A headline in the New York Times in 1934, when Gertrude Stein was on a speaking tour, read: “Miss Stein Speaks to Bewildered 500”. Stein saw and heard the world differently. It takes time to look at and listen to even a selection of her outpouring of poems, prose, opera and “writings about writing.” Here are five reasons why you should bother.
1. Gertrude Stein was a genuine trailblazer. In an article on Suite 101, Tel Asiado describes the significance of Stein in American literature and her role as a mentor to artists and writers such as Picasso, Apollinaire and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Stein, who lived most of her life in France, showed inspirational courage as a personality and as a writer. She was a large woman, completely confident of her physical identity and proud of her appetites. Although she professed not to be interested in feminism, she was a lesbian who wrote passionately about sexual relationships, as well as a modernist writer at a time when the modernist “lions” (such as James Joyce) were all men. A child of privilege, Stein survived two world wars, the second as an old woman sometimes walking sixteen kilometres for bread.
Stein’s firm belief that she was an artistic “genius” (in the league of Picasso, with only a few others) annoyed many. She famously told Hemingway, “Remarks are not literature”, and provoked such notables as Tristan Tzara and Matisse to write a “Testimony Against Stein”. You may discover you do not like Gertrude Stein, but such a provocative figure can add richness to the “reading list” of an emergent writer.
2. Gertrude Stein was one of the masters of sound poetry. “…I don’t hear a language, I hear tones and voice and rhythms,” she wrote in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Stein was famous for her use of repetition and word-play. A poem such as Susie Asado needs to be read out loud several times to understand the meaning (“sweet tea” as “sweetie”, for example). Recordings of Stein reading some of her own work can be accessed through UbuWeb.
3. Gertrude Stein developed new modes of visual poetry. Her contribution here was not so much in concrete poetry, although as a careful craftsperson she cared about how her work looked on the page, but more that she used words and observed the world as a painter. Stein was a patron of emerging visual artists and produced the first Cubist word paintings, using fragmentation as a technique. According to leading American poet Robert Hass, her word portraits, such as “Mrs. Emerson” and “Jane Heap” develop a distinguished literary genre dating back to the Greeks.
4. Linked perhaps to her love of the visual arts, Gertrude Stein was a magnificent observer and listener. Among hundreds of portraits and photographs of her she is often pictured sitting quietly, watching. She wrote in the “continuous present” and focused on describing, rather than interpreting, internal or external reality. Stein told reporters, “You see and you hear and you have got to know the difference.”
5. Like all poets, Gertrude Stein wrote to create a fresh way of seeing. In Four in America she tries to explain why writing poetry “in a late age” is much harder than in the days of Chaucer and Homer. Then, the poet could use the name of something, the sea for example, and it was “really there”. Generations and thousands of poems later poets have to find new ways of portraying “the excitingness of pure being.” About her famous line, “a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose,” she comments: “I think that in that line the rose is red for the first time in English poetry for a hundred years.”
Sources: Stendahl, Renate (editor). Gertrude Stein In Words and Pictures. London: Thames and Hudson, 1995.
Stein, Gertrude, edited by Robert Haas. Reflection on the Atomic Bomb. Los Angeles, Black Sparrow Press, 1974.
