October 11, 1922

THE NEW REPUBLIC

# Four American Impressions

GERTRUDE STEIN, PAUL ROSENFELD,
RING LARDNER, SINCLAIR LEWIS.

## I

ONE who thinks a great deal about people and what they are up to in the world comes inevitably in time to relate them to experiences connected with one's own life. The round, hard apples in this old orchard are the breasts of my beloved. The curved, round hill in the distance is the body of my beloved, lying asleep. One cannot avoid practising this trick of lifting people out of the spots on which in actual life they stand and transferring them to what seems at the moment some more fitting spot in one's fanciful world.

And one gets also a kind of aroma from people. They are green, healthy, growing things or they have begun to decay. There is something in this man, to whom I have just talked, that has sent me away from him smiling and in an odd way pleased with myself. Why has this other man, although his words were kindly and his deeds apparently good, spread a cloud over my sky?

In my own boyhood in an Ohio town I went about delivering newspapers at kitchen doors, and there were certain houses to which I went—old brick houses with immense old-fashioned kitchens—in which I loved to linger. On Saturday mornings I sometimes managed to collect a fragrant cooky at such a place, but there was something else that held me. Something got into my mind connected with the great, light kitchens and the women working in them that came sharply back when, last year, I went to visit an American woman, Miss Gertrude Stein, in her own large room in the house at 27 rue de Fleurus in Paris. In the great kitchen of my fanciful world in which I have, ever since that morning, seen Miss Stein standing, there is a most sweet and gracious aroma. Along the walls are many shining pots and pans, and there are innumerable jars of fruits, jellies and preserves. Something is going on in the great room, for Miss Stein is a worker in words with the same loving touch in her strong fingers that was characteristic of the women of the kitchens of the brick houses in the town of my boyhood. She is an American woman of the old sort, one who cares for the handmade goodies and who scorns the factory-made foods, and in her own great kitchen she is making something with her materials, something sweet to the tongue and fragrant to the nostrils.

That her materials are the words of our English speech and that we do not, most of us, know or care too much what she is up to does not greatly matter to me. The impression I wish now to give you of her is of one very intent and earnest in a matter most of us have forgotten. 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. And one has always that picture of the woman in the great kitchen of words, standing there by a table, clean, strong, with red cheeks and sturdy legs, always quietly and smilingly at work. If her smile has in it something of the mystery, to the male at least, of the Mona Lisa, I remember that the women in the kitchens on the wintry mornings wore often that same smile.

She is making new, strange and to my ears sweet combinations of words. As an American writer I admire her because she, in her person, represents something sweet and healthy in our American life, and because I have a kind of undying faith that what she is up to in her word kitchen in Paris is of more importance to writers of English than the work of many of our more easily understood and more widely accepted word artists.

## II

When it comes to our Ring Lardner, here is something else again. Here is another word fellow, one who cares about the words of our American speech and who is perhaps doing more than any other American to give new life to the words of our everyday life.

There is something I think I understand about Ring. The truth is that I believe there is something the matter with him and I have a fancy I know what it is. He is afraid of the highbrows. They scare him to death. I wonder why, for it is true that there is often, in a paragraph of his, more understanding of life, more human sympathy, more salty wisdom than in hundreds of pages of, say, Mr. Sinclair Lewis's dreary prose—and I am sure Mr. Lewis would not hesitate to outface any highbrow in his lair.

I said that I thought I knew what was the matter with Mr. Ring Lardner. He comes from out in my country, from just such another town as the one in which I spent my own boyhood, and I remember certain shy lads of my own town who always made it a point to consort only with the

IV

them something extremely sensitive that did not want to be hurt. Even to mention the fact that there was in them a real love of life, a quick sharp stinging hunger for beauty, would have sent a blush of shame to their cheeks. They were intent upon covering up, concealing from everyone, at any cost, the shy hungry children they were carrying about within themselves.

And I always see our Ring Lardner as such a fellow. He is covering up, sticking to the gang, keeping out of sight. And that is all right too, if in secret and in his suburban home he is really using his talent for sympathetic understanding of life, if in secret he is being another Mark Twain and working in secret on his own Huckleberry Finn. Mark Twain wrote and was proclaimed for writing his Innocents Abroad, Following the Equator, Roughing It, etc., etc., and was during his lifetime most widely recognized for such secondary work. And Mark was just such another shy lad, bluffed by the highbrows—and even the glorious Mark had no more sensitive understanding of the fellow in the street, in the hooch joint, the ballpark and the city suburb than our Mr. Ring Lardner.

