There used to be something known to all readers as “Steinese.” Steinese was the peculiar literary idiom invented by Gertrude Stein around 1910 and made familiar to a large American public by her admirers and non-admirers alike. Gnomic, repetitive, illogical, sparsely punctuated, this idiom became a scandal and a delight, lending itself equally to derisory parody and fierce denunciation. It had a formidable currency in writing and conversation throughout the teens, twenties, and thirties. “A rose is a rose is a rose” and “Pigeons on the grass alas” were encountered as frequently-almost-as the “Yes we have no bananas,” a nonsense phrase—later a song—of popular origin which may actually have been inspired by Steinese. “My little sentences have gotten under their skins,” Gertrude Stein was at last able to say, with the pride of someone who craved recognition the more that she got mere notoriety. In other words, her little sentences, originally quoted in scorn, had come in time to be repeated from something like affection; and thus the very theory that underlay her technique of reiteration was proved: what people loved they repeated, and what people repeated they loved.

Simple-minded as she sounded to the public, Gertrude Stein did have her theories—few writers of note have had more stringent ones. If she was “the Mother Goose of Montparnasse,” as someone said (such attempts to characterize her in a witty phrase were constantly repeated, too), she was a Mother Goose with a mind. She had studied psychology with William James at Radcliffe; conducted laboratory experiments there with Hugo Münsterberg; come close to getting an M.D. at Johns Hopkins; and then, settling in Paris with her brother Leo, communed with Picasso in his Paris studio where a different kind of experiment was in progress: the plastic analysis of spatial relations which gave rise to Cubist painting.

Thus, behind the popular image of Gertrude Stein there came to be, as we all know by now, a woman of immense purpose, equipped with astonishing powers of assimilation, concentration, and hard work—as well as, to be sure, relaxation (she liked to lie in the sun and stare right into it). Her meeting with Picasso was in itself purely fortuitous; such a meeting might have befallen any tourist with a mildly questing spirit and enough money to buy paintings which, in any event, went almost begging. Gertrude Stein converted this meeting into the basis of a vocation and a life. It became for her the major case—her acquaintance with William James was another—of genius by association. Her scientific interests now fused with a passion, at last fully awakened, for art and literature. Out of this union of the laboratory and the studio came a body of theory and writing like none before or after it. There were elements in it of the Naturalism that was just then (circa 1900) taking root in American literature.

So far as these elements alone went, Gertrude Stein might have been a Dreiser manqué—except that, with her Cubist predilections, she became, as it were, post-Dreiser. Like Dreiser and other Naturalists she held quasi-scientific conceptions of race and individual character; life expressed itself best in forms of “struggle” (the word was frequently hers as it was that of Dreiser’s generation: “the class struggle,” “the struggle for existence”). Her first mature work, Three Lives, was a triple portrait of the servant, a type of oppressed individual with a special appeal for the Naturalist novelist; in addition, her trio, two Germans and a Negress, belonged to ethnic minorities. Yet this staple subject of Naturalist fiction proved to be more a study in the language, syntax, and rhythms of consciousness than in the effects of oppression, social or cosmic. Here her aesthetic predilections checkmated and partially transformed the Naturalist elements. Three Lives remains her most widely admired book.

The American writer who most attracted her was not Dreiser or any of his school but Henry James. And there may have been personal as well as aesthetic reasons for her refusal of Naturalist pessimism and protest. Gertrude Stein felt no deep identification with the oppressed; life was a struggle that she could very probably win. Her grandparents had been German Jewish immigrants, but they had prospered in the United States; her parents, prospering too, had been beguiled by art, languages, and educational theory; as children, Gertrude Stein and her sister and brothers, like the young Jameses at an earlier period, had been transported to Europe for a prolonged stay in Vienna and Paris. Thus the impression left by the elder Steins, at least on Gertrude Stein, was one of people who, if they were not exactly free spirits, had to a degree done as they liked and made themselves at home equally in America and Europe. No doubt their example, as she conceived of it, fortified her own determination to do the same, do even better. Hence the impulse, so patiently and passionately followed by her, to root herself in a profession, in the city of Paris, in a society of her choosing.

