Gertrude Stein C’est Moi!

I recently attended Obie Award winner, David Greenspan’s amazing performance of Composition…Master-Pieces…Identity at the Connelly Theater in New York. It consisted of two of Stein’s lectures: Composition as Explanation; What Are Masterpieces, and Why Are There So Few of Them; and one poem that could be a mini-play, as Greenspan acted it out, Identity A Poem. xxxxxx

On a bare stage with nothing more than a chair, a water bottle, and a table, Greenspan succeeded in negotiating Stein’s difficult thicket of repetitive words, thoughts and ideas in both Composition—this by memory alone—and Master-Pieces, simply by reading.

Right: David Greenspan on stage. Photo Credit: Aaron Epstein.

With perfect timing, and his a ‘just right’ laying down of Stein words and rhythms—Stein’s writing here is akin to painting a picture—coupled with well-placed verbal stresses and clever use of physical and facial movements, Greenspan was able to bring Stein’s very words alive. He was even able to add a bit of humor, as well as irony, where there seemed to be little, if any.

Equally important, if not more, was that major meanings were extricated, thrown onto the table and into the light, so to speak.   So, while you had to be there to get the full impact of the Stein’s genius; this review only offers hints at her profundity, and only partially at that.

Left: David Greenspan. Photo by Erik Carter.

Below you will find a few paragraphs, taken out of context, which capture the essence of Gertrude Stein’s thinking. I deliberately broke up the paragraphs from the lecture into sentences, to allow the necessary time, to taste, savor, swallow, and digest, the thought that you just read.

Also below is a link to writer Janet Malcolm’s New Yorker essay on Gertrude Stein for those who want a more detailed account of Stein’s life and legacy.

Though filled with biases and hearsay aplenty, it is still worth reading.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/06/25/gertrude-steins-war

And then there is a link to Stein seriously reciting, straight forward and dry, If I Had Told Him a Completed Portrait of Picasso.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJEIAGULmPQ

Think of all of this as Gertrude Stein 101…            

For those few that read her, and continue to do so, Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) is an acquired taste, a taste I confess I acquired decades ago. What attracted me to her, and still does, in addition to her writings and her ideas, is her common sense, an aspect that is rarely mentioned when the subject of Stein surfaces.

Consider the following quotes, drawn from her various writings, and you will get an idea of Stein’s wide-ranging thoughts: provocative, fresh, timely, humorous, and common sense among them…

“It’s funny that men who are supposed to be scientific cannot get themselves to realize the basic principle of physics, that action and reaction are equal and opposite, that when you persecute people you always rouse them to be strong and stronger.”

“Just as everybody has the vote including woman, I think children should, because as a child is conscious of itself then it has to me an existence and has a stake in what happens.”

Right: Gertrude Stein (r), and Alice B. Toklis in their Paris apartment (1920s).

“Money is always there but the pockets change. It is not in the same pockets after a change, and this is all there is to say about money.”

“If you are looking down while you are walking it is better to walk uphill as the ground is nearer.”

Also reeling me into the Stein camp was her monumental genius, a self-diagnosis, delivered in both speech and word, that she had no shame in trumpeting. “Let me listen to me and not them,” she wisely wrote.

Another Stein quote that I identify with wholeheartedly and just discovered in my research for this review is “Argument to me is the air I breathe. Given any proposition, I cannot help believing the other side of defying it.”

My own version arrived at a couple of decades or more ago – it took that long to actually own up to it – goes “When ever I say something I run to the other side of the room to refute it.”

Interesting, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1899-1951) the German philosopher, who shares an interest with Stein in Propositions, echoes similar sentiments.

Having just read The Duty of Genius, Ray Monk’s biography on Wittgenstein, I could not help but notice the similarity in both their thinking, as well as their laying down of words, especially in their more difficult writings. I am talking fraternal here, as opposed to identical.

Left: Picasso portrait of Stein (1905). When she commented that it didn’t look like her, Picasso replied, “It will.”

