The answer to the charge of repetition is on many levels. On one level Miss Stein points out that repetition is in all nature. It is in human life: “if you listen to anyone, behind what anyone is saying whether it’s about the weather or anything, you will hear that person repeating and repeating himself.” Repeating is emphasis. Every time a thing is repeated it is slightly different. “The only time that repeating is really repeating, that is when it is dead, is when something is being taught.”5 Then it does not come from the creating mind, but from unliving forms. Sometimes Miss Stein’s repeating is for emphasis in a progression of ideas; sometimes it is as a musical refrain; sometimes it is for a reassembling of the motifs of the book and their re-emergence into a later stage of the discussion; sometimes it is in the spirit of play.
But if this book is about the psychology of the creative act, why is it also called The Geographical History Of America?
Miss Stein, believing the intermittent emergence of the Human Mind and its record in literary masterpieces to be the most important manifestation of human culture, observed that these emergences were dependent upon the geographical situations in which the authors lived. The valley-born and the hill-bounded tended to exhibit a localization in their thinking, an insistence on identity with all the resultant traits that dwell in Human Nature; flat lands or countries surrounded by the long straight lines of the sea were conducive toward developing the power of abstraction. Flat lands are an invitation to wander, as well as a release from local assertion. Consequently, a country like the United States, bounded by two oceans and with vast portions so flat that the state boundaries must be drawn by “imaginary lines,” without dependence on geographical features, promises to produce a civilization in which the Human Mind may not only appear in the occasional masterpiece, but may in many of its aspects be distributed throughout the people.
Miss Stein’s theory of the audience insists upon the fact that the richest rewards for the reader have come from those works in which the authors admitted no consideration of an audience into their creating mind. There have been too many books that attempted to flatter or woo or persuade or coerce the reader. Here is a book that says what it knows: a work of philosophy, a work of art, and a work of gaiety.
From Gertrude Stein, The Geographical History Of America
Or The Relation Of Human Nature To The Human Mind
(New York: Random House, 1936), pp. 7–14
Gertrude Stein Makes Sense
(1947)
Thornton Wilder
Miss Gertrude Stein, answering a question about her famous line, A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose,1 once said with characteristic vehemence:
“Now listen! I’m no fool. I know that in daily life we don’t say ‘is a . . . is a . . . is a . . .’”
She knew that she was a difficult and an idiosyncratic author. She pursued her aims, however, with such conviction and intensity that occasionally she forgot that the results could be difficult to others. At such times the achievements she had made in writing, in “telling what she knew” (her most frequent formulization of the aim of writing), had to her the character of self-evident beauty and clarity. A friend, to whom she showed recently completed samples of her poetry, was frequently driven to reply sadly: “But you forget that I don’t understand examples of your extremer styles.”2 To this she would reply with a mixture of bewilderment and exasperation:
“But what’s the difficulty? Just read the words on the paper. They’re in English. Just read them. Be simple and you’ll understand these things.”
Now let me quote the speech from which the opening remark on this page has been extracted. A student in her seminar at the University of Chicago had asked her for an “explanation” of the famous line.
She leaned forward, giving all of herself to the questioner in that unforgettable way which endeared her to thousands of students and to thousands of soldiers in two wars, trenchant, humorous, but above all urgently concerned over the enlightenment of even the most obtuse questioner:
“Now listen! Can’t you see that when the language was new—as it was with Chaucer and Homer—the poet could use the name of a thing and the thing was really there? He could say ‘Oh, moon,’ ‘O sea,’ ‘O love’ and the moon and the sea and love were really there. And can’t you see that after hundreds of years had gone by and thousands of poems had been written, he could call on those words and find that they were just worn out literary words? The excitingness of pure being had withdrawn from them; they were just rather stale, literary words. Now the poet has to work in the excitingness of pure being; he has to get back that intensity into the language. You all have seen hundreds of poems about roses and you know in your bones that the rose is not there. I don’t want to put too much emphasis on that line of mine because it’s just one line in a longer poem. But I notice that you all know it; you make fun of it, but you know it. Now listen! I’m no fool. I know that in daily life we don’t go around saying ‘is a . . . is a . . . is a . . .’ Yes, 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.”
There are certain of Miss Stein’s idiosyncrasies which by this time should not require discussion, for example, her punctuation and recourse to repetition. The majority of readers ask of literature the kind of pleasure they have always received; they want “more of the same”; they accept idiosyncrasy in author and periods only when it has been consecrated by long accumulated prestige, as in the cases of the earliest and the latest of Shakespeare’s styles, and in the poetry of [John] Donne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, or Emily Dickinson. They arrogate to themselves a superiority in condemning the novels of [Franz] Kafka or of the later [James] Joyce or the later Henry James, forgetting that they allow a no less astonishing individuality to Laurence Sterne and to [François] Rabelais.
