WHILE Gertrude Stein was a student at Radcliffe she took a course she liked immensely. She likes lots of things immensely, but this she did like more than others. It was a course in cloud-formation, she wrote to me about it just the other day. And the other day, quite by accident, I learned a fellow-Californian that the Bay-region around San Francisco is one of the finest in the world for the observation of cloud phenomena. Now Stein says that at Bilignin too (in the Rhone River valley where she spends her summers) the sky is the bluest and the clouds are the nicest of any!

But Gertrude Stein is a Californian—that is, we Californians appropriate her as such. Although she was actually born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, she spent most of her youth under the clouds of Oakland and San Francisco. In the "Making of Americans" she was writte of them, these clouds of California, as "the firm white summer clouds breaking away from the horizon and slowly moving." I like to think that they helped to make her what she is more than the other clouds of America she has lived under—certainly more than the clouds of Belley or Paris which have, it is true, been over her while she has lived out the last three decades of her writing.

And possibly this is so, for throughout her writing (as in the last lecture of this book) she has insisted, "I am an American and I have lived half my life in Paris, not the half which made me but the half in which I made what I made." Perhaps the "breaking away and slowly moving" American clouds did help her first to see and then to say what is in Composition as Explanation, just as Paris has helped her to what she says in An American and France. I hope it is true, but you may judge for yourself. It is a grave matter, believe me—a matter of pride if you are an ardent Californian who wants the poetry of Gertrude Stein as well as the clouds of California to belong to you.

Possibly the most adequate account of Gertrude Stein's early accomplishments is to be found printed on the dust-jacket of her book "Geography and Plays." It reads: "Gertrude Stein was

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