The consequences for her personality were, again, astonishing. In her maturity, she gave the impression, not merely of doing what she liked but of being almost anything she wanted to be. She seemed, as the many surviving likenesses of her suggest, at once female and male, Jew and non-Jew, American pur sang and European peasant, artist and public figure, and so on. She did not, however, create this intricate unity and sustain it without showing evidences of great strain. Her magnetic, almost magical self-mastery was buttressed by frank self-indulgence on her part and advertised to the world by a good deal of unashamed self-congratulation. A regular system of compensations characterized her life. Inclusions entailed exclusions in a virtually mechanical perfection of balance. For almost every idea she embraced, almost every person she befriended, there was some idea that remained pointedly alien to her, some person who was an outsider. Henry James had played something like this drama too, though with more compunction, it seems, and with himself often cast as the outsider. Gertrude Stein, never the outsider, seems not to have risen—or sunk—to the level of James’s flexibility. Thus her combined residence, salon, and art gallery in the rue de Fleurus, where she presided with the aid of the devoted Miss Toklas, presented the aspects, now of an infinitely charming refuge, now of a bristling fortress. The former aspect predominated; the wariest visitor was apt to be struck by things about Gertrude Stein which were more literally magical than her self-mastery—things that were not to be fully accounted for by will, intelligence, or the principle of genius by association: her magnificent head and features, her appealing voice, her elementally refreshing laugh.

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But Gertrude Stein’s family background was not the only source, or even the principal one, of her prodigious and largely good-humored will to power. The same background failed to supply her brother Leo with any such determination to make himself at home in the world. Brilliant, erratic, eternally unfulfilled, Leo Stein became an early advocate and perennial patient of psychoanalysis, finding a sort of fatherland only in Freud. In Gertrude Stein’s case, obviously, it was her involvement in the profession of literature, and the stern mysteries attending it, that made the difference. The profession was the more engrossing because of the variety of influences she brought to bear on it. If her conception of literature included elements of Naturalism, it also anticipated the literary Modernism that was to culminate in the chief works of Joyce, Eliot, Yeats, and others. To her as to them (up to a point), literature in the 20th century presented itself as a problem in the reconstruction of form and language. But where the solution of this problem was a means to an end for these writers, it became, for her, on the whole, a pursuit worthy in itself of her best efforts. She had no quarrel, as they did, with culture, with the self, with history. Culture in her terminology becomes “composition,” an aggregate of institutions, technologies, and human relations which the artist, as artist, accepts as it is, eliciting its meanings primarily through eye and ear rather than through mind, memory, or imagination. And words, like the other materials of the literary medium, become useful to the artist, assume a character purely aesthetic, in proportion as they can be converted from bearers of established meaning and unconscious association into plastic entities.

Such was the theoretical basis of her work, a basis to which she added many refinements as she sought to find literary equivalents for the various experiments conducted by the Cubists. Her theories have been admirably expounded and criticized in a number of recent books. The usual conclusion is the common sense one. Literature is a temporal art rather than, like painting, a spatial one; and in using words as plastic entities, as things in themselves, words become not more but less alive, indeed peculiarly inert. Mr. Kenneth Burke has called Gertrude Stein’s practice “art by subtraction,” a phrase that expresses well the literal and merely negative aspect of her work at its least effective. Mr. B. L. Reid has made Burke’s phrase the title of a hostile study of Gertrude Stein; and Mr. John Malcolm Brinnin, in The Third Rose, the best biography of her, sums up his investigations into her methods as follows:

Language is plastic, but its plasticity must be informed and determined by the philosophy or, at least, by the information it conveys. In her earlier works, Gertrude Stein operated under this injunction naturally; but as she continued, her attraction to painting led her to wish for the same plastic freedom for literature, and eventually to write as though literature were endowed with such freedom. “The painter,” said Georges Braque, “knows things by sight; the writer, who knows them by name, profits by a prejudice in his favor.” This was the profit Gertrude Stein threw away.

All this applies to darkest Stein. Mr. Brinnin and many others, including the present writer, find this territory difficult of access. Nor, of course, is one helped by having learned one’s way around in, say, Finnegan’s Wake and Four Quartets. On the contrary, a knowledge of Joyce’s or Eliot’s methods sets one to looking in Gertrude Stein for meanings and values according to the principle of association. But this is the wrong principle to apply to, for example, Tender Buttons. Gertrude Stein was insistent that she was not practicing “automatic writing” or working in any literary convention, such as Surrealism, related to automatic writing. No release of unconscious impulses, her own or those of fictional characters, is intended. She must, in fact, have devoted much labor to eliminating such suggestions. Thus the body of her theory and writing at its most advanced occupies an anomalous position among the various modern schools.