This work is for those who not only largely accord to others “another’s way,” but who rejoice in the diversity of minds and the tension of difference.
It is perhaps not enough to say: “Be simple and you will understand these things”; but it is necessary to say: “Relax your predilections for the accustomed, the received, and be ready to accept an extreme example of idiosyncratic writing.”
A brief recapitulation of Miss Stein’s aims as a writer will help us to understand her work. She left Radcliffe College, with William James’s warm endorsement, to study psychology at Johns Hopkins University. There, as a research problem, her professor gave her a study of automatic writing.3 For this work she called upon her fellow students—the number ran into the hundreds—to serve as experimental subjects. Her interest, however, took an unexpected turn; she became more absorbed in the subjects’ varying approach to the experiments than in the experiments themselves. They entered the room with alarm, with docility, with bravado, with gravity, with scorn, or with indifference. This striking variation re-awoke within her an interest which had obsessed her even in very early childhood—the conviction that a description could be made of all the types of human character and that these types could be related to two basic types (she called them independent-dependents and dependent-independents).
She left the University and, settling in Paris, applied herself to the problem. The result was a novel of one thousand pages, The Making Of Americans, which is at once an account of a large family from the time of the grandparents’ coming to this country from Europe, and a description of “everyone who is, or has been, or will be.” She then went on to tell in “A Long Gay Book” of all possible relations of two persons.
This book, however, broke down soon after it began. Miss Stein had been invaded by another compelling problem: How, in our time, do you describe anything? In the previous centuries writers had managed pretty well by assembling a number of adjectives and adjectival clauses side by side; the reader “obeyed” by furnishing images and concepts in his mind and the resultant “thing” in the reader’s mind corresponded fairly well with that in the writer’s. Miss Stein felt that that pr
ocess did not work any more. Her painter friends were showing clearly that the corresponding method of “description” had broken down in painting, and she was sure that it had broken down in writing.
In the first place, words were no longer precise, they were full of extraneous matter. They were full of “remembering,” and describing a thing in front of us, an “objective thing,” is no time for remembering. Miss Stein felt that writing must accomplish a revolution whereby it could report things as they were in themselves before our minds had appropriated them and robbed them of their objectivity “in pure existing.”
Those who had the opportunity of seeing Miss Stein in the daily life of her home will never forget her practice of meditating. She set aside a certain part of every day for it. In Bilignin, her summer home in the south of France, she would sit in her rocking chair facing the valley she has described so often, holding one or the other of her dogs on her lap. Following the practice of a lifetime she would rigorously pursue some subject in thought, taking it up where she had left it on the previous day. Her conversation would reveal the current preoccupation: It would be the nature of “money” or “masterpieces” or “superstition” or “the Republican Party.”
She had always been an omnivorous reader. As a small girl she had sat for days at a time in a window seat in the Marine Institute Library in San Francisco, an endowed institution with few visitors, reading all Elizabethan literature, including its prose, reading all [Jonathan] Swift, [Edmund] Burke, and [Daniel] Defoe. Later in life her reading remained as wide but was strangely nonselective. She read whatever books came her way. (“I have a great deal of inertia. I need things from outside to start me off.”) The Church of England at Aix-les-Bains sold its Sunday School library, the accumulation of seventy years, at a few francs for every ten volumes. They included some thirty minor English novels of the ’70s, the stately lives of Colonial governors, the lives of missionaries. She read them all. Any written thing had become sheer phenomenon; for the purposes of her reflections absence of quality was as instructive as quality. Quality was sufficiently supplied by Shakespeare, whose works lay often at her hand. If there was any subject which drew her from her inertia and led her actually to seek out works, it was American history and particularly books about the Civil War.
And always with her great relish for human beings she was listening to people. She was listening with genial absorption to the matters in which they were involved. “Everybody’s life is full of stories; your life is full of stories; my life is full of stories. They are very occupying, but they are not really interesting. What is interesting is the way everyone tells their stories”; and at the same time she was listening to the tellers’ revelation of their “basic nature.” “If you listen, really listen, you will hear people repeating themselves. You will hear their pleading nature or their attacking nature or their asserting nature. People who say that I repeat too much do not really listen; they cannot hear that every moment of life is full of repeating.”
It can be easily understood that the questions she was asking concerning personality and the nature of language and concerning “how you tell a thing” would inevitably lead to the formulation of a metaphysics. In fact, I think it can be said that the fundamental occupation of Miss Stein’s life was not the work of art but the shaping of a theory of knowledge, a theory of time, and a theory of the passions. These theories finally converged on the master question: What are the various ways that creativity works in everyone?
Miss Stein held a doctrine which informs her theory of creativity, which plays a large part in her demonstration of what an American is, and which helps to explain some of the great difficulty we feel in reading her work. It is the Doctrine of Audience. From consciousness of audience, she felt, come all the evils of thinking, writing, and creating.