Below are two of my favorite paragraphs of Stein’s taken from her lecture on The Gradual Making of the Making of Americans. I have been quoting them at every opportunity, almost like a mantra, for many years.

I like to think that these worded truisms are how Stein, who studied psychology at Radcliff under William James, and conducted laboratory experiments with Hugo Munsterberg, which led her to study the anatomy of the brain at John Hopkins, came about her knowledge.

“I cannot remember not talking all the time and all the same feeling that while I was talking while I was seeing that I was not only hearing but seeing while I was talking and that at the same time the relation between myself knowing I was talking and those to whom I was talking and incidentally to whom I was listening were coming to tell me and tell me in their way everything that made them.”

“I began to think again to think about the bottom nature in people, I  began to get enormously interested in hearing how everybody said the same thing over and 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 there was inside them, not so much by the actual words they said or the thoughts they had but the movements of their thoughts and words endlessly the same and endlessly different.”

I seem to remember that at one point Stein wrote that she no longer had to even listen to what they were saying but could tell by their breathing.

Thinly analogous to this is the lie detector test (voice stress analysis) which relies in part on similar phenomena. Add movement and you get the pseudo-science of body language, the silent film, as well as mimes and clowns, all relying on the physicalization of thought and emotions.

As an extra added attraction that captured my attention, the basis of her fame for many, Stein brought along with her Alice B. Toklas, her lifelong companion, her brother Leo Stein – his book The ABC of Aesthetics is a must read – and a slew of soon to be famous Salonettes, among the better known, Picasso, Matisse, Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald—all an irresistible cast of  characters.

I guess I started out like most, reading the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, far and away her most popular and easily readable book. I then jumped to Three Lives, Tender Buttons, Q.E.D, her Lectures in America, and The Geographical History of America or The Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind, arguably her most brilliant book.

I also plodded though some 1000 pages of The Making of Americans and continued to study and pay attention to Stein’s various outpourings, among them her two popular operas, Four Saints In Three Acts and The Mother Of Us All, for which Virgil Thomas wrote the music.

Left: The Stein gallery in the apartment at 27 Rue de Fleurus  

Add to this a number of visits to her two residences in Paris—when in Paris I never fail to visit 27 Rue de Fleurus where Stein’s salons took place and her storied art collection hung, pass by Christine # 5, her last home, and to pay my respects to Gertrude and Alice at Père Lachaise Cemetery, where they are buried next to each other.

During an extensive tour of the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, another of my Stein epiphanies, I got to hold actually hold her glasses in my hand and lightly finger one of her vests.

A couple of decades ago, at an equally exciting event, I found myself, as the guest of Bruce Kellner, an authority on Carl Van Vechten and Langston Hughes, sitting at a round table with Edward M. Burns, Ula Dydo, and some forgotten others, all foremost Stein scholars in the country.

Right: Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in Piazza San Marco, Venice, circa 1908. Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Papers. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New haven, CT.

And then there are the countless plays based on her writings—most often attended by The Creatives, those of us intent on mining Stein’s work in order to further their own—the numerous Stein books that I read, and of course Picasso’s portrait of her at the Met.

To expand on the picture, consider the following Stein essay:

Excerpts from Composition as Explanation: 

“There is singularly nothing that makes a difference a difference in beginning and in the middle and in ending except that each generation has something different at which they are all looking.

By this I mean so simply that anybody knows it that composition is the difference which makes each and all of them then different from other generations and this is what makes everything different otherwise they are all alike and everybody knows it because everybody says it.

It is very likely that nearly every one has been very nearly certain that something that is interesting is interesting them. Can they and do they. It is very interesting that nothing inside in them, that is when you consider the very long history of how every one ever acted or has felt, it is very interesting that nothing inside in them in all of them makes it connectedly different.

By this I mean this. The only thing that is different from one time to another is what is seen and what is seen depends upon how everybody is doing everything.

This makes the thing we are looking at very different and this makes what those who describe it make of it, it makes a composition, it confuses, it shows, it is, it looks, it likes it as it is, and this makes what is seen as it is seen.