### III

Which brings me to a man who seems to me, of all our American writers, the one who is most unafraid, Mr. Paul Rosenfeld. Here is an American writer actually unashamed at being fine and sensitive in his work. To me it seems that he has really freed himself from both the high and the low brows and has made of himself a real aristocrat among writers of prose.

To be sure, to the man in the street, accustomed to the sloppiness of hurried newspaper writing, the Rosenfeld prose is sometimes difficult. His vocabulary is immense and he cares very, very much for just the shade of meaning he is striving to convey. Miss Jean Heap recently spoke of him as "our well dressed writer of prose," and I should think Paul Rosenfeld would not too much resent the connotations of that. For after all, Rosenfeld is our man of distinction, the American, it seems to me, who is unafraid and unashamed to live for the things of the spirit as expressed in the arts. I get him as the man walking cleanly and boldly and really accepting, daring to accept, the obligations of the civilized man. To my ears that acceptance has made his prose sound clearly and sweetly across many barren fields. To me it is often like soft bells heard ringing at evening across fields long let go to the weeds of carelessness and the general slam-it-throughness of so much of our American writing.

Of the four American writers concerning whose handling of our speech I have had the temerity to express my own feeling there is left Mr. Sinclair Lewis.

The texture of the prose written by Mr. Lewis gives one but faint joy and one cannot escape the conviction that for some reason Lewis has himself found but little joy, either in life among us or in his own effort to channel his reactions to our life into prose. There can be no doubt that this man, with his sharp journalistic nose for news of the outer surface of our lives, has found out a lot of things about us and the way we live in our towns and cities, but I am very sure that in the life of every man, woman and child in the country there are forces at work that seem to have escaped the notice of Mr. Lewis. Ring Lardner has seen them and in his writing there is sometimes real laughter, but one has the feeling that Lewis never laughs at all, that he is in an odd way too serious about something to laugh.

For after all, even in Gopher Prairie or in Indianapolis, Indiana, boys go swimming in the creeks on summer afternoons, shadows play at evening on factory walls, old men dig angleworms and go fishing together, love comes to at least a few of the men and women and, everything else failing, the baseball club comes from a neighboring town and Tom Robinson gets a home run. That's something. There is an outlook on life across which even the cry of a child, choked to death by its own mother, would be something. Life in our American towns and cities is barren enough and there are enough people saying that with the growth of industrialism it has become continually more and more ugly, but Mr. Paul Rosenfeld and Mr. Ring Lardner apparently do not find it altogether barren and ugly. For them and for a growing number of men and women in America there is something like a dawn that Mr. Lewis has apparently sensed but little, for there is so little sense of it in the texture of his prose. Reading Sinclair Lewis, one comes inevitably to the conclusion that here is a man writing who, wanting passionately to love the life about him, cannot bring himself to do so, and who wanting perhaps to see beauty descend upon our lives like a rainstorm has become blind to the minor beauties our lives hold.

And is it not just this sense of dreary spiritual death in the man's work that is making it so widely read? To one who is himself afraid to live there is, I am sure, a kind of inverted joy in seeing other men as dead. In my own feeling for the man from whose pen has come all of this prose over which

there are so few lights and shades, I have come at
last to sense, most of all, the man fighting terrifical-
ly and ineffectually for a thing about which he
really does care. There is a kind of fighter living
inside Sinclair Lewis and there is, even in this dull,
unlighted prose of his, a kind of dawn coming.
In the dreary ocean of this prose, islands begin to
appear. In Babbitt there are moments when the
people of whom he writes, with such amazing at-
tention to the outer details of lives, begin to think
and feel a little, and with the coming of life into
his people a kind of nervous, hurried beauty and
life flits, like a lantern carried by a night watch-
man past the window of a factory as one stands
waiting and watching in a grim street on a night
of December.

SHERWOOD ANDERSON.

