her books, although most of the time I do not know what she is driving at. That, Miss Stein tells me, is because I am dumb. I note that one of my partners and I are characters in this latest work of Miss Stein's. Both of us wish that we knew what she was saying about us. Both of us hope, too, that her faithful followers will make more of this book than we are able tojlO
This attitude is charmingly candid, and it remains charmingly candid in the many other instances in which it appearsi
(These sections) have, with a number of other passages, so far exceeded the delighted but inadequate powers of this commentator.il
The effect of such a passage perhaps defies analysis, but it is characteristic of Gertrude Stein's writing at its best.12 4. I shall admit frankly that I did not at once understand these articles, but I was deeply impressed by them.13
The second paragraph of "Patriarchal Poetry" has also its solidity, a specific gravity rare in literature, though I have not the slightest idea what it means.14
It is not my purpose, even if I could, to enumerate or account for her many changes of style and intention...15
The list could go on indefinitely. Again, this attitude can be well understood by anyone who has read extensively in Gertrude Stein's writing; it is only another symptom of the difficulty --a fairly basic one! which criticism has had with Miss Stein's work.
Since Gertrude Stein's death, critics have been a little less fearful of the difficulties encountered in the canon. Indeed, the pendulum has swung in quite the opposite direction! where, during her life, her strong presence made anyone but a boor diffident of overly adventurous interpretation, after her death, interpretation has become bold and assured. The results have often been illuminating, but on other occasions they have been ludicrous. Allegra Stewart, in Gertrude Stein and The 1 fi Present , devotes several pages to an interpretation of the first poem of Tender Buttons, "A Carafe, That is 5. a Blind Glass", in which she traces the etymological roots of the word "carafe" back to the Sanskrit, providing, if nothing else, a tour de force of research that leaves the reader numb. Unfortunately, it tells us nothing about the poem. Rosalind S. Miller, in i 7 Gertrude Stein* Form and Intelligibilityx , provides desperate glosses for many of Stein's most difficult works, including Ida, which she reveals breathlessly to be the story of a whore who frequents army camps, a fascinating suggestion which one must, unhappily, decline to accept.
Beneath such cheerful gaffs as these, however, there lies a more disturbing tendency, which is that of approaching Stein's writing from other than literary points of view. The two which are most prominent are the psychological and the philosophical, with the latter a strong leader. The philosophical group includes two of the best books on Miss Stein's writing and one of the worst. The worst is the book by Allegra Stewart mentioned earlier; the two others are Norman Weinstein's Gertrude Stein and the Literature 1 8 of the Modern Consciousness and the "classic" study, Donald Sutherland's Gertrude Steini A Biography of Her Work19. 6.
Weinstein's book, published in 1970, relates Stein aesthetically and technically to the avant garde writers of America today, while exploring her progress as a phenomenological thinker. While the influences of both Whitehead, Stein's close friend, and William James, her college teacher, are traceable in her work, this is not sufficient evidence to lead one to the extreme which Miss Stewart reaches when she says that "...the total volume of Stein's work belongs to the phenomenology of 20 mind rather than to literature." Although Weinstein errs toward a predominantly philosophical view, he does not view Stein primarily as a philosopher, but as an artist with philosophical leanings, a small but important difference. The book closes with a section of "Documents and Correspondences", consisting of excerpts from the critical and creative work of many prominent modern authors from Iris Murdoch and D.H. Lawrence to Eugene Jolas, Tristan Tzara and Clark Coolidge; these Weinstein comments upon and relates to ideas and technical achievements in Miss Stein's work.
Donald Sutherland's Gertrude Steini A Biography of her. Work was first published in 1951, and was the first full-length study of Stein's writing by a critic who had neither known her nor been old enough during her American 7. tour in the mid-thirties to have been interested in her writings or thoughts. He comes fresh to the material, and presents what B. L. Reid has called a "defense (which) is meaty, eloquent, perspicuous, and wide in range, fully learned in Miss Stein's writing and in literature 21 generally." While he tends to be a little rapt, and to gloss over what the reader feels to be real difficulties, he does cover the wide range of Miss Stein's writing and places at least the major works in a context which is useful and persuasive, though, like Weinstein's, more philosophical than literary.
There remains one other important group: the negative critics, represented by two books: B,L,Reid's .Art by Subtraction: A Dissenting Opinion of Gertrude 2 Stein, and Richard Bridgman's Gertrude Stein in Pieces. Reid's book is excellently written, scrupulously re• searched, and badly mistaken in its major judgments, but he admits the work is a subjective appraisal, the 23 result of "a gradual disenchantment" occasioned by his delight in Three Lives and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas' being shattered by the discovery that Gertrude Stein was not always as accesible as those two popular volumes might lead one to believe. The substance of Reid's argument is that Stein is not an essentially serious writer, and that "serious acceptance of writing 8. which seems to me ultimately unserious is wasteful of 24 time we need for reading toward richer increment." Apart from the misguided taste for "relevance" which seems to be the curse of many " modern readers, this statement suggests that Reid was simply not willing to work hard enough at Stein's writing; had he worked even a little harder than he had,, he would surely have revised his opinion of Miss Stein as an "unserious" writer. Nevertheless, Reid is no more subjective than Sutherland in the opposing position, and his chapter on Gertrude Stein's critics should be read by anyone attempting to write more than a sentence or two on her work, for it is lucid and eminently sensible.
Much fuss has been made over Richard Bridgman's Gertrude Stein in Pieces. It seems generally to be considered the successor to Donald Sutherland's book, and no less a critic than Sutherland himself has praised it highly. Bridgman attempts a psychological treatment of Miss Stein and her work, and fails both as a psychol• ogist and critic. His psychological judgments, based almost entirely on Freud, are simplistic and often irrelevant, and his literary opinions are ill-considered. He seems in some cases simply to have misread the text, as when he accuses her of contradicting herself by giving 9. a subjective rather than an historical view of English literary history in "What is English Literature", when in fact the subjective view is precisely what she promised.
Bridgman*s book is small-minded and inept. He. constantly resorts to proof-texting, and frequently misquotes;; He has avowedly set out to write a "preliminary inventory of Gertrude Stein's literary estate " , on the assumption that few of her critics have had the time or the patience to read her complete works. In the light of the book he produced, it were best for Bridgman if that misguided opinion were true. His reliance on the ignorance of his readers has led him to set himself up as a hierophant whose word is about as trustworthy as that of the Great Oz.
But for all the negative qualities of this supposedly positive book, Bridgman does make one valid point, Before 27 discussing Lectures in America , he gives a short appraisal of its worth as criticism. He is, as usual, reckless in his judgment, suggesting that "it remade Gertrude Stein's artistic past as the Autobiography had remade her personal 28 past," but he goes on to say that "(c)ritics have heretofore relied too heavily upon its explanations in order to clarify the huge splatter of Gertrude Stein's 10. career." The error which Bridgman suggests is one of commissions he sees the critics as willfully accepting Gertrude Stein's statements in the lectures as her last word in exegesis, as indeed many do; yet the real error, and a far more serious one, is one of omission; they have failed to realize that Stein went much farther in exegeting her own art usefully in such works as How To Write 30 , An Acquaintance With Description 31 , An Elucidation 32 , and Descriptions of Literature 33 , and this error Bridgman shares.
Gertrude Stein used language with a full sense of all its grammatical, syntactical and etymological restraints. With that language she examined artistic genres, experiment• ing with forms -- prose and poetry -- and with modes -- narration, description and explication. In the combinations of these linguistic and artistic factors, she found the means to voice the results of her meditations on character, perception and epistemology. In the last twenty years of her life, she succeeded in synthesizing her thought in a group of remarkable works! Lucy Church Amiably; Mrs. Reynolds; Four Saints in Three Acts; Winning His Way. A Narrative Poem of Poetry; Four in America; Ida; How To Write; Stanzas in Meditation; and The Geographical History of America or the Relation of Human Nature to 11. the Human Mind. In these can be found the apotheoses of the theories which were first tentatively presented to the public in Lectures in America. 12, PART ONE THE AMERICAN LECTURES
(i) A Preliminary Survey
If the reader of Gertrude Stein's difficult works turns to the American lectures for explanation it is understandable. Even the most adventurous reader feels dismay at finding the solid, dependable nouns which form the foundations of his understanding suddenly turned to active verbs which leave him in a profoundly subjunctive frame of mind surrounded by the rubble of his grammar. While a lover of painting can spend an afternoon with Picasso's cubist portraits and still have no difficulty in recognizing his wife when he arrives home; while a music lover can spend the evening immersed
it in Schonberg's "Variations for Orchestra" and still whistle "Show me the Way to go Home" as he prepares his midnight snack; even the enthusiastic reader of Stein, having read Tender Buttons or An Acquaintance With Description at one sitting, may wonder whether he dare attempt speech, or whether he is still capable of describing an elephant to his son.
We guard our language jealously, and we require far more "responsibility" of our writers than of other artists. 13.
Recordings and recitals of modern music and exhibitions of kinetic sculpture we dismiss with a wave of the hand, but the knowledge that there is a book in which a cutlet is described as "blind agitation is manly and uttermost" drives many people into a frenzy. It is impossible, such folk argue, to communicate without an ordered common language, and so language must be defended against such writing.
It was in part for readers like these that Gertrude Stein finally decided to come to America to lecture. While she could be ruthless to intellectuals who refused to acknowledge the truth of her ideas, she seemed to have infinite patience with, and interest in, those who were uneducated, whose minds were not sophisticated, or who were.simply not geared to aesthetics and philosophy. The stories are legion of her long conversations with farmers in Bilignin, with GI's in Paris, and with students during her American tour and her English lecturing trips to Oxford and Cambridge. She intended to present her ideas to the people, and it was largely as a result of W.G. Rogers' assurance that she would be a popular success that she agreed, finally, to return to the States, There was no mistaking her intentionss she had refused a very lucrative offer from a commercial lecture bureau on 14. the grounds that she would be seen as a curiosity rather than an artist. "There is not enough money in the world," she said, "to persuade me to stand up before a horde of curious people who are interested in my personality 35 rather than my work."
In all, she presented ten lectures in the United States, published in two volumes. Lectures In America consists of six lectures, three concerned with general topics -- "What is English Literature", "Pictures" and "Plays" -- and three directly concerned with Gertrude Stein's own writing -- "The Gradual Making of The Making of Americans", "Portraits and Repetition" and "Poetry and Grammar". It is the last of these, "Poetry and Grammar", which is the best known, and which has borne the brunt of the critical attention mentioned by Richard Bridgman in Gertrude Stein in Pieces. In this lecture, Gertrude Stein came as close as she ever came in her popular explanations to examining the bases of her art. In it she discusses her feelings about punctuation, parts of speech, and the differences between poetry and prose so clearly that the temptation is very strong to take it as her last word on all these subjects.
The four lectures published in 1935 as Narration 15. were written in Chicago at the request of Thornton Wilder for Miss Stein's return visit to the university there. They are given short shrift by most critics, and have only been dealt with extensively by Bridgman, who contents himself with inadequate glosses while failing to see the connections which exist between these four lectures and the earlier Lectures In America. In fact, the second Narration lecture provides a useful corollary to "Poetry and Grammar", relating poetry and prose to narrative while redefining and enlarging some of her earlier statements about their basic natures. The lectures in Narration are far less general than those in Lectures In America, as they are all directed to the scrutiny of one subject, while those in Lectures In America are concerned with introductions to a variety of topics. Narration was written specifically for an academic audience, Lectures In America primarily for a lay audience. The Lectures In America, moreover, have been far more widely published and read than Narration and "Poetry and Grammar" remains the best known of them all.
The popularity of "Poetry and Grammar" among readers of Gertrude Stein is understandable. Throughout her difficult works, Stein forces the reader constantly to 16. re-examine his definitions of language, literary form, syntax, and grammar, and it is a relief to most readers, pushed to these basic questions, to find Stein apparently answering them. Her remarks about punctuation are witty and sensible, as for example, when she abjures question marks because "anybody can know that a question is a question and so why add to it the question mark when it is already there when the question is already 37 there in the writing." She gives personal, but illuminating, portraits of the parts of speech, ranking them in terms of their inherent interest. The noun is not interesting because it is just the name of something, and "why after a thing is named write about it. A name 38 is adequate or it is not." "Verbs and adverbs are 39 more interesting" because "they can be so mistaken." Yet these points are really only by way of preface to her central concern in "Poetry and Grammar" which was announced in its first sentences "What is poetry and 40 if you know what poetry is what is prose." It is no mistake that this question occupies the culminating lecture of the six. As the lectures were published, Miss Stein placed the three dealing with general topics first, followed by the three concerned with her work. She seems intent on allowing the reader time to work his way toward her writing, which may be seen 17. as the technical culmination of much that has gone before. The first, "What is English Literature," presents a useful general history of the literature of England, portraying each period in terms of the way words were used in it. Her explanation, for example, of the style of Chaucer as one in which the words "had not yet to be chosen, they had only as yet to be there 41 just there" is wonderfully evocative, and conveys the lyric naivete of Chaucer exactly. The Elizabethans, coming on a language that was two centuries old, had to choose words to go beside one another, as the words no longer could "sing" by themselves, and they "did not care so much about what they said although they knew that what they said meant a great deal but they liked the words, and one word and another word next to the other 42 word was always being chosen." This seems to me to describe perfectly the quality of many of Shakespeare's passages, particularly the lyrics, sonnets and songs. And so it goes on: the eighteenth century was a century of the "completed thing," where "words were not next to each other but all the words as they followed each other 43 were all together." The nineteenth century "proceeded 44 to live by phrases," and the nineteenth century "needed a paragraph. A phrase no longer soothed, suggested or 18.
convinced, they needed a whole paragraph. Whatever rhetorical exception might be taken to these statements, they are examples of a much-maligned art, that of intelligent generalization. Threaded through this stylistic chronology is a discussion of the writer's decision whether to serve god or mammon, whether to write "directly", in obedience to his mind, or whether to cater to a preconceived audience, to write "indirectly". Miss Stein is, one sees, nothing if not "direct".
This is probably, next to the third lecture, "Plays", the most neglected of the six in this volume, and that is unfortunate. "What is English Literature" is beautifully made, and is very rich in ideas. Among the many other threads woven into its fabric are two which will concern us laters the portrayal of "daily island living" as a primary influence on the nature of English writing, particularly poetry; and the first "popular" presentation of her edict that paragraphs are "emotional" while sentences are not, an idea she mentions in "Plays" and expands considerably in "Poetry and Grammar". The first is symptomatic of a train of meditation which became more and more frequent in her later writings, particularly in The Geographical History of America; the second was first broached in How To Write, and will be of concern to us in 19.
our analysis of her prose theory.
It is not necessary for me to gloss all six of the lectures so fully. "Pictures" and "Plays" both present highly subjective aesthetics relating to painting and the theatre, and although they are by no means disappointing, their subjects set them slightly apart from the purely literary thrust of the others. "Pictures" is of particular value in examining the influences of graphics on Miss Stein's writing, and in any study of her great acumen as a collector of modern painting; as such it has been widely quoted and studied. "Plays" is perhaps the weakest of the six, as it seems to set out solely to discuss Miss Stein's own explorations of the form, but in addition provides a kind of theatergoer's handbook; it deals well with both subjects, but somehow fails to knit them together. Stein's plays are, in any case, probably the most difficult items in the canon, and it is likely that those who were lucky enough to see the production of Virgil Thomson's opera to her libretto, Four Saints in Three Acts, running at the time, discovered more in that example than Miss Stein was able to give them in a relatively brief lecture. To say that "Plays" is the weakest of the lectures is only to point out its weakness 20.
as a lecture, rather than to imply any diminution of insight or wisdom. There remains much work to be done before the plays are given their due, and this lecture is only the first, hesitant step; it is worth noting that Miss Stein never attempted any other exegesis of her dramatic writing.
With "The Gradual Making of The Making of Americans" and "Portraits and Repetition", we move into direct discourse on Miss Stein's work. Both were very topical subjects to her audiences. By 1934, The Making of Americans had been published for ten years in the Contact Press Edition, and just before her tour an abridgement by, Bernard Fay, approved by Miss Stein, had been published by Harcourt, Brace and Company^ Apart from The Making of Americans and Tender Buttons and Three Lives, the latter two long out of print, the greater portion of Stein's published and available works were portraits, and her most obvious and widely-parodied 46 stylistic device was repetition.
"Poetry and Grammar" forms the centre of a trio, with "What is English Literature" and "Narration #2", which leads us into the most profound and basic investigation Stein advanced in her exegesis. Although, as we shall see, she does little more than introduce the subject \ 21.
of poetry and prose and the distinctions between them, the feeling that this is a central question for a reader of Gertrude Stein's writing is strongly supported by the attention paid to it here. She very skillfully moves the discussion far enough to be satisfying at what I have called the "popular" level, while leaving the reader with profound interest, curiosity and determination to explore further. Somehow, one feels, the "answer" to Gertrude Stein may be there.
In one sense, the "answer" to Gertrude Stein's writing is summed up in her answer to the young reporter who asked, "Why don't you write the way you talk?" Miss Stein countered with her own question: "Why don't you read the way I write?" The Making of Americans, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Three Lives, Paris France and Ida are obviously prose; Before the Flowers of Friendship Faded Friendship Faded, Lifting Belly and Stanzas in Meditation are clearly poetry. Beyond these, however, are a great many works which defy classification under either heading. Consider this passage from Lend a Hand or Four Religionsf
First Religion Does she almost see the grasses grow four times yearly does she see the green grasses grow four times yearly and is she nearly kneeling beside the water where the water is flowing. Does she 22.
touch it and does she remove it and does she see the green grasses grow nearly four times yearly. Does she see someone as she advances and does she kneel by the water is she kneeling by the water where the water is flowing. I do not think so, She is feeling that the green grasses grow nearly four times yearly.47
One might well argue that this is prose. The structure seems to be that of a paragraph, with sentences which are syntactically sound. Rhetorically, there is a conventional organization of questions posed and answered with a final assertion. In its original form, it is set on the page as prose, with justified margins. One understands it as much by its logic as by its manner. It is prose.
But is it? Consider the clarity and simplicity of the images, which are made more vivid by their repetition and by their incorporation into phrases which are repeated as rhythmical forces to give the passage momentum. Surely the rhyme in the phrase "nearly four times yearly" is more sonal than rhetorical? And look at the symmetry of the constructions three compound sentences, each containing three questions, concluding with a simple sentence for contrast and a final re-evocation of the sonal and rhythmical elements of the passage. One understands it as much by its manner as by its logic. It is poetry. 23.
This is, of course, a game which might be played throughout literature. It is foolish to pretend that the distinctions between poetry and prose are so marked that the two have nothing in common but the language which they use. Prose uses metaphor, cadence and sonality, just as poetry uses logic, parallel structure and exposition, and both use the sentence as a basic rhetorical unit. Yet there are technical and modal primacies within each: the imposition of a rhyme scheme on a passage of expository prose is as discomfiting as the interjection of a set of syllogisms into a lyric poem is bafflingj and where there is a choice, prose will move to discursive clarity, where poetry will embrace imaginative effect. Finally, beyond the text, is the spirit of the work, bound up in the intent• ion of the author vis-a-vis the expectation of the reader.
I am supposing that there is an essential difference between the state of mind brought to the reading of poetry and that brought to the reading of prose. A reader attempting to discover the essential facts of Wordsworth's life in The Prelude soon turns to the standard biography, yet this does not reveal the spirit of Wordsworth as a poet or a man as The Prelude does. Wordsworth's intention in The Prelude was to present a portrait of his spiritual and intellectual growth and the reader cannot expect to 24. find more than an ephemeral account of this in his biography. But we do not, after all, approach literature as a. body of reference works, and it is in the area of aesthetic expectation on the reader's part, and,aesthetic intention on the author's,that we encounter the differences between poetry and prose. 25.
(ii) Theories of Prose
The prose theories of Gertrude Stein as they are presented in the American lectures may be divided into two main areas of study: the functions of parts of speech and punctuation, and the nature and construction of sentences and paragraphs; or, for our purposes, grammar and rhetoric.
While it is true that more time is spent in the American lectures in discussing prose, it should be noted that the techniques of prose are not nearly' so fully discussed as those of poetry. The reasons for this are rather difficult to determine, and will be more fully discussed later in this chapter. For the moment, it is sufficient to say that Gertrude Stein saw her prose style from a conventional aesthetic viewpoint, as growing from its content, with the content dictating the form the sentences and paragraphs would take. In "Portraits and Repetition" and "The Gradual Making of The Making of . , Americans", she talks about what she was trying to convey in portraiture and in the use of repetition as a mode of expression, but does not separately deal with syntax and composition. She did not, of course, have time to do 26.
everything, and seems to have felt that the bases of prose could be assumed by her audiences. Nothing she says about her portraits or The Making of Americans is contentious as far as the formal elements are concerned. Her principal aim is to persuade her audience that the portraits are portrayals of their subjects and that The Making of Americans really is a novel which conveys "an orderly history of everyone who ever was or is or will 48 be living." Whether or not her writing employs orthodox sentences and paragraphs does not enter into the discussion until "Poetry and Grammar", in which she briefly deals with the natures and roles of sentences and paragraphs after having appraised parts of speech and punctuation. Remembering that her basic premise about poetry, made later in the same lecture, is that it is concerned with the noun, one can safely assume that her remarks on these subjects are to be taken as relating to prose rather than poetry, and so may be said to constitute part of her discussion of prose theory and technique.
As she does with poetry, Stein discusses prose first in its historical context in "What is English Literature". It is interesting to note that prose is not separately referred to until the eighteenth century, which was the age of the "completed sentence. To be sure, Stein speaks 27. of "Elizabethan prose and poetry",—but she makes no formal distinction between them. The distinction was one of intent, a choice between "god and mammon", and presumably both could be used for either purpose. The implication is that, like Elizabethan poetry, Elizabethan prose depended on the choosing of "one word and another word next to the other word."'"** Gertrude Stein is curiously vague about the writing of the seventeenth century, perhaps deliberately, as she regards this as a period of confusion. She suggests that the English Civil War confused the "daily island life", and that this confusion resulted in little writing of any consequence. (One notes the elimination of Milton with some dismayj he is only mentioned as a writer in whom this confusion may be seem "And so we come to the confusion of which I spoke and which shows in Milton and lasts pretty well to Pope and Gibbon and Swift and Johnson." ) Her point is made quite clearly, however, and it is oohsistent with the rest of her argumenti
This confusion comes when there is a giving up choosing, words next to each other are no longer so strictly chosen because there is intention to say what they are saying more importantly than completely choosing the ^ words next each other which are to be chosen.
The implied criticism of the seventeenth century as one in 28. which what was said often overrode the manner in which it was said is well taken, to my mind; certainly, as far as prose is concerned, the seventeenth century could be called "The Age of the Tract", but what is important to our discussion is Miss Stein's feeling that it led naturally to a reaction in the eighteenth century when the Restoration had ended the period of "confusion":
...then we come to the beginning when everything was clear again and the daily island life was being lived with so much clarity that there could be nothing but the expression of that being that thing. That was the period that made Swift and Gibbon and Pope and Johnson and they had no longer to choose their words they could have all the pleasure in their use. And they did. No one everrenjoyed the use of what they had more than they did. There was no separation anywhere, the complete• ness was in the use.5$
And the "use" was the use of the sentences
As I said the eighteenth century was clear and so there was a choice and the choice was a completed thing and what is a completed thing. A sentence is a completed thing and so the eighteenth century chose the completed sentence as a completed thing.5* The nineteenth century again presented a change in prose writing, due to the growth of British Imperialism. Because the British then owned "everything outside", they had to relate what they owned to their "daily inside life". 29.
This involved explanation, and explanation became a central preoccupation in nineteenth century prose writing:
... it must be understood that explain• ing was invented, naturally invented by those living a daily island life and owning everything else outside. They owned everything inside of course but that they had always done, but now they owned everything outside and that rein• forced their owning everything inside, and that was as it was only more so but as they owned everything outside, outside and inside had to be told something about all this owning, otherwise they might not remember all this owning and so there was invented explaining and that made nineteenth century English literature what it is. And with explaining went emotional sentimental feeling because of course it had to be explained all the owning had to be told about its being owned about its owning and any• body can see that if island daily life were to continue its daily existing there must be emotional sentimental feeling.56
In order to explain satisfactorily, the nineteenth century had to devise a new kind of writing! they could not "write in words that were simply words as Chaucer did," because that was too simple for the necessary explanations; they could not "choose words to be next to each other and to be lively," like the Elizabethans, because "anything as lively as that could 30. not own everything"; they could not use a completed sentence, as the eighteenth century had, "because if a thing is a completed thing then it does not need explan• ation, "~^ With these possibilities ruled out, the nine• teenth century turned to the phrase:
They thought about what they were thinking and if you think about what you are thinking you are bound to think about it in phrases, because if you think about what you are thinking you are not thinking about a whole thing. If you are explaining, the same thing is true, you cannot explain a whole thing because if it is a whole thing it does not need explaining, it merely needs stating."