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The usual theoretical objections to her work are persuasive; yet between them and her work there is always a certain accusing margin of doubt. Poets have found her work exciting, however inexplicably so, as if words in themselves might in certain circumstances appeal to some receptive apparatus in man that is comparable to what people call extrasensory perception. This is not, on the whole, the experience of the present writer in the farther reaches of Gertrude Stein. Yet, read aloud, certain passages in, say, Tender Buttons, do make their effect, especially if read in the company of people prepared to laugh. The silent reader expects familiar rewards for his efforts. The viva voce reader is more apt to take what comes and make the most of it. To the ear, when it is lent freely to a given passage, the contrast stands out between, on the one hand, the perpetual flow of non-sequiturs in the passage and, on the other, the air of conviction conveyed by the very definite words, the pregnant pauses, the pat summary phrases (“This is this,” “It is surely cohesive,” “It is not the same.”); and the mingling of apparent conviction with transparent nonsense throughout the passage takes on its own kind of momentary sense, giving rise (if the reader is lucky) to a wondering laugh. As one of the pat phrases suggests, “It shows shine.” Does it also show Stein? If so, reading these tongue-twisting words aloud helps to bring the pun to light. So too with the occasional rhymes and jingles strewn through this prose: they also come alive better when spoken.

Tender Buttons is probably Gertrude Stein’s most “private” performance. The verbal still lifes in that book defy even Mr. Donald Sutherland, the critic who, in Gertrude Stein: A Biography of Her Work, has made more headway than anyone in interpreting her. Here is a passage (surely very beautiful) from “Lend a Hand or Four Religions” (published in Useful Knowledge, 1928), followed by Mr. Sutherland’s comment:

First, religion. She is feeling that the grasses grow four times yearly and does she furnish a house as well. . . . Let her think of a stable man and a stable can be a place where they care for the Italians every day. And a mission of kneeling there where the water is flowing kneeling, a chinese christian, and let her think of a stable man and wandering and a repetition of counting. Count to ten. He did. He did not. Count to ten. And did she gather the food as well. Did she gather the food as well. Did she separate the green grasses from one another. They grow four times yearly. Did she see some one as she was advancing and did she remove what she had and did she lose what she touched and did she touch it and the water there where she was kneeling where it was flowing. And are stables a place where they care for them as well.

One might say that the essence of this passage is the phrase “as well”—a sort of welcome to anything that is there to come into the composition, such a welcome being the genius of France and as often as not of America. The coherence of the passage, which consists in a sort of melodic progress of consideration, is between the rational French discursiveness and the rambling American sympathy as Whitman had it. But more important is the kind of existence expressed here. The existence of the woman in the passage is intimately involved with the existence, growth, and movement of things in the landscape. Her kneeling and the water flowing and the grass growing four times yearly and the caring for Italians are all part of the same slow natural living of the place and the world.

In serious literary circles, as distinguished from the large public, Gertrude Stein’s real accomplishments were always known. There, her influence was at one time considerable, though it worked in very different ways and degrees on different individuals. It was known that her writing had influenced, in certain respects, Sherwood Anderson and, later, Hemingway. It was supposed that Steinese had found echoes in Don Marquis’ archy and mehitabel as well as in the difficult poetry of Wallace Stevens, who once wrote “Twenty men crossing a bridge,/ Into a village,/ Are/ Twenty men crossing a bridge/ Into a village.” Her insistence on the primacy of phenomena over ideas, of the sheer magnificence of unmediated reality, found a rapturous response in Stevens, a quiet one in Marianne Moore. In Axel’s Castle, Edmund Wilson’s discriminating study of modern literature published as early as 1931, she had a chapter to herself, as had, in each case, Yeats, Valéry, Eliot, Proust, and Joyce. Axel’s Castle was a decisive event in the history of modern reputations. Wilson had some doubts as to Gertrude Stein’s readableness in certain books but few doubts as to her general importance. Steinese and its inventor had become reputable.

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By the time she died, in 1946, at the age of seventy-two, Gertrude Stein had become something she wanted still more to be, historical. Beginning with The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1932) she had developed unsuspected capacities for writing intelligibly and charmingly. The universal surprise at this fact, combined with the intrinsic fascination of the book, made it a best seller. And dire though the Autobiography is with special pleading, it remains one of the best memoirs in American literature.

The improvement in her literary status disturbed for a while her firm sense of herself and her place in the world. “Money is funny,” she said quizzically as the royalties poured in. But she soon embraced her new role and played it with good-humored dignity. Returning to America for the first time since 1903, she lectured to sizable audiences across the country. And following World War II she became a kind of oracle and motherly hostess to American military personnel in liberated Paris. Just before her death her sayings and doings over there were much in the news in America, and her later writings, cast in a much modified Steinese, were sought by the popular magazines. She seems to have died at peace with herself, her natural craving for recognition to some extent satisfied. At least she died firmly in character, having delivered from her hospital bed the last specimen, and one of the most searching and comical specimens, of Steinese. “What is the answer?” she inquired, and getting no answer said, laughing, “In that case, what is the question?”

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