Gertrude Stein and the Present [Reprint 2014 ed.] 9780674592964, 9780674592902

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GERTRUDE STEIN AND THE PRESENT

GERTRUDE STEIN AND THE PRESENT

Allegra Stewart

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge • Massachusetts 1967

© Copyright 1967 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Distributed in Great Britain by Oxford University Press, London Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 67-20884 Printed in the United States of America

FOR MY SISTER LUCILLE with affection and gratitude

PREFACE

This book is focused upon the underlying experience of contemplation and creative dissociation which seems to me to have determined not only Gertrude Stein's metaphysical outlook but also her poetic practices and purposes. It must be conceded that there is much in Gertrude Stein's life, writing, and personality to suggest the jester as well as the sage. Nevertheless, there is a profound underlying harmony between the search for the "new word" which inspired, for example, Tender Buttons and the philosophical views which become explicit in The Geographical History of America. It is a harmony between principle and application that cannot have evolved arbitrarily. It argues a deep experience of some sort, and it is my conviction that this was the psychological experience of deep concentration, self-realization, or "ingatheredness." Once having found this unity, I have had to take it seriously—in spite of the apparently ordinary ideas and the elements of triviality or frivolity in much of her writing—as a long-neglected clue to the meaning of Gertrude Stein's life and work as a whole. Gertrude Stein, however, always denied any belief in God, the God of the Bible and Western tradition, at least: she seems to have regarded whatever breakthrough she made to her own buried resources as an act of aesthetic creation rather than of religious mysticism. For these reasons she is singularly akin to the twentieth-century spirit as a whole—to the spirit, that is, of the creative minority. For the same reasons

viii

PREFACE

it has been easiest to attack the problem first of all by way of Stein's philosophical ideas. Thus in Chapter One, "Stein and Her Era," I point out her affinities, personal and intellectual, with some of the important philosophers of her own time as well as such earlier men as James and Santayana, Bergson and Whitehead. In Chapter Two, "Language and Vision," I continue the discussion by pointing out the crucial importance, in several contexts, of the moment of dissociation. This point of "unhooking," at which the links between past determining factors and the future are temporarily loosened, was capable of leading, Gertrude Stein thought, to the emergence of new forms in the cosmic process or, in man's experience, to a state of enlarged consciousness. This general explanation is followed by a detailed analysis in my third chapter of Tender Buttons as a verbal mandala— a work formed, I believe, by repeated acts of genuine concentration in the attempt to discover fresh language and to effect a breakthrough to deeper creativity. Many years later, after much work and an inevitable period of aridity and despair, Stein was to write Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights. This odd opera libretto is in subject matter devoted to those Jungian archetypes of self-realization and self-creation which are suggested in veiled fashion in Tender Buttons. It is possible to see, in the curve of Gertrude Stein's life, an effort to counter the naturalistic vision of the cosmos as a purposeless process (a vision she accepted) with a vision of possibility and creativity. Perhaps this effort is most beautifully expressed in a passage from "England": "Anything that is everything and everything that is anywhere and everything that is everywhere has no special singular purpose. If purpose is intellectual then there is a garden, if there

PREFACE

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is a garden there is a fountain, if there is a fountain then there is an intellectual purpose." I wish to express my appreciation to Butler University for a sabbatical leave and a faculty fellowship which enabled me to make a study of the vocabulary of Tender Buttons. In greatly altered form, a small part of the material in Chapter Five appeared in "The Quality of Gertrude Stein's Creativity," American Literature, January 1957. For their thoughtful reading of my manuscript and for their helpful suggestions, my gratitude goes to Harold Watts, Donald Sutherland, and William Alfred. I am more deeply indebted than I know how to say to Rebecca Pitts, who listened to these chapters as they were written and with whom I discussed endlessly the ideas on religion, philosophy, and the arts with which this book is concerned. My thanks go also to Joyce Lebowitz of Harvard University Press for her encouragement and guidance. Quotations from Stein's The Geographical History of America, Everybody's Autobiography, Lectures in America, and Wars I Have Seen are copyright and reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc. The epigraph to Chapter Two is from The Wisdom of Laotse, translated and edited by Lin Yutang (New York: Modern Library, 1948). Grateful acknowledgment is made to the Estate of Gertrude Stein for permission to quote from various writings of Stein's, including Tender Buttons and Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights. A. S. December 1966 Indianapolis, Indiana

CONTENTS

I. II.

III.

Stein and Her Era

3

Language and Vision: A Clue to Steinian Thought

29

Selfhood and the Word: Reflections on Tender Buttons

69

TV. An American Version

V.

of the Faust Legend

141

A Way of Kneeling

189

Index

217

ABBREVIATIONS OF STEIN TITLES

ABT

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1933. E "An Elucidation." Transition, supplement, April 1927. EA Everybody's Autobiography. New York: Random House, 1937. FIA Four in America. Introduction by Thornton Wilder. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1947. GHA The Geographical History of America, or the Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind. Introduction by Thornton Wilder. New York: Random House, 1936. HTW How To Write. Paris: Plain Edition, 1931. LIA Lectures in America. New York: Random House, 1935. LOAP Last Operas and Plays. Edited by Carl Van Vechten. New York, Toronto: Rinehart and Company, 1949. MOA The Making of Americans. Preface by Bernard Fay. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1934. N 'Narration. Introduction by Thornton Wilder. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1935. P Picasso. London: B. T. Batsford, Ltd., 1938. TB Tender Buttons. New York: Claire Marie, 1914 (Reprinted in Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein. Edited by Carl Van Vechten. New York: Random House, 1946.) UK Useful Knowledge. New York: Payson and Clarke, Ltd., 1928. WAM What Are Masterpieces and Why Are There So Few of Them. Introduction by Robert Bartlett Haas. Los Angeles: Conference Press, 1940. WIHS Wars I Have Seen. New York: Random House, 1944.

GERTRUDE STEIN AND THE PRESENT

Hundreds of writers may be found in every long-civilized nation who for a short time believe and make others believe that they see and utter truths, who do not of themselves clothe one thought in its natural garment, but who feed unconsciously on the language created by the primary writers of the country, those, namely, who hold primarily on nature. —Emerson, Nature The care with which the rain is wrong and the green is wrong and the white is wrong, the care with which there is a chair and plenty of breathing. The care with which there is incredible justice and likeness, all this makes a magnificent asparagus, and also a fountain. —Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons

I. STEIN AND HER ERA

Certain European philosophers (especially Martin |ri§v