^ The end of the nineteenth century brought with it a change in the order of things, and "the daily island life was less daily and the owning everything outside 59 was less owning." With the advance of communications life became less clearly ordered, and something else was needed to be used in prose. Because the distinctions between "daily island living" and the outside were breaking down,"explaining and expressing their feeling was not any fif) longer an inevitable thing." What was required was control over one's thinking in writing, and for this the paragraph was the proper tool. 31.
Just as Gertrude Stein sees poetry as arising from emotion, from calling things "by their names with passion," so she sees the basic elements of her prose style, the sentence and the paragraph, arising from the exigencies of presenting emotion in writing. In both cases, the juncture of emotion and the need to express it fuses into a theory of form. It is this conviction which led Stein to make her celebrated statement that 6 2 "a sentence is not emotional a paragraph is."
In "The Gradual Making of The Making of Americans" and "Portraits and Repetition," Stein discusses her prose techniques only obliquely, by providing examples from her work to demonstrate different stages of concern with such subjects as portraiture, landscape and the role of repetition, or "insistence." Again, however, it is in "Poetry and Grammar" that she finally lays down her findings about the nature and structure of prose, and as always, she begins very basically, with an analysis of the parts of speech and the punctuation of the English language. She commences with a rather startling pronouncement:
Words have to do everything in poetry and prose and some writers write more in articles and prepositions and some say you should write in nouns, and of course 32.
one has to think of everything.
Elizabeth Sprigge suggests that Gertrude Stein's studies with William James had a strong effect on her concepts of grammar.^ James, in his Principles of Psychology (1890), had described thought as "sensibly continuous," a concept which later led to Stein's development of a continuous present in such works as The Making of Americans. But James made another observ• ation which affected Gertrude Stein's prose writing even more*
We ought to say a feeling of "and," a feeling of "if," a feeling of "but," and a feeling of "by," quite as readily as we say a feeling of "blue" or a feeling of "coldT" Yet we do not: so inveterate has our habit become of recognizing the existence of the substantive parts alone, that language almost refuses to lend itself to any other use.65
There are areas of Stein's writing which can be identified as "participial" or "adverbial" writing, in which the emphasis of the writing's structure has been made to devolve on a certain part of speech. We have already seen that her early poetry might well be referred to as "nounal" writing} this arbitrary concentration on one or another part of speech leads away from a substantive sense of language in which we leap from noun to verb to 33. noun again, trusting in the nets of particles to save us should our understanding fail. The results of such experiments are often works of great structural beauty, but her rigid experiments in isolated parts of speech are very rare. This sort of study led Gertrude Stein very quickly to an acute understanding of the natures of words, and thence to the use of a peculiarly "democrat• ized" language which served her in much of her finest work.
After her remarks about writers' choosing to write more in one part of speech than another, Stein spends the first third of her lecture discussing the parts of speech and punctuation. Her treatment of them is as direct as her analysis of the history of English literature.
Our discussion of her early poetry has already shown her feeling that the noun is "not really interesting" ; it naturally follows that the adjective is uninteresting as well, "because after all adjectives effect (sic) nouns and as nouns are not really interesting the thing that effects (sic) a not too interesting thing is of 66 necessity not interesting." ,; Verbs and adverbs, on the other hand, "are more interesting. In the first place they have one very nice quality, and that is that they 34. can be so mistaken." This quality of being "mistaken," a reference to the inflection of English verbs in contrast to the dropping of noun declensions, offers an intriguing possibility to interpreters of Steins deliberate amiguity might be said to have its place in her attitude to language. This proves to be true only structurally, how• ever, in works like Tender Buttons where the "democratiz- ation" we have spoken of can be seen. Verbs, when appearing as gerunds and participles and modal auxiliaries "can change ttoo look like themselves or to look like something else. „69
Next, prepositions are discussed. Stein confesses to liking prepositions "the best of all," because they "can live one long life being really being nothing but absolutely nothing but mistaken."^ She acknowledges that this is something which some might find "irritating," but gives as her opinion that they are both useful and enjoyable as a result. Articles are "varied and alive"^ and they "are interesting because they do what a noun 72 might do if a noun was not ... the name of something." 73 Articles are "delicate and varied" because they presumably hint at any number of "things" -- i.e. nouns -- without being committed to the limitations of naming something. 35.
Conjunctions are "not varied" but they have "a force that need not make anyone feel that they are 74 dull." "Conjunctions have made themselves live by 75 their work." One feels that pronouns will come under censure, but it appears that they do not. "(In) the first place practically they cannot have adjectives go with them," and that "already makes them better than 76 nouns." Moreover, as they only "represent" a noun, they are not names. Stein rounds off the discussion of parts of speech with an interesting observation which constitutes another swipe at the noun: "That is the reason that slang exists it is to change the nouns which have been names for so long."^
A checklist of punctuation begins with those signs which are not "interesting": question marks, exclamation marks, quotation marks, dashes, dots and spaces. The arguments against the first three are all the same: if the sentence is properly written it should be perfectly clearly a question, an exclamation or a quotation; they are, in addition, an irritant to the eye. "There so much 78 for that." The last three "might be interesting ... 79 if one felt that way about them." She then discourses delightfully on the apostrophe for possession, finally leaving it to the individual to decide for himself whether 36/ or not to use it: "Well feel as you like about that, I can see and I do see that for many that for some the possessive case apostrophe has a gentle tender insinuation that makes it very difficult to definitely decide to do without it."80
The rest of the discussion of punctuation centres around the more important points: "periods, commas,colons, 81 seim-colons and capitals and small letters." Gertrude Stein's struggle with punctuation followed the increasingly familiar pattern of outright rejection by logic, followed by the gradual reappraisal of the rejected items until a useful and workable balance was reached. This process was at work in her poetry, all but nouns being removed until absolute necessity drove her to use other parts of speech, resulting, in the culmination of her early style, in vivid genre pictures in primary colours. In the case of punctuation, her initial instinct was to discard everything, and this she did, retaining only the period. Even the period had first been rejected, as she felt that writing should above all be "going on," and that if this momentum were to be maintained, whatever halted or slowed or interfered with it had no place. However, she realized at once that "physically one had to again and again stop sometime," and that periods consequently had 37.
"to exist." This did not, after all, interfere unnaturally* "Stopping sometime did not really keep one from going on, it was nothing that interfered, it was only something that happened and as it happened as a perfectly natural happening, I did believe in periods and I used them." Later, she felt that periods had "a life of their own," and could be used to break a passage of writing into arbitrary sections, as they were in "Winning His Way." This use of periods was explored in How To Write, and became an important part of her writing in such other late works as "Brim Beauvais" (1931), "Marguerite; or, A Simple Novel of High Life" (1932) and "They Must. Be Wedded. To Their Wife. A Play." (1931).
The colon and the semi-coIon are seen as functioning at a halfway point between the period and the comma, and Stein's contention is that they can be seen either way. However, semi-colons and colons "had for me from the first completely this character the character that a comma has and not the character that a period has and 84 therefore and definitely I have never used them." She confesses that she has sensed occasionally that they might have "the character that a period has," making it "an adventure to use them," but that she has always stopped short because they "really have within 38.
85 them fundamentally within them the comma nature."
The comma, as we have already inferred it might, comes in for quite a drubbings
A comma by helping you along holding your coat for you and putting on your shoes keeps you from leading your life as actively as you should lead it and to me for many years and I still do feel that way about it only now I do not pay as much attention to them, (ate) the use of them was positively degrading.86 And what does a comma do, a comma does nothing but make easy a thing that if you like it enough is easy enough without the comma. A long complicated sentence should force itself upon-you, make you know yourself knowing it and the comma, well at most the comma is a poor period that it lets you stop and take a breath but if you want to take a breath you ought to know yourself that you want to take a breath.8'
The section on grammar and punctuation ends with a nod toward upper and lower case letters, and Stein's attitude seems to be quite indifferent: "I have always felt that one does do pretty well what one pleases with oo capitals and small letters." She concludes that sentences, paragraphs and periods will always be with us, and that "prose and also poetry will also always always 89 be with us." It is at this point that the long central 39. section of the lecture which deals with prose structure is introduced;
Sentences and paragraphs. Sentences are not emotional and paragraphs are. I can say that as often as I like and it always remains as it is, something that is. I said I found this out first in listening to Basket my dog drinking. And anybody listening to any dog's drinking will see what I mean.90
The meaning of this observation, after the initial jolt which Gertrude Stein so often gives us, is quite clear. Sentences are functional, presenting only one aspect of a subject; as a sentence is a "completed thing," it cannot be more than one thing, and so cannot change the statement it makes; it may modify or amplify or provide anfapposition to its basic statement, but'it cannot change it and remain a "completed thing." The paragraph, on the other hand, consists of a succession of sentences which may, in the course of the paragraph, comment upon and diverge from one another, so that the cumulative effect of the paragraph is a changing of the state of the subject and a changing of the reader's attitude to it; it is therefore an aesthetic, or "emotional," response which the paragraph evokes, not merely an intellectual response to a statement. Just as each lap of a dog's drinking performs the function of taking water into its mouth, so the sentence provides 40.
information; and as the relief from thirst is the final emotion of the cumulative effect of lapping, so the paragraph is the emotional construct of many sentences.
The next point is a corollary to thisi sentences and paragraphs differ in that each has a "balance," the balance of a sentence being "unemotional," and the balance of a 91 paragraph, "emotional." Stein then describes her endeavours to "break down this essential combination by making enormously long sentences that would be as long as the longest paragraph and so to see if there was really and truly this essential difference between 92 paragraphs and sentences." She claims to have done this in The Making of Americans, although she provides no examples, her reason being that while she had succeeded in doing it, she felt that it "was not leading to any• thing because after all you should not lose two things in order to have one thing because in doing so you 93 make writing just that much less varied." Stein then turns to examples from How To Write to demonstrate what she feels were successful attempts to fus the emotional and unemotional balances of paragraphs and sentences without discarding the sentences and the paragraph as useful tools in writing; in short, to create a third possibility, a syntactical-rhetorical unit 41.
which would distil the essences of both. Here are three of her nine examples:
94 He looks like a young man grown old. A dog which you have never had before has sighed.^5
Poplars indeed will be and may be indeed will be cut down and will be sawn up and indeed will be used as wood and may be used for wood?^
It is difficult to imagine that even the most willing and astute of Stein's audience can have followed this. While the examples, with study, amply demonstrate what she claimed -- as we shall see when we look at How To Write -- Stein undeniably expects too much of her audience. The sentences are beautifully formed; they are assuredly intriguing ("They even make sense," some newly converted but still bewildered philistine might have whispered to his wife) but they do not unequivocally convey the formal point their author is trying to make. The rhetorical effect is precisely the one which she would use strikingly later in the evening, ending her discussion of her poetry with examples drawn from Before The Flowers of Friendship Faded Friendship Faded and leaving her audience straining at the threshold of her greatest poems. But then, an audience expects to be lost when listening to poetry, especially modern poetry; 42.
on the contrary, it expects to understand prose both technically and contextually. When presented with examples intended to clarify an abstruse point of aesthetics, clarity is the very least one should expect. It must be said that, while her audience may have sensed what was meant by the theory itself, the examples probably left them confused. This may well have been her intention.
In spite of this, Stein quickly wins her audience back by confessing that while she was "intending to write about grammar and poetry (she is) still writing about 97 grammar and prose." But, she goes on, "if you find out essentially what prose is and essentially what poetry 98 is may you not have an exciting thing happening." Here she introduces the first concept which will lead her into her discussion of poetryt After all the natural way to count is not that one and one makes two but to go on counting .by one and one as chinamen do as anybody does as Spaniards do as my little aunts did. One and one and one and one and one. That is the natural way to go on counting.99
The idea of enumeration recalls "What is English Literature", and dovetails nicely with her later contention that poetry is concerned with the calling upon nouns. Now she begins to lead her audience toward the subject 43. of poetry by recounting her efforts to rid herself of nouns in The Making of Americans "by the method of living in adverbs in verbs in pronouns, in adverbial clauses written or implied and in conjunctions."1*^ It was after this that she "decided not to get around (nouns) but ... to refuse them by using thern."1^1 Before moving into poetry, we are given a summary of the functions of prose which have been discussed*
We do know a little now what prose is. Prose is the balance the emotional balance that makes the reality of paragraphs and the unemotional balance that makes the reality of sentences and having realized completely realized that sentences are not emotional while paragraphs are, prose can be the essential balance that is made inside something that combines the sentence and the paragraph, examples of this I have been reading to you.
Finally, before leaving prose to introduce poetry, she makes reference once more to How To Write, this time on the subject of vocabulary, the most basic element of language*
The vocabulary in prose of course is important if you like vocabulary is always important, in fact one of the things that you can find out and that I experimented with a great deal in How To Write vocabulary in itself and by itself can be interesting and can make sense. Anybody can know that by thinking of words. It is extraordinary how it is impossible that a 44.
vocabulary does not make sense. But that is natural indeed inevitable because a vocabulary is that by definition, and so because this is so the vocabulary in respect to prose is less important than the parts of speech, and the internal balance and the movement within a given space. So then we understand we do know what prose is.
This is only one of many cases of Gertrude Stein's reducing what seems to be endless complication to utter 104 simplicity. The structure of "Poetry and Grammar" is beautifully simple: an analysis of grammar, punctuation and composition and an increasingly complex description of poetry begin and end a lecture which has, as its calm centre, vocabulary. Words. It is, after all, from words that both poetry and prose must grow. 45.
(iii) Theories of Poetry
Gertrude Stein says of poetry that it is "a vocabulary entirely based on the noun as prose is essentially and determinately and vigorously not based on the noun."*0"5 She offers as an example of this her much-maligned line "rose is a rose is a rose is a rose"i
When I said, A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose. And then later made that into a ring I made poetry and what did I do I caressed completely caressed and addressed a noun.107
This sense of poetry is first encountered in "What Is English Literature," when she discusses the attitude of Chaucer to his language. Because Chaucer lived in an "island life" in which everything was defined by geographical boundaries, he was shut in with his language and with the objects which constituted his experience. All that was required for the making of poetry was the enumeration of the objects of the "daily island life,"
1 AO because "anything shut in with you can sing." She suggests that the geographical frame of the English life, combined with its intellectual corollary, "daily island living," constituted a state of being which made for i no poetry, as "the things being shut in are free." This 46.
attitude and situation together contributed to the inception of a literature founded on aesthetic simplicity, on a lack of complication, on stability and balance:
In England the daily island life was the daily life and it was solidly that daily life and they generally always simply relied on it. They relied on it so completely that they did not describe it they just had it and told it. Just like that. And then they had poetry, because everything was shut in there with them and these things birds beasts woods flowers, roses, violets and fishes were all there and as they were all there just telling that they were all there made poetry for any one A
This simple attitude to poetry, that it is essentially enumeration, can indeed be seen as the basic mode of lyric poetry in England. The opening of the "General Prologue" to the Canterbury Tales is, after all, nothing more or less than a list of various natural events contributing to Spring: April showers; singing birds; light breezes; and sunshine. What follows is another list, this one of people enumerated and described in lists of characteristics, talents and items of appearance. Following that we have an enumeration, a listing by telling, of the tales which each pilgrim told. The whole work is, from a structural viewpoint, a succession 47.
Before assertions such as these are dismissed as rank generalization, it is interesting to look closely at works such as the Canterbury Tales to see what kind of description is used. Certainly in the "General Prologue" the predominant form is the simple image conveyed 112 by the noun, sometimes with an adjective; "shoures soote"; "tendre croppes";11^ "ful devout corage";"parfit gentil knyght, "11 ~* and so on. The use of simile is quite rare, and simple when it does appears "Embrouded was he, as it were a meede/ Al ful of fresshe floures, whyte and reede";11^1 "He was as fresshe as is the month of May";11^ "His eyen twynkled in his heed aryght,/ As doon the sterres in the frosty nyght." Metaphor is very difficult to find, and might best be exemplified as a type in this description 119 of the Franklins "Seint Julian he was in his contree." This is metaphor at its most basic, little more than simile with the connective adverb omitted. Within the historical context Stein has set up in "What is English Literature," her argument holds very well. It is, of course, clear to everyone that such a theory cannot be universally applied. Even in the case of the Canterbury Tales, the presence of narrative removes it to some extent from the usual sense of "lyric," and although Stein does not use "lyric" as a term, her suggestion that early English poetry consists of the 48.
enumeration of the things which surround the poet seems to apply only to lyric poetry. It does not, for example, account for Piers Plowman, or for Chaucer's own "Merciles Beaute" or the "Parlement of Foules." As a statement concerning the poet's attitude to language it is charming and useful; as a critical guide it is less so.
This historical discussion of English poetry performs an interesting and useful function when we come to Stein's discussion of her own poetry in "Poetry and Grammar." Our first impulse, when we read her remarks about poetry being "based on the noun," is to recall her discussion of early English lyrics, and at once we see Gertrude Stein's poetry in a context extending back to the beginning of English literature. To re-read the notorious "rose is a rose is a rose is a rose" in that light is not at all the same as to come across it in a facetious editorial or to hear it quoted out of context over the radio. A moment's contemplation in such a perspective will bring to mind several well-known roses -- "0 my Luve is like a red, red rose"; "A rose/ By any other name would smell as sweet"; "Rose, thou art sick";; "There will I make thee beds of roses" -- and a few minutes more will conjure up armfuls of flowers of every sort, from Shakespeare's "cowslips tall" and "daisies 49. pied and violets blue" to Wordsworth's daffodils and Housman's "cherry hung with snow." The effect is both judiciously prepared and apt, for Stein's poetry, with one or two notable exceptions, is essentially lyric and 1 20 descriptive. But her concern in "Poetry and Grammar" is to give a technical and aesthetic rationale for her own poetry, and this she proceeds to do.
Her first statements about poetry are unequivocal and startling:
Poetry is concerned with using with abusing, with losing with wanting, with denying with avoiding with adoring with replacing the noun. It is doing that always doing that, doing that and doing nothing but that. Poetry is doing nothing but using losing refusing and pleasing and betraying and caressing nouns. That is what poetry does, that is what poetry has to do no matter what kind of poetry it is. And there are a great many kinds of poetry.12d
The reader's immediate reaction is to cite exceptions. What about epic poetry? Well, Stein might answer, what about it? Isn't epic poetry simply the citing of great men or events? Doesn't Paradise Lost consist of a series of events? And isn't an event essentially a noun? What about the list of demons' names in Book One? But Paradise Lost is a narrative poem, and 50. narrative involves more than strings of nouns. This charge is answered by Stein in "Narration #2:"
If poetry is the calling upon a name until that name comes to be anything if one goes on calling on that name more and more calling upon that name as poetry does then poetry does make of that calling upon a name a narrative it is a narrative of calling upon that name.122
The continuous calling upon a name, which occupies time, has to be seen as a progression or succession of technical or formal events in the poem, and this makes a narrative of the poem of which it is a part. This suggests an intriguing possibility: the "story" in a poetic narrative consists of events, which are nouns; the "poetry" of the poetic narrative consists of the calling upon, the recounting of, those nouns: therefore, the "story" which the poem tells is equally a product of the necessities of poetic form and the sequential ordering of the tale being told. Poetry is the calling upon nouns; narrative is the ordering of nouns in some sequence; narrative poetry is then the calling upon sequences of nouns. Narrative poetry may be simply an arbitrary ordering of the elements which make up any and all poetry.
Exceptions to the statements Gertrude Stein makes 51. might seem to litter the ground, but we must remember that her primary intention in these lectures is to present her own views of poetry and prose as a writer and to show their relation to her own work. She goes on to discuss two of the major technical areas of poetry, line formation and rhyme:
Why are the lines of poetry short, so much shorter than prose, why do they rhyme, why in order to complete themselves do they have to end with what they began, why are all these things the things that are in the essence of poetry even when the poetry was long even when now the poetry has changed its form. Once more the answer is the same and that is that such a way to express oneself is the natural way when one expresses oneself in loving the name of anything.123
The answer, that the use of rhyme and short lines is a "natural way" to express love for an object, brings us back once more to the original contention that poetry is the caressing of nouns. The person calling out the noun does so repeatedly: "Do you not inevitably repeat what you call out and is that calling out not of necessity 12 4 in short lines." Repetition must inevitably lead to rhyme, if only to identical rhyme -- this seems to be the only statement Stein cares to make about it. She does explore, however, the beginnings of her feeling that poetry is concerned with nouns, and the process, where directly stated, is interesting. 52.
During the writing of The Making of Americans, it became necessary to discuss things other than the inner lives of the characters with which the book begins. In the early sections of the book the struggle had been with the sentence and the paragraph, with the internal balance of the writing which must be made to correspond with the subject matter. This was prose, and poetry was of no real concern to her then. But as the book progressed, it became necessary to use nouns, "to discover the names of things, that is not discover the names but discover 1 25 the things the things to see the things to look at." As these things were already represented by nouns, she naturally "called them by the names they had and in doing so... I called them by their names with passion 12 6 and that made poetry." This was an unwanted development ("I did not mean it to make poetry but it 1 27 did..." but it led her eventually to the writing of Tender Buttons. However, even at this point, Stein was unhappy about the use of nouns. She knew "dimly...that nouns made 1 28 poetry," but was troubled with the feeling that she needed them in poetry when she felt she did not need them in prose. I commenced trying to do something in Tender Buttons about this thing. I went on and on 53.
trying to do this thing. I remember in writing An Acquaintance With Description looking at anything until something that was not the name of that thing but was in a way thaactual thing would come to be written. 1^
This replacing of the name with another name is, after all, the basis of metaphor. She realized that it was not possible to create new nouns, as it requires "a tremendous 1 30 amount of inner necessity to invent even one word." Her concern in poetry was with "the recreation and the avoidance of nouns as nouns and yet poetry being poetry 131 nouns are nouns." In this sentence we come to the crux of her distinction between poetry and prose to the extent that she deals with it in the American lectures: in poetry, nouns retain their nature as nouns; in prose they become mere verbal elements in a larger structure, as we have seen. She would be rid of nouns, but not by ignoring them; she would be rid of them by "refusing" them. As an example of her early poetry, demonstrating the characteristics she discusses in "Poetry and Grammar,"
Stein quotes two sections from "A Valentine £9."-. Sherwood Anderson": "A Very Valentine" and "Bundles for them. A History of Giving Bundles." The first of these presents Stein's poetry at its most unequivocally poetic in what might be called her "jingle" style: 54.
Very fine is my valentine. Very fine and very mine. Very mine is my valentine very mine and very fine. Very fine is my valentine and mine, very fine very mine and mine is my valentine.* 32
Certainly this is directly connected with the statements Stein has just been making to her audience about the uses of rhyme and short lines. The content is the calling upon someone who is loved, a "valentine," and this noun, with the rhyming pronoun "mine," governs the piece. There is as well a conjunction ("and") an adverb ("very") two adjectives ("my" and "fine") and a copula verb ("is") which stitches the language together grammatically. The ryme between "valentine," "fine" and "mine" accentuates the essential "noun-ness" of the passage by f;ocussing sonally on the central grammatical construction of adjective, pronoun, and noun.
The next passage is more complex, but retains this "nounal" quality with sophistication and adroitnessi
BUNDLES FOR THEM A History of Giving Bundles
We were able to notice that each one in a way carried a bundle, they were not a trouble to them nor were they all bundles as some of them were chickens some of them pheasants some of them sheep and some of them bundles, they were not a trouble to them and then indeed we 55.
learned that it was the principal recreation and they were so arranged that they were not given away, and today they were given away. I will not look at them again. They will not look for them again. They have not seen them here again. They are in there and we hear them again. In which way are stars brighter than they are. When we have come to this decision. We mention many thousands of buds. And when I close my eyes I see them. If you hear her snore It is not before you love her You love her so that to be her beau is very lovely She is sweetly there and her curly hair is very lovely. She is sweetly here and I am very near and that is very lovely. She is my tender sweet and her little feet are stretched out well which is a treat and very lovely. Her little tender nose is between her little eyes which close and are very lovely. She is,.,very lovely and mine which is very lovely. I-**
The title at once prepares us for the profusion of nouns by announcing its concern with "bundles," with collections of objects: that this is "A History of Giving Bundles" (italics mine) makes the telling itself a thing, an event, a noun. This is what we discussed earlier, "a narrative 56. of calling upon" nouns.
