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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
A new collection of Gertrude Stein's most enrapturing and essential short writings, selected by Francesca Wade'A Stein-shaped sentence is a very bespoke thing-you need an espresso martini to recover' Deborah LevyIn this collection, readers will rediscover Gertrude Stein as the bearer of a joyfully radical literary vision. A bold experimenter, her writing sparks with vitality, relishing in rhythm, repetition, sound and colour in its central vision: to prise apart language and association and find thrilling new ways to express the true essence of her subject with charming joie de vivre.Stein considered her shorter writings to be the truest expressions of her enrapturing style. Her fascination with people and personalities can be located in expressive portraits of close friends such as Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Juan Gris, whilst her decades-long relationship with Alice B. Toklas is immortalised with shimmering eroticism. There are also playful meditations on her unique writing process, conveying her serious delight in meddling with conventions of grammar and composition.
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GERTRUDE STEIN
EVERY DAY IS TO-DAY
Essential Writings
Selected and Introduced by Francesca Wade
PUSHKIN PRESS LONDON
Contents
Introduction
One autumn day in 1934, two women, recently arrived from Paris, entered a grocery store in central Manhattan. The owner glanced up and greeted them without missing a beat. ‘How do you do, Miss Stein,’ he said casually, as if he’d been expecting her. ‘It must be pleasant coming back after thirty years.’ As the women passed on through Times Square, squinting up at the billboards advertising Chevrolet, Wrigley’s and Coca-Cola, one nudged the other and they looked up, together, at the tickertape snaking around the New York Times building, flashing breaking news to all who passed beneath. ‘Gertrude Stein has arrived,’ it read in electric lights.
‘One of the most talked-about authors in the world returns to America this week,’ read a report in Newsweek. ‘Some people call her the “most intelligent American woman alive today”; others say she is crazy.’ Stein’s tour had been organised to promote her bestselling memoir, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), which she had written over six weeks the previous summer, hoping to earn the fame and readership which—at age 59—she feared was passing her by. Its story is, by now, one of legend: of her arrival in Paris from America in 1903; her immersion in the city’s artistic world as the eccentric host of Saturday evening salons attended by writers and artists from Guillaume Apollinaire to Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse to Ernest Hemingway, Juan Gris to F. Scott Fitzgerald; and her self-proclaimed ‘genius’ as a radical innovator who set out, in her life and work, to ‘kill the nineteenth century’. The autobiography—an audacious act of knowing artifice, employing the voice of her long-term partner to portray Stein as she wanted to be seen—was an instant sensation. Its publication catapulted Stein to international celebrity—yet threatened to submerge her in the very fictions she had created.
Stein had written the book with an ulterior motive. She was fed up with decades of mockery and poor sales for the avant-garde texts she considered her ‘real’ writing—her 1,000-page epic novel The Making of Americans, printed in 1925 by a now-defunct Parisian press; the books she and Toklas had self-financed through their own press, the Plain Edition, including her pastoral romance Lucy Church Amiably and How to Write, a series of meditations on sentences, narrative and grammar; the hundreds of short portraits, plays and poems published long ago in small magazines or languishing, unread, in filing cabinets—and hoped the autobiography would win her a new generation of readers willing to take her writing seriously. But, ironically, the book’s huge success cemented the public image of Stein as a personality; a collector of other talents, rather than an artist in her own right. Up to this point, Stein had hesitated to explain her work, insisting that ‘compositions are complete only if they are self-explanatory, requiring no interpretations beyond what they are.’ But when Stein was invited to undertake a lecture tour of America, she saw the opportunity to elucidate her method in person. This was, she decided, a chance for doubting readers to learn how to read Stein from Stein herself; to turn attention away from the gossipy Autobiography and back to her older, notoriously ‘difficult’ work, and make the case for its importance—and, crucially, for its pleasure. ‘If you understand a thing you enjoy it,’ she told a bemused reporter, ‘and if you enjoy a thing you understand it.’ Over the course of six lectures, repeated in packed halls at universities, clubs and galleries in thirty-seven cities, she set out to challenge prevailing assumptions and convince readers that her work required no prior knowledge or intellectual framework; that there was no secret code to be deciphered, no key to the riddle. All that was needed, she repeated, was an open mind.
