There is no use in finding out what is in anybody’s
mind. There is no use in finding out what is in
anybody’s mind.
—How to Write
FROM GERTRUDE STEIN I LEARNED that language is born in sense and nonsense, in mystery and banality, in secrecy and subterfuge, in dissonance and rhyme; that it can only ever be a beautiful, dangerous, private offering; that it exists apart from its creator, un-arbitrary and uncompromised, incapable of being duplicated and therefore, in its way, divine.
I recall the photograph of Stein seated on the commodious sofa in her famous Montparnasse salon, herself a monumental figure whose near catatonic stare betrays nothing of her meticulous, frank, sovereign, mischievous mind. She appears to be a still life beneath the lively company of paintings by Matisse, Cezanne and Picasso—including his appropriately outsized portrait of her—whose friendships she cultivated and whose works she so sagely promoted and acquired. And yet how her words on the page caper and cavort, charm and conceal, comfort and confound in a cagey effluence, not stopping until the whole enterprise of language itself has been put forth and put to rest, put forth and put to rest, put forth and put to rest.
Reading, among other books, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, The Making of Americans and Four Saints in Three Acts— savoring the serious, goofy brilliance of these works—was a literary liberation the likes of which I had never experienced. Stein’s “little sentences,” as she called them, were revelatory. Especially important for me was the marvelously colloidal Tender Buttons. A series of disarming, aphoristic discourses on objects, food and rooms, the work was seminal in my understanding of what was meant by literary modernism.
Coming across exquisite, inscrutable lines like “Dining is west” and “A white hunter is nearly crazy” made me believe, as no other writer had—I was a senior in high school—in the supremacy of poetic language, the efficacy of its instruction and the stunning variety of its uses. I marvelled at how Stein’s so-called automatic writing (she never called it that) concealed a powerful quality of deliberateness, of inevitability, how such earnest sounding prose contained an undeniable element of willful, high hilarity, how a single sentence could be made to tell an entire story. Stein had, somehow, got hold of the process of thought (her thought) itself and laid it down. Writing, Stein’s heavily associative narratives seemed to proclaim, was a slipstream into and out of which flows this wondrous, unreliable entity called consciousness.
Stein had, in fact, studied psychology with William James at Radcliffe and medicine at Johns Hopkins University before taking off for Paris, about which she wrote, “America is my home but Paris is my home town.” You can detect the science in Stein’s writing—the doggedness, the specificity, the sobriety. It is nothing if not rigorous, the stuff of philosophical inquiry. And yet her work reads madly, obscurely, drunkenly. There is about it the quality of something rarefied, monastic; resistant to and defiant of being understood, learned from, made one’s own. It is, in a word, difficult.
Stein’s radical example, her conceptual and stylistic innovations, led me to the disparate, fiercely modern writings of Joyce and Beckett and Pound, and to such later cloistered yet adamantly catholic writers as Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, Simone Weil, John Ashbery and Lydia Davis. I still find Stein’s work wild and invigorating, pleasingly solecistic and not so much solipsistic as solitary, unto itself, by turns loquacious and taciturn, modest and good-naturedly vain, driven by wisdom, by wile.
I had first read Stein in the heady fever-dream of my own early creative writing efforts. The poetry (and poetic prose) I emulated and tried to imitate was “fancy,” by which I mean highblown, willfully obscure and language-drunk. Inaccessibility was all. I worshipped Baudelaire, Ponge, Russell Edson, Rimbaud, Djuna Barnes, Ronald Firbank, Gerard Nerval, Henri Michaux. The works of these literary oddballs and experimenters, these writers of deranged sensibility (remember the wonderful story of Nerval walking his pet lobster on a pink ribbon through the Tuileries?) made the world seem, at last, desirable, strange, possible, new.
While Stein’s writing was fancy, it also was plain. It read like poetry yet had the length and breadth and heft of prose. Reading Stein, I saw that it was possible to write something as real as a story—as opposed to the gorgeous fictiveness of poetry, so full of artifice, of art!—without losing poetic impulse and expression. Before Stein, I had loved the rapturous lines of Spenser and Chaucer and Donne, but not the more grounded paragraphs (I couldn’t see the grandness!) of A Tale of Two Cities and Silas Marner and The Red Badge of Courage. How daunting were these substantial works of prose, how level compared to the lofty reaches of “The Mutabilitie Cantos,” the bawdy excesses of The Canterbury Tales.
In Stein’s work I found such freedom, an unfetteredness that I had thought only poetry, with its romance and luster, its mystery and abandon, could supply. It was Stein who gave me the nerve to start writing prose poems that slowly would lengthen into short stories and, years later, into a novel. Stein who made me seek out other fiction writers—George Eliot, Charlotte Bronte, Edith Wharton, Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf—whose biographies I had devoured but whose books I had never read. Stein who clearly proved to me that a writer could have, in addition to reputation, a life!
What has stayed with me about Gertrude Stein is that she was a genius. Like Wittgenstein—another passionate promoter of one’s own “vocabulary of thinking”—Stein’s work made me laugh. Better put, her writing (and his) tickled my mind at its absolute core. What a sense of delight and well-being I experienced reading Stein’s splendid little sentences, crafted and canny like no others. The world of her words—stringent, moony, repetitive, humorous, surreal—still makes me long to linger in them, subsist on them, claim them as my own.