What is the difference between Shakespeare’s plays and Shakespeare’s sonnets? “Shakespeare’s plays were written as they were written. Shakespeare’s sonnets as they were going to be written.” Sometimes an interesting bit comes upon one suddenly, like a handout on the street: “Henry James had no failure and no success.” Everything is process. There is no need for revision since the work celebrates and represents process itself, like an endless stirring on the stove. One gift never boils away: She is a comedian.
Such was her gift, and she created a style to display the comedy by a deft repetition of word and phrase. To display the comedy of what? Of living, of thinking? The comedy of writing words down on the page, perhaps that most of all. She was not concerned with creating the structure of classical comedy, the examination of folly. What she understands is inadvertence and incongruity. Imperturbability is her mood, and in that she is herself a considerable comic actor, in the line of Buster Keaton.
Remarks are not literature, so she said. But the remark is her triumph. She lives by epigrams and bits of wit cut out of the stretches or repetition, as if by a knife, and mounted in our memory. Her rival in this mastery is Oscar Wilde, with whom she shared many modes of performance: the bold stare that faced down ridicule, a certain ostentation of type, the love of publicity and the iron to endure it.
I like a view but I like to sit with my back to it.
What is the point of being a little boy if you are going to grow up to be a man?
Before the flowers of friendship faded friendship faded.
I am I because my little dog knows me.
Ezra Pound is a village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if not, not.
Oscar Wilde was an aesthete. Gertrude Stein thought up something more stylish and impressive. She came forth as an aesthetician: more severe and riddling, yet dandyish in her handsome wools and velvety in her sentences.
“Continuous present”: Her most valuable continuous present or presence was the alliance with Alice B. Toklas. It appeared she could achieve herself, become Gertrude Stein, without Leo, and she found him expendable. He combined her vanity with a down-turning contentiousness and tedious pretension, all bereft of her revolutionary accent and brilliant dogmatism.
But still she ponders ones and twos and twos not being ones and then had the luck to turn a corner and find this small, neat person from California, one with the intelligence, competence, and devotion to complete the drama of the large, indolent, brooding, ambitious sibyl, herself.
They are a diptych: figures gazing straight ahead, with no hint of Cubist distortion. A museum aspect to their image—wooden, fixed, iconographic in the Byzantine style. They are serene and a bit sly in the direct gaze.
Everything works, above all the division of labor. Carl Van Vechten considered that Gertrude couldn’t sew on a button, couldn’t cook an egg or place a postage stamp of the correct denomination on an envelope. Alice’s labors over the manuscripts, the copying and proofreading, with a numbing attention to the mysteries of the commas that are and the commas that are not, make of her a heroine of minute distinctions.
The Autobiography of Alice B. overwhelms by charm and the richness of the cast and the rosy dawn in Paris at the time. The tone and the wit of the composition stand in an almost perfect balance to the historical vividness of the moment. The book is valiant in self-promotion also, boldly forward in conceit, but that is what spurs the recollection. Otherwise it would not have been worth the effort, Gertrude Stein’s effort.
She enjoyed the Autobiography a good deal more than some of the great personages on the scene. More than one felt himself or herself to be wrongly presented. Matisse was not amused; he charged she knew nothing about painting. Braque was dismayed by her account of the beginnings of Cubism. Tristan Tzara called her “a clinical case of megalomania.”
“Testimony Against Gertrude Stein” appeared in Transition. Eugene Jolas, who edited the pamphlet, wrote: “There is a unanimity of opinion that she had no understanding of what really was happening about her, that the mutation of ideas beneath the surface of the more obvious contacts and clashes of personality during the period escaped her entirely.”
No matter, she was now a bona-fide international celebrity and had an American public. Books, poems, lectures, plays appeared—and she appeared in person. She returned to America in 1934 for a lecture tour, and everyone knew she had said a rose is a rose is a rose. Newspapermen came to the ship, crowds were waiting at the dock. She and Alice were photogenic, and Gertrude was ready with a reply to every question. It is Oscar Wilde landing in America in the 1880s with nothing to declare but his genius.
She returned to Paris, and then there was World War II and the Occupation—tragic, complex events not suitable to her talent and disrupting to her comfort. Her removal from large events, the hypnotic immersion in the centrality of her own being, made it possible for this very noticeable couple to stay on in France, move here and there, get food, in a sense to brazen it out and be there when the Americans arrived. And wasn’t she first and last an American, a true example of the invulnerability of the New World? To be imperturbable, root strong, can be a kind of personal V-day.
Wars I Have Seen, published in 1945, covers these ruminating years in the countryside. It reads like a diary, the recording of events of the day. Perhaps it was dictated to Alice in the evenings. The landscape of the Occupation provided splendid vignettes and an awesome and rich cud of complacency. She did not understand the war, and she did not like things to be troublesome, and so she is increasingly conservative. Both Pétain and Franco pleased her—comfort requires order, that she understood.
