Miss Gertrude Stein’s memoirs, published last year under the tide of Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, having brought about a certain amount of controversial comment, Transition has opened its pages to several of those she mentions who, like ourselves, find that the book often lacks accuracy. This fact and the regrettable possibility that many less informed readers might accept Miss Stein’s testimony about her contemporaries, make it seem wiser to straighten out those points with which we are familiar before the book has had time to assume the character of historic authenticity.
To MM. Henri Matisse, Tristan Tzara, Georges Braque, André Salmon we are happy to give the opportunity to refute those parts of Miss Stein’s book which they consider require it.
These documents invalidate the claim of the Toklas-Stein memorial that Miss Stein was in any way concerned with the shaping of the epoch she attempts to describe. There is a unanimity of opinion that she had no understanding of what really was happening around her, that the mutation of ideas beneath the surface of the more obvious contacts and clashes of personalities during that period escaped her entirely. Her participation in the genesis and development of such movements as Fauvism, Cubism, Dada, Surrealism, Transition etc. was never ideologically intimate and, as M. Matisse states, she has presented the epoch ‘without taste and without relation to reality’.
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in its hollow, tinsel bohemianism and egocentric deformations, may very well become one day the symbol of the decadence that hovers over contemporary literature.
EUGENE JOLAS.
Paris, Feb. 1935.
‘Without taste and without relation to reality’
Matisse was accusing Gertrude Stein but the irony of his charge was that it summarised precisely the complaints made against the Modernist movement as a whole, including Post-Impressionism and his own work.
‘Testimony against Gertrude Stein’ was a supplement published with the French literary magazine Transition edited by Maria and Eugene Jolas. Transition was a vehicle for new work, it was avowedly experimental, it had published Gertrude Stein on a number of occasions, and was privately funded by the Jolases themselves. Why denounce Stein? Why in 1935?
In 1934 Stein had published the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklos. An instant success on both sides of the Atlantic it gave Stein the recognition she had hoped for since Three Lives in 1905. Stein had the personality for success; she loved it, and it loved her. She toured, she lectured, she packed halls wherever she went, she told undergraduates at Oxford and Cambridge how to read and how to write. There had been nothing so sensational since the days of Oscar Wilde. In 1934, Gertrude Stein was not on the map, she was the topography of her own country.
I do not think we should dismiss the pack hunt against her as ordinary envy of recognition; Matisse was as famous as their mutual friend, Picasso. Something much more interesting fuelled the fires lit around her: it was the old problem of Representation; Realism, if you like. The quality of lifelikeness which the Cubists had mocked, was raised from its grave as witness against Gertrude Stein. What Stein had done, how it was received by the general reader and how it was received by her co-workers, raises some hard questions about the artist and autobiography.
‘Testimony Against Gertrude Stein’ fatally assumes that autobiography is a rigid mould into which facts must be poured. That was an odd assumption from a group of men and women, some of them painters, all closely connected to what each would admit was a revolution of form and taste. All of the painters we group as Post-Impressionist (I mean the originators not the later copyists) were accused of misrepresenting both their painterly tradition and their subject matter. Plato was the first person to call the artist a liar, and it is a label used indiscriminately every time new work is produced. We call artists liars by claiming that what they do is not really art because art is really something else; usually whatever previous generations have produced. Matisse called Stein a liar, which is strange from a man who had so often been called a liar himself. To illustrate the point, I quote the following extract from Art by Clive Bell. The 1912 exhibition to which he refers was the one at which the British public got their first home view of Post-Impressionism. Picasso, Matisse and Cézanne were represented. The art critic of The Times declared that the frames were worth more than the pictures.
In the autumn of 1912 I was walking through the Grafton Galleries with a man who is certainly one of the ablest, and is reputed one of the most enlightened, of contemporary men of science. Looking at a picture of a young girl with a cat by Henri Matisse, he exclaimed – ‘I see how it is, the fellow’s astigmatic.’ (A defect in the eye by which rays from one point are not focused as one point.) He assured me at last that no picture in the gallery was beyond the reach of optical diagnostic … I suggested tentatively that perhaps the discrepancies between the normal man’s vision and the pictures on the wall were the result of intentional distortion on the part of the artists. At this, the professor became passionately serious – ‘Do you mean to tell me,’ he bawled, ‘that there has ever been a painter who did not try to make his objects as lifelike as possible? Dismiss such silly nonsense from your head.’
Matisse’s distortions are not faulty Realism, they are a different kind of reality. A different kind of reality was what Gertrude Stein was trying to achieve in the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.