The opening lines immediately imply groups of people as well as many "bundles": "each one in a way carried a bundle." The next clause has "they" the bundles -- as its subject, and continues to suggest great numbers: "nor were they all bundles." These "bundles" suddenly explode into many possibilities -- "some of them were chickens some of them pheasants some of them sheep" -- before returning to the enriched basic noun once more "and some of them bundles." What follows is, especially in the context of the lecture for which this piece serves as an example, a delightful and significant pun: "they were not a trouble to them and then indeed we learned that it was the principal recreation" (italics mine). Immediately before beginning to read, Stein had spoken of struggling with "the recreation and the avoidance of nouns as nouns," and here in the poem she is happily playing with nouns which contain nouns, nouns which when "opened" will reveal possibilities which are all "things," and which can be "given away." She then discourses briefly on the experiencing of these "bundles" of nouns, making the first person singular and the third person plural pronouns circle the "bundles" like cats, all eyes and ears: "I will not look at them again./ They will not look for them again./ 57.
They have not seen them here again./ They are in there and we hear them again." These troublesome "bundles" having been disposed of, or at least accounted for, she is faced with two incalculably huge further "bundles," "stars" and "many thousands of buds," and finds that she cannot escape nouns after alls "And when I close my eyes I see them."
In the next section quoted in the lecture, there is a slight removal, for contrast, from the clutter of nouns which has preceded. In this recounting of the charms of a lover there is a list of nouns, but the speaker and the subject are only pronouns, and the passage is softened a little in tone as a result. There is also a shift in point of view in the first five lines, from the second person singular in the opening three ("You love her so that to be her beau is very lovely") through a modulation in the fourth where only the object of the attention is present in the third person ("She is sweetly there and her curly hair is very lovely") to the first person singular in line five ("She is sweetly there and I am very near"). The effect of this passage is similar to the "valentine" passage dealt with earlier, but it is more subtle, and allows the careful reader a closer insight into the problems Stein is citing by letting him see the 58. power of nouns and pronouns which she felt in her experi• ments with verse. This was, to her, a continuing struggle:
I knew nouns must go in poetry as they had gone in prose if anything that is, everything was to go on meaning something.13^ I had to feel anything and everything that for me was existing so intensely that I could
put it down in writing as a thing in itself' g without at all necessarily using its name. And here was the question if in poetry one could lose the noun as I had really and truly lost it in prose would there be any difference between poetry and prose.136
She also realized, in writing Before the Flowers of Friendship Faded Friendship Faded, that she "could use very few nouns in poetry and call out practically no names in poetry and yet make poetry really feel and sound as 137 poetry" , and she quotes two passages from this poem as examples. Here is the second of the two:
It could be seen very nicely That doves have each a heart, Each one is always seeing that they could not be apart, A little lake makes fountains And fountains have no flow, And a dove has need of flying And water can be low, Let me go. Any week is what they seek When they have to halve a beak. I like a painting on a wall of doves And what do they do, 59.
They have hearts They are apart Little doves are winsome But not when they are little and left.
Although it is one of the more accessible sections of the poem and certainly the easier of the two examples quoted in "Poetry and Grammar," this stanza is considerably more difficult than the earlier selections from "A Valen- tine to Sherwood Anderson." The use of a pattern of nouns is evident ("doves"; "beaks"; "flying") and there is a definite mood of affection and tenderness. The use of such a cloying rhyme scheme and metric pattern in the first half lends an almost surrealistic touch, however, and makes what might otherwise appear to be simple images appear strange. This no longer a simple calling upon nouns. In short, the piece can be understood only with some effort, like the sentences from How To Write used as examples at the end of the prose section of the lecture; and like those sentences, this verse receives virtually no comment from Stein, and the audience is left once more at the threshold of some discovery which is not explored any further.
Before the Flowers of Friendship Faded Friendship Faded is a fitting place for Stein to end this popular discussion of her poetics because it shows her finally 60. breaking the hold of nouns on her poetry and moving to• ward a deeper sense of the poem, toward being able to "put it down in writing as a thing in itself without at«:all necessarily using its name." It is interesting, and worth remembering, that Before the Flowers of Friendship Faded Friendship Faded began as quite another exercise, that of translation. Georges Hugnet, a young French poet, had asked Gertrude Stein to translate his long poem, Enfjance, and this she had agreed to do. As she began to work on it, however, she discovered a different quality in the words she was writing, because the "recognition," the inception of the poem, had already been done for her: she had only to write what was a fait accompli. The result was perhaps the first poetic example in her experience as a writer of writing "through" something. The noun -- Hugnet*s poem -- was the object of her attention and the subject of her writing. By concentrating on that "noun," she discovered that she was not translating Hugnet's poem, but writing a meditation of her own upon it: she was, in fact,"(putting) it down in writing as a thing in itself without necessarily using its name." This was the first step toward her own great poem, Stanzas in Meditation1 in which the inner nature of poetry itself would come under poetic scrutiny, and the poem would comment on itself. 61.
The poetry with which she deals in "Poetry and Gram• mar" is all early work which she demonstrates to have grown out of prose, poetry arrived at by a sense that there was another function in writing which prose could not fulfil. She came on it first in her repeated and fruit• less attempts to avoid the noun. Discovering that this was impossible, she decided to "meet" nouns, and "in that 140 way (her) real acquaintance with poetry was begun." ~v
Leaving her audience with the quotations from Before the Flowers of Friendship Faded Friendship Faded, apart from being an effective rhetorical stroke, was a necessity for Stein. While by this time she knew far more than she had discussed in "Poetry and Grammar" about the differences between poetry and prose, she could not tell what she knew. She had learned it through a painstaking process which had begun eleven years earlier with an abstract piece called "An ElucidationV'ihad progressed through How To Write, from which she had drawn a few examples earlier, and had ended in 1932 with Stanzas in Meditation. In the process she had returned to the roots of her language and had reassessed it step by step, allowing it to reassemble as she watched, studied and documented it. These works had taken her beyond the language of the lecture hall. If anyone wished to explore her findings, he would have to 62. follow her research from beginning to end, through the most abstruse and complex studies created by any major writer in English. 63.
(iv) Summary
It should be obvious even to a cursory reader of Stein that, in the American lectures, she does not begin to deal with what Bridgman calls "the huge splatter" of her work.1^1 Three Lives is not even mentioned in the lectures, nor are Stanzas in Meditation, "An Elucidation," A Novel of Thank You, or "As A Wife Has A Cow A Love Story," all of which were important works in Gertrude Stein's develop• ment of character study, poetry, exegesis, narrative structure and grammatical analysis, and all of which she would certainly have dealt with, probably to the exclusion of the first three lectures of Lectures in America, had she really intended a clarification .of her whole artistic career. How To Write and Before the Flowers of Friendship Faded Friendship Faded are only briefly mentioned: from How To Write she cites her central concept of "emotional" paragraphs and "unemotional" sentences (but the book con• tains far more than that) and quotes a few brief excerpts with virtually no comment, as we have seen; from Before the Flowers of Friendship Faded Friendship Faded she quotes two sections with similarly scanty remarks. In both cases, as was pointed out earlier, strong rhetorical points are made, but Stein can hardly be said to have dealt fully with either work. 64.
The lectures form only a part of a most important segment of Gertrude Stein's work, that of theoretical writing. This group of works may be divided into two sec• tions, the first of which we shall call exegetical, and 142 the second, exemplary. The exegetical writings include "How Writing is Written," "What Are Masterpieces," Compo• sition as Explanation," parts of The Making of Americans, Lectures in America and Narration. These works all discuss theories of writing or aesthetics, explaining principles, providing examples and developing arguments. They are, in short, pieces of expository writing in which writing is principally discussed.
The second group, the "exemplary" writings, are far more important and very difficult to define. The group includes An Acquaintance With Description,"Descriptions of Literature," "An Elucidation," "Winning His Way. A Narrative Poem of Poetry," How To Write and Stanzas in Meditation. All these works are characterized by their presenting to the reader literary principles, formal, tech• nical and aesthetic, in aj form .which is itself an "exemplar" of the principle being discussed. To paraphrase the title of one of the exegetical pieces, these are "compositions as explanations," in which Gertrude Stein constantly im• merses herself in the making a work. Occasionally she will 65. step aside long enough to offer some comment on what is being done, but these asides are not disconnections! they are glosses, and are themselves part of the fabric of the work. Here is an example of this process from How To Writet
They will be ready to have him. We think so. He looks like a young man grown old. That is a sentence that they could use. I was overcome with remorse. It was my fault that my wife did not have a cow. This sentence they cannot use. A repetition of prettiness,makes it re• peated. With them looking.143
It is the exemplary writings which represent the most profound portions of Gertrude Stein's theoretical writing and which enabled her to create the greatest of her purely creative works, Lucy Church Amiably. Mrs. Reynolds, A Novel of Thank You, and The Geographical History of America, auong others. Stanzas in Meditation represents the culmination of her poetic output, and as such holds a unique position which bridges the exemplary writings and the purely creative pieces.
The reason for Gertrude Stein's having developed her exemplary writing is simple enough: there was no other way for her to write about the kinds of writing she was attempting to create than in the style of that writing 66. itself. There is no other way to describe it than in its own terras. One can really only provide a setting and com• mentary to such writings as How To Write and Stanzas in Meditation, although commentary can sometimes provide considerable insight. These works are neither impregnable nor fragile: they respond well to scrutiny and they are composed of parts which may be individually examined with• out damage to the work as a whole. They are so well crafted that they rearrange themselves imperturbably. It is very easy to be fond of them.
For all these reasons, the exemplary writings had no place in the American lectures except as guests. They represent Gertrude Stein's exploration beyond the other works discussed and sampled in Lectures in America: aes• thetically, technically and formally they are beyond the language of exegesis which serves her purpose so well. By leaving her audiences with glimpses of her further discoveries, she was implicitly telling them that these works could only be described in their own terms. She was asking them, in the most direct way possible, to read as she wrote. 67.
PART TWO THE EXEMPLARY PROSE WORKS
(i) Introduction
The first work using the exemplary method was "An Elucidation," written in 1923. It first appeared in April, 1927, in transition, as a supplement to the magazine's regular issue. It actually appeared in the magazine proper, but the text had been garbled at the printers and the supplement was included at Stein's insistence to present the work in its proper form. In a note preceding the text, Elliot Paul made the following observations:
"An. Elucidation" is particularly valuable to followers and admirers of Miss Stein's work since in it, by means of a series of examples, she makes clear in a less obvious but much more effective way what was later embodied in "Composition as Explanation", first delivered as a lecture at Oxford and later printed in the Hogarth Essays. To explain in even a semblance of the usual way, a technique and artistic conception transcending the kind of writing which consists in a long line of bits of information placed end to end, is indeed difficult. This difficulty is apparent in "Composition as Explanation." It disappears in "An Elucidation" because Miss Stein hits upon the happy idea of explaining herself in her own terms.144
In his note, Paul makes a number of assumptions, not all of which are correct. To begin with, there is 68.
no relation at all between the intentions of Gertrude Stein in "An Elucidation" and in "Composition as Explanation." "Composition as Explanation" is concerned with the relation of time to creation, and in particular with the relation of the creator to his time and his contemporaries. It is written in the "exegetical" style of the American lectures, and proceeds to make its points by fairly orthodox expository steps, "An Elucidation" is Gertrude Stein's first attempt at "exemplary" writing, and is relatively simple when compared to other pieces such as "Regular Regularly in Narrative," which had already been written by the time transition printed "An Elucidation". "An Elucidation" is really a miniature sampler of various grammatical, syntactical, and rhetorical devices which Gertrude Stein would use to more direct effect in her later works. It is an anthology of possibilities, but it is not, despite its title, an elucidation of anything in particular. It "elucidates" only insofar as it accurately exemplifies kinds of writing. Because it is directed to no expository end, the reader is creating unnecessary problems for himself if he does more than view it as examples of style. Although he is wrong in seeing a relationship between these two works, Paul is probably right in his opinion that "An Elucidation" 69,
represents a more effective manner of presentation for Stein's difficult theoretical writing than is offered by simple expository prose. While "Composition as Explanation," like Lectures In America, presents striking ideas in a charming and generally lucid style, it does not equal the element of surprise and excitement which greets a resourceful reader faced with so apparently obscure "An Elucidation" as this.
Paul's other major assumption, that works such as "An Elucidation" transcend "the kind of writing which consists in a long line of bits of information placed end to end," is substantially correct. The exegetical writings present sequential expository arguments, and in fact often depend on a chronology which is easily referred to at any point,* in Lectures In America, for instance, "What Is English Literature" uses the established literary periods as a set of divisions, "The Gradual Making of The Making of Americans" follows a series of stages in Gertrude Stein's evolution as a writer, and "Poetry and Grammar" divides itself by references to lists of parts of speech, points of punctuation, and so on. These are orthodox and useful forms of presentation, but the exemplary writings "transcend" this in that they simply do not require it. Gertrude Stein intended to 70. present her difficult theories in their own forms, and they are presentations rather than developed pieces of explanation or even example. They are exemplars of thought about language and its structures, and the particular elements of language to be exemplified are announced in the title ("Sentences and Paragraphs") or are allowed to manifest themselves as the work is presented (2'Forensics"). The process is basically the same as that used in music, in which the title "Symphony in C Major," for example, simply announces an essential fact about the nature of the sounds and forms which will be heard; it is not a symphony about the key of C major, but a C major symphony. This fact about the nature of these works is embodied with delight• ful whimsy in such titles as "Arthur a Grammar" and "Finally George a Vocabulary of Thinking"; why, after all, should a grammar or a vocabulary not be named?
The exemplary works develop as they progress. It is impossible to read any of them without accumulating a sense of some aspect of language. This cumulative effect allows Stein to develop structures of climax, anti-climax, questions and answers, and to take advantage of the linearity of writing. There is no way to escape the linear nature of language, and more than once in the 71. exegetical writings she mused over the difficulty of having to write in a linear fashion what one knew in an instant. The writer contains and is aware of a complete concept before he begins to write, but he must plot the symbols which will convey that concept to his reader from point to point, through subject, verb and object, word, phrase and clause,* That is an inherent paradox in writing which has always been with writers, and Gertrude Stein never fully accepted it. She uses it perforce and avoids it as much as possible, but the repetitions which appear in many of her writings may be seen, on one level, as attempts to freeze the linearity of language and to force a single unit of thought to hold still and to be realized. To say that the exemplary writings "transcend" linear writing is only to say that they are not enslaved by it.
Gertrude Stein's entire output of theoretical writings;in both the exegetical and exemplary modes was created in less than twelve years, beginning with "An Elucidation" in 1923 and ending with "How Writing is Written" in 1935. In that time she explored every basic aspect of writing technique: the word, the phrase, the clause, the sentence and the paragraph; exposition, description and narration; sonality, rhythm, rhyme, 72. stanza form and imagery. The "myth of order" which 146 Bridgman claims is created in Lectures In America is shown to be a matter of fact, not myth, since the theoretical writings give ample proof of a steady and conscientious technical development. Toward the beginning of the series, after "An Elucidation," a pattern begins to emerge in which exemplary writings are frequently followed by purely creative works embodying the techniques which the theoretical piece has developed. Sections of "If I Told Him. A Completed Portrait of Picasso" and "As a Wife Has a Cow a Love Story" clearly spring from the paradigms of "An Elucidation," written earlier the same year. The relation among these three works is one of hypothesis followed by proofs. Compare a paragraph from the first section of "An Elucidation" with the closing paragraph of "As a Wife Has a Cow a Love Story":
You do see that halve rivers and harbours, halve rivers and harbours, you do see that halve rivers and harbours makeshalve rivers and harbours and you do see, you do see that you that you do not have rivers and harbours when you halve rivers and harbours, you do see that you can halve rivers and harbours. Have it as having having it as happening, happening to have it as having, having to have it as happening. Happening and have it as happening and having it happen as happening and having to have it happen as 73.
happening, and my wife has a cow as now, my wife having a cow as now, my wife having a cow as now and having a cow as now and having a cow and having a cow now, my wife has a cow and now. My wife has a cow.148
The most obvious difference between these two excerpts is the development toward a more sophisticated use of sonality in the latter example. The coincidental use of the verb "have" in both makes it easier to see that "An Elucidation" relies upon a very simple correlation of sound and sense in the form of a pun on "have" and "halve". The passage begins quite abstractly with an imperative verb phrase ("halve rivers and harbours") placed structurally as the object of the verb "see." This appears four times before the syntax releases the tension by placing the pronoun "you" at the head of the "punned" phrase "have rivers and harbours," and the original phrase is finally switched from the imperative to the indicative mood by the same device.
The passage from "As a Wife has a Cow a Love Story" has, first of all, moved completely away from direct statement, whereas "An Elucidation" retains the bases of regular syntax and deductive grammar. In "As a Wife Has a Cow a Love Story" we have an abstract composition of some complexity, with the two verbs "have" and "happen" used in both the indicative and imperative moods, in 74. participial and infinitive forms, and as auxiliary and main verbs set against one another. The result is a paradigm of some of their potentials as grammatical objects divorced from any but a structural context. Already "An Elucidation," which Carl van Vechten referred 149 to as "the most 'difficult* of her explanations" begins to look relatively simple.
Another clear example of the relationship between "An Elucidation" and a later work may be seen in a comparison of the section from "An Elucidation" entitled "Another explanation" with a passage from "If I Told Him. A Completed Portrait of Picasso."
I think I won' t I think I will I think I will I think I won't I think I won't I think I will I think I will I think I won't. I think I won't I think I will I think I will I think I won' t I think I will I think I won't I think I will I think I won't. I think I will I think I won't I think I won't I think I won * t I think I won't I think I will 75.
I think I won't Of course I think I will I think I won't I think I won't I think I will This is a good example if you do not abuse it. Where they like. Can follow where they like. I think this is a good example. I think I will. I am afraid I have been too careful. I think I will. Two examples and then an elucidation and a separation of one example from the other one. I think I will. 150 Then very certainly we need not repeat.
Exactly do they do. First exactly. Exactly do they do too. First Exactly. And first exactly. Exactly do they do. And first exactly and exactly. And do they do. At afirst..exactly and first exactly and do they do. The first exactly. And do they do. The first exactly. At first exactly. First as exactly. At first as exactly. Presently. As presently. As as presently. He he he he and he and he and and he and he and he and and as and as he and as he and he. He is and as he is, and as he is and he is, he is and as he and he and as he is and he and he and and he and he.1-*1
Again, the excerpt from "An Elucidation," which counterpoises a main clause with its negative in a rhythmical series of repetitions, sounds fairly simple 76.
in contrast to the manipulations of the abstract phrase "do they do" with the auxiliary adverbs "first," and "exactly," and "presently." In the second passage, the reiterations are less directly repetitive than those in "An Elucidation," and with the closing paragraph of the "Picasso" excerpt repetitions are varied and coloured by being given different syntactical or rhythmical emphases.
This excerpt from "An Elucidation," however, introduces a stylistic device which was to play an increasingly important part in Gertrude Stein's exemplary writing. Toward the close of the passage, we discover the writer commenting on the efficacy of her examples, or describing what she has just effected: "This is a good example if you do not abuse it"; "Two examples and then an elucidation and a separation of one example from the other one." This early example of the running commentaries which the exemplary writings intro• duced is, again, less sophisticated than the later examples would come to be. As we shall see, what is a stepping aside into "commentary" here, becomes in How To Write and Stanzas in Meditation, an adroit system of glossing which is itself an integral part of the fabric of the whole work. 77.
By the end of 1927 the exemplary works were becoming more sophisticated, and began to take on an independence and stylistic quality comparable to purely creative writing. Lucy Church Amiably was written late in 1927 and had been preceded in 1926 by An Acquaintance with Description, the first major exemplary work of depth and consistency. Early in 1927, the writing of "Patriarchal Poetry" had given Gertrude Stein a further impetus toward the creation of her "novel of romantic 152 beauty." In An Acquaintance With Description, Gertrude Stein had begun her real surrender to the noun, Where Tender Buttons had been a riot of nouns removed from 153 syntax, An Acquaintance With Description was an ordering of them within the sentence. Her later interest in geography as a reflection of the human mind first took the basic form of a concern with relative position, and this meant the use of prepositional placement within 154 the sentence. This concern with the placing of things, to some extent a matter of point of view, is seen in countless passages of An Acquaintance With Description. Here is an example from the beginning of the book: ...Why when the sun is here and there is it here. Acquainted with the sun to be acquainted to to be unacquainted and to be unacquainted and to be un• acquainted . and to be in the sun and to be acquainted to be acquainted with the sun. It can be there. 78.
Look down and see a blue curtain and a white hall. A horse asleep lying surrounded by cows. There is a great difference not only then but now.iDD
The "Advertisement" to Lucy Church Amiably evokes this within a syntax which has become more graceful than that of An Acquaintance With Description In the "Advertisement," the names given are characters' names, and these and the other nouns recall Gertrude Stein's earlier "addressing and caressing" of nouns in order to make poetry. That element of her writing has been assimilated too, and combines with the sense of placement anticipated in An Acquaintance With Description to form a pleasing synthesis:
Lucy Church Amiably. There is a church and it is in Lucey and it has a steeple and the steeple is a pagoda and there is no reason for it and it looks like something else. Beside this there is amiably and this comes from the paragraph. Select your song she said and it was done and then she said and it was done with a nod and then she bent her head in the direction of the falling water. Amiably. This altogether makes a return to romantic nature that is it makes a landscape look like an engraving in which there are some people, after all if they are to be seen there they feel as pretty as they look and this makes it have a river a gorge an inundation and a remarkable meadowed mass which is whatever they use not to feed but to bed cows. Lucy Church Amiably is a novel of romantic beauty and nature and of Lucy Church and John Mary and Simon Therese.156 79.
Meanwhile;, immediately after writing "Patriarchal Poetry" early in 1927, Gertrude Stein had written "Regular Regularly in Narrative," the first of the eight exemplary prose studies which together would form How To Write (1931). In 1928, three more were written: "Finally George, A Vocabulary of Thinking"; "Arthur a Grammar"; and "Sentences." "Saving the Sentence" followed in 1929, "Sentences and Paragraphs" and "A Grammarian" appeared in 1930, and 1931 produced "Forensics," the volumejs closing piece. "Forensics" struck off in a new direction which had emerged in 1930 through her experience with Before the Flowers of Friendship Faded Friendship Faded 8 this "translation" of Georges Hugnet's "Enfance" had interested Gertrude Stein in the poetic mode, and she followed it with several short and tentative poems of her own, including the "exemplary" poem, "Narrative." "Forensics" in some ways provides a further step in this poetic sequence of studies, although it is equally applicable to prose, However, the two works which followed it, the last of the exemplary writings, were totally occupied with poetry: "Winning His Way, A Narrative Poem of Poetry." and Stanzas in Meditation.
After Stanzas in Meditation, Gertrude Stein never felt the need to use the exemplary mode of itself again. 80.
(There are hints of it in The Geographical History of America, but they are infused in the whole structure of the piece to such an extent that their exemplary nature is decidedly secondary, and they do not add to what has already appeared.) After a brief respite from theoretical writing, during which the whodunit, B^lood on the Dining Room Floor, was written, she returned to the exegetical writings which she had abandoned in 1926 after "Composition as Explanation." The third section of Four in America, "Henry James," is a curious combination of the exemplary and the exegetical; it deals peripherally with Gertrude Stein's experience with Before the Flowers Of Friendship Faded Friendship Faded, but is only incidentally connected to the mainstream of the theoretical writings. This book was followed in 1934 by Lectures in America, and Narration, "What Are Masterpieces" and "How Writing is Written." With the exceptions of passages in Everybody's Auto• biography, these were Gertrude Stein's last attempts to explain herself. 1936 saw the publication of her major masterpiece, The Geographical History of America or the Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind, which was in large part made possible by the exemplary writings of the preceding twelve years.
It is important that the thorough logic of this 81. sequence of works be emphasized. Each of them leads to the next with an intensity and sureness based on utter conviction and a long-range sense of purpose. The main stream of thought from 1924 to 1930 concerns "writing," which to Gertrude Stein generally meant prose, but in "Natural Phenomena" and An Acquaintance With Description a concern with poetic matters begins to run beneath the surface. This is brought out by the Hugnet "translation" in 1930, a catalyst which splits her attention into two distinct parts, one concerned with poetry and the other with prose. By examining sections of How To Write and Stanzas in Meditation, we are able to see the new insights which Gertrude Stein had achieved through her exemplary writings, and to understand the distinctions between her poetry and her prose. 82.