But, at last, she had to mull over the question of Jewishness:
The Jews have never been an economic power as anybody knows who knows and as everybody knows who knows. But the Europeans particularly the countries who like to delude their people do not want to know it, and the Jews do not want anybody to know it, although they know it perfectly well they must know it because it would make themselves to themselves feel less important and as they always as the chosen people have felt themselves to be important they do not want anybody to know it.
If it were not for the fact that the reader supplies his own vision of Gertrude and Alice hanging on with the fortitude of lambs hunting for the sheepfold, the whimsicality of Wars would offend. “Oh dear. It would all be so funny if it were not so terrifying and so sad.”
She lived a long time with her wondrous contraption, the Model T of her style, and sometimes she could run on things with a turn of phrase, but sometimes not. So, she opines, “Soviet Russia will end in nothing so will the Roosevelt administration end in nothing because it is not stimulating it will end in nothing.” From the sheep-fold, she took up dangerous challenges and offered a work called “Reflections on the Atomic Bomb.” She found that the bomb was not interesting.
Anyway, she, the first American, loved the GIs, and they loved her. But she didn’t know anything about the young men, and Brewsie and Willie (1946) is the aesthetician’s defeat. The dialogue is atrocious. She had forgotten that she must fabricate speech, not believe she has captured it at the train station. By now, she is speaking in her own voice, just like any other old person, and confident always, she addresses the nation: “Find out the reason why, look facts in the face, not just what they all say, the leaders, but every darn one of you so that a government by the people for the people shall not perish from the earth, it won’t, somebody else will do it if we lie down on the job.” And so on.
Finally she emerged as a strange figure, competitive and jealous and also unworldly in her self-isolation. She could not understand why Ulysses, radical and difficult—or so she had been told for perhaps she hadn’t read it—should have been selling more than The Making of Americans. Joyce is difficult because he has more knowledge, more language, more rhythmical musicality than the reader can easily summon. With Gertrude Stein we are frequently urged to forgetfulness, to erasure of tonal memor
y, so that we may hear the hypnotic murmurings of what is a literature in basic English.
Gertrude Stein, all courage and will, is a soldier of minimalism. Her work, unlike the resonating silences in the art of Samuel Beckett, embodies in its loquacity and verbosity the curious paradox of the minimalist form. This art of the nuance in repetition and placement she shares with the orchestral compositions of Philip Glass.
1987
THE FICTIONS OF AMERICA
Rien ne vous tue un homme comme d’être obligé de représenter un pays.
—JACQUES VACHÉ, in a letter to André Breton, quoted as the frontispiece by Julio Cortázar in Hopscotch
IMAGINATIVE literature does not have a long history in the United States. It is not even as old as the country itself—this strange world always ferociously impatient to reach the twentieth century, bored with the notion of a peasantry, ready from Plymouth Rock for the Model T, without an ivied ruin in its landscape. And proud enough to be young—its youth, as Oscar Wilde observed in his velvet wanderings to the mining camps, being its oldest tradition.
It was not until the nineteenth century that our fertile surroundings produced our handful of reassuring genius in the art of literature. Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, Whitman, Poe, Emily Dickinson, each his own patron you might say, starting anew, giving a special visionary aspect to Ben Franklin’s assurance that God helps those who help themselves.
•
Had we not had the good fortune to bring the English language to the northern woods, there amid the tiresome Wampanoag, and the great American Indian King Philip to be drawn and quartered, dispatched in the diction and rhythms of the King James Bible and Shakespeare, our classics might today be greeted with the glazed condescension so familiar to the recessive languages of the world and to their masterpieces. It is just as well that the feudal-minded Dutch patroons, with their land grants on the Hudson River, for the most part mismanaged, that they did not, in this case, have the “business sense,” the aboriginal maize necessary to prevail. On the other hand, the spirit of Erasmus might have thawed the chilblains of Increase Mather. Everything indeed was, as we say, a toss-up.
But here we are, speaking and writing English, feeling both the last born and yet the overburdened, self-appointed patriarch of the world family. To be a young patriarch is troublesome. It is to be a schoolmaster and to face much recalcitrance in the dormitories of an evening. It is ever burdensome and frustrating, also bankrupting, and offers little except the gratifying self-pity of the dutiful.
Here we are under the celestial protection of two oceans. This protection is one of those matter-of-fact realities scarcely worth noting. The oceans might be as pleasing and impractical as the Rocky Mountains after the wagon trains pushed through. But the oceans are deeply rooted in the American unconscious. Only a savage amount of nudging, shouting, and alarming can make the often exhorted American People feel threatened by insidious microbes and ideological poisons winging in from little islands and destitute countries to the south of us, to be carried on the vapors to Florida and on, on to California. No doubt the fear is cant. What we have is better called annoyance when the microbes are studied under the microscope of military science or contemplated as a sting and rash we could do without.
We are also to be evermindful of the ocean-spanning detonations crossing each other on the two-way street from here to Eastern Europe. Unless intercepted in the heavens, God’s last frontier. The newfound land is not altogether at ease and happy, but other than that . . . fine.