Nothing changes from generation to generation except the thing seen and that makes a composition.

No one is ahead of his time; it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who also are creating their own time refuse to accept.

And they refuse to accept it for a very simple reason and that is that they do not have to accept it for any reason. They themselves that is everybody in their entering the modern composition and they do enter it, if they do not enter it they are not so to speak in it they are out of it and so they do enter it.

But in as you may say the non-competitive efforts where if you are not in it nothing is lost except nothing at all except what is not had, there are naturally all the refusals, and the things refused are only important if unexpectedly somebody happens to need them. In the case of the arts it is very definite.

Below: Stein said of Ernest Hemingway, “You are the lost generation.” The term embraces Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, E.E. Cummings, Archibald MacLeish, Hart Crane, and many other writers who made Paris the center of their literary activities in the ’20s. Photo: Ernest Hemingway (far right) with John Dos Passos (far left), Joris Ivens (back to camera), and Sidney Franklin in Madrid during the Spanish Civil War.

Those who are creating the modern composition authentically are naturally only of importance when they are dead because by that time the modern composition having become past is classified and the description of it is classical.

That is the reason why the creator of the new composition in the arts is an outlaw until he is a classic, there is hardly a moment in between and it is really too bad very much too bad naturally for the creator but also very much too bad for the enjoyer, they all really would enjoy the created so much better just after it has been made than when it is already a classic, but it is perfectly simple that there is no reason why the contemporaries should see, because it would not make any difference as they lead their lives in the new composition anyway, and as every one is naturally indolent why naturally they don’t see.”

By Edward Rubin, Contributing Editor

Excerpts from Stein’s: “What is a Master-piece and why are there so few of them?” (1936)

“One of the things that I discovered in lecturing was that gradually one ceased to hear what one said one heard what the audience hears one say, that is the reason that oratory is practically never a master-piece very rarely and very rarely history, because history deals with people who are orators who hear not what they are not what they say but what their audience hears them say.You can tell that so well in the difficulty of writing novels or poetry these days. The tradition has always been that you may more or less describe the things that happen you imagine them of course but you more or less describe the things that happen but nowadays everybody all day long knows what is happening and so what is happening is not really interesting, one knows it by radios cinemas newspapers biographies autobiographies until what is happening does not really thrill any one, it excites them a little but it does not really thrill them.The painter can no longer say that what he does is as the world looks to him because he cannot look at the world any more, it has been photographed too much and he has to say that he does something else. In former times a painter said he painted what he saw of course he didn’t but anyway he could say it, now he does not want to say it because seeing it is not interesting. This has something to do with masterpieces and why there are so few of them but not everything.The moment it is in relation it is common knowledge and anybody can feel and know it and it is not a master-piece. At the same time every one in a curious way sooner or later does feel the reality of a master-piece. The thing in itself of which the human nature is only its clothing does hold the attention.The manner and habits of Bible times or Greek or Chinese have nothing to do with ours today but the masterpieces exist just the same and they do not exist because of their identity, that is what any one remembering then remembered then, they do not exist by human nature because everybody always knows everything there is to know about human nature, they exist because they came to be as something that is an end in itself and in that respect it is opposed to the business of living which is relation and necessity.That is what a master-piece is not although it may easily be what a master-piece talks about. It is very interesting to have it be inside one that never as you know yourself you know yourself without looking and feeling and looking and feeling make it be that you are some one you have seen. If you have seen any one you know them as you see them whether it is yourself or any other one and so the identity consists in recognition and in recognizing you lose identity because after all nobody looks as they look like, they do not look like that we all know that of ourselves and of any one. And therefore in every way it is a trouble and so you write anybody does write to confirm what any one is and the more one does the more one looks like what one was and in being so identity is made more so and that identity is not what any one can have as a thing to be but as a thing to see. And it being a thing to see no master-piece can see what it can see if it does then it is timely and as it is timely it is not a master-piece.” .