She had no manuscript, Hawthorne insists; it did not exist. And he concludes:
Thus there appears to have been a total collapse in poor Margaret, morally and intellectually, and tragic as her catastrophe was, Providence was, after all, kind in putting her, and her clownish husband, and their child, on board that fated ship . . . a strange, heavy, unpliable, and in many respects, defective and evil nature . . . she proved herself a woman after all and fell like the lowest of her sisters.
1986
[1] It was from Bell Gale Chevigny’s book, Margaret Fuller: The Woman and the Myth, with its masterly organization of many then-unpublished letters, along with the comments of contemporaries, that I came first to understand the complexity of Margaret Fuller and her situation.
[2] I am indebted for much about the European period of Margaret Fuller’s life to Joseph J. Deiss, The Roman Years of Margaret Fuller.
GERTRUDE STEIN
IN THE midst of her unflagging cheerfulness and confidence, Gertrude Stein can be a pitiless companion. Insomniac rhythms and melodious drummings: She likes to tell you what you know and to tell it again and sometimes to let up for a bit only to tell you once more: “To know all the kinds of ways then to make men and women one must know all the ways some are like others of them, are different from others of them, so then there come to be kinds of them.”
Her writing, T. S. Eliot once said, “has a kinship with the saxophone.” That could be one of her own throwaways, but she would not have used a word like saxophone. The saxophone is an object with a history, and she didn’t care much for nouns with such unique significance.
In any case, Gertrude Stein was born in 1874, nearly thirty years after the birth of the saxophone. Her family and its situation must have been the womb of her outlandish confidence, confidence of a degree amazing. She was, after all, determined to be, even if in absentia, or because of that exile, our country’s historian. There is nothing hothouse in this peculiar American princess. For one thing, she is as sturdy as a turnip—the last resort of the starving, and native to the Old World, as the dictionary has it. A tough root of some sort; and yet she is mesmerized and isolated, castlebound, too, under the enchantments of her own devising.
What can Eliot mean? The saxophone, invented in 1846 by Adolphe Sax, has little standing in the hereditary precincts of the classical orchestra. So it must be that Gertrude Stein is a barbaric and illicit intrusion. Preceding the curiosity of the saxophone, Eliot said about her work: “It is not improving, it is not amusing, it is not interesting, it is not good for one’s mind.” No doubt, Eliot wasn’t aware of the improvisations of the great American masters of the saxophone.
Confidence is highly regarded by both citizen and nation; it is altogether warm and loving. Without confidence, fidelity to death, as it were, the work Gertrude Stein actually produced cannot easily be imagined. Other writings, perhaps, since possibility was everywhere in her; but not what we have, not what she did. In her life, confidence and its not-too-gradual ascent into egotism combined with a certain laziness and insolence. It was her genius to make the two work together like a machine, a wondrous contraption, something futuristic and patented for her use.
She wrote her Cambridge lecture at the height of her fame, while waiting for her car to be fixed. She sat down on the fender of another car and, waiting around, wrote “Composition as Explanation.” Several hours it took her: “Everything is the same except composition and as the composition is different and always going to be different everything is not the same.” So it was. And: “Now if we write, we write; and these things we know flow down our arm and come out on the page.” Yes. So she told Thornton Wilder.
Many wires and pieces of string went into the contraption, the tinkering, and the one result was that she wrote at great length and used a vocabulary very, very small. It was her original idea to make this vocabulary sufficient for immensities of conception, America, Americans, being perhaps her favorite challenge. When she is not tinkering, we can see her like a peasant assaulting the chicken for Sunday dinner. She would wring the neck of her words. And wring the neck of sentences, also.
Miss Stein lived until 1946, through two world wars and much else. Perhaps she never seemed young, and everyone would certainly have wished for her to live on and on, since there is a Methuselah prodigiousness about her. Everything we know about her life contributes to her being.
When was she not a prodigy—and even without exerting herself to represent the exceptional in action? She went to Harvard and studied with William James. Anecdotes appeared on her doorstep, anecdotes quite enduring. No, she didn’t want to take an examination because the day was too fine. William James understood and gave her the highest mark in the course, if we can trust the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, which we can and cannot.
Premedical studies at John Hopkins; that is part of her aura. Perhaps she’s a scientist, so look, when the pages confuse, for the rigors of the laboratory. She abandoned the medical studies, and we must say that, too, added something to the whole. The willful simplification she practiced can make her, to some, appear to be a philosopher in the most difficult mode of our own period.
It will be said William James taught her that everything must be considered, nothing rejected. Simple enough and not quite a discovery. What you can say is that while she was not learning, actively not learning, other young women were going to finishing schools, primping, dancing, and having babies, and she was becoming Gertrude Stein. Every refusal was interesting, a word she liked very much.
Both of her parents were German Jews. Whether she thought of herself as Jewish is hard to say. Perhaps she didn’t, or not quite. She didn’t like to be defined and that helped her to stay on in Occupied France. Her brother Leo thought of himself as Jewish, even at Harvard—or (why not?) certainly at Harvard.