•
The interesting thing is that we are where we are. We are living in the United States, in our mostly temperate and potentially self-sufficient large land mass. Our placement in the scheme of things is more real, more to the point, than our indefinable national character. America is more concrete than American. In spite of the most insistent drumming, we are not a folk. That lump of a word is an elusive signification, but it does appear to have some meaning when one thinks of, for instance, the peoples of Europe.
Even our early settlers are still to be described and accounted for, filled in like characters in a novel, with their accents from the Thames valley and the Outer Hebrides, their frieze coats, worsted stockings, and faces pitted with smallpox. The Harvard historian Bernard Bailyn has written recently about the “peopling of British North America” in the late eighteenth century, before our revolution, in preindustrial America. At that time the press for immigration from the British Isles became so intense and politically embarrassing that serious thinkers considered it should be put under a government ban—in the manner of one of the great powers of the present day. Some were convicts, but many were dispossessed peasants and unemployed artisans who, needing to pay debts incurred by the often thieving brokers of the sea passage, allowed themselves to become indentured servants, to be sold on arrival, and committed to service for five years. These transatlantic crossings, removal from the pastures and cemeteries of one’s ancestors, from the worn cobbles of London, represented the greatest population movement in early modern history. From the very first the American imagination was faced with the promise of the land and the cultural instability of its uprooted people.
•
Englishmen, involuntary slaves from Africa, families from the whole span of Europe, Asia, and the present, the 1980s, high birthrate of the new Spanish-speaking arrivals, are all somehow to be translated, perhaps transmogrified, into Americanness. We were never quite settled and perhaps are never to be. Migrations continue, surge, in stealth or otherwise, by land and water, ditch, over every porous border:
The dreadful sundry of this world,
The Cuban, Polodowsky,
The Mexican women,
The Negro undertaker
Killing the time between corpses
Fishing for crayfish . . .
(Wallace Stevens)
“The dreadful sundry” is in reality to be thought of as a group of lottery winners, all of us. To be living here, and not in what we mostly believe is the insupportable there, elsewhere, is to be assimilated into a powerful abstraction, the abstraction of never-ending possibility. The American situation is not so much to overthrow the past as to overthrow the future before it arrives as a stasis; thus in our architecture the destruction of the new in favor of the newer. The country is concrete in its parts: this town, this group, this couple, this family, this western or eastern or southern landscape. But to be an American is to try to make a rock out of a waterfall.
In our fiction it has always been difficult to find the parts that would somehow stand for the whole. Just as our metropolis, Manhattan, for all its dominance as a vision of the twentieth century, does not have the wholeness of London, Paris, or Rome, is not quite the measure of national destiny, so the country is not a whole, despite its being a genuine union and not a spurious union of conquered nationalities.
America does not easily lend itself to metaphorical representation. Perhaps Ahab, in Moby-Dick, in malevolent pursuit of the white whale, the source of injury, pursuit unto death, is a symbolic temptation of power and obsession in battle with the vastness. And we might offer The Golden Bowl, The Scarlet Letter, Huckleberry Finn, The Great Gatsby, and Leaves of Grass, all powerfully resonant, somehow going beyond their creative terms and representing an intuition of national character and fate.
•
As a large and modern destiny, the country is resistant, forever in transition. When Kafka sat down to write Amerika, a place he had never seen, he said he came to the creation by way of Benjamin Franklin, “the first American dummy,” as D. H. Lawrence called him. But somehow Amerika is the least “modern” of Kafka’s works. He, who lived his short life under the shadows of the ancient city of Prague, could not find in his imagination a symbolic center for the wanderings of the cheerful, bewildered Karl Rossmann in the “boundless theatre” of the space, with a sign saying “Everyone Is Welcome.”
The episodic Amerika bears a resemblance, or a counterresemblance, to Melville�
�s The Confidence-Man, usually considered a failure and certainly a failure at its birth. This bitter litany of crookedness and dissemblance is bereft of anything resembling a sympathetic character; it is a curiosity of moral chagrin, or worse, moral revulsion, first published in 1857. Melville gathers his unseemly crowd on a steamboat going from St. Louis to New Orleans, down the Mississippi. The crowd displays the phantom physiognomy of the American:
Natives of all sorts, and foreigners; men of business and men of pleasure; parlor men and backwoodsmen; farm-hunters and fame-hunters; heiress-hunters, gold-hunters, buffalo-hunters, bee-hunters, happiness-hunters, truth-hunters, and still keener hunters after all these hunters.
Hunters, on the trail, wary and seeking whatever may be off guard. On and on Melville goes with his listing: Quakers, soldiers, slaves, Creoles, old-fashioned French Jews, Mormons and Papists, Sioux chiefs, hard-shell Baptists and clay eaters . . .
In Amerika Karl Rossmann’s journey, meeting after meeting, incident after incident, that sort of inchoate journey, is held together by the naïve hope and the bounding, naïve energy of a young immigrant. A folly of misunderstandings in a world so ready with offerings and disappearances it defeats the imagination. “I greet you in the name of the Theatre of Oklahoma.” The biggest theater in the world, “almost no limits to it.” All of this at the end of the novel which remained unfinished. The actual last words Kafka wrote are interesting. Karl is on the train to Oklahoma, going across America:
The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick Page 47