(ii) Approaches to How To Write
The eight exemplary prose pieces which comprise How To Write were written separately, and there is no evidence to suggest that Gertrude Stein intended them to be grouped together as she was writing them. While the pfeeces were not intended to be read as a "sequence" as they have been referred to by more than one critic -- they did offer a natural selection of works to make up a book when, in 1931, Gertrude Stein and AliceToklas were preparing the third of their "Plain Editions" of Gertrude Stein's unpublished writings.The works are all concerned with either the nature of writing or the qualities of language, and they are all written in the. exemplary style. Their published order seems quite arbitrary, being neither chronological nor thematic, but the eight pieces quite readily sort themselves into three groups, each dealing with a large facet of language and writing.
The first of these is concerned with words, their generation and their ordering into vocabulary, grammar and syntax, and comprises "Finally George a Vocabulary of Thinking" and "Arthur a Grammar". The second group 83. deals with the larger compositional elements of the sentence and the paragraph, and includes three works: "Sentences," "Saving the Sentence," and "Sentences and Paragraphs." The last group considers modes of writing and aesthetic questions in three works: "A Grammarian" is concerned with the relation of the writer to his language, "Regular Regularly in Narrative" deals with narration, and "Forensics" explores exposition and argument while initiating some formal experiments which lead directly into the exemplary poems of 1932. "Finally George a Vocabulary of Thinking," the earlier of the two pieces in the first group, presents words in vocabulary, as lists or enumerations of words in arbitrary order, interspersed with the glosses which we have mentioned before. Later, in "Poetry and Grammar," Gertrude Stein would say that "vocabulary in itself and 158 by itself can be interesting and can make sense." The long, dense, bewildering groups of words and phrases in "Finally George a Vocabulary of Thinking" provide some of the most inscrutable pages Gertrude Stein ever produced, but we must acknowledge that, however arbitrary this work might seem, it is indeed a vocabulary, a listing of words and phrases uncommitted to purpose. If this work comes closest to the tendency which led some wag to dub Gertrude Stein "the Mama of Dada," that tendency is 84. dispelled by its closing lines, which form a gloss summarizing the nature of vocabulary and leading the reader to "Arthur a Grammar," composed immediately after "Finally George a Vocabulary of Thinking":
There is a very great difference between a vocabulary a dictionary and Arthur Arthur and Ernest becoming George. Danny becoming a very increased produce a prosody. That is what a vocabulary is. What is a vocabulary. Settling the North Pole little by alike and never not liking a distinct layer of their repeal. The way to have a grammar is to learn diagram. A belief in right away they may, they may be following me up. Up cup culpable custard culpable account occupied and their tell. I see through a part of their say so. The next is more vocabulary and some grammar or more grammar ormore grammar. Arthur or more grammar after Finally George a Vocabulary.15"
An analysis of this passage will serve to present something of the nature of "Finally George a Vocabulary of Thinking" while introducing the method of exemplar- with-gloss which forms the mode of the exemplary writings. The opening statement presents both direct gloss and the exemplary use of words. The clause "There is a very great difference between a vocabulary a dictionary" is quite straightforward, and performs two functions: it equates "vocabulary" with "dictionary" by implied oppos• ition, each being a list of words, the first ordered from within, the second arbitrarily from without; and it 85. anticipates a rhetorical structure which is only partially provided. The reader is prepared for another clause after "and" which will contrast the first. For example; the sentence might have read: "There is a very great difference between a vocabulary a dictionary and the use of words in sentences and paragraphs." That would be "plain English" at least. Instead, we are told that there "is a very great difference between a vocabulary a dictionary and Arthur Arthur and Ernest becoming George." Where we expect a cogent parallel phrase, we find four nouns, a conjunction, and a present participle. They are arranged, to be sure, in a structurally sound order: if we take the parts of speech as a blueprint, and sub• stitute other words we can construct a "sensible," though arbitrary, parallel clause:
noun noun conj. noun participle noun Arthur Arthur and Ernest becoming George grammar syntax and logic producing exposition
Now our sentence reads: "There is a very great difference between a vocabulary, a dictionary, and grammar, syntax and logic producing exposition," With some commas, this becomes a plausible statement, if not a world-shaking one. But in the context, we have lost an immense amount, * For one thing, the very fixing of meaning is antithetical 86. to Gertrude Stein's intention here. What she intended to demonstrate is the,very plasticity of language within its structures. Even if we whimsically treat "Arthur" as a "grammar" (stealing from the title of the next piece) re-spell Ernest as an adjective, and take "George" as being "a vocabulary," as the title of this piece allows, we are still faced with a most evasive and elliptical statement. Gertrude Stein's purpose only becomes clear when we consider that the confusing second half of the sentence is itself a list, a vocabulary, of nouns, of proper nouns, of names, while at the same time it falls into a grammatical structure. So, while retaining the "vocabularic" nature of this piece, Gertrude Stein is exemplifying the' nature of the next, which she announces later in the paragraph.
The next sentence reaffirms this intention by making an arbitrary list of words which falls into a structural framework: "Danny becoming a very increased produce a prosody." There are tricks here: the participle "increased" seems to beg a complementary noun to form a phrase, and the number of verbs -- if "produce" is a verb and not a noun -- is at odds with the singular subject," "Danny." But despite these rough edges, the sentence is structurally sound. It combines vocabulary 87. with syntax while compromising neither. There follows a comment: "That is what a vocabulary is." Then, in a deliberate wrenching of expositional logic, we find the question posed to which the preceding has provided the answer: "What is a vocabulary." The question is answered again, however, in a sentence which once more combines vocabulary with grammar: "Settling the North Pole little by alike and never not liking a distinct layer of their repeal." Here there are more rough edges, the roughest being that the "sentence" is actually a fragment, having no finite verb. Moreover, the phrase "little by alike" teases us into thinking "little by little," thus slapping at colloquial patterning. Beyond these, the "sentence" can again be made no more than a list of words, although it seems to be slightly closer to orthodox syntax than the two earlier examples, possibly because of its having drawn attention to the overall sentence structure by fragmenting it.
The second half of the passage is initiated by a clear statement: "They way to have a grammar is to learn diagram." Not "diagrams" or "a diagram", but "diagram": still, the usage is defensible, and the sentence makes a clear statement. It is followed by another of the "diagrammed vocabularies" (Gertrude 88.
Stein has given us a term for them now): "A belief in right away they may, they may be following me up." This is structurally more obscure than the earlier exemplars, but the comma aiding the structure, and the possibly inverted order of the first clause with its verb at the end, combine with the rhythm of the "sentence" to suggest an oratorical flourish. The vocabulary has thinned here and phrases are forming more readily than before, and its nature is obviously associated through sound xtfith the preceding "sentence": "up cup culpable custard culpable account occupied and their tell." The "dictionary" of the first sentence is recalled by the alliteration of the first part, and structurally this seems quite removed from sense. The next sentence has its structure intact if we allow the slang verbal noun "say so" to stand as the object of the verb. The passage closes with a statement of Gertrude Stein's intention in the piece which is to be written next: "The next is more vocabulary and some grammar or more grammar or more grammar. Arthur or more grammar after Finally George a Vocabulary." In "Arthur a Grammar," Gertrude Stein would reconsider word lists as she had presented them in "Finally George a Vocabulary," but they would be "grammatical" rather than "vocabularic," if at first only by virtue of the title under which they would appear. "Arthur a Grammar" progresses; it does become 89
"more grammar" than vocabulary, as if the seemingly aleatory successions of words were gradually sorting and arranging themselves and settling into grammatical structure. This may serve as a fair example of the, method of the exemplary writings. The problem facing the critic is obvious, for it seems that to comment on a work which is so intact within itself is to break its fabric entirely. However, How To Write and Stanzas in Meditation have a toughness and resilience which allows them, once examined, to spring back easily into their former shape.
The danger of sophistry is greatest during the process of examination itself. There are, as always, tempting extremes. It is easy, on one hand, to pass the works by with general comment, allowing the reader to forage for himself. This has amounted, particularly in the case of How To Write, to there being virtually no criticism at all; in the case of Stanzas in Meditation, it has led to Sutherland's rather florid generalizations in his introduction to the poern*^0 and to Norman Weinstein's misinterpretation of the work as a "phenomenology of mind" rather than an exemplification of the activity of poetry, a small but essential distinction. 90.
(Weinstein, particularly, tends toward a related error, that of constructing a mammoth critical machine to deal with the special problem of the poem, like a million dollar computer programmed to count apples.) The opposite extreme is just as tempting, easier to detect, and common to almost every Stein critic: proof texting and "translation." In the case of the exemplary writing, this takes the insidious form of the critic's gravitating to the glosses like a drowning man clutching at a straw -- and when faced with the perplexing sprawl of How To Write, the temptation to do so is very great. The glosses are objectively easier to understand than the material which surrounds them, and they may all too easily be used as signposts along the way. The critic most guilty of this is Bridgman, who builds his treatment of nearly every work of Gertrude Stein, exemplary or otherwise, on proof texts or free trans- lation into "normal" English. Writing about "Sentences," he says: "Gertrude Stein's conclusions have an aphoristic solidity," In relation to How To Write, this commits the two cardinal errors: it centres on the glosses, assigning them arbitrary meanings, and ignores the rest of the work: and it implies an expository, logical sequence (in its use of the word "conclusion,") which we shall seeuis completely eliminated from the 91. exemplary writings, which, when they are not forming abstract construction, have as their central function a striving toward simultaneity at the cost of the linearity which is ^a primary component of logical exposition.
Having dispensed of the two most obvious hazards, we must now find the proper method of analysis for these difficult works. The answer to this is simple enough, because there is no reason why we should not treat them in the same way as the difficult Cantos of Pound or the abstractions of Joyce in Finnegan's Wake, with one main distinction: whereas the words of Pound and Joyce rely on their past for understanding, the words of Gertrude Stein have no past and rely on their future. That is to say that while the Cantos and Finnegan's Wake and any number of other obscure writings may be understood by the discovery of allusion, etymology, symbolic value and so on in their words, phrases, and clauses, that is, by their pasts; these words of Stein's difficult works, as so many critics have pointed out without much conviction, are first of all stripped of any allusion, allowing Gertrude Stein to add definition, grammatical function and structural implications as she will. Furthermore, to rely on even 92. the most obvious sequential pattern is dangerous, as we saw when, in the above example, a question followed its answer, and a standard parallel sentence structure was dislodged at the last minute.
The method of analysis which will best serve for the exemplary writings is a structural one. After all, structure is the concern of all these works. It would be quite possible to analyze the complete texts of How To Write, Stanzas in Meditation and the other exemplary works in the way I have used with the paragraph from "Finally George a Vocabulary of Thinking," but the resultant work would be both gratuitous and enormously long. Once the principles at work are understood, the pieces begin to open slowly, like oysters in fresh water, and much of the point derived from these works is contingent upon the reader's effort in entering them. These exemplary writings of Gertrude Stein introduce the layman to the process and struggle of literary creation. They exemplify the building of linguistic and literary structures, and in order to examine them we need go no farther than the page on which they appear. 93.
(iii) "Arthur a Grammar"
A detailed analysis of even the shortest piece from How To Write would be impractical, but we can gain some understanding of the progress of these studies by first investigating the large designs which they encompass. If we begin by looking at the overall shape of the piece, then look more closely at two or three short passages from different parts of it, we will have gone far toward mapping the major contours of what might be seen as a "landscape of language." For this purpose, I will choose one example from each of the three groupings in the books "Arthur a Grammar" from the pieces concerned with words; "Sentences and Paragraphs" from the group concerned with compositional elements; and "Forensics" from the works on aesthetics and modes of writing.
"Arthur a Grammar" was written immediately after "Finally George a Vocabulary of Thinking," and shares its concern with the generation and ordering of words as vocabulary and grammar. The piece is more than sixty pages long, and is arranged in four numbered parts, the two central ones both being called "Part II." The first and last parts are each about twenty-five 94. pages long; the central two are twelve and two pages respectively.
Part I is very much in the style of "Finally George a Vocabulary of Thinking," with thick, dark blocks of words as abstracted as anything in the preceding work. It begins with an important gloss, 162 "Successions of words are so agreeable" and then immediately diverts to abstract constructions as exemplars of this, consisting either of lists or blocks of words seemingly chosen at random. Toward the end of the first part, the word "grammar" begins to appear more frequently, seeming to move the constructions into line with the order implied in the title. Lists of phrases, rather than just words, begin to appear. A vocabulary concerned with domestic life, food, and farming, interspersed with the increasing appear• ance of "grammar," seems to shape the language a little, narrowing the focus of the substantives. Toward the end of the section there is a burst of the earlier vocabularic writing before the domestic images strengthen and the section ends.
The two second parts have similar imagery but employ different treatments of it. The first of the two, 95. and the longer, uses the title,"Arthur a Grammar," as a key phrase to which it constantly returns. This sec• tion's principal stylistic characteristic is itemization. Long passages of short lines consisting of the word "grammar" followed by a short phrase or abstract group of words make up much of its length, and towards the end of it there is a brief passage of four word groups headed by the numerals 1 to 4. There are several small vocabularies which provide images here, one concerned with garments and sewing, another with small creatures and babies, and a third with flowers. The continual references to "grammar" suggest a strengthening of the ordering of words, and the passage ends with its only 1 63 direct gloss* "Grammar is in our power."
The second "Part II" is a very short section of phrases and occasional sentences which serves as a transition to the last part. Its most important func• tion is to introduce a new vocabulary which is of great importance in Part III* words and phrases having to do with landscape and perspective. It too concludes with a gloss which moves the deliberation of the piece forward significantly* "Why is grammar not dull. Be• cause it is a diagram."1^ 96.
Part III begins with a very basic "diagram'? indeed, in the form of an abecedarian formula which, though un• orthodox, initiates an elementary attitude toward language. "A for watches. B for below m for mountain d for does it k for alright." The implication that we have re• turned to first principles is confirmed by the relatively large number of "definitions" of grammar appearing in this last section. They form combinations of direct glosses and abstract constructions akin to the syntactically structured vocabulary lists in "Finally George a Vocabulary of Thinking"! "Grammar is and and did do day deign divide."* Until the last two or three pages of the piece, this part is full of landscape vocabulary mingled with statements using the word "grammar." The glosses here have also moved toward a more direct state, as for the first time they frequently begin "grammar is. . . ," and while the complement of the verb is far more often abstract than not, the movement toward overt definition is clear. The closing pages drop nearly all the specialized vocabularies developed through the earlier parts, and concentrate on maxims to do with grammar which are constructed from abstractions such as "usefulness," "secretiveness," and
•I fL"J "expectation," Unlike the preceding three sections, the last does not close with a gloss of any kind, but with an isolated phrase: "Visibly comforting."*^8 97.
We now have a rough sketch of the work. We know its divisions and their relative lengths. We know something of the patterns of vocabulary and syntax at work in each. We have noted a development from blocks of raw vocabulary in the first to abstracted definition in the last. We have seen various methods of forcing language to systematize itselfs aleatory word lists; simple lists; enumerative lists; and alphabetical lists. Now we can examine a brief passage from each of the four parts to see these patterns at work.
Maintained authorise colored postals make macadamised roads never the less in unifi• cation extraordinary believed relayed plainly coupled entirely antelope with our precaution pardonably raised intercourse administer heard negatively how outer below candid meant inter• position faintly have it opposite lain customary blooms conceive having Ellen inlain to be aroused that it was trained relation remainder consign preeminent caused causasus yes no How are Arthur Arthur's aim aimed cause pleas placate presently dominated having used close however may we stare to saw sell heaving a grass.169
This cannot even be analyzed as an abstract structural passage like the closing of "Finally George a Vocabulary of• Thinking"; it is plainly a block of words, a certain vocabulary of the moment of writing. The method by which Gertrude Stein arrived at this particular assortment of words, whether by a Tristan Tzara-inspired bag of cut-outs 98. or a system of free association, is really unimportant. There are two things which should be noticed. First, there is a sense of grammatical variety here; there are examples of every part of speech except the conjunction, which might have implied a connection between parts of the list which Stein did not wish to encourage. Second, note how, even on first reading, combinations of words form in our mindss "authorise colored postals"; "with our precaution pardon• ably raised"; "conceive having Ellen inlain to be aroused." A few minutes' experimentation will show how very difficult it is deliberately to construct a list of words unsusceptible to organization of this sort. As Gertrude Stein said in "Poetry and Grammar," "it is extraordinary how it is im• possible that a vocabulary does not make sense. The constructions of "Arthur a Grammar" have begun in the most basic way here. Without help from the writer, the words are left to cluster together as they can. This is elemental writing.
Toward the end of the first "Part II" we encounter this passages
Grammar. In a breath. 1. What is the doubt when after all. 2. Oblige a taken get well finally double parted in case remainder loan a boat about. 99.
3. With a withdraw finding two more mend matter meanwhile applied in opportunity tell and tell, 4. Four five six seven all good children go to heaven some are good and some are bad one two three four five six seven. Grammar. In seduced. Grammar. Remain. Grammar. Out and about. Grammar. He will have had doubt. Grammar. Enemies deter partners from leaning advisably to in relation then remarkably lately north with tableing in fern with aground theirs in redistribution does prefer lain to take.1'1
While certain important stylistic elements found in Part II do not appear in this passage (such as the voca• bularies of garments and flowers, and the repeated use of the title as a key phrase), it does represent the move toward a systematic itemization which is first explored in this part. There are two kinds of itemization used. The first, and more common, juxtaposes the word "grammar" with single words, dissociated groups of words, and phrases. There is even one perfectly orthodox clause: "He will have had doubt." The use of the word "grammar" to set off one item from another serves the dual purpose of signalling new "entries" and steadily abstracting the word "grammar" until we begin to lose our expectations about it, just as children repeat a word until it becomes nothing but a sound without meaning.
Interposed among these "grammar" items is the small enumerated list, the only one of its kind in the whole 100. work. It provides a passing mention of what is, after all, the most usual form of listing, but more than that, it offers a respite from the abstracting use of "grammar," and introduces an allusion to the vocabulary of babies and small creatures in the nursery rhyme of item 4. The use of allusion is one of the more notable omissions from many of the exemplary writings, for the very good reason that when words have been stripped of meaning to some degree, it is difficult to allude to anything but word patterns, as is the case here. While none of the words of the "baby" vocabulary are cited in the item, the nature of the rhyme recalls the presence of the vocabulary else• where, and may even draw the reader's attention to it for the first time. This is one of two uses of allusion in "Arthur a Grammar," the second occurring far more subtly in Part III.
Finally, the tendency of words to cluster together unavoidably even in the most arbitrary assortment is picked up here and allox^ed to develop into clear phrases ("In a breath"), complete clauses ("He will have had doubt"), verbal systems ("one two three four five six seven") and unfinished, but clearly prepared, syntactical or colloquial patterns ("What is doubt when after all"). 101.
Here is a section from the middle of the second Part
Hi
What is an answer. What is a grammar. Grammatical when the sun is sunday. Grammar is the breaking of forests in the coming of the extra sun and the existence principally of which it was. Grammar readily begins. Grammar is occupied allowances. Grammar made making of grain grain is put about and at a splendid eagle eglantine and a circle of preventing wishes. Imagine in grammar.1'2
The principal contribution of this part to the whole is the introduction of the landscape vocabulary which forms a very important part of the last section. While the use of this vocabulary is not nearly so pronounced here as it is in Part III, such a clause as "Grammar is the breaking of forests in the coming of the extra sun" evokes quite a clear landscape image. This appearance of deliberate imagery centred in a particular vocabulary a kind of allusion, enters here for the first time.
While all the exemplary works are tightly and intricately woven, Part III of "Arthur a Grammar" is so organically conceived that it is very difficult to excerpt any passage without sacrificing the effect of the whole section. The following segments are fairly representative: 102. Grammar makes no mistakes. Grammar uses indisposes in that way. There can be a name for riches. Grammar has a measure for poplars. They are for near and for far. Grammar also has a place for prizes. Grammar also makes one branch shake before another. So it does. Grammar does not need a balustrade to be broken so much so that separate parts of it are far apart and in that way are recognised and very pretty. It is partly there as earns. Very well. Grammar may not be counted. Make it changes. Tomorrow is grammar. Allow. Partly they wait for fruit which is grapes and peaches. If peaches are called peaches do they grow where they grow that is where grapes grow.
Grammar of intermittence. If a sound is made which grows louder and then stops how many times may it be repeated. Hills a grammar. A hill slopes and there is a long length when ' there is not a deception. Hills a grammar. Battles become hills. Hills a grammar. Hills give names to battles. Hills a grammar. Battles are named because there have been hills which have made a hill in a battle. Hills a grammar. A bay and hills hills are surrounded by their having their distance very near. Hills a grammar. What is the difference between a description and a grammar. Hills a grammar. Very nearly hills. There are hills which are very well known very well known hills. Poplars. Poplars may be they certainly will be cut down and sawn up. Poplars may be indeed they will be cut down and used as wood. Indeed, a grammar. Poplars indeed will be and may be indeed will be cut down and will be sawn up and indeed will 103.
be used as wood and may be used for wood. Indeed a grammar. Finally will be and indeed may be cut down and having grown tall poplars are very easily sawn into boards and used as wood.1'4
These two passages between them demonstrate the major stylistic traits of Part lilt landscape vocabulary and imagery, and glosses tending toward direct definition, with "grammar" as at least the structural subject of most of the sentences in which it appears. Especially noteworthy is the movement from the presentation of voca• bulary in various imposed systems such as lists and word clusters, to the working of that same vocabulary -- in this case, one of landscape -- into imagery and metaphors di• rectly related to the concept of grammar. "Grammar" now becomes a word among words. As;metaphor is a very sophisticated system of allusion, this can be seen as a progression, by continual building and re-structuring, from the simple allusion of the nursery rhyme motif in the second Part II. The most direct examples of metaphors for grammar arising from the fusion of landscape images and glosses appear in the passage concerned with poplars being "sawn dp and . . . used as wood." The statements about the transformation of a tree (which has a name, "poplar," which is a noun) into lumber (another noun, syno• nymous in this passage with "wood" and "boards"), is inter- 104. woven with the observation "Indeed a grammar" in a way which inescapably links the two. One noun becomes another noun; in another sense a name -- "poplar" -- becomes a tool -- "boards;" The process of metaphor is exemplified in their appearance together: rather than speak meta• phorically about grammar, Gertrude Stein grows both metaphor and grammar for us on the page, one indivisible from the other.
Another important facet of grammar is its linearity, which I have said Gertrude Stein tried to escape all her writing life. Here she faces it through this "landscaped metaphor," to assign a whimsical term to the process. The hills are presented in terms of their "long length" and their being "surrounded by their having their distance very near." Again, these statements are interspersed with a repeated phrase, "(h)ills a grammar." As Gertrude Stein says, "What is the difference between a description and a grammar." The process of transformation is accounted for too, in the statements about hills giving their names to battles. In the other passage I have quoted, a similar effect is realized in the sentence about the balustrade, the parts of which, when broken, "are far apart and in that way are recognised and very pretty." 105.
While these concepts appear in Part III for the first time, the techniques which give rise to them have been in use throughout the piece. Many of the sentences of Part III are not greatly different in structure from some of the abstract glosses or word groups of Part I» the difference between them lies in the systematization of vocabulary in the later structures which the earlier ones lacked.
"Arthur a Grammar," apart from its place in the sequence of exemplary writings, has a strong relation to several of the important creative works. Its origins can be traced back two years to An Acquaintance With Description , which amounted to a preliminary study for Lucy Church Amiably, but "Arthur a Grammar" redefines and infinitely improves many of the key concerns of An Acquaintance With Description, and adopts some of the findings of the novel. The use of proper names associated with inanimate objects as well as with people (embodied in Lucy Church, a name derived from a church with a curious steeple in the hamlet of Lucey) was deeply ingrained in Four Saints in Three Acts, written in 1927 a few months before Lucy Church Amiably. This becomes the property of two titles in How To Write, "Finally George a Vocabulary 106.
of Thinking" and "Arthur a Grammar", but this is of less importance than the whole concept of the relation between landscape and mind. I have already cited an example of this concern as far back as 1913, in "England," and we have seen that it is the basis of her argument in "What is English Literature." It reappears in Four in America, is discussed in Everybody's Autobiography, and even initiates the action of her 1 75 children's book, The World is Round. But its most important manifestation occurs in The Geo.graphical History of America, in which the thesis of landscape and mind forms the central hypothesis of the work that is in many ways Gertrude Stein's masterpiece. "Arthur a Grammar" is a crucial step in the movement toward The Geographical History of America, as it documents the growth of a systematic, lucid and useful language from a chaos of linguistic fragments, and uses the metaphor of landscape to present this process. 107.