["PROVIDENCE\nR. I.\nJOURNAL", "JUN 10 1923", "Reconsidering Van Gogh", "V\nINCENT VAN GOGH, that amazing\nartist whose career has interested\ncollectors of the curious in mental fields\nas well as students of the finest in paint-\ning, has been a much discussed, much\nwritten-about individual during these past\nfew years when impressionist adventures\non canvas have displayed alarming\ntendencies. There has been a disposition\nin some quarters to blame it all upon Van\nGogh, much in the manner of those critics\nwho say that Walt Whitman is to blame\nfor Gertrude Stein and so on.", "The real place of Van Gogh among the\npioneers is to be definitely appointed, if\na small number of earnest and energetic\nworkers are not hampered, and one nota-\nble contribution in that direction is the\nsplendid volume bearing the artist's name\nwhich has been put out by the Medici\nSociety of Boston, embracing an elaborate\nbibliographical study prepared by Julius\nMeier-Graefe. This is a costly volume,\nnot within the reach of everyone, but its\ninfluence will be felt. Perhaps others will\nderive from it an inspiration for smaller\nbooks, any of which would be important\nto an age which appears to understand\nnothing about Van Gogh, excepting that\nhe knew Gauguin, and that once upon a\nmad day, contemplating himself in his\nmirror, he picked up a razor and cut off\nhis own ear.", "Clipping from\nDETROIT (MICH.) NEWS", "MAY 13 1923", "By D. KENNETH LAUB.", "\"MUMBO JUMBO is like no other\nbook ever written. It is an\nessay, a satire, an exposure and\neven more. It is an indictment\nagainst our beloved cults and the\nfrauds of modern civilization. Its\nhumor is hilarious; its satire biting.\nIt out-Shaws Shaw and lashes with\na Swiftian wit.\"", "Thus the publishers—Boni &\nLiveright—on the paper jacket of a\nplay by Henry Clews, Jr.", "Mr. Clews is the son and name-\nsake of the celebrated banker. He\nis a monarchist. He is a champion\nof old-fashioned ideas and ideals;\nold-fashioned faith and old-fashion-\ned virtues. He loves his God, his\nwife, his mother and the side-\nwhiskers of his butler—perfect\nsymbol, these last, of old-world\ncourtesy and the dignity of service.\nHe despises democracy and all its\nworks. More than any other one\nthing he despises modern vulgarity\nand by way of proving it he has\nwritten, in \"Mumbo Jumbo,\" a book\nsurpassed in vulgarity by few\nmodern writings. In the matter of\nreflective he far outdistances H. L.\nMencken, whom he affects to de-\nspise. Indeed, by wholesale borrow-\nings and elaborations of derogatory\nsynonyms, from a dictionary and\nthesaurus, he has almost reached\nthe sublime heights of long-wind-\ned, hysterical acrimony attained by\nBrann the Iconoclast just before\nthat promising Texan Demosthenes\nwas laid low by the bullet of In-\ndignant Subscriber.", "The publishers are right in as-\nserting that \"Mumbo Jumbo\" is\nlike no other book ever written\n(though the author has done his\nbest to make it like several others\n—notably the plays of Bernard\nShaw, whom, of course, he despises)\nbut whether this truth is flattering\nto Mr. Clews is another matter.\nThey are right, too, in asserting\nthat its humor is hilarious. The\nbook is capital fun—especially\nwhen the author assails the writers", "of modern verse and strikes blithely\nand with good aim at the tender\negos of the newspaper \"columnists;\"\nbut considered as a whole—as a\nserious criticism of our modern\ncivilization—it reminds one of noth-\ning so much as of a verbatim\ntranscript of the nightmare of a\nhalf-educated man who talks in his\nsleep after an indigestible literary\nmeal of Shaw, Mencken, Nietzsche,\nSt. Francis, the advertising section\nof Vanity Fair, The New Republic,\nSnappy Stories, Gertrude Stein and\na 148 page Sunday newspaper—\nsport section, society section, book\nsection—and all! A sterling ex-\nample, this, of the effects of too\nmuch general reading and too swift\na fitting from one philosophy to\nanother on the mind of a man\nwhose reflective faculty has not\nbeen developed as fully as his per-\nceptive—whose emotions are out of\nall proportion to his reason—in\nshort, a hodge-podge of polysylla-\nbic, ungrammatical blither. Mr.\nClews might have called his book,\nwith much more exactness \"Mum-\nble Jumble.\"", "The important (or, rather, amus-\ning) part of the book is the 60-\npage preface. The play itself is\npretty bad. The publishers, we\nthink, are exercising unnecessary\ncaution in warning the public not to\npresent the play without obtaining\nthe author's consent. Briefly, it\ncelebrates the astuteness of two\nrascally art dealers who turn the\npitiful personality and sorry daubs\nof an idiot boy to profitable account\nby foisting them on certain rich\nand gullible Americans as master\nand masterpieces. The rich Ameri-\ncans and the dilettanti of the So-\nciety and Art world (here's where\nthe satire comes in) make a cult\nof the boy's paintings and a god of\nthe bewildered boy. They call their\ncult \"Mama"—a heavy-handed dig\nat the Dadaists!", "But the book, when all is said\nand done, is very funny—like Mr.\nClews' picture, which it much re-\nsembles: a cocky, high-white-collar-\ned, hat-on-the-back-of-the-head,\nnegligently-but-elegantly-attired,\ngo-to-hell sort of book.", "Reviewer\nRichmond, Va.\nJAN - 1923", "Carl Van Vechten, author of The Blind Bow-Boy, is also the author of The Tattooed Countess, which Mr. Knopf will publish next August. It is a story of Iowa in 1987, and Mr. Van Vechten calls it \"a romantic novel with a happy ending\". He has also remarked that it will have an uplifting effect on American youth. Robert Nathan's third book and second novel, The Puppet Master, was lately published by McBride, following Autumn and Youth Grows Old. One of the editors of The Reviewer, meeting Gertrude Stein in Paris last summer, was asked by her if The Reviewer, like other magazines, was afraid of Miss Stein. To which the editor replied that The Reviewer was afraid of nothing. Whereupon Miss Stein rewarded him with the contribution in the present issue. Miss Stein is the author of Tender Buttons and Three Lives. The editors refuse to enter into correspondence about An Indian Boy, so all questions will be quite useless. Amy Lowell is occupied with her Life of Keats, and has snatched the time to honor The Reviewer again."]

