Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein Read Free

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.
    By the time she died, in 1946, at the age of 72, Gertrude Stein had become something she wanted still more to be, historical (see “A Message from Gertrude Stein,” which precedes). Beginning with
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
(written in 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. The present volume, edited by Mr. Carl Van Vechten, her friend for over thirty years, was in the press when she died and was published later in the same year. Its aim was to make examples of her more difficult writing available along with examples of that more popular writing, and thus to demonstrate, as far as possible, the unity of her life and work. 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