(iv) "Sentences and Paragraphs"
"Sentences and Paragraphs" was the last written of the three pieces focusing on the sentence and the paragraph, and is prefaced by the famous epigram, "A Sentence is not emotional a paragraph is." It begins with single sentences and clauses presented without any apparent connection, except that many of them are accompanied by glosses which comment on their effectiveness. There follows a set of genitive phrases, linked by structure, and then a return to the method of the opening. The piece continues the pattern of sentences and clauses followed by glosses almost throughout, but after the first page, paragraphs begin to appear occasionally, increasing in length toward the end. I refer to them as "paragraphs" simply because they are constituted of sentences written as a group rather than individually but they are not markedly different from the free standing sentences elsewhere in the text. In fact, the pattern of sentence and gloss is adhered to even more strictly in the "paragraphs" than in the rest of the piece. The sense of the paragraph as opposed to the sentence seems at first to be one of arbitrary structure, but 108. this idea is gradually changed toward the end, with paragraphs which seem to develop an idea through successive sentences. If there is no consistent imagery in "Sentences and Paragraphs," as there was in "Arthur a Grammar," there is in the last few pages a preponderance of nouns to do with rhetoric ("question," 176 "answer," "meaning") and mental events ("premeditated meditation," "concerns," "analysis")1^ and this leads toward the two exemplary works which follow, "A Grammarian" and "Forensics."
Its physical characteristics are possibly more important to the point of "Sentences and Paragraphs" than are those of the other exemplary pieces. The paragraph is. to some extent a physical form, making a visual as well as a rhetorical impression on the reader. The visual impact of the few long paragraphs in the midst of the welter of disconnected sentences in these pages is strong. Even in the opening passage, the paragraph beginning "A repetition of sweetness..." draws the reader into a sense of security. After the initial epithets, one unconsciously "settles back" to take in the development of what has been introduced, only to find that there is no development of the expected kinds 109.
Dates of what they bought. They will be ready to have him. We think so. He looks like a young man grown old. That is a sentence that they could use. I was overcome with remorse. It was my fault that my wife did not have a cow. This sentence they cannot use. A repetition of prettiness makes it repeated. With them looking. A repetition of sweetness makes it not repeating but attractive and making soup and dreaming coincidences. The sentence will be saved. He raises his head and lifts it. A sentence is not whether it is beautiful. Beautiful is not thought without asking as if they are well able to be forgiving. George Maratier in America. The sexual life of Genia Berman. A book of George Hugnet. The choice of Eric Haulville. The wealth of Henri d'Ursal. The relief of Harry Horwood. The mention of Walter Winterberg. The renown of Bernard Fay. The pleasure of prophecy con• cerning Rene Crevel. Titles are made of sentences without interuption. Sucking is dangerous. The danger of sucking.1'"
The opening clause, "Dates of what they bought," seems by its separation from the rest of the text to be a subtitle, albeit a meaningless one. The line which follows presents a structural pattern which will rapidly become familiar as the work progresses, consisting of a sentence or clause followed either by a gloss, a restatement or reworking of the sentence, a comment on the sentence, or another sentence totally unrelated to the first. Here the sentence, ("They 110. will be ready to have him,") quite a commonplace affair, is followed by the anomalous comment, "We think so." Who "we" might be is a question which only serves to accentuate the abstraction of the language from ordinary meaning or context, so that the two sentences together exemplify the physical pattern to follow while establishing the lack of context which it is essential the reader realize before continuing. The physical structure is immediately reinforced by the 179 sentence, "He looks like a young man grown old, which is followed by the comment, "That is a sentence that they could use." This is followed by another such grouping, this time with two sentences followed by the negative comment, "This sentence they cannot use." The reader is naturally drawn to wonder why the first sentence should be more "useful" than the second two. The answer probably lies in the structure. Apart from the fact that "He looks like a young man grown old" is rather a pleasing sentence in itself, it is a single unit, while the second "sentence" which "they cannot use" is not one sentence, but two. It has a diffuseness which the first sentence lacks. Struc turally, the two sentences of the second passage could be fused into one by the interjection between them of a coordinating conjunction, thus: "I was overcome with 111.
remorse, as it was my fault that my wife did not have a cow." In their present state, they form a paragraph• like structure, with a logical sequences the first of them states a feeling which the second explains. Perhaps because they can exist as a sentence, a single unit, Stein's feeling is that they should, and that to present the emotion in two parts is to destroy the effect for which, in "Poetry and Grammar," she tells us she is striving, namely a syntactical unit which will combine the "unemotional balance of a sentence" and the 1 on "emotional balance of a paragraph" It is also worth noting that the character of the exemplary writings avoids sequential development wherever possible, although in the last pages of "Sentences and Paragraphs" and in "Forensics" this becomes more and more difficult to achieve. Finally, "He looks like a young man grown old" implies, as a'statement, that a great many events and a long period of time are contained in the aspect of the sentence's subject; the fullness of the sentence makes a paragraph on the subject unnecessary.
There is a gloss after this ("The repetition of prettiness makes it repeated.") and then what, structur• ally, we would expect to be a comment on the gloss ("With them looking.") This is the third use of a third 112. person plural pronoun, and as we read on we discover more and more such references. There seems to be a cast of "eminences grises" who anonymously provide material for the generation of exemplary sentences.
The sentences which make up the paragraph beginning "A repetition of sweetness" are almost completely unrelated. The repetition of certain words between them constitutes the only binding, as in the repetition of "sentence" in the second and fourth sentences, and the use of "beautiful" in the fourth and fifth. "The sentence will be saved" constitutes a gloss which links the first and third sentences: the first is more abstract than the sentences we have seen so far, seeming by comparison with them to be about to fly out of its structure entirely. "The sentence will be saved" seems to be a reaction to this weakness and precedes the third sentence,* which is straightforward enough and structurally sound. "He raises his head and lifts it." The second gloss ("A sentence is not whether it is beautiful.") provides the subject ("beautiful," an adjective used structurally as a noun) of the last sentence of the paragraph, which is as abstract as the first, though more soundly structured. 113.
After the uncertain form of that paragraph, careful structuring is most pronounced in the next passage, which consists of nine noun phrases, all but the first in the genetive case. They sound like titles; this is, of course, a list of nouns, harking back to "Arthur a Grammar." The structuring of these is interesting and even rather amusing, especially in the light of the failed paragraph which precedes them. As she lists the first six of them as detached phrases, Stein seems to be gathering momentum, and with the seventh she dives into a paragraph, using the last three phrases as its first three elements, and sealing them hastily with a glossed comments "Titles are made of sentences without inter• ruption." But this seems to have broken the momentum. For no particular reason, the injunction "Sucking is dangerous" is introduced, and the paragraph is only just "saved" structurally as it is rounded off with another genetive phrase, reminiscent of the earlier one, but built from this non sequitur: "The danger of sucking."
This sort of juggling of the sentence and the paragraph in various combinations and with varying success continues through "Sentences and Paragraphs." One typical experiment occurs toward the middle of 114. the piece, when the two elements are combined in an attempt to create a structure which uses both while allowing each to have its integrity. A single sentence is followed by a paragraph which glosses and comments on it before introducing new material.. The paragraph ends and the original sentence is repeated to form a cyclical structure.
Once when they were nearly ready they had ordered it to close. This is a perfect example and it is not because it is a finish it is not ended nor is it continued it is not fastened and they will not.:neglect. There you are they will not neglect and yet once again they have mustaches. Think well do they grow any taller after they have a beard. They do although all experience is to the contrary. Once when they were nearly ready they had ordered it to close.1°1
The connections between the two elements are clear enough. The first sentence of the paragraph forms a ^rloss on the sentence preceding it. Its second, third and fourth sentences refer to the subject, ("they") of the sentence, and so presumably add to that abstract development through the use of the grammatical reference of the pronoun. The repetition of the initial sentence closes the form. 115.
It is quite easy to see why this particular variant was discarded. The continued use of such a pattern would severely limit the content of writing by insisting on a progression whereby individual sentences would have constantly to generate paragraphs, or paragraphs generate sentences. . The matter which could be put into this mould would be as varied as the author's imagination allowed, but because of the structure the result would always be exposition of some kind, whether exemplary or exegetical. Narrative, description or explication could only appear as material for the filling out of this particular structure, and could not generate their own forms.
The same argument could of course be levelled at many of the structures Gertrude Stein tries in How To Write, but in this particular case we are shown the opposite extreme of the completely aleatory writing of "Finally George A Vocabulary Of Thinking" and sections of Part I of "Arthur a Grammar." Where, in "Finally George A Vocabulary Of Thinking," grammatical and syntactical structures are entirely abandoned for short periods, in this passage from "Sentences and Paragraphs" the language is cramped not only into grammatical correctness, but into correct syntax, into 116.
paragraph structure, and finally into a form designed to serve a very particular rhetorical function, namely exposition by example and comment. In both cases the result is unusable in any other circumstance, but in both cases Stein has demonstrated extremes which restrict themselves by their nature, and in both cases the nature of the extreme grows from the nature of language itself. In the former, complete variance with organization of any kind results in chaos which, if it has any inherent aesthetic or linguistic value at all, only serves as a potential for the application of structural experiment. In the latter, structural contrivance to a particular end has eliminated all but that particular possibility.
If I seem to be labouring this point, we should remember that the exemplary writings aim, on one level, to experiment with new structures in language and new potentials for words. If they are viewed this way, extremes such as the two I have discussed must be presented if the exemplary principle is to be maintained. We should note that the process of writing these works constituted a learning process for Gertrude Stein, and it is this which^aesthetically defines the exemplary from all her other writing. These are the only writings 117.
in which Stein was really feeling her way. It is true, as even a brief skimming of The Making of Americans-Will show, that she often commented on her progress within the text as she wrote, and offered signposts to the reader:
...this is a little description of something that happened once and it is very interesting. Perhaps now I will give just a little description of it, later I will give more description of it. I understand it and I can tell it, I will wait a little longer before I tell very much about it. Now there will be only a little description of it.18J
Passages such as these are found in all periods of her work, and clearly document her interest in the progress of the creative function. But when, in a work like The Making Of Americans, she comments on her progress or announces her intentions, she does so with a full knowledge not only of what those intentions are, but of how they will appear when they are written. In the exemplary writings, while she does announce her intentions in the titles themselves if nowhere else, she does not suggest that she has planned what her conclusions will be. Indeed the titles are best considered as analogous to key signatures in music or directions for lens settings in photography; they indicate 118.
the nature of the material to be presented, and suggest the focus required to deal with it most usefully. But in the exemplary writings she sets out to try something. She is not: so bold as in The Making of Americans, when she states for example, that "later (she) will give more description," for in How To Write she allows herself to be led from word to word, phrase to sentence to paragraph, until she knows that she has reached the end of her investigations, until, in a sense, a further title is required. If there is any sequence at all to these pieces, it is a sequence which must, by the nature of the works, be provided by hindsight. The trail from "Finally George a Vocabulary of Thinking" and "Arthur a Grammar" to "Saving the Sentence" and "Sentences and Paragraphs" can only be followed because Stein herself travelled it first.
"Sentences and Paragraphs" was the last of the second group of pieces in How To Write to be written. The paragraph and sentence debacle which has been discussed occurs on the fifth of its eleven pages. As the piece continues, the constraints which Gertrude Stein has imposed on her writing become increasingly crippling. In attempting to combine the sentence and the paragraph as forms regardless of content, she arrives 119.
at the point at which pure form must take some attitude, must be directed to some objective purpose, must adopt a mode.
If we look back at the first of these pieces to be written, "Regular Regularly in Narrative," we find that Gertrude Stein explored some superficial .elements of narration as a literary mode, mainly sequence and the listing of nouns. It was in this work that she laid down the bases of her theory that narrative in poetry is a calling upon sequences of nouns, regardless of their order: whatever the order, the poem was always "a 1 84 narrative of calling upon that name." However, it may have been the difficulty she encountered in exemplifying narrative structures that led her into the series of studies beginning with "Arthur a Grammar," in which she returned to the elements of language in order to work the problems of writing from the root. The difficulty she encountered in "Regular Regularly" was largely in distinguishing between sequential linguistic systems, such as counting and sonal patterns, and true narrative in the sense that it might be "the calling upon" a noun in which the noun would be the 185 centre of attention. A system is a formal structure distinct from context, while a mode is an application 120.
of systems to a particular aesthetic or intellectual purpose. Thus lists, logical structures, phrases, clauses, sentences, paragraphs, are all systems. They may all be used in creating a piece of writing in some mode, be it descriptive, expository, or narrative, but of themselves and without context or applied content, they cannot be greatly useful except as objects for perusal. While it was true that by citing them she was giving them a context of their own -•- a central quality of all the exemplary writings -- and while many of the exemplary writings are objectively pleasing to read and structurally very beautiful, they are means to an end. An Acquaintance With Description is pleasing to read as a structure, but Lucy Church Amiably takes the discoveries of An Acquaintance With Description and transforms them into a pastoral novel, however abstract. Where An Acquaintance With Description is static and imposing, Lucy Church Amiably is mutable and charming: while the effect of one is intellectual, that of the other is aesthetic and, more important, artistic. The same may be said of other pairs made of exemplary writings and their creative counterparts, such as those formed with "An Elucidation" which were discussed earlier.
Having reached this crucial stalemate midway in 121.
"Sentences and Paragraphs", Gertrude Stein begins in the remainder of the piece to move toward the third group in How To Write, concerned with modes and aesthetic questions, and comprising "A Grammarian" and "Forensics" with the earlier "Regular Regularly in Narrative." Previous mention was made of the appearance of nouns concerned with rhetoric and mental events, and these anticipate the concerns of the third group, particularly of "Forensics." Moreover, a technical element which has not appeared before makes a brief showing:
Now make a sentence all alone. They remember a walk. They remember a part of it. Which they took with them.l°°
Here the sentence is split by a period after the main clause, separating it from the subordinate clause "whixh they took with them." Having built up the sentence through individual words and phrases in the first group, and through clauses and paragraphs in the second, Stein is now fragmenting it and re-examining its parts. The form of the sentence with its constituent parts is now firmly established, making it susceptible to moulding and shaping without fear of its being damaged. Now it may be taken apart purely for the delight of our seeing its workings. 122.
Another appearance of this sentence fragmentation in "Sentences and Paragraphs" comes at a significant point -- at the entry of the nouns concerned with mental events. The suggestion is implicit in the use of these words that writing, as exemplified in this group of pieces, has arrived at the necessity for context and the adoption of modes. This implication is reinforced by evidence of freedom within the structure of the sentence which has been so painstakingly researched and learned.
Premeditated. That is meditated before meditation. Meditation. Means reserved the right to meditate. Concerns. This cannot be a word in a sentence. Because it is not of use in itself. Analysis is a womanly word. It means that they discover there are laws.187
As if to confirm the adoption of a context, these four lines are all definitions of a kind, and in the last there even seems to be an announcement of what Stein has achieved: the realization, through "analysis" that there are laws. In each of these lines there is a re- evocation of one of the techniques which has predominated through the earlier works. In the first, there is an ambiguity centering on the word "that": it may be a 123. demonstrative pronoun, in which case the second part of the line is a complete sentence; or it may be part of the coordinating phrase, "that is" (i.e. "that is to say"), making the second part a sentence fragment offering a simple definition of "premeditated." In the second line, an elusive statement of the disembodied nature of pure meditation is wittily implied by the absence of the subject in the second part and by the use of the period to break up the sentence structure while maintaining a familiar pattern of single word and gloss. The third line once more embodies the breaking of the sentence by a period, here between the main and subordinate clauses. In the fourth line, as if by contrast, we are given two perfectly straight- • forward sentences, and a statement which, in the light of what has been achieved here, is hard to treat with the detachment one has had formerly to< apply to glosses. The last few pages of "Sentences and Paragraphs" consist almost entirely on sentences concerned with sentences, appearing singly and in combination to form paragraphs and glosses. Although a year and several other exemplary experiments would precede it, the entry of words concerned with rhetoric ("question," "answer" and "meaning") provides further preparation for "Forensics," and the closing passage announces it in all but name. 124.
A sentence th@n can easily make a mistake. A sentence must be used. Who has had a sentence read for him. He will be pleased with what he has and has heard. This is an exceedingly pretty sentence which has been changed. I did not expect to be interested but I am. Now the whole question of questions and not answer is very interesting. The whole thing about all day is not at all when they were owned. What is a question. To thank for a question is no mistake. We change from Saturday to to-day. 125.
(v) "Forensics"
Between "Sentences and Paragraphs" and "Forensics" a year elapsed, during which time Stein continued exper• imenting with exemplary writings. In the three exemplary prose works which were written between them, she attempted, without marked success, to overcome the tendency toward modal writing and context which "Sentences and Paragraphs" had initiated. There is no feeling of desperation about this: Stein was interested in finding out the truth about her writing, and explored every possibility before advancing. "More Grammar for 189 a Sentence" continues the experiments with the fusion of the sentence and the paragraph, but uses small portraits and scraps of narrative as content, with the result that the piece is a riot of imagery and colour but succeeds even less than "Sentences and Paragraphs" in effecting what it attempts to do.
In "A Grammarian" she experiments with the problem of mode in a different way. She adopts an explicit attitude, that of a grammarian toward his language, to see whether the content can be obviated by its closeness 126.
to the manner in which it is presented, an attempt which recalls her remark in "Poetry and Grammar" about "refusing" nouns by "using" them. "A Grammarian" also experiments with the breaking of sentences by arbitrary periods which had been introduced in "Sentences and Paragraphs," often with considerable wi t."
190 Grammar. Fills me with delight. If a sentence is choosing. They make it in little pieces.1^1
The success of "A Grammarian" in remaining true to a purely exemplary method is even less pronounced than that of "More Grammar for a Sentence." While it is amusing, and instructive to a degree, the reader finds himself reading it more as an exegetical than an exemplary piece. It induces him to read with an eye to the content more than to the structure, whereas the reading of the exemplary works requires, and forces, a perfect balance of attention to both.
"Evidence"192 and "Title, Sub-Title"193 are both very short pieces, and each attempts to circumvent the same problem of content by other means. "Evidence" is 127.
divided into several individually titled short sections which seem unrelated and inconclusive: indeed, the last part, "Why Willows," was written several months after the rest and tacked on to the end. The lack of apparent progression is common to most of the exemplary writings, but in no section of "Evidence" does there seem to be a concentration on any one structural problem. "Title, Sub-Title," assuming titles to be representative of content, lists titles and glosses their effectiveness. This ploy is similar to that used in "A Grammarian," begging the question by employing as its content something which is itself the announcer of every kind of content. The result is, like "A Grammarian," amusing but unconvincing. Stein had discovered that context in prose was as unavoidable as were progression and sequence.
It was at this point that she wrote the "translation" of Hugnet * s Enfance which was to become Before the Flowers of Friendship-Faded! Friendship Faded. This was followed by a number of short poems which seemed to owe their inception more to the momentum the long poem had created than to any inner necessity of their own. They experiment with line form and sonality in short poetic descriptions of objects or people. However, this relief from her 128.
concentration on exemplary prose enabled her to adopt a perspective toward its problems which she had been unable to do while she was working on them, and the result was one of the best of all the exemplary works, "Forensics," which forms a bridge between the prose pieces and the exemplary poems which were to follow.
"Forensics" manages to come to grips with the problems encountered in "Sentences and Paragraphs" in several distinctive ways. Its title, in the first place, differs from all the others in How To Write because it does not consist of a grammatical or structural label, but a rhetorical one, and as the reader begins the work he sees that he is expected to draw inferences from the title. Although it is given in its noun form, meaning the argument of "one side or 195 the other of a given question." Stein clearly has taken into account its adjectival form as well, for the trying of questions and the atmosphere of the witness-box is strongly implied in many places. Exactness of expression is mentioned many times, and the piece abounds with definitions of the word "forensics" which summarize discoveries which have taken place inferentially in the text. 129.
Now what is forensics. Forensics is eloquence and reduction.196 Forensics is a taught paragraph.197 What is forensics forensics is an argument to be fought.198
What are forensics. Forensics are elaborated argument.199
The most basic format of all the other pieces in How To Write takes one of two forms, each centering on the use of example: the first of these has an example, or an exemplary unit, followed by a gloss commenting upon it; the second is merely an extension of the first, and consists of an exemplary statement or gloss followed by an example or a parallel unit, followed by a gloss. In both cases, each unit of the structure can stand by itself, and no expectation is created by any one unit. Their relationship is initiated principally by their appearing next to one another. There are many examples of exemplary statements standing without glosses, and often glosses appear as statements without being linked directly to any passage of the text. But in the use of question and answer, which is a predominant form in "Forensics," there is a necessary relation between the two parts of the structure. A question demands an answer -- even a rhetorical question in a sense answers itself -- and the reader infers an 130.
answer when he sees a question posed. The individual units of the text are therefore no longer sovereign, but linked by structural dependance to one another. Furthermore, the form of question and answer embodies a sequence, as the answer must follow the question if each is to retain its nature.
While there are elements in "Forensics" which are unavoidably sequential, and so linear, it remains firmly in the style of the other pieces in How To Write in its absence of expository progression. By the end of the piece, the reader has gathered what is there to be seen, but the material has not been presented in a particular order. Passages of the writing create effects which contribute to the whole work, and there is an accumulation of techniques toward the end, as they recur and are recognized, but Stein has not imposed a predetermined structure on the writing here any more than in "Arthur a Grammar." Her realizations are documented as she writes, and the reader shares them.
The one technique which is advanced here is the use of the period begun in "Sentences and Paragraphs," In "Forensics" it is developed and explored, and at times almost succeeds in creating the fusion between the 131. sentence and the paragraph which Stein had spoken of in "Poetry and Grammar." The style appears twice at some length, most markedly at the end.
A detachment of troops. Who can. Be careful. Of a. Detachment. Of troops. And if they are. What is it. That they leave there. As they leave alike. It. Alike. As a bother. To them. This can show. That they Must. Accept. A denial. They have authority. For all. That they want. As their. Treasure. And. Do they. Hope. To show. Something.. For it. Without. An appointment. Just when they went. Usefully. In their. Destruction. In. Enjoyment. Such forensics can lately take shape. Just plan their use. Then carry it out in principle. Find it a favourable moment. To advance. Their interests. Moreover. Just at once. Which is. By their account. That they will have it as a blemish. In theirs. In unison. An advantage to forsake. Which they will. As they may glean. More facts. For which. By their ordinary values. They will be practically. As far apart. Forensics may be athirst for gold. It may with them battle and die. It can as much bequeath and condole. For them. To merit. That they. Should console. Them.201
Rather in the way that faces and objects are concealed in the design of a child's maze, the sentences iri these paragraphs are hidden by the liberal strewing of periods throughout them. More than that, the clauses and phrases are often broken midway rather than allowed to maintain their own forms. (."Of'-a. 132.
Detachment.") As a result of this, the sentences are fused in the paragraph by being unrecognizable as clear entities within it; they are in the paragraph, but their outlines are so indistinct that one must take the paragraph with all its sentences, or the sentences with the paragraph by default.
The most important result of this use of periods is the effect it has on the-motion of prose. By stopping the reader visually at places where the syntax tells his ear he should go on, Stein focuses attention on this progressive quality in prose, discovering that even so final a signal as a period will neither stop nor appreciably slow the momentum of sense. This was the final proof in the exemplary prose writings of the one most essential quality of prose: forward movement.
In How To Write, she had explored every aspect of the making of prose, from the grammatical natures of words, through the structuring of phrases and clauses, to the qualities of the sentence and the paragraph. She had attempted to use language abstractly to exemplify form without depending on objective contexts, and discovered that such writing presented only limited possibilities. By then allowing carefully selected 133. contexts to inform the exemplary style she had developed, she discovered that the "excitingness of pure being" withdrew from the form, that the unalloyed structure immediately took on the context and fused with it. Language demanded meaning.
Furthermore, the linearity of language was brought forcibly home in many ways. Only in "Arthur a Grammar" and "Finally George a Vocabulary of Thinking," had she succeeded in making language static, with deliberately unpatterned masses of words, and that at the expense of every other quality it possessed. Even in those works, the realization which grew from her discovery led her to try further arrangements of words, and this was itself a process of movement, The use of repetition, present in so much of her writing, momentarily stopped progression in a superficial way, but as it created a pattern which was realized cumulatively as the repetitions were read, it, too, moved.
