BOOKS
Funny Being a Genius
BY LAIN HAMILTON
Heaven forbid Miss Stein should become a fashion. —Katherine Mansfield in The Atherueum.
Barr she did. Katherine Mansfield's pious appeal was uttered in 1920, and twenty-one years later, when Random House published Ida, A Novel, Bennett Cerf wrote in the blurb : • . . here it is, presented faithfully to you by a publisher who rarely has the faintest idea of what Miss Stein is talking about, but who admires her from the bottom of his heart for her courage and for her abounding love of humanity and freedom.' Of the eponymous heroine of this novel, an admirer said that she was a 'publicity saint'—Gertrude Stein plus the Duchess of Windsor, Garbo, Dulcinea and Helen of Troy. The author herself said : 'Ida decided that she was just going to talk to herself. Anybody could stand around and listen but as for her she was just going to talk to herself.'
And there we have Gertrude Stein.
She loved above all, this hefty expatriate whom Scott Fitzgerald once called the Great Stone Face, the squeak of her own pencil stringing one mono- syllable after another, regardless, for the most part, of grammar and syntax, the conveniences and courtesies of punctuation, and mere meaning. Sometimes she could use longer words, as when she elected to lay down the law on How to Write: A narrative is in revision a narrative is in division a narrative is in reconciliation a narra- tive is in a narrative is they is in they that the the that that is the and then . .
in which one can see an elemental germ of per- ception multiplying itself into gibberish.
Miss Elizabeth Sprigge's biography* is a book that was well worth writing and publishing— and reading, especially by authors and critics of the younger generation. In every toppled reputa- tion there is an awful warning, and the broken stones of this one spell out catastrophe itself in a variety of dialects. But the first and most elementary instruction imparted by Miss Sprigge, unwittingly perhaps, is that mere modernity, excessively self-insistent contemporaneity, is something to be approached by anybody in any generation with a cool head and a steady hand. When one surveys the debris of verbiage that is Gertrude Stein's work—the mountains of exer- cise-books and galley-proofs and bound volumes from which can be extracted no more nourish- ment than from a peck of 'breakfast cereal'—one must remember first that when they were growing there were sane men who thought they saw the hills of heaven. Painters as hard-headed as Picasso (although there were others who took a different view) thought the world of her. Lytton * GERTRUDE STEIN: Her Life and Work. (Hamish Hamilton, 25s.) Strachey and George Moore had the kindness to listen to her. H. G. Wells read her with a 'deepening pleasure and admiration.' She was even capable of fussing Bertrand Russell. While she was pouring forth what must now seem to anybody under forty the idlest of sound and fury signifying nothing (or, worse still, very little— for there can be a certain virtue in pure nonsense), Sherwood Anderson was admiring her, and so was E. M. Forster. The young Ernest Hemingway fell, for a time under her spell. T. S. Eliot wrote: 'I am immensely interested in anything you write.' Even Edmund Wilson, not the most pacific of critics, held at least half of his fire. Edith Sitwell was a close friend and admirer. She could, with impunity, patronise James Joyce. Thornton Wilder sat at her feet. By the middle Thirties, as you may see, she had amassed an imposing pile of references and could say herself, without being howled down by the intelligentsia : Einstein was the creative philosophic mind of the century and I have been the creative literary mind of the century. . . .
How had all this come about?
Gertrude Stein was born in Pennsylvania of Bavarian Jewish stock. In childhood she travelled in Europe, read omnivorously, and developed slowly. California, where the family had moved when she was small, was and remained her real home. At Harvard (Radcliffe College) she listened to the teaching of William James and absorbed a good deal of it. With her brother Leo, who had an equal dislike of their father, she went to Europe again, returning to study psychology at the John Hopkins Medical School, Baltimore. Here, we learn from Miss Sprigge, the big girl was often worried about her health and once hired a welter-weight to pummel her : 'Now give me one on the jaw! Now give me one in the kidney!'
Some of the difficulties which she must have experienced during this period may be deduced from her later remark : 'I always did thank God I wasn't born a woman!'
At the age of twenty-six she failed to take her degree, and that was the end of America. In 1903 she set up house in Paris with Leo and started collecting pictures : a Daumier, a Manet, two Renoirs, two Cdzannes, a Toulouse-Lautrec, a Gauguin. She wrote Three Lives, of which she remarked that it was 'a noble combination of Swift and Matisse.' Her interest in post-impres- sionist painting, in all its fragmented facets, grew and in 1906, when she was thirty-two, she met Pablo Picasso. This meeting, and that of the fol- lowing year with Alice B. Toklas, set her life on the course it held until cancer killed her in 1946.
Her writings, with a few exceptions, grew steadily wordier and more wilfully eccentric, like those of a not particularly innocent child who • has the idea that if he only covers enough sheets with enough words, and to hell with the order, he will eventually be patted on the head and called a clever boy. The most tedious aspect of her work at its clearest and most perceptive (and I shall return to this) is the relentless succession of monosyllables, the merciless repetitions. Writ- ing in a very basic sort of basic English she required chapters to convey a meaning which could, in any more civilised idiom, have been expressed, in its totality of shades, in a paragraph. She could praise Juan Gris on his death by say- ing: 'He made something that is to be measured'; but she herself, desperate to be an artist in words and to be famous for her art, renounced all limits. Doing most of her 'writing' by night, 'she wrote down whatever came into her head and stopped when the flow ceased'; and in the morning, as she admitted herself, she had not the faintest recol- lection of what she had written. But it was not automatic writing: a pity, for if she had tapped the unconscious something more amusing might have emerged. As it was, she was just a large, hard-faced, middle-aged' American lady in Paris sitting at a desk surrounded by post-impressionist paintings and, perfectly consciously, writing words down in exercise books.
That she should have taken herself in, and demanded to be treated seriously, is not, perhaps —given her hard hunger for adulation—very surprising. That she should have taken so many others in, apart from the merely sycophantic, is —as this sort of discovery perennially is—mildly depressing. But were they all taken in? When I read some of their protestations in this ample biography I had the same feeling of gloom that comes over me when I hear an acquaintance, frantic lest his taste should be thought &mode, praising some fashionable novelist or poet or playwright whom he believes to be a poorish second-rate at best. No amount of gazing at ruins will cure us of our gullibility, hypocrisy, desire to keep up with the Joneses, and, when all is said, uncertainty.
For Gertrude Stein was not a negligible person. The 'old covered-wagon' was no mere laughing- stock even if the populace of a village in Spain, thinking her a travelling bishop, did queue up to kiss her ring. She turned up in Paris when the world of art was splintering into a bewilderment of brilliant fragments. She could pick the winners, in those early days at least, and she backed them. In his recent Old Friends Mr. Clive Bell suggests that she had no genuine feeling for visual art. This is belied, in my view, not only by her collec- tion but by her book on Picasso which tells more about that painter and his vision (in execrable prose, certainly) than any other. She knew, intuitively, the painterly process; and it was her misfortune to attempt to do with words what she might conceivably have learned to do with paint. Failing that, she might have made herself a good art critic. Or even—although she protested that she didn't know how to sell on a margin—a pretty sharp dealer. For the final impression that I have from Miss Sprigge's biography is that there were very few flies on Gertrude Stein.
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