Argus Pressclipping Bureau
352 Third Ave., New York

CLIPPING FROM

New York Office

4

APRIL 12 23

Oetner

## BEDLAM IN BELLES-LETTRES.

The Hermione school of criticism is busy these days. The young woman of Don Marquis' fantasy has appeared in the flesh and been made the high priestess of a widespread cult. Various of her followers are employed on New York publications, especially those which are "different, if you get what I mean." Perhaps the most outspoken is Kenneth Burke, who writes of "Engineering With Words" in the current Dial.

Mr. Burke compares Gertrude Stein with John Milton, remarking:

"Milton writes, for instance,

'Where he now sits at the right hand of God,' And the beauty of the line lies precisely in its 'significant form.' . . . I pass hastily on to a quotation from Miss Stein:

"Point, face, canvas, toy, struck off, sense or, weigh coach, soon beak on, so suck in, and an iron." Here, too, we have the appeal of significant form."

This is almost too good. Gertrude Stein has significant form all right, the sort of form to be found in an accumulation of unrelated objects. There is as much architecture in a dump cart filled with the waste papers and empty cans of a household kitchen. Like John Milton, indeed! There are more poetry and more beauty in Noah Webster's columns of words in the dictionary than in Gertrude Stein's subtlest passages. For Noah Webster at least had the "significant form" of an alphabetical arrangement, while Miss Stein's bundles of words are devoid of reason.

There is as much sense in the chatter of primates in the monkey house of the Bronx Zoo as in the best of Gertrude Stein, and yet it is accepted by Dial critics as important. Being true followers of Hermione, they fear what they do not understand, and so herald vagueness, obscurantism, and even the pathological sounds of an unlit mind as new forms of art. They are solemn when they would be humorous and funny when they seek to be serious. But it matters not. If they were not playing with words in new magazines they might be occupied with toys in Bedlam, and it is perhaps less trouble to keep them at large, even though they can't distinguish between Gertrude Stein and John Milton.