In The Geographical History Of America she illustrates the idea by distinguishing between our human nature and our human mind. Our human nature is a serpents’ nest, all directed to audience; from it proceed self-justification, jealousy, propaganda, individualism, moralizing, and edification. How comforting it is, and how ignobly pleased we are, when we see it expressed in literature. The human mind, however, gazes at experience, and without deflection by the insidious pressures from human nature, tells what it sees and knows. Its subject matter is indeed human nature; to cite two of Miss Stein’s favorites, Hamlet and Pride and Prejudice are about human nature, but not of it. The survival of masterpieces, and there are very few of them, is due to our astonishment that certain minds can occasionally repeat life without adulterating the report with the gratifying movements of their own self-assertion, their private quarrel with what it has been to be a human being.
Miss Stein pushed to its furthest extreme the position that, at the moment of writing, one should rigorously exclude from the mind all thought of praise and blame, of persuasion or conciliation. In the early days she used to say: “I write for myself and strangers.” Then she eliminated the strangers; then she had a great deal of trouble with the idea that one is an audience to oneself, which she solves in her posthumous book, Four In America, with the far-reaching concept: “I am not I when I see.”
It has often seemed to me that Miss Stein was engaged in a series of spiritual exercises whose aim was to eliminate during the hours of writing all those whispers into the ear from the outside and inside world where audience dwells. She knew that she was the object of derision to many and to some extent the knowledge fortified her. Some of the devices that most exasperate readers are at bottom merely attempts to nip in the bud by a drastic intrusion of apparent incoherence any ambition she may have felt within herself to woo for acceptance as a “respectable” philosopher. Yet it is very moving to learn that on one occasion when a friend asked what a writer most wanted, she replied, throwing up her hands and laughing, “Oh, praise, praise, praise!”
Miss Stein’s writing is the record of her thoughts, from the beginning, as she “closes in” on them. It is being written before our eyes; she does not, as other writers do, suppress and erase the hesitations, the recapitulations, the connectives, in order to give you the completed fine result of her meditations. She gives us the process. From time to time we hear her groping towards the next idea; we hear her cry of joy when she has found it; sometimes, it seems to me that we hear her reiterating the already achieved idea and, as it were, pumping it in order to force out the next development that lies hidden within it. We hear her talking to herself about the book that is growing and glowing (to borrow her often irritating habit of rhyming) within her.
Many readers will not like this, but at least it is evidence that she is ensuring the purity of her indifference as to whether her readers will like it or not. It is as though she were afraid that if she weeded out all gropings, shapings, re-assemblings, if she gave us only the completed thoughts, the truth would have slipped away like water through a sieve because such a final marshalling of her thoughts would have been directed towards audience. Her description of existence would be, like so many hundreds of thousands of descriptions of existence, like most literature—dead.
’47: The Magazine of the Year 1.8 (Oct. 1947): 10–15
Reviews of Ida A Novel in 1941
In one of Stein’s lectures, “Portraits And Repetition,” she noted the irony of the response her work had gotten in the popular press: “[E]very time one of the hundreds of times a newspaper man makes fun of my writing and of my repetition he always has the same theme” (LIA 167). The reviews gathered here put that irony—one review repeating another—on display. One after the other, they describe the novel as obscure, and cut short their analysis of the novel to reference Bennett Cerf’s address to the reader (Figure 15). Of course there are deviations: the Hauser, Rogers, Time, and Roscher reviews are sincere and insightful, while those by O. O. and Auden mimic her style, and Littell and Mann, in the face of a novel with little plot, invent their own stories in response.
The useful criticism in these reviews is partly what ma
kes them a necessary adjunct to the novel. Their primary function is to reconstruct the culture of expectation. Stein had read such reviews for years and knew the attitude that was ostensibly working against her; with these reviews, we can know it too. Moreover, Ida came from this news world. In 1937 Stein wrote to her friend William Rogers about her plans for Ida: “I want to write a novel about publicity a novel where a person is so publicized that there isn’t any personality left. I want to write about the effect on people of the Hollywood cinema kind of publicity that takes away all identity” (RM 168). These Ida reviews illuminate a similar process of publicization—in this case of a novel. To the extent that collectively these reviews “took away” the complex personality of Ida, our discussions will bring it back.
Figure 15: Bennett Cerf’s address to the reader, on the jacket flap of Ida A Novel (Random House, 1941).
O. O., “WHAT HAS GERTRUDE STEIN DONE NOW?”
There was a writer erupting named Gertrude Stein. Critics tried to keep Gertrude from being born but when the time came, well, Gertrude came. And as Gertrude came with her also came Alice, so there she was, Stein-Stein.
She always had an Alice B. Toklas. That was Gertrude. Not Ida.
One month was not March and a book came out of Gertrude. She always had to have a book. One month was not March but it was eleven years and Gertrude Stein had not written any novel that is a story of course. This is called a book but it does easily lose itself. So much for Gertrude.