The exemplary studies of sentences and paragraphs which formed the second of the three groups in How To Write had already capitulated in this matter to some extent: a sentence and a paragraph, unless merely viewed as shapes on a page, must be read from beginning 134.
to end, another form of forward movement. Her attempt to discover a form which would successfully combine what she called "the emotional balance" of a sentence with that of a paragraph ended in a cyclical form which allowed the two to function within it only at the cost of constant reference to one another. While this would allow the author any content he desired, and while it would stop the outer motion of at least that structure, it would be useless except as a rather plain abstract form, because anything put into it would inevitably settle into a pattern of reciprocating references which would only be useful in expository writing. This led her to the realization that, if writing was to retain its variety, it must adopt modality, must become narrative, or descriptive, or expository. This, in turn, meant that it must have content, and content meant that it must have motion. Gertrude Stein's final attempt, in "A Grammarian" and "Forensics," to stop the flow of language by deliberately breaking its momentum at unnatural places in the .text was her last experiment with developing a non-linear style of writing. It is wrong to suppose that these experiments, which warred against theAmost basic qualities of language and writing, sprang from' aesthetic anarchy or nihilism. Gertrude Stein loved language and 135.
loved writing, and all her experiments were directed toward the end of improving existing forms, or providing supplemental ones. She said in "Poetry and Grammar" that she had attempted to find a form which combined the balance of the sentence and the paragraph as early as The Making of Americans, and even felt she had succeeded at that time, but that she had decided to abandon the experiment on the grounds that it "was not leading to anything because after all you should not lose two things in order to have one thing because 20' in doing so you make writing just that much less varied."
Her apparent decision to take the problem up again twenty years later in How To Write was really a different matter. In The Making of Americans she had been attempting this experiment within the body of a novel, and felt a responsibility to the context which did not altogether free her to try out structural theories. How To Write, by contrast, was intended to be a series of experiments, with no responsibility to anything but the principles of investigation. She was not, after all, obliged to use the results of these studies, even if they worked.
In the end, the one quality of writing in How To Write which she had not been able to dislodge was its 136. linearity. Even in "Forensics," the one technique which jarred its progress more strongly than any other finally only served to accentuate what it disturbed. It was at this point that Gertrude Stein saw a possibility which had not presented itself before. The essential quality of prose writing, the one quality she had been unable to escape as she had explored it in How To Write, was that it had to move. If prose did differ in a basic way from poetry, it was logical that the difference lay in that direction. As the essential nature of prose was movement, it followed that the essential nature of poetry was stillness. Perhaps the development of a static structure within the confines of language could be realized in poetry. 137.
PART THREE THE EXEMPLARY POEMS
(i) "Winning His Way"
The word which Gertrude Stein used in reference to herself was "writer," rather than "novelist," "poet," or "playwright." She felt that, as an artist with language, she could control any genre she chose, and she wrote plays, poems, novels, essays, lectures, portraits and anything else her imagination demanded. Rather than consider herself a specialist in any one field of literature, shaping her conceptions to the exigencies of a particular genre, she chose to let her ideas assume the form they must take, to follow a course in which they shaped themselves to the mould which would best contain them. This belief in the integrity of ideas resulted in her works being truly "organic" -- to use a much overworked word quite correctly.
Stein's concern with the idea per se as the matter of writing, a process which we saw in How To Write, has often resulted in a false impression about the nature of her work. It is not, as Weinsteiri has said in reference to Stanzas in Meditation, a "phenomenology of 138.
mind,'"1^ because it was not epistemology which interested Stein, but temporal spatial relationships. When she said in "Poetry and Grammar," that she liked 204 prepositions "the best of all," she was far from being whimsical. Prepositions designate the spatial, temporal and mental relationships between things, and throughout her writing this had concerned Gertrude Stein deeply. In Four Saints in Three Acts she had made the saints form the landscape of the play; in Tender Buttons she had written through nouns to arrive at their true nature. This interest carried over into the exemplary writings. In "Arthur a Grammar" she had created a landscape which was grammatical, a grammar which arrayed itself around the contours of thought. Her attempts to dispense with the linear quality of prose in the second group of writings in How To Write was also, in its way, an attention to a prepositional relationship* in progressing forward, whether by logic or rhetorical sequence, prose constantly realigned itself with its past, just as a conclusion is appreciated in relation to the propositions which have preceded it, and the answer to a question is the answer to a question.
Stein's two successful attempts to make prose static were both encumbered by other problems. In "Finally 139.
George a Vocabulary of Thinking" she had managed to freeze the motion of language by robbing it of every characteristic which gave it value, presenting blocks of undigested and indigestible verbiage. Even then, the words began to arrange themselves structurally in spite of their random quality, and just by their appearing together, formed a vocabulary of that moment. In "Forensics," the technique of randomly placed periods did stop the flow of the sentences momentarily, but the forward impetus remained.
Her realization that this forward motion was an essential quality of prose led Gertrude Stein at once to experiment with a long poem, "Winning His Way. A Narrative Poem of Poetry." There was a certain bravado in this. By referring to the poem as a narrative, Stein weighted the scales against herself, as narrative is acknowledged to be a sequential mode of writing. But, as she was to explain .three years later in "Narration #2," it was not necessary that narrative move forward, only that it be a sequence of calling upon nouns, and the elements of a narrative, being events, were nouns. If the movement forward which the title suggested -- both in the word "narrative" and in the implications of "winning his way," gaining ground 140.
-- were modified by the imposition of some outside influence, some arbitrary form, perhaps the linear momentum of the "narrative" could be modified, or dissipated, to such an extent that the reader would abandon the attempt to find the sequence he expected and read for the isolated moment, for the "nouns" themselves.
All this was very problematic, and the poem did not succeed in stopping this flow. The techniques Stein used were basic and incompletely applied. She borrowed the period technique of "Forensics" and constructed her poem in lines which were not markedly different from those of "Arthur a Grammar" or "Finally George a Vocabulary of Thinking," thus harking back to the earliest group of works in How To Write which dealt with the isolated word. Line length was inconsistent, and there was no metrical or sonal pattern which recurred with any frequency; had there been, expectancy on the reader's part would have led to the poem's having a momentum imposed upon it.
The subject matter of the poem places it quite clearly in the exemplary writings. There are abundant references to the title and to the process of the 141. writing, implying a return to the beginning of the poem.
Winning his way. A poem. A long narrative poem. Of poetry. And winning. His way. The poetry. Of paper moving. Because. She was sleeping. Winning his way. A narrative poem. Of poetry. And friendships. And not. To be removed. As leaving. Winning his way. A narrative poem. Of poetry and of friendship. Winning his way. In. Coming. Why have they not made. A pansy perfume. Since pansies smell. So delicious. They are beautiful. And. Delicious. Pansy perfume would be delicious, A narrative poem entitled. Winning his way. A poem. Of poetry. And friendship, A narrative. Should be. A poem. Telling. Of poetry. And friendship. And it should have the name. Of. Winning his way. 205 This is such a narrative poem.
There is a limited charm in this style, although it does not achieve what it set out to do. As was the case in "Forensics," the poem is crippled at once by an inconsistency of logic« if the periods are to be arbitrar• ily placed, they must be placed in sentences, or clauses, or phrases, so that the reader can realize that there is some movement which is being broken. To place periods throughout one of the blocks of words which appeared in "Finally George A Vocabulary of Thinking" would not 142. achieve the same effect at all, because as there is no sense of progressive syntax or rhetorical form in the words, there would be nothing to interrupt. As a result, in the process of recognizing the arbitrary placing of periods, the reader must note the forward motion of the sense. The poem requires forward motion in order to exercise its effects.
"Winning His Way" is further hampered by a more basic problem, that it fails to hold the interest of the reader. The reason for this is not hard to discover: where in the exemplary prose, the structures of the sentences and paragraphs, the relations between them and the play of grammatical reference all contribute to the effect of the piece, in a poem one is to concentrate on nouns, or on elements which are to be seen as objects, however composite they might be. "Arthur a Grammar" can provide exemplars for grammatical construction for sixty pages without becoming tedious, because the variety inherent in its subject matter, which is a system of relativistic materials, provides constant tension and flux regardless of progression. "Winning His Way," in attempting to follow the exemplary method of self-examination, and in further trying to establish a static nature which is essentially poetic, must rely 143. solely on nouns, and particularly on its own title and some few other events and objects and characters which are brought in. The result is tedious because the techniques used to effect it were brought over from prose to poetry without modification. The most important effect of "Winning His Way" was.its dullness, because it revealed the necessity of finding a technique which would be capable of sustaining interest over some length, and which would allow poetry to take on its proper quality of stillness, without having it roughly imposed. One of the most, important things' Gertrudei"Stein learned through her exemplary studies was the necessity of allowing the raw material of her art, the idea, to take its form through her agency, rather than under her rule. 144.
(ii) Stanzas in Meditation
In Stanzas in Meditation, Gertrude Stein allowed her poetry to take on its proper form. Until that time her sense of poetry was not formal, but rhetorical. When she wrote pieces such as "Sonnets that Please" and others designated as poems by their titles or by references within their texts, she was not writing sonnets or lyrics (although she might have been writing lyrically, a very different thing). Her insistence that these were poems was based on her long-held contention that poetry had to do with nouns. If a work seemed to be concerned in some way with exploring the nature of the noun, it was avowed to be; poetry. While her sense of prose was acute and tasteful from the earliest days of her career, her sense of poetry tended to the primitive. She must surely have read the great poetry -- certainly she had read Shakespeare, Pope and Chaucer -- but she had not really tried to emulate it. Her interest lay in prose writing, and 207 tended toward exposition.
I use the word "primitive" to describe Gertrude Stein's early sense of poetry advisedly, because her early work tended to be very simply and openly rhymed 145. and metred, like the "Valentine" segment of "A Valentine to Sherwood Anderson." We saw this style in Before The Flowers Of Friendship Faded Friendship Faded' in the short "dove" section Stein quoted in "Poetry and Grammar," and it remains right into Stanzas in Meditation, where its naivete in contrast to the elegance and cool lyricism of much of the rest of the poem can be doubly enjoyed.
Stanzas in Meditation is perfectly in accord with Stein's sense of poetry, because it is full of objects, often natural objects, and of the immediate present, the process of creation. The language is simple, although this does not make the poem immediately accessible: in fact, Stanzas in Meditation is at least as difficult of access as How To Write. Its concern with objects, events, and other substantives, however, allows Gertrude Stein to indulge her love of prepositions to a degree which is unsurpassed anywhere else in her work, as the poem is deeply concerned with the relationships between all the elements which make it up.
Stein had learned from "Winning His Way" that the form of a successful poem (which now meant a poem which 146. was static by nature) had to be a poetic one, and her directness led her to decide that the poem should be divided into "stanzas" of varying length. This had the double effect of announcing her poetic intention and providing a flexible but definite set of divisions which might be played against one another -- the first "objects" of the work. Within the stanzas, the materials of the poem would shape themselves into smaller units: lines. The metric of the line should be set; because Gertrude Stein's reading in poetry had always been concentrated on Shakespeare, the metre chosen to begin the poem was what Donald Sutherland 208 calls "a very plain iambic affair." As the poem progressed and Stein felt more sure of herself, the lines would begin to vary, becoming sometimes strictly metrical, sometimes very free, but always the line would be the noticable unit of the poem's construction.
Within the structure of the stanza, the lines were allowed considerable play. The stanzas range in length from one line to over a hundred, but in nearly every case each line constitutes a syntactical unit, and the relations between them tend to be rhetorical rather than poetic. For example a closed couplet will often be formed by two main clauses, 147.
I caught a bird which made a ball And they thought better of it.209 by a main clause with an appositive addition,
It is not only early that they make no mistake A nightingale and a robin.210 or by a main clause followed by a modifying phrase or clause,
They can be no occasion to leave roses On bushes.211
Sequences of lines often consist of a succession of parallel clauses, in this case with a rare example of enjambmenti
If she said very much or little or not at all If she said very much or not at all If she said a little very much or not at all 212 Who is winning why the answer of course is she,is.
Stein's purely poetic techniques are less varied, but effective and pleasurable. She relies chiefly on the use of perfect rhyme with a very conventional metre, or on direct repetition, resulting in identical rhyme:
I think very well of Susan but I do not know her name I think very well of Ellen but which is not the same 148.
I think very well of Paul I tell him not to do so I think very well of Francis Charles but do I do so
Mama loves you best because you are Spanish Mama loves you best because you are Spanish Spanish or which or a day.214
The stanzas as units are internally organized by their content, usually the exploration of an object or .a group of objects in various syntactical, rhetorical 215 and contextual relationships. Sometimes the organiz• ation takes the form of overt poetic structuring of a simple kind, often in a quatrain or couplet, and these "prosodic" stanzas --as opposed to the more "rhetorical" ones -- frequently provide the glosses which we have come to expect in Gertrude Stein's exemplary writing:
A stanza should be thought And if which can they do Very well for very well And very well for you.2l°
This little stanza appears very near the end of the work, yet it provides an important clue to the reading OI Stanzas in Meditation. Donald Sutherland said that only "the most intrepid reader should try to begin (the "Stanzas") at the beginning and read through consecutively. If read at random, as one may read the Old Testament or In Memoriam. (the "Stanzas") 149. yield more more readily." Reading it through from the beginning is only the most obvious way of reading Stanzas in Meditation, and it can indeed yield to browsing most productively. What Sutherland does not mention is that the reason for this is founded in Stein's concern with escaping the linearity of writing. How To Write consists of a group of works studying the nature of language, and each devotes itself to one aspect,of this study. Yet within each piece, no matter how abstracted the method, the accumulation of exper• iments leads the reader to a position where he knows more than when he began to read. This is linear, and the same thing occurs in Stanzas in Meditation, but there randomness .• is far more marked than in How To Write, if only because the form allows Stein to designate each stanza as a self-contained unit. In a way this makes the work less arduous to deal with, as a few stanzas will demonstrate the method and the matter of the poem, whereas How To Write demanded a fuller attention to successive steps, as both the result and the indicator of its essentially linear style. The stanzas as a whole deal with one subject -- the relational aspect of thought.
I have already suggested that Stein's love of 150. prepositions was an early indication of this fascination with what things have to do with each other. Her studies in clinical psychology at Radcliffe and Johns Hopkins and the studies of families and individuals in The Making of Americans were more direct results of it. In How To Write she had explored the relationships within language, the tendency of a vocabulary to make sense, the almost automatic structuring of words according to their functions, and the relationships between sentences and paragraphs. It was natural that a writer so concerned with the nature of language would single out for her special affection the part of speech which designates relations of any kind, spatial, temporal, or intellectual.
It is puzzling at first to see how very little overt use of metaphor or simile there is in any of Gertrude Stein's writing, because these are the rhetorical and poetic devices which have been devised to specify the relations between things, no matter how abstruse. Stanzas in Meditation is asffree of them as any other work, perhaps even more. This can be explained anal• ogously by recalling that, although she understood grammar very well, was acutely aware of it, could use it, and never claimed to find it inadequate to its 151.
purpose, she spent nearly ten years stripping it down and reassembling it, documenting its processes. For Gertrude Stein to accept grammar without knowing all the alternatives within it seemed too easy, and it is not hard to see that for her to accept simile and metaphor as they were was too easy as well. In Tender Buttons, her first poetry, she had already passed the rudimentary use of tenor and vehicle in metaphor by failing entirely to define the tenor of the metaphorical relationships she expressed in the poems. The structures which resulted were only abstract because the titles were inadequate to paraphrase their contents to the reader -- even the relationship between the title and the poem it prefaced was objectively undefined. That the title and the piece appeared together was enough, and was a relationship in itself. Most readers of Tender Buttons today read out of curiosity, to try to find out what Gertrude Stein is trying to tell them, which is another way of saying "to try to find out what is tender about what buttons," A preposition even serves to ask the question, "What is Tender Buttons about?"
Stanzas in Meditation is about "about-ness," if I may be forgiven such a word. The stanzas are in medit- 152. ation just as Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is in C minor: the ambience of the musical materials consists of the particular set of sonal relationships we. ; have agreed to call "the key of C minor." Similarly, the ambience of the verbal materials in Stanzas in Meditation is what we call "meditationj' the process of mental reflection. The relational nature of thought is exemplified by the very fact that we have a word to signify it. Relation is as fundamental to thought as grammar is to language. Each is the system which makes the other possible. Stanzas in Meditation, by exploring relation, goes past the structure of language to the structures which made language and which created the need for there to be language in the first place.
We have not yet really moved away from the title of Stanzas in Meditation. We began by discussing the use of the stanza as a form, a mould, for the content of the poem. We went on to say that prepositions function as the designators of the relational in language, as can be demonstrated by the phrase "stanzas in meditation," which says that the stanzas are immersed in some mental surround which we call "meditation." We then saw that "meditation" signifies the process of mental reflection, and now we may say that "reflection" 153. is impossible unless it is directed toward something, so that when we say that we are "reflecting on poetry," or "meditating on words," we are using a preposition to show the characteristic of the process, the perspect• ive of the thinker in relation to the thought.
An experienced reader of poetry is fundamentally sensitive to the words of the poem he is reading, and we are accustomed to noticing particular words or groups of words which are more frequently used than others in a given poem, Thus in "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," taking a cue from the title, we find our• selves particularly aware of words connected with the sea and seafaring. On a less obvious level, the reader of Wordsworth's The Prelude becomes aware of a recurring use of words to do with time and memory, and develops a sensitivity to the use of tense and sequence. Even more subtly, the title of Hopkins' "The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo" makes one acutely appreciative of the intricate use of rhyme and repetition as formal poetic renderings of the "echo" of the title. In Stanzas in Meditation, then, we may keep our ears open for words to do with thought or mental processes, or expect to find statements about the quality of mental reflection or intellectual recreation, but we are no 154. more rewarded in that than if we had spent our first reading of Tender Buttons looking for references to buttons and tenderness.
Stanzas in Meditation is a difficult work even for an experienced reader of Stein and Donald Sutherland's suggestion that they will "yield more more readily" if read at random is a good one. I have already quoted the little quatrain which states this almost directly. However, there are patterns to be seen, both in the form of the poem and in its language, and if the browser in the work becomes aware of any particular word more than another, that word is the relative pronoun "which." There is no particular reason why the word should be apparent except for the frequency of its use, as normally we do not notice words such as articles, conjunctions, and prepositions which are widely used. But "which" is noticeable, and appears far more than usual in this poem. (A simple statistic will make it plains of the one hundred sixty-four stanzas which make up the poem, a quick count will show that thirty-seven use the word "which" in their first two lines.) If we follow this line of research, we come on this stanzas
Which can be which if there This which I find I like 155.
Not if which if I like. This which if I like. I have felt this which I like. It is more then. I wish to say that I take pleasure in it
The method used here is quite like that of the exemplary prose works. The word "which" is considered from several viewpoints. It is used in a grammatically orthodox way in lines two and five, heading a pronominal phrase in apposition to the demonstrative pronoun "this" in line two, and appearing again as a relative pronoun in a main clause in line five. In the first line, however, it is structurally the object of perusal, demanding that the reader mentally set it between inverted commas in each of its two appearances, thus* ""Which" can be "which" if (it is) there," with "there" pointing to the second line where "which" is used grammatically, as if by demonstration. It can be construed as a demonstrative pronoun in line three (i.e. "which 'if I like") although the line does not connect syntactically with the rest of the "sentence" set off by the period at the end of the third line. Line four seems to constitute a summary of the concerns of the first three lines, although it is more a catalogue of them than a statement or a reappraisal. The fifth line, again using "which" grammatically, is a subjective 156.
comment by Stein professing her enjoyment of the knowledge she has acquired, and she adds that "it (i.e. "which") is more then," that the word "which" is more useful and enriched than she had realized. She "takes pleasure in it."
Paraphrase is odious, but it is important to see the vigour with which Stein approaches her investigation of this key word. As was the case with the quatrain suggesting the non-sequential nature of the stanzas, each of which "should be thought," this important stanza occurs in the last part of the poem. To the reader who has read through from the beginning, the importance of "which" as a key word in the poem might have become apparent, in which case this stanza would simply be an affirmation of what was already suspected; it is possible, however, that the realization provided here would require a re-reading of all that had gone before.
Within the purview of Stanzas in Meditation, "which" has an importance going beyond its purely grammatical nature. As a pronoun, it stands for a great variety of nouns in the course of the poem, and with its accentuated presence it serves in the process as a reminder of the nounal nature of poetry. It is as a 157. relative pronoun that it acquires its greatest importance, however, by relating the materials of the poem to one another. Its function as a "relator" of things should itself be considered as a statement of Stein's intentions. It is, of course, frequently associated with prepositions in the text, forming phrases such as "by which," "with which," and "in which," and is thus conjoined with the other primary grammatical instigators of the poem. In this process of relating two substantives, whether they are abstractions or concrete objects, there is a perspective which is taken for granted, and it is fundamental to Stein's conception of poetry. If two things are related to one another grammatically, rather than just placed together, they are relative to one another in some sort of position, whether spatial, temporal or intellectual. The attention is first drawn to one, then to the other in terms of that first one, so that while there may be movement from one to the other, the movement goes no further than the second object of the comparison of the relation, but remains within and informs the space separating the two. So, to say "the man and the dog" is to move from the man, to the dog, and thence to some further point which, if that is the only phrase available, is void. The citing 158. of the two objects may be seen as a unit by itself, but it does not contain movement within itself. But if we say, "the man near the dog," we have fixed the two in some relation. We move from the man to the dog, but our sense of where the dog is, namely "near" the man, limits the possibilities of our conception of the two together by narrowing the range to a small area. Once our attention in the course of the phrase lights upon the dog, our mind reassesses and affirms the relation, because we are aware of the dog as an adjunct of our consciousness of the man. That realization has brought our attention back to the man, which will in turn give us a further sense of the position of the dog, and so on. This is fundamental to our use of language and to our thinking about reality.
Consider the difference betx^een these two passages from Stanzas in Meditationt
Coming to think it only as they knew Known makes it plain I shall Think birds and ways and frogs and grass and now That they call meadows more I have seen what they knew.219 I could not be in doubt About. The beauty of San Remy, That is to say The hills small hills Beside or rather really all behind. Where the Roman arches stay ...220 159.
The third line of the first example is really nothing more than a list, and such relation as exists is merely the result of the items in the list's all being objects of "think." The grammatical perspective in which the words appear is so tenuous, indeed, that the adverb "now" at the line's end seems for a moment to be an item in the list. The movement of the line is progress• ive and unidirectional, as successive conjunctions without the restriction of a preposition simply gather momentum.
The second example is much closer to the state of the poem Stein is trying to achieve. In the first place, the passage begins with the establishment of a mental position, "not... in doubt," which is hardly conclusive but is at least precise within its broad boundaries. This internal state is linked preposition- ally to "the beauty of San Remy" by being placed "about" that beauty; the mind of the speaker can consider one thing from any number of attitudes surrounding that thing, and this generous perspective linked to a relatively small object is a nice counterpoise to the sweeping nature of not being "in doubt." There is then a syntactical relation between "the beauty of San Remy" 160.
and the following "hills" and "archesin the form of a connective clause, "that is to say." "The beauty of San Remy" then equals"the hills," and the hills are placed in two relations to the "Roman arches," first "beside," then "behind," when "beside" is considered to be inaccurate. This "corrected" relationship neatly balances the negative element of the first line and provides a tension which binds the lines together in more than a merely grammatical way. "The beauty of San Remy," the object of all this attention, itself has a relational structure, as the "beauty" is defined in terms of the thing which possesses it, "San Remy." The movement of the prepositional rela- . tionships throughout the few lines forms an intricate balance as precise as the workings of a watch.
We can readily see that while the first example, by enumerating several nouns, initiates a movement in one direction, the second achieves a complexity which is important to an understanding of the poem while being aesthetically pleasing as a poetic and grammatical pat• tern. Moreover, if Gertrude Stein's principal objective in Stanzas in Meditation is static composition, or at least a succession of self-contained units, the second exemplar binds itself together in a sound and consistent fashion which grows from the basic nature of language, 161.
rather than from such an imposed whim as the periods of "Winning His Way" had come to be.
There is a very strong temptation to offer a "per• sonal anthology" of excerpts from Stanzas in Meditation in lieu of further theorizing. In a way, the relational aspects of the poem lose in being isolated and analyzed because they are so common to the language of our everyday lifeJ prepositions are, after all, essential to the most mediocre demands of speech. Systems of relation such as I have discussed are quite naturally to be found in every stanza, almost in every line, of the poem, just because prepositions are nearly as hard to avoid as verbs. They are also remarkably acquisitive parts of speech, and reference to the vocabulary groups of "Finally George a Vocabulary of Thinking" will show that it is prepositions which first suggest phrases and word groups to the reader intent on winning through the mass of words.