Gertrude Stein played a trick and it was a very good trick too. She had, as a precedent, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928) but instead of re-making biography into fiction, she pushed the experiment one step further, and re-defined autobiography as the ultimate Trojan horse.
We are supposed to know where we are with biography and autobiography, they are the literary equivalents of the portrait and the self-portrait. (Reflect a while on what the Post-Impressionists did with those.) One is the representation of someone else’s life, and the other is the representation of your own. We shouldn’t have to worry about form and experiment, and we can rest assured that the writer (or the painter) is sticking to the facts. We can feel safe with facts. You can introduce a fact to your mother and you can go out at night with a proven fact on your arm. There we are; a biography in one hand, and an autobiography in the other. A rose is a rose is a rose.
Suppose there was a writer who looked despairingly at her readers and who thought: ‘They are suspicious, they are conservative. They long for new experiences and deep emotions and yet they fear both. They only feel comfortable with what they know and they believe that art is the mirror of life; someone else’s or their own. How to smuggle into their homes what they would normally kill at the gate?’
Bring on the Trojan horse. In the belly of a biography stash the Word. The Word that is both form and substance. The moving word uncaught. Woolf smuggled across the borders of complacency the most outrageous contraband; lesbianism, cross-dressing, female power, but as much as that, and to me more than that, she smuggled her language alive past the checkpoints of propriety.
At similar risk, although Stein is not close to the genius of Woolf, the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklos is an act of terrorism against worn-out assumptions of what literature is and what form its forms can take. Modernism fights against fixity of form, not to invite an easy chaos but to rebuild new possibilities. Art cannot move forward by clinging to past discoveries and the re-discovery of form is essential to anyone who wants to do fresh work. Stein knew this as well as Picasso knew it and although she was not as able as he to devise new solutions, she perfectly understood the problem. That in itself makes her a significant writer. The Autobiography has been described as a retreat from her experimental style but it was no more a retreat for her than Orlando was a compromise for Woolf. Both writers identified and exploited the weak-mindedness of labels. The Autobiography is not Gertrude ghosting Alice, it is Gertrude refusing to accept that real people need to be treated really. She included herself. Gertrude Stein made all of the people around her into characters in her own fiction. I think that a splendid blow to verismo and one which simultaneously questions identity, the nature of truth and the purpose of art. Had anyone said to Matisse ‘I don’t like that’ or ‘Your painting is not a proper record of that house/fruit bowl/guitar’, Matisse would have laughed in his face. Why then is Matisse complaining that Gertrude has not made a proper record of him?
It was not necessary to agree with the focus of any of Stein’s work, or to like it, to know that she was a committed experimenter and that to her, nothing was sacred except the word. Stein never pretended that Toklas had written the book, and even though Stein is named on the jacket as the author, the last paragraph is still one of the wickedest most delightful paragraphs in English literature:
About six weeks ago Gertrude Stein said, it does not look to me as if you were ever going to write that autobiography. You know what I am going to do? I am going to write it for you. I am going to write it as simply as Defoe did the autobiography of Robinson Crusoe. And she has and this is it.
How could she? The cheek of it. It is an explosion of eighteenth-century wit and Modernist sensibility. The world turned upside down. Poor Matisse. Made into a fiction and determined to behave like a fact. What would he have said if Stein had rejected the portrait painted of her by Picasso when Picasso blanked out her head?
By refusing to recognise Gertrude Stein’s literary adventure her accusers were forced into writs of authenticity. A fact is a fact is a fact. Or is it? Stein was not writing a faithful account of her Paris years, she was vandalising a cliché of literature. Autobiography? Yes, like Robinson Crusoe. Why not daub with bright green paint the smug low wall of assumption?
Gertrude Stein was not an art criminal. The real criminals of art are the ones who parade the efforts of the past as their own work. To force Stein into a kangaroo court because she had no care for convention, is to determine a writer’s scope by the prejudices of her readers. What irritated Stein’s detractors had little to do with literature. They were falling for the lie they had so often exposed; content above form, subject matter above method. A book cannot be judged by its subject matter any more than a picture can. We need to look at the experiment of the piece. The riskiness of art, the reason why it affects us, is not the riskiness of its subject matter, it is the risk of creating a new way of seeing, a new way of thinking. It does this by overturning the habits and conventions of previous generations. New work is not just topical (although it might be that), it is modern; that is, it has not been done before. What Stein did with the convention of autobiography had not been done before, but her detractors were not (and are not) interested in that. ‘Testimony Against Gertrude Stein’ never asks any questions about what her literary motives might have been, instead, it rages against her ‘clinical megalomania’, her ‘maiden lady greed’, her ‘Barnumesque publicity’, her ‘coarse spirit’, her ‘spiritual depravity’. And what had she done but take a genre and smash it?
