Quoting Gertrude Stein

Here’s my own small anniversary: 50 times Gertie, many more quotes! Inspired by the sisterhood of She Writes, in Oct. 2009, I started sharing my musings about my first Muse — my passion (and sometimes exasperation) for Stein. 50 is a good moment to take a little loop backward and solve one of her mysteries… In post # 2, I had already alluded to Blood on the Dining-Room Floor: A Murder Mystery . Now it’s time to dive in.
In this famous photograph, Gertrude Stein sits with her massive back turned to the world, at her desk in Bilignin, in the southeast of France, writing about being unable to write. She reports what is happening in and around the deceptively dreamy little village while “it” — the writing — is “not happening.” Continue reading →

A hearty Happy Birthday to She Writes!

In “Alphabets and Birthdays” Gertrude suggests: “And you have to think of alphabets too, without an alphabet well without names where are you, and birthdays are very favorable too, otherwise who are you.” Continue reading →

“I am writing for myself and strangers.” Quoting Stein leads to inevitable creativity. I enjoyed the comment to my last blog (# 44) that offered a Stein quote: “I am writing for myself and strangers. The strangers, dear Reader, are an afterthought.” This came from Germany, from She Writer Ginster Votteler who got it from Wilson Sherwin’s group “Favorite Quotes About Writing” contributed by She Writer Amy-Jo Sprague, who got it…? I wonder excitedly. Did she invent it? Does it sound like Stein? Continue reading →

There is a general consensus that there are two Gertrude Steins: one readable, the other not. One easily accessible, the other not. I found this to be true and not true. Even her earliest work in fairly simple story-telling prose — stories like “Melanctha” of Three Lives (1903-1906)– felt to me at first like rock-climbing because of her uniquely strange, perilous way of using narrative. Continue reading →

/9L6M3P3S3ZYlSY5u4vrHlaEIyctP2UQkrcAIh8VZqoPfwPOpOdLXnipAHl1oOO0WSAcV6sokirCXCBiJ0NHwjGPpV*BYANfW/GsandFlag191small.jpg” />

“America is my country and Paris is my home town.”
May concludes the six-month USA tour of Gertrude and Alice that made Gertrude so famous that ten years later, when GIs had liberated France, soldiers would knock at her door to say hello. Paris had become the place where one could look up Gertrude Stein and knock at her door. “I like to be a celebrity a real celebrity who can decide who they want to meet and say so and they come or do not come as you want them. I never imagined that would happen to me to be a celebrity like that but it did and when it did I liked it…” (Everybody’s Autobiography)
During Stein’s absence, however, Paris had also become a literary battleground. “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas” had been read (and misread, in ad-hoc translations) by the artists and writers who appeared in the book. A good number of them were not amused. They set out to rebut Stein’s portrayal of them and her story of the birth of modernism in a pamphlet published in February 1935 as a supplement to the magazine transition. This “Testimony against Gertrude Stein” contained attacks by Matisse and Braque, Maria and Eugene Jolas (the editors of transition) and, most viciously, by Tristan Tzara who stamped her as “a clinical case of megalomania.” “Far be it from me to throw any doubt upon the fact that Miss Stein is a genius,” Tzara wrote. “We have seen plenty of those. Not that Miss Toklas is convinced of it. To tell the truth, all this would have no importance if it took place in the family circle between two maiden ladies greedy for fame and publicity.”
Stein was not happy with this concerted attack but while she publicly brushed it off as “infantish” it only served to make her book more famous. In 1933 already, Stein had had a premonition. In her highly experimental “Stanzas in Meditation” she wrote:
“I will be well welcome when I come.
Because I am coming.
Certainly I come having come.”