Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein Read Free Page B

for example, says of her: “In the universal confusion (the war years and after) she remains intelligent she has kept her poetic sense and even her sense of humor.” Of
Wars I Have Seen
he writes: “The originality of the ideas, the deliberate fantasy of the comparisons, the naïveté of the tone, combined with the profundity of the thought, the repetitions, the absence of punctuation, all that first irritates the reader finally convinces him so that more orthodox styles appear insipid to him. Gertrude Stein is believed to be a difficult writer. This is false. There is not a single phrase in this book that cannot be comprehended by a schoolgirl of sixteen years.”
    Here is Ben Ray Redman’s testimony: “Few writers have ever dared to be, or have ever been able to be, as simple as she, as simple as a child, pointing straight, going straight to the heart of a subject, to its roots; pointing straight, when and where adults would take a fancier way than pointing because they have learned not to point.… In the past, perhaps wilfully, she has often failed to communicate, and it was either her misfortune or her fun, depending on her intention.”
    Or perhaps you would prefer Virgil Thomson’s capsule definition: “To have become a Founding Father of her century is her own reward for having long ago, and completely, dominated her language.”
    An earlier, sympathetic, and highly descriptive view is that of Sherwood Anderson: “She is laying word against word, relating sound to sound, feeling for the taste, the smell, the rhythm of the individual word. She is attempting to do something for the writers of our English speech that may be better understood after a time,
and she is not in a hurry.
… There is a thing one might call ‘the extension of the province of his art’ one wants to achieve. One works with words and one would like words that have a taste on the lips, that have a perfume to the nostrils, rattling words one can throw into a box and shake, making a sharp jingling sound, words that, when seen on the printed page, have a distinct arresting effect upon the eye, words that when they jump out from under the pen one may feel with the fingers as one might caress the cheeks of his beloved. And what I think is that these books of Gertrude Stein do in a very real sense recreate life in words.”
    William Carlos Williams’s opinion is correlated to the above: “Having taken the words to her choice, to emphasize further what she has in mind she has completely unlinked them (in her most recent work: 1930) from their former relationships to the sentence. This was absolutely essential and unescapable. Each under the new arrangement has a quality of its own, but not conjoined to carry the burden science, philosophy, and every higgledy-piggledy figment of law and order have been laying upon them in the past. They are like a crowd at Coney Island, let us say, seen from an airplane.… She has placed writing on a plane where it may deal unhampered with its own affairs, unburdened with scientific and philosophic lumber.”
    Edmund Wilson feels compelled to admit: “Whenever we pick up her writings, however unintelligible we may find them, we are aware of a literary personality of unmistakable originality and distinction.”
    Julian Sawyer contends: “If the name of anything or everything is dead, as Miss Stein has always rightly contested, the only thing to do to keep it alive is to rename it. And that is what Miss Stein did and does.”
    Pursuing these commentators, I fall upon Thornton Wilder who asserts: “There have been too many books that attempted to flatter or woo or persuade or coerce the reader. Miss Stein’s theory of the audience insists on the fact that the richest rewards for the reader have come from those works in which the authors admitted no consideration of an audience into their creating mind.”
    And as a coda, allow me to permit Joseph Alsop, Jr., to speak: “Miss Stein is no out-pensioner upon