Happy birthday, Gertie!
She is turning 136 this year in her very own ageless way.
And here is the mythical birth as told in the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas:
“Gertrude Stein was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania. As I am an ardent californian and as she spent her youth there I have often begged her to be born in California but she has always remained firmly born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania. Continue reading
For the beginning of a busy week:
“It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.”
“The world is covered all over with people but geniuses are very few. Interesting if true and it is true.”
“And so what is it that makes you a genius. Well yes what is it.”
Here is the author who said, “work is something I cannot do,” busy in her tomato patch of her house in the country that was a country house. It’s a good reminder to look for the humor and self-irony in Stein’s writing, to read her with awe, if you like, and with a big grain of salt.
What’s she cooking up? “Grammar means that it has to be prepared and cooked…” (How to Write)
There are always surprises. Until a few days ago, I had never seen this photo of Gert and Alice in their country kitchen, in Occupied France, in 1942. It was found by my friend, Stein collector Hans Gallas, who created the international events for “Gertrude and Alice: 100 Years, 100 Roses” http://www.archives.scene4.com/jun-2007/html/karrenalenier0607.html– the 100th anniversary of their first meeting, Nov. 7, 1907, resp. 2007. (See the website and blog at http://gertrudeandalice.com/blog/) As far as I know nobody who was anybody has had photographic access to the privacy of Alice’s kitchen.
Like a child, Gertie is peeking into Alice’s big pot under what looks like a French flash-light. She herself would be cooking up words of course. And sentences. And paragraphs. “A sentence is not emotional a paragraph is.”
For her Sunday special, it would perhaps be a sentence that holds the emotional energy and charge of a whole paragraph. Here now a few examples that she dished up for her American audience when she went to explain poetry and grammar and “How to write”:
“…I worked a lot at this thing trying to find out just exactly what the balance the emotional balance of a sentence is and what the emotional balance of a paragraph is and if it were possible to make even in a short sentence the two things come to be one. I think I did a few times succeed. Will you listen to one or two sentences where I did think I had done this thing.
“He looks like a young man grown old.”
“It looks like a garden but he had hurt himself by accident.”
“A dog which you have never had before has sighed.”
“Battles are named because there have been hills which have made a hill in a battle.”
“A bay and hills hills are surrounded by their having their distance very near.”
“The thing to remember is that if it is not if it is not what having left it to them makes it be very likely as likely as they would be after all after all choosing choosing to be here on time.”
And did she succeed?
I would add this very convincing sentence-paragraph: Why do something if it can be done.
Stay tuned.
The deep question, What have we learned from writing in the past year? is still drawing circles and surprising answers among the She Writers. Here is one from Gertrude: what she learned about writing from her dog, Basket:
“Basket although now he is a large unwieldy poodle, still will get up on Gertrude Stein’s lap and stay there. She says that listening to the rhythm of his water drinking made her recognize the difference between sentences and paragraphs, that paragraphs are emotional and that sentences are not.” (Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas)
“There is no such thing as a natural sentence but there is such a thing as a natural paragraph and it must be found.”
“A paragraph is never finished therefore a paragraph is not natural. A paragraph is with the well acquainted. It languishes in mediocrity.”
“A sentence is a hope of a paragraph. What is a paragraph that is easy. How can you know better if you say so. A sentence is never an answer.” (All three from As Fine As Melanctha)
Got it?
What a lovely puzzle, what lovely clarity. Stay tuned.
