Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein Read Free Page A

and comical specimens, of Steinese. “What is the answer?” she inquired, and getting no answer said, laughing, “In that case, what is the question?”
    F. W. D UPEE
    February, 1962

A Stein Song
    Gertrude Stein rings bells, loves baskets, and wears handsome waistcoats. She has a tenderness for green glass and buttons have a tenderness for her. In the matter of fans you can only compare her with a motion-picture star in Hollywood and three generations of young writers have sat at her feet. She has influenced without coddling them. In her own time she is a legend and in her own country she is with honor. Keys to sacred doors have been presented to her and she understands how to open them. She writes books for children, plays for actors, and librettos for operas. Each one of them is one. For her a rose is a rose and how!
    I composed this strictly factual account of Miss Stein and her activities for a catalogue of the Gotham Book Mart in 1940, but all that I said then seems to be truer than ever today. Gertrude Stein currently is not merely a legend, but also a whole folklore, a subject for an epic poem, and the young GIs who crowded into her Paris apartment on the rue Christine during and after the Greater War have augmented the number of her fans until their count is as hard to reckon as that of the grains of sand on the shore by the sea. During the war I frequently received letters from soldiers and sailors who, with only two days’ furlough at their disposal and a long way to travel, sometimes by jeep, spent all of their free hours in Paris with the author of
Tender Buttons.
Other GIs bore her away on a flying tour of Germany and still others carried her by automobile to Belgium to speak to their comrades there. In Paris she gave public talks to groups of them too large to fit into her apartment.
Life
and the
New York Times Magazine
contracted for articles from her pen. Her play of existence in occupied France,
Yes Is for a Very Young Man
, was presently produced at the Community Playhouse in Pasadena, California. Some of these tributes, naturally, were due to her personality and charm, but most of them stem directly from the library shelves which hold her collected works. Furthermore, as she once categorically informed Alfred Harcourt, it is to her so-called “difficult” works that she owes her world-wide celebrity.
    There is more direct testimony regarding her experiences with the GIs in her letters to me. On November 26, 1944, after the coming of the Americans, an event excitingly described in this Collection, she cabled me: “Joyous Days. Endless Love.” In 1945, she wrote, “How we love the American army we never do stop loving the American army one single minute.” If you will recall Alexandre Dumas’s motto,
J’aime qui m’aime
, you will be certain they loved her too. Still later she wrote me: “Enclosed is a description of a talk I gave them which did excite them, they walked me home fifty strong after the lecture was over and in the narrow streets of the quarter they made all the automobiles take side streets, the police looked and followed a bit but gave it up.” Captain Edmund Geisler, her escort on the Belgian excursion, said to me, “Wherever she spoke she was frank and even belligerent. She made the GIs awfully mad, but she also made them think and many ended in agreement with her.”
    II
    In
Everybody’s Autobiography
, Gertrude Stein confesses: “It always did bother me that the American public were more interested in me than in my work.” Perhaps this statement may be affirmed justifiably of the anonymous masses, but it would be incorrect to apply it generally to the critics, novelists, and reviewers who frequently have considered her writings worth discussing seriously. It has occurred to me that a brief summary of the opinions of a few of these distinguished gentlemen might serve to reassure the reading world at large and Miss Stein herself on this controversial point.
    André Maurois,