Her parents were, in terms appropriate for American history, early settlers. That she knew and took in seriously. If, as one can read, the definition of Old New York, of New York aristocracy, is to have made your money before the Civil War, the Steins were aristocrats. The Stein brothers, one of whom was her father, arrived in 1841; her mother’s family had settled in Baltimore previously.
A Stein Brothers clothing store was set up in Baltimore with success, but Gertrude’s father and the brother moved on to Allegheny, Pennsylvania, where she was born. Then quite soon the characteristic behavior of the family began to assert itself. They showed a desire to take off, for Europe. They are inclined to be Americans abroad.
The family finances are not easy to make out, at the beginning or at the end. But even when the Allegheny store was not quite flourishing, Amelia Stein took herself and the children to Vienna. There they lived with governesses and tutors, the lessons and practices of the upper class. The Steins early on must have realized that one could be almost rich in Europe at that time without being rich enough at home. And they liked to buy things, to go shopping. The mother and children went to Paris to buy clothes and trinkets and to have a good time. In a later period, while Gertrude and Leo remained abroad, the older brother, Michael, and his wife, Sarah, came back to stun California with their collection of modern paintings.
From Pennsylvania, the family settled in Oakland, California, and the father, Daniel Stein, went into the streetcar business—a good career move, it would be called nowadays, even if Daniel was not quite the master of it. He died when Gertrude Stein was seventeen, and she wrote about his disappearance: “Then our life without a father began a very pleasant one.” But more of that later, about the pleasantness of not having family members and the strain when you have them.
The older brother, Michael, took over the family business and made good investments for the fine purpose of not having to work. He was able to set Gertrude and Leo up abroad: a princely situation. Michael and his wife, Sarah, were connoisseurs of the new, not of the refectory table from an old monastery or the great decorated urns to put in the hall and fill with dead reeds. For a time, they lived just o
utside Paris in a house designed by Le Corbusier.
In this family, you are not concerned with provincials—never at any point in their history. Not one of them seemed afflicted with puritanical, thrifty scruples, with denial or failure of nerve. Works of art were, in the end, their most daring and prudent investment. The paintings and the great international celebrity of the creative one, Gertrude, and even the fading claims of Leo make of the Steins one of the truly glittering American families. They stand in history along with the Adams and James families—along with if not quite commensurate with. They were immensely important in the history of American taste, by way of their promotion of modern painting through their collections and in their influence on the many painters, writers, and intellectuals who came to the salon on the rue de Fleurus.
The Cone sisters of Baltimore, contemporaries of the Steins, were to merit a kind of immortality when they used their cotton-mill fortune to buy Manets, Renoirs, Cézannes, and Matisses for the later glory of the Baltimore Museum. Acquisition has need of special conviction and taste, but neither of the Cone women could claim for themselves an art to rank with that of Cézanne and Picasso—a claim that Gertrude Stein did not hesitate to make.
Picasso, bewildered by the Stein entourage, coming and going in Paris, said: “They are not women. They are not men. They are Americans.”
The Stein family was to be The Making of Americans. “It has always seemed to me a rare privilege, this of being an American, a real American, one whose tradition it has taken scarcely sixty years to create.” There is no doubt Gertrude knows how to look at it, this subject of being American—the sixty years names it just right. An amused chauvinism—that is her tone. And elsewhere she notes that America is the oldest country in the world because it’s been in the twentieth century the longest, something like that.
Still, it must be said Gertrude Stein feels more sentiment for America than she does for her fellow Steins, except as a subject. The mother, the Baltimore bride, faded into illness and at last died when Gertrude was fourteen: “We had already had the habit of doing without her.” Simon, older (Gertrude was the youngest), ate a lot and was slow. Bertha, well, she never cared for Bertha: “It is natural not to care for a sister, certainly not when she is four years older and grinds her teeth at night.”
The alliance between Gertrude and Leo ended in bitter contempt on both sides. It was said that Gertrude gave Picasso’s portrait of Leo to Etta Cone in order to get it off the wall. When Gertrude died, she and Leo were so greatly estranged he knew of her death only by reading about it in the papers. His comment was: “I can’t say it touched me. I had lost not only all regard, but all respect for her.” They were an odd lot, except for Michael, but then, as she put it herself: “It takes time to make queer people, and to have others who can know it, time and a certainty of means.”
Three Lives was finished in 1906, published in 1909—in every way a work of resonating originality, even if no aspect of its striking manner will persist in the eccentric shape of the works that follow. The stories are composed in the manner of a tale. The characters are sketched by a trait or two, and they pace through their lives, as the pattern has ordained; and then each one dies.
Sometimes there is an echo of realistic fiction, the setting of a scene, the filling in of detail, but we are given almost everything by assertion, and thus there is an archaic quality to the tone. But, of course, the tone is new, partly because of this archaic picturing. No other writer would have composed these moving portraits as Gertrude Stein composed them. One, “Melanctha,” is of a higher order than the other two, “The Good Anna” and “The Gentle Lena.”