Throughout Stein’s writing life, she had been preoccupied with questions of identity and perception: what it might mean to truly see another person or object, and to express their essence in language. As a medical student at the dawn of the twentieth century, reading her way through English literature in her spare time, Stein became fascinated by the inner workings of personality, and curious to isolate the forces that differentiated people from one another, and made each individual themselves. Around 1911, as Stein explained in her lecture ‘Portraits and Repetition’, she set aside her novel The Making of Americans, in which she set out to write ‘a complete history of everyone’, drawing on years of close study of friends, acquaintances and strangers, and began work on a series of short compositions which she called ‘portraits’. Taking their cues from people she knew, often the artists who attended her Saturday evenings – Matisse, Picasso, Gris – Stein’s word-portraits are radical experiments in conveying character without any narrative or straightforward description. Stein believed the way to understand others was not by what they said or did but by discovering what she described as their ‘bottom nature’: ‘what is moving inside them that makes them them’. Her sustained use of repetition—which led one medical journalist to diagnose her with a rare form of echolalia—derived from her conviction that personality reveals itself through the ‘infinite variations’ in the way people repeat their characteristic gestures and phrases over time.
‘The business of art,’ Stein insisted, ‘is to live in the actual present, that is the complete actual present, and to completely express that complete actual present.’ Stein wanted her work to convey a sense of ongoing motion, a shifting dynamic, that would unfold on the page as if in real time. In her texts, Stein set out to strip language of its prior associations so that her words would mean something fresh and specific, unique to the particular context she was giving them. Seeking to counter the falsity she had begun to associate with purely representational art, Stein wanted her writing to feel not like a description of a thing, but the ‘thing in itself’: not imitation, but ‘intellectual recreation.’ If a text is to feel truly alive, she argued, it must exist not only in relation to something separate from it – the thing or person it’s representing – but it ‘must have its own life’. Trying to describe things so an imagined audience might recognise them, she believed, created distance rather than immediacy: if you’re focused on creating a replica, you aren’t really seeing beyond the surface, or creating in the moment. In Stein’s work, words follow others not to advance a story, but to move the piece forward through associative logic, verbal echo, or pure insistence. At the University of Chicago, in response to a student’s question about her famous and much-parodied line ‘rose is a rose is a rose’ (which first appeared in her 1913 text ‘Sacred Emily’), Stein summed up her approach: ‘You all have seen hundreds of poems about roses and you know in your bones that the rose is not there. I’m no fool; but I think that in that line the rose is red for the first time in English poetry for a hundred years.’
Stein’s work defies traditional ways of reading. It’s impossible, for one thing, to say what her texts are about. Even though they often start from concrete source material—objects in Stein’s sightline, snippets of conversation, the people around her—they aren’t so much about that ostensible subject-matter, but engage with the way the words work together on the page, re-forming everyday experience in surreal mutations of language. Reading Stein can feel like a slow-motion experience of perception dawning. Often, a noun or phrase establishes itself through repetition, tests its strength with slight variations, before puns and jokes and ambiguities flood in as the words themselves take over, emerging with a momentum all their own. Stein called her process of writing ‘meditation’, and reading her work feels as close as possible to experiencing its composition in real time, as Stein focuses in on an image, swaps a syllable for a homophone, prods at words and makes them fizz. Writing, for Stein, came out of deep concentration, and her work lays bare both the struggle of its creation and the triumph of finding the next idea. ‘I am I not any longer when I see,’ wrote Stein: in shedding words’ associations and referents, Stein was also shaking herself out of the text, attempting to forget her audience and write as un-self-consciously as possible. She wanted to break every habit, never to fall back on cliches or formulas that she considered numbing to active thought. Her work is a celebration of chaos and mutability, a rejoinder to rules, where words are set free from the shackles of meaning and grammatical function, made unfamiliar, and charged with power to make the world afresh. Her untiring quest for alternative ways of thinking extended, in her life, to her longstanding interest in astrology, prophecy and the lives of saints; her rejection of hierarchy and convention in her writing mirrors her resolutely unpatriarchal household.
Stein left few clues to her work beyond her lectures: she didn’t keep a diary, rarely discussed her writing in letters, and refused—despite many requests from admirers and detractors alike—to write introductions or explanations. From the notebooks, manuscripts and correspondence in Stein’s enormous archive (held at Yale’s Beinecke Library) it’s possible to piece together fragments of context: to know, for example, that ‘Idem the Same: A Valentine to Sherwood Anderson’ was originally written for Toklas, but that Stein changed the title in gratitude after Anderson wrote an introduction to her 1922 book Geography and Plays; that ‘Miss Furr and Miss Skeene’—now considered one of the earliest examples of the word ‘gay’ used in its sexual context—was based on Ethel Mars and Maud Squire, two artist friends of Stein and Toklas; that ‘Susie Asado’ and ‘Preciosilla’ are companion pieces inspired by the whirling skirts of Spanish dancers; that ‘Identity a Poem’ was written for a puppeteer she met on the streets of Chicago, who asked her to compose something for his marionettes. That ‘Ladies’ Voices’ stemmed from eavesdropping on a group of strangers in Mallorca, and recalls the plotless dinner-party conversation of ‘What Happened’, Stein’s first play; that plays, after portraits, became the form in which Stein developed her idea of time as a landscape, where events might occur not in linear order but simultaneously.