I promised to give you another few stunning examples of Gertrude’s sense of a paragraph:
“I began to get enormously interested in hearing how everybody said the same thing over and over again with infinite variations but over and over again until finally if you listened with great intensity you could hear it rise and fall and tell all that that there was in them, not so much by their actual words they said or the thoughts they had but by the movement of their thoughts and words endlessly the same and endlessly different.” (Lectures in America)
To my ear, this is very beautiful writing, very musical, poetic, intensely emotional and satisfying. And I have an example of her early writing, where she begins to develop this life-long theme of “saying the same thing over and over”:
“Loving repeating is one way of being. This is now a description of such being. Loving repeating is in a way earth feeling. Some children have loving repeating for little things and story-tellling, some have it as a more bottom being. Slowly this comes out in them in all their children being, in their eating, playing, crying, and laughing. Loving repeating is then in a way earth feeling. This is very strong in many, in children and in old age being. This is very strong in many in all ways of humorous being, this is very strong in some from their beginning to their ending.” (The Making of Americans)
The young woman with the dreamy eyes took her first creative writing class at Radcliffe (then called Harvard Annex) with the poet William Vaughn Moody, in 1894. She wrote a number of compositions that already show some eccentricity, if not in content, in her style of punctuation:
“She had not noticed the man before, she did not look at him now, but he ((,)) taking advantage of the position ((,)) leaned toward her rather heavily. She felt his touch. At first she was (oblivious to) only half aware of it, but soon she became conscious of his presence. The sensuous impressions (had done their work only too well. The magic charm of a human touch was on her) was in her and she (could) did not stir. She loathed herself but still she did not move.”
She is clearly talking about her own experience, something Stein would continue to do until the end of her life. All her writing, one can argue, is autobiographical.
Similarly candid is a self-portrait written for the class:
“…a girl rather stout, fair ((,)) and with a singularly attractive face, attractive largely because puzzling. Her mouth is just saved from complete severity by a slight fullness of the lower lip which seems rather an afterthought by her Creator. Her chin does its best to make up for this slip by hard lines of determination. Her nose just escapes being beautiful for at the last moment it drooped and spoiled its perfect shape. Still in spite of these features she is distinctly lovable…
Promising beginnings?
Now look at the mastery of her narrative voice much later, in Paris France, the melody, the rise and fall of energy in a single paragraph, and how she places her few commas in a highly effective way:
“Then one day when I was at college at Radcliffe in Cambridge Massachusetts, I was on a train and sitting next to me was a frenchman. I recognised him as a visiting lecturer and I spoke to him. We talked about American college women. Very wonderful he said and very interesting but and he looked at me earnestly, really not one of them, now you must admit that, not one of them could feel with Alfred de Musset that le seul bien qui me reste au monde c’est d’avoir quelque fois pleuré.* I was young then but I knew what he meant that they would not feel like that.”
An apparently simple but in fact highly sophisticated story-telling voice. The beauty of this language is what makes me fall in love with Stein again and again.
*( The only thing left to me in this world is having cried a few times.)
After saying “Melly Christmas” with Alice (Blog # 17), it’s time to say Zappy New Year!
A little time-out was needed. Or, if you like, a comma. “A long complicated sentence should force itself upon you, make you know yourself knowing it and the comma, well at the most a comma is a poor period that it lets you stop and take a breath but if you want to take a breath you ought to know yourself that you want to take a breath.” So true. But I am sometimes grateful if someone hands me a comma and helps me stop myself and breathe…
To anyone who loves language (anyone here?), I recommend the most amusing little text by Stein, “Poetry and Grammar”. It’s a lecture she gave on her US tour 75 years ago; a love declaration to “words doing what they do.” (Lectures in America) This text opened several doors to me when I began reading Gertrude Stein. It hasn’t lost its punch.
She tells about her struggles with nouns and adjectives. She tries (not always successfully) to capture in a single sentence the emotional energy of a whole paragraph.The author with “a lifelong passion for sentences” wrestles with every part of the sentence from colons, semi-colons to capitals and small letters. “I have had a long and complicated life with all these,” she confesses.