Their point in Stanzas in Meditation is not simply that they are there, but that the attention focussed on them will be rewarded by a deepening understanding of a very fine poem. Stanzas in Meditation is in the tradition of Aiken's Preludes and Stevens' "Idea of Order at Key West," the American philosophical poem of order and decorum. 162.
It points in many ways toward The Geographical History of America, particularly in its attention to the relation of the mind to the setting in which it finds itself. It is not so simple as thought's being affected by environ• ment, although that plays a part};it is rather that the landscape and the mind create metaphorical relations with one another which move beyond the grammatical into the aesthetic. Just as in "Arthur a Grammar" Stein was not content to leave language to find its own structures simply because it seemed able to do so, in Stanzas in Meditation she is not content to allow the prepositions to overrun the poem. She very often creates deliberate ambiguities within otherwise clear passages in order.it almost seems, to watch language wriggle out of it.
In one direction there is the sun and moon In the other direction there are cumulous clouds and the sky In the other direction there is why They look at what they see. . . 221
The "problem" which Gertrude Stein has set her lines here is very simple: where is the third direction? Grammatical sense and the dictionary tell us that if we begin with one direction, then look in "the other," there are only two directions. The third must be accounted for as more than merely a reiterative function of the second direction. 163.
The lines have a cool poise to them which is most con• vincing, and the problem's solution -- that the third direction is the rationale of the mind, the central relator of everything that is perceived -- comes to us as fitting the diction and temper of the lines. As is always the case with Stein's exemplary works, once a new technique has been discovered it may be used any• where in the work. If we proceed in sequence from the beginning, this is the first hint of truly metaphorical structure in the poem, and occurs midway in Part One. In the third section we find these linesi
It is not only that I have not described A lake in trees only there are no trees Just not there where they do not like not having these Trees. . . ^22
This creates a scene by noting what it does not contain. There is no lake, as it has not been described, and con• sequently the lake is not among the trees which are, in any case, not there, a fact which causes regret among those who do not like their not being there. But where is "there"? This is the creation of a vacuum where there was the possibility of a prepositional relationship. There is almost the creation of a metaphorical relationship between this negative statement and its possible image: the lines are so completely negative that they allow 164. us to construct their positive counterpart, thus fabri• cating a "mirror image" of the stanza, a reflection.
These are only two of many such linguistic and poetic puzzles in Stanzas in Meditation, and only serve to draw attention once more to the poem's basic concern with the relational nature of thought. In Part Five there is a final structural innovation found nowhere else in the poem, a set of stanzas which, operating across the boundaries of the stanzas as a closed form, gloss Stein's whole concern with relation, again in terms of geographical images:
STANZA XXXVI What is strange is this. As I come up and down easily I have been looking down and looking up easily And I look down easily And I look up and. down not easily Because it is this which I know It is alike that is. I have seen it or before. STANZA XXXVII That feels fortunately alike. STANZA XXXVIII Which I wish to say is this There is no beginning to an end But there is a beginning and an end To beginning. Why yes of course. Any one can learn that north of course Is not only north but north as north Why were they worried. What I wish to say is this. Yes of course 165.
STANZA XXXIX What I wish to say is this of course It is the same of course Not yet of course But which they will not only yet Of course. This brings me back to this of course. It is the same of course it is the same Now even not the name But which is it when they gathered which A broad black butterfly is white with this. Which is which which of course Did which of course Why I wish to say in reason is this. When they begin I did begin and win Win which of course. It is easy to say easily. That this is the same in which I do not do not like the name Which wind of course. This which I say is this Which it is. It is a difference in which I send alike In which instance which. I wish to say this. That here now it is like Exactly like this. I know how exactly like this is. I cannot think how they can say this This is better than I know if I do That I if I say this. Now there is an interference in this. I interfere in I interfere in which this. They do not count alike. One two three.lli
These stanzas form a set in which Stein explores similarity as a non-prepositional phenomenon. In order to say that one thing is like another, we are provided in English with the phrase "similar to," where "to" is a preposition which does no more than act as an index 166. finger pointing from one noun to another. Although it retains its basic quality, it is not nearly so complete as the same word in the clause "I am looking to you," which states a far more direct movement which is allied to purpose or desire in the speaker. Moreover, "to" is quite abstract when contrasted with prepositions like "between" or "behind" which state an unequivocal physical relation.
Nevertheless, the process of similarity, of two or more things being alike -- if I may call that a pro• cess -- can be very concrete indeed, and can create a distinct relation between or among the nouns which make it up. It can even make "a broad black butterfly" seem white, or make its blackness inconsequential. The stanzas which make up this group are different from one another, because each is a stanza in a poem which has otherwise depended on each stanza's retaining its integrity. But in the process of the poem, Stein states that the making of even the most separate things is connected in that they begin ("There is a beginning and an end to beginning") and are alike in that. Things are alike in themselves and in having a relationship between them by virtue of their common existence, and Stein creates an exemplary phrase to embody this trenchantly, using the key word 167.
"which," so basic to the Stanzas: "Which is which which of course / Did which of course. . ." The whole nature of the poem is perhaps summed up in the line "It is a difference in which I send alike" -- which may be para• phrased as "The poem is a construction of separate stanzas ("a difference") in "which" (i.e. in the relationships of which)I can discuss the relations between things ("alike")." As she says in the first of this set of stanzas, "It is alike that is," and the integrity of any noun, any thing, may be defined in terms of its relation to itself: "Anyone can learn that north of course / Is not only north but north as north. . ."
There is a beguiling sense of affirmation in these stanzas, centred around the phrase "of course." It begins to appear in Stanza XXXVIII in connection with "north," and in Stanza XXXIX it becomes extremely noticeable, being added to every clause in the first six lines. Like the repeated phrases in many of Stein's works, it takes on mystery as it progresses, becoming a figure rather than a phrase. Frequently this technique signals that some new material is to be added to the writing, and in Stanza XXXIX this occurs very forcefully indeed, beginning with line 7: 168.
It is the same of course it is the same Now even not the name But which is it when they gathered which A broad black butterfly is white with this.
This represents the thematic climax of the poem, and unequivocally states Stein's belief that the essence of the thing itself could be achieved, as she was to say later, by writing it "as a thing in itself without at all necessarily using its name." In the context of Stanzas in Meditation, it goes beyond theoretical state• ment to become an aesthetic standard which, reflection will show, is present to varying degrees in many of Stein's writings.
Stanzas in Meditation was written during the nights of the late summer of 1932 in the country house which Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas leased in Bilignin. She was surrounded by the landscape and the "natural phenomena" which informed so many of her exemplary works, most of which had been written during other Bilignin summers. The poem she was writing was the last of a long series of writings in which she had explored, both for herself 224 and "strangers," the things which she made with language, and the ways in which she made them. After working through the nights on the Stanzas, she would sleep until noon, 169. and during the long summer afternoons she worked on another quite different piece of writing, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.225
Stanzas in Meditation would not be published until after her death, and How To Write and An Acquaintance With Description were already out of print. A year later The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas would be published, and Gertrude Stein would become a best-selling author. People would be relieved to discover that she had written something they could understand, and she would be asked to come to America to lecture. She would go, taking with her a sheaf of lectures also written in Bilignin during the following summer. She would explain herself and audiences would go away impressed and informed, but in none of the American lectures would she reach the real centres of her writing as she had in the exemplary works.
In America, Gertrude Stein said to a group of school- y ? 6 boys at Choate school that she would not be accepted for another thirty years, although to most authors the celebrity she achieved in the year following the publication of The Autobiography would have constituted undreamed-of acceptance. But in 1933 she had implied that by "acceptance" she meant attention to all her writings, including"everything 170. that (had) made the autobiography." The exemplary writings had surely helped to make it, and only through proper attention to them can Stein's full skill as a writer be appraised. 171.
CONCLUSION
Gertrude Stein's reputation has suffered a little from the comprehensibility of her first works. The Making of Americans and Three Lives are not Stein's best books by any means, they are only much easier to read than many of the later ones. Three Lives is a good, even a remarkably good, first book, but it is far from Gertrude Stein's best writing. As an attempt to formalize the dialect of the American negro, "Melanctha" is an adven• turous work which succeeded to a great degree in what it set out to do. Carl van Vechten speaks of having read it to a group of negro factory workers with great success, and this might well be true, but it is still stiff and badly conceived as a narrative, and far too long for its content. Stein herself seemed to realize this, as she rarely referred to the book, a fact which B. L. Reid finds surprising, as he is one of its strongest supporters, holding it up as an example of Stein's unrealized potential. The Making of Americans is a different problem. It, too, is possibly too long, although one should be diffident of suggesting sweeping corrections to a work which so clearly was preparing new ground. It is worth noting that Stein authorized an abridgement in 1934-(and much has been made of this by critics of the book's length) but it should be noted that the abridgement mainly consists 172. of the extraction of one of the sections of the book with very little cutting within that section; as the sections of The Making of Americans are quite self-contained anyway, the abridgement did not violate the structure of the book very much.
The theoretical writings with which this thesis has been concerned divide Gertrude Stein's career between the early writings such as The Making of Americans, Three Lives and Tender Buttons, and the late works beginning with The Geographical History of America and going to her death in 1946. From The Making of Americans on, one can see an increasing interest in formal experiment which she indulged within the structures of works which were essentially creative, that is, which were not intended to be exercises in experimental writing. While there is much fine work in this first period, notably Tender Buttons and A Long Gay Book.,, most of the works suffer from this relentless experimentation within the fabric of their content. The fusion of form with content is not really accomplished except in parts of the latter half of The Making of Americans and in Tender Buttons.
When S/tein first attempted to explain herself in "An Elucidation," she achieved a marked artistic success, 173. for all the piece's stiffness. She was at last allowing her form to shape itself to what she wanted to say, and while the resultant work was extraordinarily difficult to read and understand -- being as much a new artistic event as Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" -- it was a notable achievement. She must have realized this, for as we have seen, she plunged into nearly ten years' work in such exemplary forms, exploring the bases of the style which she knew instinctively was hers. It is possible that no other writer, of however distinctive a style, has ever created one as closely matching his personality as Stein's matches hers. It is cryptic, elegant, perspicacious, romantic, playful, salty, funny and wise.
The writing of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas in 1932, just as she was finishing her experiments in prose and poetry, initiated the final stage of her writing life and launched her in a career as a literary lion. While she enjoyed this very much, and although she retained her artistic integrity, most of her works after the American tour in 1934-35 were much easier to read and, with two exceptions, simpler in intention. The exceptions are The Geographical History of America and Mrs. Reynolds. Enough has been said earlier about The Geographical 174.
History of America to allow me to say only that it brought to a serene conclusion both her interest in the relational aspects of thought and her investigations of form. Mrs. Reynolds, written in 1940, is a "commonplace" novel of a woman in wartime: it is difficult, but no more so than Lucy Church Amiably, and it has much that is beautiful and considerable psychological depth.
In this last period we also find the four children's books, most of the journalistic writing for magazines and newspapers in America, and the autobiographical books Everybody's Autobiography, Wars I Have Seen and Paris France. The little book on Picasso and the G.I. novel Brewsie and Willie are also part of this period, as are the two fine dramatic works Yes is for a Very Young Man (also called In Savoy) and The Mother of Us All, which was her last work.
Much of the simplicity of this last period of Stein's career can be attributed to her exemplary and exegetical writings. What she learned about language enabled her to write simply, although that did not mean that the writing was always easy to read. It did mean, however, that the works were only as difficult as they needed to be, a perfect marriage of technique and intention. Her 175. trouble with and exploration of the differences in poetry and prose became, in her later life, transcended by the importance of seeing that what she said was in control of its form at all times. In The Geographical History of America she wrote what seems to me to be the summing up of what she had learned about writing for people, a characteristic which had come to replace her earlier sole concern with writing for itself alonet
Poetry and prose is not interesting. What is necessary now is not form but content. That is why in this epoch a woman does the literary thinking. 228 Kindly learn everything please. 176. FOOTNOTES
1. Gertrude Stein, Lectures in America (New York: Random House, 1935), p. 243. 2. Gertrude Stein. Stanzas in Meditation. Part V, Stanza xxix, in Stanzas in Meditation and other Poems (1929 - 1933) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1956), p. 116. 3. Gertrude Stein, "Saving the Sentence," in How To Write (Paris« Plain Edition, 1931), p. 11. 4. Gertrude Stein, "Why Are There Whites To Console. A History in Three Parts," in As Fine As Melanctha (1914 - 1930) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954), p. 198. 5. Ibid., "More Grammar for a Sentence," p. 361. 6. Gertrude Stein, Geography and Plays (Boston: The Four Seas Company, 1922), pp. 5 - 8. 7. Gertrude Stein, Four in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 19477, pp. v - xxvii. 8. Gertrude Stein, The Geographical History of America or the Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind.(New York: Random House, 193677 PP. 7-14. 9. Gertrude Stein, Narration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press^ 1935), pp. v - viii. 10. Stein, Geographical History, front flap of dust- wrapper . 11. Stein, Geographical History, p. 11. 12. Gertrude Stein, Alphabets and Birthdays (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), Introduction by Donald Gallup, p. xiv. 13. Gertrude Stein, Painted Lace and Other Pieces 1914- 1937 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955), Introduction by Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, p. xi. 177.
14. Gertrude Stein, Bee Time Vine and Other Pieces (1913 - 1927) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953), Preface by Virgil Thomson, p. vi. 15. Gertrude Stein, Mrs. Reynolds and Five Earlier Novelettes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952), Foreword by Lloyd Frankenberg, p. vii. 16. Allegra Stewart, Gertrude Stein and the Present (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967). 17. Rosalind S. Miller, Gertrude Stein: Form and Intelligibility (New York: The Exposition Press, 1949). 18. Norman Weinstein, Gertrude Stein and the Lit• erature of the Modern Consciousness (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1970). 19. Donald Sutherland, Gertrude Stein: A Biography of Her Work (New Haven: Yale University Press, 195TT7 20. Stewart, p. 66. 21. B. L. Reid, Art by Subtraction: A Dissenting Opinion of Gertrude Stein (Norman: University of Oklahoma press, 1958), p. ix. 22. Richard Bridgman, Gertrude Stein in Pieces (New York: Oxford University Press, 197077 23. Reid, p. vii. 24. Ibid., p. ix 25. Bridgman, p. 246 - 7. 26. Ibid., p. xiii. 27. Bridgman's discussion of Lectures in America occupies pages 243 to 256 of his book, and con• sists largely of synopsis. 28. Bridgman, p. 244. 29. Ibid., loc. cit. 178.
30. Gertrude Stein, How To Write (Paris: Plain Edition, 1931). 31. Gertrude Stein, An Acquaintance with Descrip• tion (London: The Seizin Press, 1929). 32. Gertrude Stein, An Elucidation, supplement to transition 1 (April, 1927). 33. Gertrude Stein, Descriptions of Literature, As Stable Pamphlet #2 (Englewood, New Jersey: George Piatt Lynes•and Adlai Harbeck, 1926). 34. Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons (New York: Claire Marie, 1914), p. 21. 35. New York World-Telegram. 5 October, 1934. Quoted in James R. Mellow, Charmed Circles Gertrude Stein and Company (New York: Prager Publishers, 1974), p. 377. Mellow cites this quote as being from the New York Herald Tribune, 5 October, 1934. However, Julian Sawyer, in his Gertrude Stein: A Bibliography (New York: Arrow Editions, 19407, under "Miscellanea, Reported Conversations," shows the interview of this date under the World-Telegram, with the headline, "Gertrude Stein, Champion Ob• scurantist at 60, is Coming Back to U.S. after 30 Years Abroad," (Sawyer, p. 152). The only Herald Tribune interview in 1934 was dated January 4, several months before Gertrude Stein had made the decision to come to the United States (Mellow, p. 373).
Not only was Stein interested in people who -panted to know about her work rather than about her, but she expected a great deal from her audiences. In a letter to W.G. Rogers she said: "The lectures are good . . . but they are for a pretty intelligent audience and though they are clear very clear they are not too easy." (Quoted in W.G. Rogers, When This You See Remember Me: Gertrude Stein in Person Hew York: Avon Books, 1973), p. 93,T"Thornton Wilder takes note of this high expectation in his introduction to Narration (p. vii): "(Stein's) ideas are presented to us in a highly abstract form. Miss Stein pays her listeners the^ high compliment of dispensing for the most part with that apparatus of illustrative 179.
simile and anecdote that is so often employed to recommend ideas. She assumes, that the at• tentive listener will bring, from a store of observation and reflection, the concrete il• lustration of her generalization." 36. See Mellow, pp. 402 - 404 for an account of the writing of these lectures and her experience with the selected group of students at the University of Chicago to whom they were deli• vered . 37. Lectures, p. 215. 38. Ibid., p. 210. 39. Ibid., p. 211. 40. Ibid., p. 209. 41. Ibid., p. 30 42. Ibid., loc. cit. 43. Ibid., p. 33. 44. Ibid., p. 43. 45. Ibid., p. 49. 46. On the day of her first lecture, Random House had published Portraits and Prayers. Apart from the publicity the lectures would afford this and the abridged Making of Americans, Stein could reasonably expect that her audience would be able to refer to the works she discussed in their own copies. Both lectures treat their subjects fully and entertainingly, illuminating and providing an expert introduction to The Making of Americans, and giving insight into the nature of modern literary portraiture and the meaning and value of repetition. Although neither lecture is in the least defensive, both neatly puncture the canards which had grown up about her repetitive style (resulting in such bizarre headlines in the New York papers as "GERTY GERTY STEIN STEIN IS BACK HOME HOME BACK") by simply making plain good sense. Despite the difficulties of her lectures, her audiences almost always left convinced that;she knew what she was doing. 180.
47. Gertrude Stein, Useful Knowledge (New York» Payson and Clarke, 1928), p. 174. 48. Lectures, p. 140.
49. Ibid., P. 42. 50. Ibid., P. 22. 51. Ibid., P. 30. 52. Ibid., P. 32. 53. Ibid., P. 31. 54. Ibid., P. 26. 55. Ibid., P. 42. 56. Ibid., P. 40. 57. Ibid., P- 43. 58. Ibid., P. 44. 59. Ibid., P. 46. 60. Ibid., P. 47. 61. Ibid., P- 235. 62. How To Write, p. 23. 63. Lectures, p. 209. 64. Gertrude Stein, Look at Me Now and Here I Ami Writings and Lectures 1911 - 1945, ed. Patricia Meyerowitz, with an Introduction by Elizabeth Sprigge (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971), p. 14. 65. Ibid., loc. cit. Quoted by Sprigge. Uncited. 66. Lectures, p. 211. Bridgman, in a footnote on page 244 of Gertrude Stein in Pieces in which he offers evidence that "Gertrude Stein had not markedly improved her knowledge of grammar" since her university days, singles out this apparent mistake of "effect" for "affect," also citing 181.
an earlier example of the same "error" on page 28 of the Lectures. It is not at all clear to me that Stein's use of "effect" was not deliberate. The difference may not be apparent when the lecture is read aloud, but when it is read silently an interesting ambiguity results from this usage. Far from making the line meaningless, it adds a resonance to it. At the very worst, it may seem to be a bad pun. In the earlier instance, in "What Is English Lit• erature," where "effect" occurs in the cul• minating sentence of a passage too long to quote here (but which the reader may examine for himself) the context makes "effect" far more plausible that "affect." Even if we accept the suggestion that Stein made this mistake through a slip of the pen or a perennial inability to remember which word was which, it is unlikely that such an apparent "error" would have slipped past Alice Toklas, who typed the lectures from Stein's manuscript, and the editors of Random House, who published it. There is ample evidence in letters to Stein from Bennett Cerf of Random House that he read her work very carefully; and Toklas, according to every biographer who deals with the subject of her secretarial duties, was careful to check \tfith Stein anything in the manuscripts of which she was unsure. In addition to all this, Stein mentions in a letter to W.G. Rogers that she has read the lectures to Bernard Fay and James Laughlin, and it seems likely that in the discussion of the ideas involved the distinction between the two verbs would have arisen.
67. Ibid., loc. cit. 68. Consider these lines from Tender Buttons, "Food" #38, "Dinner": Not a little fit, not a little fit sun sat in shed more mentally. Let us why, let us why weight, let us why winter chess, let us why why. 182.
Only a moon to soup her, only that in the sell never never be the cocups nice be, shatter it they lay. It is only necessary to take notice of the shifts in function of certain words in this passage to see what this process of ambiguity can achieve. I cite, only as obvious examples, the following: the use of "fit," first as a noun, then as an adjective, in the first sentence; the use of "why" masquerading as a verb, suddenly confronted at the end of the second sentence by its real - adverbial self in a moment of Punch and Judy humour; the use of "soup" as a verb, and the use of "sell" as a noun, in the third sentence. Tender Buttons is full of such verbal games, and while they are whimsical and delightful, it is not enough to dismiss them as mere games. This is formal experiment of. a very serious and basic kind. 69. Lectures, p. 212. 70. Ibid., loc. cit. 71. Ibid., p. 213. 72. Ibid., p. 212. 73. Ibid., p. 213. 74. Ibid., loc. cit. 75. Ibid., loc. cit. 76. Ibid., loc. cit. 77. Ibid., p. 214. 78. Ibid., pp. 214-5. 79. Ibid., p. 216. 80. Ibid., loc. cit. 81. Ibid., loc. cit. 82. Ibid., p. 217. 83. Ibid., loc. cit. 183.
84. Ibid., p. 219. 85. Ibid., loc. cit. 86. Ibid., p. 220. 87. Ibid., p. 221. 88. Ibid., p. 222. 89. Ibid., p. 223. 90. Ibid., loc. cit. 91. Ibid., 225. 92. Ibid., p. 223. 93. Ibid., p. 224. This concern that writing should not become "less varied" contradicts B. L. Reid's thesis that Stein's is an "art by subtraction," in which she consciously stripped away the art• icles of the craft until there was nothing left to work with, "At which point," he might have siad, "she worked with it anyway." He does not take account of this passage in "Poetry and Grammar," yet he claims to have been steeped in the lectures for longer than he could have wished. (Reid, 144) 94. How To Write, p. 25. 95. Ibid., p. 27. 96. Ibid.,, p. 90. 97.0 Lectures, p. 227. 98. Ibid., loc. cit. 99. Ibid., loc. cit. Stein is recalling in this in• junction her earlier piece, "An Instant Answer or A Hundred Prominent Men" (1922, Useful Knowledge, 144). Here she provided a passage for each of the hundred "subjects," numbering each one; under the forty-sixth "subject" she counts to one hundred by means of this non-sequential system of enumeration: "I tell their names because in this way I know that one and one and one and one and one ..." and so on. (Useful Knowledge. 150-151.) 184.
Stein's love of numbers is obvious to anyone who has spent any time with her work. Dozens of titles employ them, from "Two: Gertrude Stein and her Brother" and "One or Two. I've Finished" to "As Eighty Or Numbered from One to Eighty-One, A Disputation" and Four Saints in Three Acts. Counting games figure prominently in Four Saints and in many other of the plays, and in the children's books, particularly The Gertrude Stein First Reader and Three Plays. It is not only the names of numbers (which she said once she thought beautiful) but the pro• cess of counting which intrigued her. In Every• body 's Autobiography (New York: Random House, 1937)she says, "I always liked counting but I liked counting one two three four five six seven, or one little Indian two little Indians three little Indian boys counting more than ten is not interesting at least not to me because the numbers higher than ten unless they are fifty- five or something like that do not look inter• esting ..." (EA, 120). . 100. Lectures, p. 228. 101. Ibid., loc. cit. 102. Ibid., p. 229. 103. Ibid., p. 230. 104. She was fond of quoting William James on this point: "Complicate your life as much as you please, it has got to simplify." ("A Trans• atlantic Interview," A Primer for the Gradual Understanding of Gertrude Stein, ed. Robert Bartlett Haas (Tos Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1971), p. 34.) 105. Lectures, p. 231. 106. Gertrude Stein, "Sacred Emily," in Geography and Plays (Boston: The Four Seas Company, 1922), p. 187. 107. Lectures, p. 231. 108. Lectures, pp. 15-6. cf, Geographical History passim. 185.