Stein’s attempts to find a wider audience for her earlier work were not entirely successful. While a devoted coterie of readers convinced of her importance sought out and passed around dog-eared copies of Plain Edition titles and transition magazine, publishers continued to reject her new and old work, asking instead for more charming anecdotes in the style of the Autobiography. At Stein’s death, in July 1946, much of the work she considered her best remained out of print: some of the texts that follow were not published at all in her lifetime, while others have a material history central to Stein’s literary legend. Mabel Dodge, Stein’s first great promoter, bound copies of ‘Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia’ in Florentine wallpaper and gave them to visitors at her Fifth Avenue soirees, while ‘Matisse’ and ‘Picasso’ were first published in Alfred Stieglitz’s influential magazine Camera Work, and distributed at the 1913 Armory Show—the first, shocking display of their paintings in America—alongside an essay by Dodge describing Stein as ‘the only woman in the world who has put the spirit of post-impressionism into prose’. From the archive, we can discern how her amused disregard for genre distinctions and her appetite for popular culture—including her abiding love of detective stories—manifest in ‘A Waterfall and a Piano’, ‘A Movie’ and ‘Advertisements’, while in ‘Identity a Poem’—part of a wave of self-questioning texts written after the Autobiography—we meet an older Stein, meditating on the disconcerting effects of fame. The presiding context for all Stein’s writing, of course, is her relationship with Alice B. Toklas. Stein’s notebooks often began with dedications to Toklas, and their love is inscribed throughout this volume in double-entendres, songs and codes, from ‘Ada’, Stein’s first portrait, a retelling of Toklas’s own account of her life story, to ‘A Book Concluding With As A Wife Has A Cow A Love Story’, a second portrait of Toklas which intertwines the joy of sexuality and writing in a glorious explosion of eroticism.
‘I like the feeling of words doing as they want to do and as they have to do,’ Stein wrote. The texts that follow are founded on pleasure and sensuality, the thrill of making something new, the intimacy of really paying attention. Stein’s bewitching work probes the possibilities of language more deeply than any writer before or since: her restless pursuit of things as they are creates a body of writing as alive as any work of art can be. More than a hundred years on, Stein’s rose is as red is it ever was.
Francesca Wade
EVERY DAY IS TO-DAY
Ada
Barnes Colhard did not say he would not do it but he did not do it. He did at it and then he did not do at it, he did not ever think about it. He just thought some time he might do something.
His father Mr. Abram Colhard spoke about it to every one and very many of them spoke to Barnes Colhard about it and he always listened to them.
Then Barnes fell in love with a very nice girl and she would not marry him. He cried then, his father Mr. Abram Colhard comforted him and they took a trip and Barnes promised he would do what his father wanted him to be doing. He did not do the thing, he thought he would do another thing, he did not do the other thing, his father Mr. Colhard did not want him to do the other thing. He really did not do anything then. When he was a good deal older he married a very rich girl. He had thought perhaps he would not propose to her but his sister wrote to him that it would be a good thing. He married the rich girl and she thought he was the most wonderful man and one who knew everything. Barnes never spent more than the income of the fortune he and his wife had then, that is to say they did not spend more than the income and this was a surprise to very many who knew about him and about his marrying the girl who had such a large fortune. He had a happy life while he was living and after he was dead his wife and children remembered him.
He had a sister who also was successful enough in being one being living. His sister was one who came to be happier than most people come to be in living. She came to be a completely happy one. She was twice as old as her brother. She had been a very good daughter to her mother. She and her mother had always told very pretty stories to each other. Many old men loved to hear her tell these stories to her mother. Every one who ever knew her mother liked her mother. Many were sorry later that not every one liked the daughter. Many did like the daughter but not every one as every one had liked the mother. The daughter was charming inside in her, it did not show outside in her to every one, it certainly did to some. She did sometimes think her mother would be pleased with a story that did not please her mother. When her mother later was sicker the daughter knew that there were some stories she could tell her that would not please her mother. Her mother died and really mostly altogether the mother and the daughter had told each other stories very happily together.