Of course there was more to it. Most of what masquerades as literary criticism is a mixture of sexism and self-importance. Stein had trespassed gender as well as social niceties and literary convention. A woman is not allowed to call herself the centre of the world. That she so charmed her ordinary readers is an interesting case of hoax. Like Orlando and Oranges are not the only fruit, the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklos is a fiction masquerading as a memoir. It seems that if you tell people that what they are reading is ‘real’, they will believe you, even when they are being trailed in the wake of a highly experimental odyssey. I have never understood how anyone can read the Deuteronomy chapter of Oranges and not catch on to my game, but then I have never understood how anyone can read the last paragraph of the Autobiography and not delight in the plain fact that we have been had. Like Stein, I prefer myself as a character in my own fiction, and like Stein and Woolf, what concerns me is language. Good books are many things, but the most important thing about Oranges is not its wit nor its warmth, but its new way with words. A writer is a raider and whatever has been made possible in the past must be gathered up by her, melted down, and re-formed differently. As she does that, she makes out of her own body a connection to what has gone before and her skull becomes a stepping stone to what will follow. Sometimes we forget that if we do not encourage new work now, we will lose all touch with the work of the past we claim to love. If art is not living in a continuous present, it is living in a museum, only those working now can complete the circuit between the past, present and future energies we call art.
Stein knew this (see her essay ‘Composition as Explanation’) and the great strength of the Autobiography is that Stein the author uses Stein the character as a circuit board to connect up all the pieces of the book. There is an eighteenth-century robustness and raciness in the style of the Autobiography as well as the kaleidoscopic fragmentation so typical of Modernism. Stein’s process of selection, the way she pinpoints and develops events, is designed to give precisely the giddy out-of-focus feel her detractors complained of. Stein enlarges what is small, reduces what is large, twists and turns her material so that she can misrepresent it. The truth of fiction is not the truth of railway timetables. At the same time as undermining our usual way of seeing, Stein the author remains in complete control by making Stein the character absolutely plausible. We doubt nothing about this Stein … until we get to the end, when the final paragraph radically alters our reading of the whole. Nevertheless, the Autobiography has all the confidence of A Sentimental Journey or Robinson Crusoe or Gulliver’s Travels, and it takes on the world with the same gusto as those eighteenth-century authors of whom Stein was fond. Stein had thoroughly absorbed her reading and like all good writers she is thus able to make a bridge with the past that is both conscious and liminal. I think this is important and only new work can do it, for second-hand work merely repeats the past in a debased habit and, rather than supplying us with the link we need, cuts us off from earlier energies.
An earlier energy that presses upon any discussion of autobiography and the way writers re-invent it, is Wordsworth’s The Prelude. This very long poem, written between 1799 and 1805, was not published until after Wordsworth’s death in 1850. Even he had some anxiety about having composed an epic around his own life and offering himself as hero. Had he published The Prelude as a young radical rather than as a dead totem, there is no doubt that he would have been thoroughly tarred and feathered with newspaper ink for assuming that the ‘Growth of a Poet’s Mind’ was worthy of the Muse.
We should not underestimate Wordsworth’s audacity. Epic poems were to be written around great themes of heroism. Wordsworth makes a long list of such themes in Book 1 of his opus and then decides that the best thing would be to write about himself. I am sure that if Transition had been running its offices from the Lake District at the end of the eighteenth century we would now be reading ‘Testimony against William Wordsworth’.
The Stein/Wordsworth comparison is instructive. Both writers were able to take a well-known, well-worn form, formula almost, and vitalise it by disrespecting it. It is the success of either experiment that has led to such commonplace misreadings of both texts. The intimacy, the confidence and confidences that charm the reader, are assumed to take their power from their relation to actual life. Nothing could be further from the truth and Wordsworth’s famous and infamously abused tag of ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’ should give us a clue to the art-process involved, provided that we read the tag rightly.
Wordsworth does not say ‘Experience recollected in tranquillity’. To the Romantics and their predecessors, who took for granted a high degree of craft in a writer, the mark of the true poet was his/her sensibility; the exquisiteness of his/her emotional range brought to bear on hard objects. That hard objects should make the poet would have been thought absurd. Wordsworth was not interested in forging actual life into a copy of itself, he was interested in creating a heightened reality.