Nothing is sentimental. We are not asked to experience more emotion than the scene can render; the stories do not manipulate in excess of their own terms. A distance is maintained, a distance—perhaps it is objectivity—that provides a fresh, bare surface for the sketching of the lives of the two German women of what used to be called “the serving class” and the extraordinary daring of the picture of Negro life and character as she has imagined it.
“Melanctha” is the most challenging as a composition, and the character is the most challenging because she has an interior life. The presentation is for the most part in dialogue of a radical brilliance that lies on the page with a calm defiance. It is as stunning today as when it was first written.
Whether this dialogue is the natural rhythm of Negro speech is not altogether the point. Such a rhythm if discovered for transcription cannot be copyrighted; no author can own it for a certain number of pages. On the other hand, it is clear that the language of “Melanctha” is some kind of speech rhythm not written down before, some catching of accent and flow the reader recognizes without being able to name. Of course, it is a literary language, constructed of repetition, repeated emphasis, all with great musicality. There is a stilted openness to it; that is, it is both declamatory, unnatural, and yet somehow lifelike. It is a courteous dialogue and not condescending because it does not proceed from models, from a spurious idea, from the shelf of a secondhand store.
Inauthenticity is so often remarked when authors need to find a speech for those not from their own class or experience. Stephen Crane’s powerful but badly written Maggie: A Girl of the Streets is an example of prefab ethnic or class speech. “Hully gee!” said he, “does mugs can’t phase me. Dey knows I kin wipe up d’street wid any tree of dem”—Hell’s Kitchen.
Gertrude Stein’s way in “Melanctha” is so simple and arresting that her ear, in an offhand passage, does have a ghostly attuning. Note the distribution of the yous in a plain bit of dialogue spoken by Melanctha’s father: “Why don’t you see to that girl better you, you’re her mother.” Pure ear, quite different from the formal cadences of Dr. Jeff Campbell, the mellifluous suitor with his high-pitched arias to the “wandering” Melanctha: “It certainly does sound a little like I don’t know very well what I do mean, when you put it like that to me, Miss Melanctha, but that’s just because you don’t understand enough about what I meant, by what I was just saying to you.”
Hemingway learned from Gertrude Stein how to become Ernest Hemingway. Perhaps one could say that. He decided most of all to strip down his sentences. (It is curious to learn condensation from Stein, who stripped, reduced, and simplified only to add up without mercy, making her prose an intimidating heap of bare bones, among other things.) One can see it in 1921—before they had met, but not before he would have read Three Lives. Perhaps he learned more from the yous than from the more insistent rhythms in “Melanctha.”
From “Up in Michigan”:
Liz liked Jim very much. She liked it the way he walked over from the shop and often went to the kitchen door to watch for him to start down the road. She liked it about his mustache. . . .
She liked it very much that he didn’t look like a blacksmith. She liked it how much D. J. Smith and Mrs. Smith liked Jim. One day she found that she liked it the way the hair was black on his arms and how white they were above the tanned line when he washed up in the washbasin outside the house.
And then he ends the paragraph: “Liking that made her feel funny.” Gertrude Stein would not have written the last line. It is too girlish for her, and is a repudiation of the tone and rhythm that goes before.
Soon after Three Lives, The Making of Americans was resumed, since it had been started earlier. It was taken up—if that is not a contradiction of what it is, a dive into the deep waters of the Stein Sea. Down into the Stein Sea she went between 1906 and 1908, and the book was not actually published until 1925, for reasons not a mystery. It is very long. It swims about and about and farther and farther out with the murmurous monotony of untroubled waters.
The enormous ambition of the book is shown in the roundness of the title. It may be a sort of chronicle, imaginative history, of the Stein family, but that’s the least of it. It is the making of Americans, just as she says. That is the intention.
In his introduction, Bernard Fay writes, not without leanin
g in the direction of her own style: “She likes too much the present; she is too fond of words; she has too strongly the love of life; she is too far from death, to be satisfied with anything but the whole of America.”
Consider her idea of the bottom nature of human beings: “A man in his living has many things inside him, he has in him his way of beginning; this can come too from a mixture in him, from the bottom nature of him.” So we live and so we die. “Any one has come to be a dead one. Any one has not come to be such a one to be a dead one. Many who were living have come to be a dead one.” The cold, black suet-pudding of her style, said Wyndham Lewis.
The “continuous present” is another of her rhetorical discoveries, and it seems to be just a circling round and round, a not going back or forward. Four in America: It is not clear how much she knows about her four Americans, how much she wished to know about Ulysses Grant, Henry James, the Wright Brothers, and George Washington. Her meditations do not run to facts or dates, and her vanity would preclude a quotation or even an appropriation. Instead, she asks herself what the four would have done had they been other than what they were. Suppose Grant to be a saint, Henry James a general, the Wright Brothers painters, George Washington a novelist.
The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick Page 46