Quoting Gertrude Stein

Post # 5. Today I just call for players: Who’s afraid of Gertrude Stein? Send in, add in your favorite quotes and join the delight and delirium! Here is my favorite quote of the day: “Don’t worry you will.”

Post # 4, day 4.
This is about how writing is written (How Writing is Written – one of the 600 titles of Stein’s oeuvre) and how writing is read.

Do you remember what you felt and thought when you first heard the line “A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose”? How old were you? Where were you when the first rose of modernism was handed to you? I was a school girl in Germany, 15 or 16 years old. I was absolutely clueless why my older friends all seemed delighted, amused, intellectually impressed with this rose. What did it mean? Why didn’t I “get” it? I felt stupid but also fascinated by the riddle. Intrigued by the sound of it. One could say I caught a perfume at the same time as the sting of a thorn. Nobody in my circle ever mentioned that Stein was a lesbian, but I saw the famous photographs by Man Ray, the cool, stern profile of an emperor who clearly looked like s/he meant what s/he said. She also said that “commas hold your coat for you” and this I understood. This one I got. I felt I had to read Gertrude Stein. Something “simple”: her stories about three women, “Three Lives”. Looking back today I am amazed that I found it impossible. I did not understand what she was doing with her strangely dressed sentences and on and on repetitions. She vexed me and bored me because I didn’t find an entry. She remained the proverbial closed book, but a book hiding the secret of a rose…
These paradoxical feelings – a powerful attraction and vexation – stayed with me even when I recognized that she had been my first Muse and when my wrestling with this Muse became an adventure and brought me the first results.
Stay tuned…

Post # 3 in anticipation of my photobiography coming out again at Algonquin (after having been a collector’s item!)
I want to add a word to my last post on fame. A topic so important to all of us. Success, fame, the dream of recognition — the very thing that got Gertrude Stein to feel “completely lost” when it happened to her. In my last post I told you the story, but here is a quote that gave me a shock when I came upon it by paging through my many gathered quotes. She seems to be speaking directly to us, today. The quote gives me a vertigo because of its immediate relevance, its questioning, its thought-provoking emotions…

“Picasso used to be fond of saying that when everybody knew about you and admired your work there were just about the same two or three who were really interested as when nobody knew about you, but does it make any difference. In writing the Making of Americans I said I write for myself and strangers and then later now I know these strangers, are they still strangers, well anyway that too does not really bother me, the only thing that really bothers me is that the earth now is all covered over with people and that hearing anybody is not of any particular importance because anybody can know anybody.
That is really why the only novels possible these days are detective stories, where the only person of any importance is dead.” (Everybody’s Autobiography)

Quote # 2. “I am I because my little dog knows me.”

It sounds to me like something a child would feel and say. Or a woman who is not sure who she is.
Today, exactly 75 years ago, Gertrude set out with Alice from Le Havre on board the SS Champlain to conquer America on a lecture tour. But before they set out, Gertrude had indeed lost the sense of who she was. She had suffered the first writing block of her life.
At the age of 59, the prolific author had finally had her first-ever success. “The Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas” (1933), penned by Gertrude in the witty, sarcastic tone of voice of Alice, had become a bestseller. Suddenly famous, imagining a large audience eager to listen to her, she fell silent.
How touching that the language revolutionary who appeared so sure of herself (“I am the literary Einstein of the century”) lost her balance through fame!
In her country house in Bilignin (remember: “A house in the country is not a country house”) she struggled to find her voice again. She began the one and only detective novel she ever wrote: “Blood on the Dining-Room Floor”, noting the crimes of passion and other strange happenings around her in the country-side, while taking note of what was NOT happening.”Writing was not happening.” Very often in this detective novel some woman “tried and cried”… That woman, in fact, was Gertrude herself. Gertrude who had lost her voice, her identity, and was trying to figure out what was happening — to her.
But there was someone, I imagine, for whom she had not changed one bit. Her poodle Basket and her chihuahua Byron alias Pépé still knew her exactly as she had always been.