I must have exercised
Upon the vulgar form of present things
And actual world of our familiar days
A higher power
(Book 12)
What Wordsworth is bringing back to us from the long tunnel of the past is an emotional rapture that allows us as readers to be deeply moved by experiences not contemporary nor personal to us. This is achieved by the strange gift of true writers to be at once fired by and distant from their material. Tranquillity is not the cosy atmosphere of the fireside pencil, it is the condition of remoteness that allows the writer artful access to her work. ‘Write from your own experience’ is fine for the writing class, useless to the writer. What the writer knows has to be put away from her as though she has never known it, so that it is recalled vividly, with the shock of memory after concussion. In the act of writing the emotions of the writer are returned and recharged. They are stronger than before. This is quite opposite to other people’s perception of experience and memory.
There is more: not only are the writer’s emotions returned and recharged, they are re-drawn. Inside the writer’s study, the balance of an ordinary day is overturned. In some ways the overturning is not unlike the effects of LSD. Art alters consciousness, and the consciousness of the writer in the process of writing is not the consciousness of the writer at any other time. Part of the Romantic experiment with drugs (particularly by De Quincey and Coleridge) was an attempt to enhance or induce this altered state, but it is Wordsworth who has left us with the most compelling model of a writer re-ordering his own identity for the purposes of a poem.
When Stein re-ordered her own identity in the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas she was preferring poetic emotion to everyday experience. I do not mean that she was substituting a vague impressionism for the facts of the matter, something her more charitable detractors suggest in the ‘Testimony’, I mean that she was working up her life into art. Had not James Joyce done the same thing in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)? Stein, like Wordsworth, was more flagrant and less apologetic. She made no attempt to clothe herself in a thin veil of fiction, she became the fiction. By allowing this plasticity to Self, she was able to impose it on Subject. That which is plastic is that which is capable of permanent de-formation without giving way. (Gr. plastikos.) Stein’s narrative authority has permanently fixed her epoch for generations of readers, but to regard it as documentary would be as grave a mistake as to read The Prelude as a Lake District diary.
I hope it is clear that poetic emotion, the emotion recollected by the writer, is not a sloppy, chaotic dogs-tongue of feeling indiscriminately slavered over people and happenings. It is the deep emotion raised up out of the best that we are; emotion of passion, of love, of sex, of ecstasy, of compassion, of grief, of death. It is an operatic largeness. Soap-opera tears are best suited to celluloid. Art is cellular. The emotions it draws upon are fundamental and not always available to the ducts around the eyes. By re-moulding the reality we assume to be objective, art releases to us, realities otherwise hidden
the soul
Remembering how she felt, but what she felt
Remembering not, retains an obscure sense
of possible sublimity
(Book 2)
Against daily insignificance art recalls to us possible sublimity. It cannot do this if it is merely a reflection of actual life. Our real lives are elsewhere. Art finds them.
Should people be treated as fictions? The question is an ethical one only if we assume that fiction is a copy of actual life. If we do, then art always is autobiography or biography and the skill of the artist is making it into a pretty toy or perhaps an educational instrument. Art should not drag unwilling actors into its animation. But is this what Gertrude Stein was doing? Or was she insisting on the whole splendid spectacle of her time as fiction in much the same way as the Cubists refused independent authority to hard objects?
Instead of art aspiring towards lifelikeness what if life aspires towards art, towards a creative, controlled focus of freedom, outside of the tyranny of matter? What if the joke about life imitating art were a better joke than we think?
Are real people fictions? We mostly understand ourselves through an endless series of stories told to ourselves by ourselves and others. The so-called facts of our individual worlds are highly coloured and arbitrary, facts that fit whatever fiction we have chosen to believe in. It is necessary to have a story, an alibi that gets us through the day, but what happens when the story becomes a scripture? When we can no longer recognise anything outside of our own reality? We have to be careful not to live in a state of constant self-censorship, where whatever conflicts with our world-view is dismissed or diluted until it ceases to be a bother. Struggling against the limitations we place upon our minds is our own imaginative capacity, a recognition of an inner life often at odds with the external figurings we spend so much energy supporting. When we let ourselves respond to poetry, to music, to pictures, we are clearing a space where new stories can root, in effect we are clearing a space for new stories about ourselves.
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, by refusing to recognise the scriptural authority of actual life, suggests itself and its subject matter as a myriad text open to unlimited interpretation. If we can fictionalise ourselves, and consciously, we are freed into a new kind of communication. It is abstract, light, changeful, genuine. It is what Wordsworth called ‘the real solid world of images’. It may be that to understand ourselves as fictions, is to understand ourselves as fully as we can.