109. Lectures, p. 18. 110. Ibid., pp. 49-50. 111. Lists are another strong interest of Gertrude Stein's. Many of her works, such as Alphabets and Birthdays and "A Birthday Book" (Alphabets, p. 127.) and the previously mentioned "An Instant Answer or a Hundred Prominent Men" are structured as lists. There is as well a play called "A List": (Gertrude Stein, Operas and Plays (Paris? Plain Edition, 1932), p. 89.), and lists figure promi• nently in works such as "A Valentine to Sherwood Anderson" (Useful Knowledge, p. 90) and Four Saints in Three Acts (New York: Random House, 1934$. 112. Geoffrey Chaucer, "General Prologue" to The Canterbury Tales, The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson, 2nd edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1957), 1. 113. Ibid., 7. 114. Ibid., 22. 115. Ibid., 72. 116. Ibid., 89-90. 117. Ibid., 92. 118. Ibid., 267-268. 119. Ibid., 340. 120. While she was lecturing to Thornton Wilder's students at the University of Chicago in 1935, one of them asked her about "Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose," and Wilder took down her answer in shorthand: Now listen. Can't you see that when the language was new -- as it was with Chaucer and Homer -- the poet could use the name of the thing and the thing was really there. He could say "0 moon," "0 sea," "0 love," and the moon and the sea and love were really there. And can't you see that after hundreds of years had gone by and thousands of poems had been written, he could call on those words and find that they were just wornout literary words. The excitingness of pure being had withdrawn from them,- they were 186.
just rather stale literary words. Now the poet has to work in the excitingness of pure being; he has to get back that intensity into the language. We all know that it's hard to write poetry in a late age; and we know that you have to put some strangeness, as something unexpected, into the structure of the sentence in order to bring back vit• ality to the noun. Now it's not enough to be bizarre; the strangeness in the sentence structure has to come from the poetic gift, too. That's why it•s doubly hard to be a poet in a late age. Now you all have seen hundreds of poems about roses and you know in your bones that the rose is not there. All those songs that sopranos sing as en• cores about "I have a garden! oh, what a garden!" Now I don't want to put too much emphasis on that line, because it's just one line in a longer poem. But I notice that you all know it; you make fun of it, but you know it. Now listen! I'm no fool. I know that in daily life we don't go around saying " ... is a ... is a ... is a . . .." Yes, I'm no fool; but I think that in that line the rose is red for the first time in English poetry for a hundred years.
The simple attention to the word "rose" which allows it to be "red for the first time . . . for a hundred years" recalls her claim for the early poets, such as Chaucer, whose poetry could "sing" because the- things which made its subjects were "shut in," and "anything shut in with you can sing." Gertrude Stein's purpose in Lectures in America was to present herself as a writer and as a thinker. She had anticipated the central idea of *What is English Literature," -- the influence of England's geography on its writers -- as early as 1913, in the essay, "England"« "Nothing is perplexing if there is an island." (Geography and Plays, 91.) In 1928, Useful Knowledge had consisted almost entirely of such studies as "Wherein the South Differs from the North" and "Near East or Chicago, a Description." Just before coming to the U.S. she had been writing Four in America, and the next year was to see the publication of The Geographical History of America, which brought 187.
her meditations on geography and many of her experiments with form to a brilliant conclusion. With these facts in mind, we can see that in "What Is English Literature" Stein is intro• ducing herself more as a thinker than as a writer, Stein quite rightly realized that the reader of the lectures would be more likely to grasp the technical points put forward in the last three lectures if he understood the kind of mind with which he was to become acquainted. In a sense, it would not have mattered if the first three lectures had concerned "them• selves with the history of the automobile, French cuisine and the care of dogs, all sub• jects which interested Gertrude Stein: the fact that she chose to write about the history of English literature, painting, and the theatre perhaps only suggests that she felt that the thrust of the lectures should be toward the arts. The end which she intended, an acquaint• ance with Gertrude Stein, is well achieved.
121. Lectures, p. 231. 122. Narration, p. 26. 123. Lectures, p. 234. 124. Ibid., loc. cit. 125. Ibid., p. 235. 126. Ibid., loc. cit. 127. Ibid., loc. cit. 128. Ibid., p. 236. 129. Ibid., p. 237. 130. Ibid., p. 238. 131. Ibid., loc. cit. Italics mine. 132. Ibid., p. 239. This poem in its entirety has a strange publication history. Written in 1922, its first appearance was in The Little Review "Exiles' Number" (IX.3, Spring, 19237] There it was entered in the table of contents as two separate items: "Idem the Same -- 188.
A Valentine to Sherwood Anderson," which included the first five sections, to the end of "Kneeling"; and "Bundles for Them," which included the last four, through "Let Us Describe." In its next appearance, in Useful Knowledge, the piece is printed as a complete entity under the first title, but there are two typographical errors and one misreading, where in "Bundles for Them" the phrase "her little feet are stretched out well" reads "stretching out well"; in addition to this, the last two sections, "In This Way" and "Let Us Describe" are omitted entirely. In Portraits and Prayers the typographical errors and the misreading are corrected, and the two final sections are restored; yet in the colophon, where acknowledgement is accorded Harcourt, Brace and Company for permission to reprint the work, there is no mention made of the restoration,
In the recording of the work made by Gertrude Stein at Columbia University in 1935, she her• self omits three sections: "Why Do You Feel Differently," "Kneeling," and "In This Way." In her anthology of Gertrude Stein's writing called Look At Me Now And Here I Am: Writings And Lectures 1911-1945 (see note 64 above), Patricia Meyerowitz restores the piece to its (presumably) proper form by reprinting the version found in Portraits and Prayers, as does Robert Haas in the Primer (see note 104 above). Probably in an effort to skirt all this confusion, Robert A. Wilson, in his definitive Gertrude Stein A Bibliography (New York: The Phoenix Book Shop, 1974), cites the section titles in• dividually in his contents for the Haas anthology, and of course enters them separately in his own index. This sort of confusion is happily not usual with Stein's work, even with those pieces which have often been reprinted. I am at a loss to know why "A Valentine To Sherwood Anderson" should have caused such problems where more difficult works seem to have escaped. 133. Lectures, p. 239-40. 189.
134. Ibid. , p. 242. 135. Ibid. , loc. cit. 136. Ibid. , p. 243. 137. Ibid. , loc. cit. 138. Ibid. , p. 245. This is section XIV of the poem. 139. Note that there is another quality(which Stein does not mention in the Lectures)which is displayed in Stanzasi static presentation. The whole problem of movement in prose (linearity) vis a vis non-movement in poetry is touched on in Narration, but was evidently too difficult for inclusion in this already-long lecture. 140. Lectures, p. 228. 141. Bridgman, 244. Bridgman's suggestion that the lectures are an attempt to "remake" Stein's literary past is wrong, first, because a chrono• logical examination of her writings in any of the areas she discusses in the lectures will show that things happened precisely as she claims they did; and, second, because it implies that Lectures in America and Narration together com• prise a complete evaluation by Stein of her own work. This is simply not true.
There is another point to be made peripheral to this, which is that while Stein knew that the lectures were to be published, she was con• cerned with writing lectures which she also knew would be heard individually by most members of her audience, because the lectures were de• livered in single appearances rather than in series. • Thus, any one member of the audience would likely only hear one lecture, and her concern must have been to see that, within that one lecture, her meaning would be clear, and that the audience would take away something complete in itself. It should be pointed out, however, that they were apparently composed in roughly the published order. In a letter to W.G, Rogers, written from Bilignin during the summer of 1934, she sayss "I am solemnly going on writing the lectures. 190.
I have finished one about pictures, one about the theatre and am now doing the one about English literature. Then there are three about my work, Making of Americans, 2, Portraits and so-called repetition and what is and what is not, 3, Grammar and tenses." (quoted Mellow, 376) Note that "What Is English Literature," apparently written third, was published in first place, and that the lecture that became "Poetry and Grammar" was first conceived as dealing with "Grammar and tenses," although it was already evidently dele• gated to the last place.
In a letter to the writer dated 14 April, 1975, Donald Gallup points out that there is no readily available record of the lecture itinerary followed by Gertrude Stein, or of which lectures were delivered to what audiences. It would be interesting to know whether or not she gave any of the lectures primacy, and, if so, to what audiences. 142. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Hist• orical Principles (London: Oxford University Press, 1933), 3rd ed., revised, 1970, defines the nouns from which these two words are derived as follows: "exegesis: explanation, exposition"; and "exemplar: 1. a model for imitation, an example. 2. an archetype whether real or ideal." 143. How To Write, p. 25. 144. transition, !>.. Supplement, p. i. , (April, 1927.) 145. There is a charming misprint of the first of these titles in Bridgman (197), where it appears as "Arthur A. Grammar." 146. Bridgman, p. 256. See Appendix for a conspectus of the theoretical works. 147. Elucidation, p. 2. 148. A Book Concluding With As A Wife Has A Cow A Love Story (Paris: Editions de la Galerie Simon, 1926), pTT24). 149. Gertrude Stein, Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, ed. Carl van Vechten (New York: Random House, 1946), p. 512. 150. Elucidation, pp. 9-10. 151. Portraits and Prayers, pp. 22-23. 152. While An Acquaintance With Description and "Patriarchal Poetry" are listed in the Appendix under theoretical writings concerned with poetry, they are not purely poetic exemplary writings. I have included them with poetry because description of the intensive kind they disclose revolves around the noun, and is thus closer to the poetic mode of Gertrude Stein's work than to the rhetorical one. They do not, however, explore poetic form, as do "Narrative," "Winning His Way. A Narrative Poem of Poetry," and Stanzas in Meditation. It is at about this point, in An Acquaintance With Description, that Stein begins to use the glossing which will become essential to the structure of the later exemplary works. This tendency is not peculiar to Stein in works of this period; there are many other contemporary examples of the working process entering into the work which it builds. In E. E. Cummings' & (New York: Har-
court, Brace and Company, 19257f sonnet xx of "Sonnets -- Actualities" begins: "my sonnet is A light goes on in / the toiletwindow,that's straightacross from / my window . . ."; and in No Thanks (1935), #7 begins: "sonnet entitled how to run the world). ..." and proceeds through the octave with an abecedarian formula consisting of capital letters which itemize clauses,each of which begins with the letter heading it, i.e. "A always don't there B being no such thing / for C can't cast no shadow. . ." etc.; the sestet's first line further describes the structure of the sonnet and comments on its theme: "(sestet entitled grass is flesh or swim. . In Merrill Moore's M: One Thousand Autobiographical Sonnets (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1938), the seventh section, entitled "Dreams and Symbols," has many sonnets whose titles describe both their natures and their processes: "Sonnet in Code?"; ."Sonnet Splotched by Rain"; "Sonnet Without Syntax"; "Sonnet of Pullman Names and Other Words," and one extreme example of concrete poetry entitled " " and consisting of fourteen lines of dots. 192.
153. See note 68 above. 154. See Lectures, p. 212, for Stein on prepositions. 155. Acquaintance, p. 5. 156. Gertrude Stein, Lucy Church Amiably (Paris* Plain Edition, 1930), p. 7. 157. How To Write was first announced as Grammar Paragraphs Sentences Vocabulary Etcetera (Wilson, 25). Apparently the final title was not confirmed until the eleventh hour, and only then after a second change: a catalogue from L.W. Currey Rare Books Incorporated, New York, in 1973, offers for sale the page proofs of How To Write; in his description of the item, Mr. Currey notes that "the original title, Saving the Sentence, (is) cancelled by the author who has then penned the title of the published version." There was a good reason for this, just as there was reason for her discarding the long first provisional title. The first title provided a list of the elements of writing which would appear in the book. In a sense it was an exemplary title: the book would be "grammar, paragraphs, sentences and vocabulary," and the title was the book. However, Gertrude Stein obviously felt that the works in the book had an application, and this was not suggested by a title which simply catalogued the book's components. The book had to be given an impetus. The title should provide a directive to the book's use.
To call the book Saving the Sentence would have thrown far too much, emphasis on only one aspect of its intention. While the sentence might be . symbolic in many peoples' minds of writing in general, and particularly of traditional writing, it was this very symbolism that Stein would work to dispel in her book. She was certainly trying to "save the sentence," but she was trying to save the paragraph too, and to revive grammar and to portray vocabularies, and the title had to imply all these things. How To Write was a title which embraced every aspect of composition from grammar to modes such as narrative and exposition. At the same time, it suggested usefulness and practi• cality. 193.
158. Lectures. p. 230. 159. How To Write, p. 382. 160. Stanzas in Meditation, pp. (v)-xx. 161. This passage from Gertrude Stein in Pieces gives a fair example of Bridgman's approach. On page 199, he is discussing "Forensics," the last piece in How To Write (see p. 125 ff. of this paper): She meant by forensics argumentation for the sake of victory rather than truth, the shrewd utilization of emotional appeals, distortion, and simplification wherever necessary to win. "Forensics is eloquence and reduction," she said. "Forensics leads to reputation." But, "Forensics may pale. It often does" (386, 388, 394). So this was her dismissal of rhetorical strategy in composition. " 162. How To Write, p. 39. 163. Ibid., p. 73. 164. Ibid., p. 75. 165. Ibid., loc. cit. 166. Ibid., loc. cit. 167. Ibid., p. 100. 168. Ibid., p. 101. 169. Ibid., p. 51. 170. Lectures, p. 230. 171. How To Write, pp. 69-70. 172. Ibid., p. 74. 173. Ibid., p. 81. 174. Ibid., pp. 89-90. 175. Gertrude Stein, The World William R. Scott, Inc., 1939). 194.
176. How To Write, p. 34. 177. Ibid,, p. 32. 178. • Ibid., p. 25. 179. The reader will remember that this is one of the nine sentences drawn from How To Write which Stein used in "Poetry and Grammar" to exemplify the fusion of the sentence and the paragraph. In her letter of 1930 to Henry McBride, entitled "Genuine Crea• tive Ability," she quotes this sentence and the next, and modifies her rather strict position about sentences' being "unemotional" and paragraphs "emotional." Paragraphs. How to write. Paragraphs are natural and sentences are not and if I must forget the reason why. (Primer, p. 105.) According to the Yale Catalogue, "Sentences and Paragraphs" was the first work written in 1930, "Genuine Creative Ability," the last. In the light of the title change for the book discussed in note 157 above, the use of the phrase "how to write" in this passage is very interesting. 180. Lectures, p. 225. 181. How To Write, p. 29, cf. Lectures, p. 226. 182. Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans Being a History of a Family's Progress (New^York: Something Else Press, 1966), p. 490. This is a photo-offset of the original Contact Press edition of 1925. 183. Ibid. , p. '347. 184. Narration, p. 26. 185. See also Part I, Section iii, p. 50. 186. How To Write, p. 31. 187. Ibid., p. 32. 188. Ibid., p. 35. 189. As Fine As Melanctha. p. 361. 195.
190. How To Write, p. 106. 191. Ibid., p. 108. 192. Gertrude Stein, Reflection on the Atomic Bombs Volume I of the Previously Uncollected Writings of Gertrude Stein, ed. Robert Bartlett. Haas TLOS Angeless Black Sparrow Press, 1973), p. 153. 193. As Fine As Melanctha. p. 386. 194. See Appendix. 195. Oxford English Dictionary, Shorter Edition,p. 734. 196. How To Write, p. 386. 197. Ibid., loc. cit. 198. Ibid., loc. cit. 199. Ibid., p. 387. 200. See also Part II, Section ii, p. 87,,, concerning the passage from "Finally George a Vocabulary of Thinking" in which the question follows its answer. 201. How To Write, p. 395. 202. Lectures, p. 224. 203. Weinstein, p. 81. 204. Lectures, p. 212. 205. Stanzas in Meditation, pp. 169-170. 206. Bee Time Vine, p. 220. 207. Gertrude Stein took two courses in composition during her time at Harvard Annex (Radcliffe). In English 22, a sophomore composition course, she received only a C, but in her junior year she took English C (Forensics), and received an A-. 208. Stanzas in Meditation, p. xvi. 209. Stanzas, I.i.1-2. 210. Ibid., II.xiv.1-2. 196.
211. Ibid., V.xlix.13-14. 212. Ibid., IV.xxiv.121-24. 213. Ibid., III.ii;l-4. 214. Ibid., IV.iv.1-2. 215. The larger organization of the poem should be mentioned. It is divided into five large "parts." Fart I consists of fifteen stanzas; Part II, of nineteen; Part III, of twenty-three; Part IV, of twenty-four; and Part V, of eighty-three, many consisting of only one or two lines. This organization seems to have no particular raison d'etre. The stanzas within any one part do not embody images or forms peculiar to that part alone, and none of the parts forms a dis- cernable whole except by virtue of its being designated a "part." 216. Stanzas, V.xxix. 217. Stanzas in Meditation, p. xix. 218. Stanzas, V.xxv. 219. Ibid., I.xi.42-6. 220. Ibid., V.lxxvi.1-7. 221. Ibid., I.xv.10-13. 222. Ibid., III.ii(b).87-90. 223. Ibid., V.xxxvi to V.xxxix. 224. The Making of Americans, p. 289. 225. Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 19337 226. Gertrude Stein, How Writing is Written: Volume II of the Previously Uncollected Writings of Gertrude Stein, ed. Robert Bartlett Haas (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1974), p. 151. 227. "The Story of a Book," How Writing is Written, p. 62. 197.
228. Geographical History, p. 187. 198.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bridgman, Richard, Gertrude Stein in Pieces. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970. Brinnin, John Malcolm. The Third Rose: Gertrude Stein and Her World. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1959. Firmage, George, A Check-List of the Published Writings of Gertrude Stein. Amherst: University of Massa• chusetts, 1954. Gallup, Donald C., ed. The Flowers of Friendship: Letters Written to Gertrude Stein. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953. Haas, Robert Bartlett and Donald Clifford Gallup. A Cata• logue of the Published and Unpublished Writings of Gertrude Stein. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1941. Hoffman, Frederick J. Gertrude Stein. University of Min• nesota Pamphlets on American Writers No. 10.Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1961. Mellow, James. Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Com• pany. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1974. Reid, B.L. Art by Subtraction: A Dissenting Opinion of Gertrude Stein. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1958. Rogers, W.G. When This You See Remember Me: Gertrude Stein in Person. New York: Rinehart and Company, 1948. Sawyer, Julian. Gertrude Stein: A Bibliography. New York: Arrow Editions, 1940. Stein, Gertrude. Alphabets and Birthdays. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957. Stein, Gertrude. An Elucidation. Supplement to transition 1, April, 1927. Stein, Gertrude. As Fine As Melanctha (1914-1930). New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954. 199.
Stein, Gertrude. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1933.
Stein, Gertrude. Bee Time Vine and Other Pieces (1913- 1927). New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953.
Stein, Gertrude. A Book Concluding With As A Wife Has A Cow A Love Story. Paris: Editions de la Galerie Simon, 1926.
Stein, Gertrude. Everybody's Autobiography. New York: Random House, 1937.
Stein, Gertrude. Four In America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1947.
Stein, Gertrude. Four Saints In Three Acts. New York: Random House, 1934.
Stein, Gertrude. The Geographical History of America or The Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind. New York: Random House, 1936.
Stein, Gertrude. Geography and Plays. Boston: The Four Seas Company, 1922.
Stein, Gertrude. The Gertrude Stein First Reader and Three Plays. London: Maurice Fridberg, 1946.
Stein, Gertrude. How To Write. Paris: Plain Edition, 1931.
Stein, Gertrude. How Writing Is Written. Ed. Robert Bartlett Haas. Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1974.
Stein, Gertrude. Ida: A Novel. New York: Random House, 1941.
Stein, Gertrude. Lectures In America. New York: Random House, 1935.
Stein, Gertrude. Lucy Church Amiably: A Novel of Romantic Beauty and Nature and which Looks Like an Engraving. Paris: Imprimerie (Union), 1930.
Stein, Gertrude. The Making of Americans: Being A History of a Family's Progress. Dijon: Maurice Darantiere, 200.
Stein, Gertrude. Mrs. Reynolds and Five Earlier Novelettes. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952. Stein, Gertrude. Narration. Chicago: The University of Chic ago Pres s, 1935. Stein, Gertrude. A Novel of Thank You. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958. Stein, Gertrude. Painted Lace and Other Pieces (1914-1937). New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955. Stein, Gertrude. Portraits and Prayers. New York: Random House, 1934. Stein, Gertrude. A Primer for the Gradual Und erst and i ng of Gertrude Stein. Ed. Robert Bartlett Haas. Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1971. Stein, Gertrude. Reflection on the Atomic Bomb. Ed. Robert Bartlett Haas. Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1973. Stein, Gertrude. Selected Operas and Flays. Ed. John Malcolm Brinnin. Pittsburgh: University of Pitts• burgh Press, 1970. Stein, Gertrude. Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein. Ed. Carl Van Vechten. New York: Random House, 1946. Stein, Gertrude. Stanzas In Meditation. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1956. Stein, Gertrude. Tender Buttons. New York: Claire Marie, 1914. Stein, Gertrude. Useful Knowledge.London: John Lane, The Bodley Head Limited, 1929. Stein, Gertrude. What Are Masterpieces. Los Angeles: The Conference Press, 1940. Stein, Gertrude. Writings and Lectures 1911-1945. Ed. Patricia Meyerowitz. London: Peter Owen, 1967. Stewart, Allegra. Gertrude Stein and the Present. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1967. 201.
Sutherland, Donald. Gertrude Stein; A Biography of Her Work. New Haven: Yale University Fress, 1951. Weinstein, Norman. Gertrude Stein and the Literature of the Modern Consciousness. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1970. Wilson, Edmund. Axel's Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930. 1931; rpt. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1947. Wilson, Robert A. Gertrude Stein: A Bibliography. New York: The Phoenix Bookshop, 1974. 202.
APPENDIX
CONSPECTUS OF THE THEORETICAL WRITINGS OF GERTRUDE STEIN
N.B.i 1. Works concerned with prose or with "writing" in a general sense appear in' the left column; works con• cerned wholly or partly with poetry, in the right column. 2. The exegetical works are placed in parentheses. The pieces in Lectures in America and Narration are cited separately. 3. The reader is referred to Appendix D in Richard Bridgman's Gertrude Stein in Pieces for an index of references to various of her works made by Gertrude Stein in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and Everybody's Auto biography, and Lectures in America. The first two will not otherwise appear here. 4. A page reference to the most readily available edition in which the work appears follows each title, with the following abbreviations representing the volanes. Full publishing information for these works will be found in Gertrude Steins A Bibliography, by Robert A. Wilson (New York* The Phoenix Book Shop, 1974). PGU - A Primer for the Gradual Understanding of Gertrude Stein,(Los Angeles, 1973) ;.; PL - Painted Lace (New Haven, 1955) AAWD - An Acquaintance With Description (London, 1929) BTV - Bee Time Vine (New Haven, 1953) HTW - How To Write (New York, 1973) P&P - Portraits and Prayers (New York, 1934) RAB - Reflections on the Atomic Bomb (Los Angeles,1973) AFAM - As Fine as Melanctha (New Haven, 1954) W&L - Writings and Lectures; 1909-1911 (Harmondsworth, 1971) SIM - Stanzas in Meditation (New Haven, 1956) FIA - Four in America (New Haven, 1947) HWIW - How Writings is Written (Los Angeles, 1974) NARR - Narration (Chicago, 1969) 5. The items appear in the order of composition within each year, according to Appendix C of Bridgman. 203.
1923 - An Elucidation. PGU, 91. 1924 - 1925 - Natural Phenomena. PL, 167. 1926 - (Composition as Explanation) W&L, 21. An Acquaintance With Descrip• tion. AAWD, 1. 1927 - Patriarchal Poetry. BTV, 249. Regular Regularly in Narrative. HTW, 215. 1928 - Finally George a Vocabulary of Thinking. HTW, 271. Arthur a Grammar. HTW, 37. S entenc es. HTW,113. 1929 - Bernard Fay. W&L, 236. More Grammar Genia Berman. P&P, 185. Saving the Sentence. HTW, 11. Paragraphs. (Later included in "More Grammar for a Sentence." See Below.) 1930 - Sentences and Paragraphs. HTW, 23. Evidence. RAB, 153. More Grammar for a Sentence. AFAM, 359. A Grammarian. HTW, 103. Title, Sub-Title. AFAM, 386. 204.
Why Willows. (Added to "Evidence." See above.) Before the Flowers of Friend• ship Faded Friendship Faded. W&L, 274. Narrative. SIM, 250. 1931 - Forensics. HTW, 383. Forensics. HTW, 383. Winning His Way. A Narrative Poem of Poetry. SIM, 153. 1932 - Stanzas in Meditation. SIM, 1. 1933 - (Henry James. FIA, (Henry James. FIA, 119.) 119.) (What is English (What is English Literature. W&L, 31w Literature. W&L, 31;) (Plays. W&L, 59.) (The Gradual Making of The Making of Americans * W&L, 84.) (Portraits and Repetition. W&L, 99.) (Poetry and Grammar. (Poetry and Grammar. W&L, 125.) W&L, 125.) 1935 - (Narration #2. NARR, (Narration #2. NARR, 16.) 16.) (What Are Masterpieces. W&L, 148.) (How Writing is Written. HWIW, 151.)