“There are some punctuations that are interesting and there are some punctuations that are not.” Periods are interesting enough: “Inevitably no matter how completely I had to have writing go on, physically one had to again and again stop sometime and if one had to again and again stop sometime then periods had to exist. Beside I always liked the look of periods and I liked what they did. Stopping sometime did not really keep one from going on, it was nothing that interfered, it was only something that happened, and as it happened as a perfectly natural happening, I did believe in periods and I used them. I really never stopped using them.” The apostrophe’s use is a maybe: “Well feel as you like about that, I can see and I do see that for many that for some the possessive case apostrophe has a gentle tender insinuation that makes it very difficult to definitely decide to do without it. One does do without it, I do, I mostly always do but I cannot deny that from time to time I feel myself having regrets and from time to time I put it in to make the possessive case.” There is no question, however, about the question mark: “It is evident that if you ask a question you ask a question but anybody who can read at all knows when a question is a question as it is written in writing. Therefore I ask you therefore wherefore should one use it the question mark.”
Good question. Stay tuned.
For the beginning of a busy week, a busy year:
“It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.”
“The world is covered all over with people but geniuses are very few. Interesting if true and it is true.”
“And so what is it that makes you a genius. Well yes what is it.”
Here is the author who said, “work is something I cannot do,” busy in her tomato patch of her house in the country that was a country house. It’s a good reminder to look for the humor and self-irony in Stein’s writing, to read her with awe, if you like, and with a big grain of salt.
Gertrude’s favorite little armchairs, tapestried by Jack-of-all-trades Alice with designs Picasso had made for them. When you look at the cover of the American edition of my book (blog # 23) you will notice that Picasso’s armchair design was used as the background: Gertie is marching straight out of the beginnings of modernism in art.
How different this playful, colorful touch is by comparison with the German cover. The German version has its own small playful note, but it is so very German in its thorough straightness. One could say, the Bauhaus style is alive and well in it (there happens to be a remarkable exhibition right now at Moma: “Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity”). I prefer the American childlike gaiety, not just because it fits so well with Gertrude’s spirit, but because it always reminds me that the freedom to be playful and childlike is an essentially American, Californian quality that has nourished me greatly. It inspired me to write a different foreword than for the German edition, to add new thoughts and play in new ways with words. In my next blog, I will give you an example of what could not be done in the German edition, but could be done and had to be done in the American book… But now the story of the chairs:
One day, during a heated argument with Gertrude at the salon, Ezra Pound fell out of one of these chairs — and was never invited again. According to the “Autobiograplhy of Alice B. Toklas, “Gertrude Stein liked him but did not find him amusing. She said he was a village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not.”
Publishing in Europe and publishing in the USA are two different beasts. I first brought out my photobiography in Germany. When I heard that two women had taken over the renowned literary publishing company Arche Verlag I instantly contacted them and offered them my services as a translator. “What would you like to translate?” they asked. Their list of world-famous authors already included several titles by Gertrude Stein. “Gertrude”, I said in a blink. I picked a short and “easy” one, “Blood on the Dining Room Floor”, Stein’s one and only detective novel (which of course turned out not to be not exactly easy, but that’s another story). It was tricky but I had fun with it; we all had fun with it, and as a result another Stein project had to be invented. There was no biography available in German at that time, except her “Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas”, so my idea of filling that gap with a “photobiography” hit home. Arche gave me green light to plow through any archive where photos might be hiding. They even encouraged me to splurge — and they paid for all the fees, the copyright for the 360 images and two or three times as many pieces of text. Many of the texts had to be translated into German for the first time, especially Stein’s abstract poetry — but I got paid as a translator, and I got an advance.
When Algonquin acquired the foreign rights I learned that it was MY task to pull in the permissions for the English-speaking edition — and that now I had to pay for the whole cornucopia myself. Welcome to American publishing! I had no choice, of course, but to do what couldn’t be done. I had already developed quite a passion for Gertie. During the year it took me to find every copyright holder and negotiate every permission fee, there was no doubt on my mind: I couldn’t let go of her, and she wouldn’t let go of me… It was an adventure, and there was the hope that my advance would cover the cost (it almost did).
Under these conditions, I realized, there probably would never be another photobiography of Gertrude Stein in the market place of books…
Stay tuned.