CLIPPING FROM

BROOKLYN EAGLE

14

APRIL 12 23

# PERSONALLY CONDUCTED

By JOHN V. A. WEAVER

A month or so ago we called attention to an essay in Hilaire Belloc's "On," which dealt with the phenomenon, "Mumbo Jumbo." This phenomenon, as he described it, was noticeable in the works and other efforts of poseurs and dilettantes to appear as if they had monopoly on certain forms of culture. At the time, we pointed out the examples of the Nation, the Dial, the New Republic, the Little Review, and sundry critics, notably Mr. Seldes, Edmund Wilson Jr., and Mr. Rascoe, to build up a wall of hocus pocus around their kultur-trust, so that the public might possibly be fooled into believing that such pieces of tosh as P. S. Eliot's, "Waste Land" and the "poetry" of Gertrude Stein were art of the highest order. We hoped in print that some sort of denunciation would be made in detail against these high priests of the higher idiocy.

Our prayers have been answered—at least so far as a denunciation is concerned. The manner in which it is done is not very satisfactory. But the effort has been made, and perhaps with the example before him, some really canable Isaiah will arise who will cast adequate aspersions upon all this

Clipping from

CHICAGO ILLS.-NEWS

APR 11 1923

## MODERN MASTERPIECES.

Suppose a cyclone took and split The book that Noah Webster built Across the county line;

Conceive those words so neatly listed By some fierce brainstorm wrecked and twisted,

Class, that is Gertrude Stein!

You would not think the darkest sense Could live beneath an accidence

Jumbled in such absurd style:

But, class, the Dial's wrecking crew Finds and resuscitates for you

The Ethiope in the word pile.

Tel. Chelsea 8860

OLD RELIABLE

Henry Romeike

PRESS CLIPPINGS

106 SEVENTH AVE., N. Y.

BE SURE ITS HENRY

(Other Romeikes May Disappoint)

THIS CLIPPING FROM THE

DES MOINES

IA.

REGISTER

ISSUE OF

JUN 10 1923

Book Gossip

Do You Like the New
Poetry!

Now don't think we are refer-
ring to the work of such old-
timers as Amy Lowell, H. D., and
the other great writers.
Among the really new poets of
the present day are T. S. Eliot,
Elinor Wylie, A. E. Housman and
Gertrude Stein (though it is safe
to say that none of them would
be to be "grouped") and the
wildest of these is Gertrude
Stein.

Many critics find great charm
in Elinor Wylie, and welcome the
publication of her second book
of poems, "Black Armour" as the
literary event of the year. Per-
sonally her work seems to us too
artificial, metallic, lacquered, to
be entirely pleasing. What do
you think? Here are some sam-
ples from her new volume:

FABLE.

A knight lay dead in Senlac:
One white raven stood.

Where his breast-bone showed a
crack:

She dipped her beak in blood.

The old man's lean and cagy
head

Was severed under the chin;

The raven's beak was varnished
red.

Where the veins ran small and
thin.

Empty sockets sucked the light

Where the great gold eyes had
shone:

Oh, but the raven's eyes were
bright

With fire she supped upon!

The old man's beard was ravelled
up

In stiff and webby skeins:

From his broad skull's broken
cup

The raven sipped his brains.

Insensate with that burning
draught

Her feathers turned to flame:

Like a cruel silver shaft

Across the sun she came.

She flew straight into God's
house;

She drank the virtuous air.

A knight lay dead: his gutted
brows

Gaped hollow under his hair.

NOW THAT YOUR EYES ARE
SHUT.

Now that your eyes are shut

Not even a dusty butterfly may
brush them;

My flickering knife has cut

Life from sonorous lion throats
to hush them.

If pigeons croon too loud

Or lambs bleat proudly, they
must come to slaughter.

And I command each cloud

To be precise in spilling silent
water.

Let light forbear those lids;

I have forbidden the feathery ash
to smutch them;

The spider thread that thrids

The gray-plumed grass has not my
leave to touch them.

My casual ghost may slip,

Issuing tiptoe, from the pure in-
human:

The tissues of my lip

Will bruise your eyelids, while
I am a woman.

÷ ÷ ÷

HEMSTREET'S
PRESS CLIPPING
BUREAU
50 Park Place, N. Y. City

NEW YORK CITY

JUN 3 - 1923

Sam Hoffenstein took me around this aft-
ernoon to see Steve Clow, whom, by
rights, I ought to have shot on sight for all
the vicious things he has been writing about
me month in and month out; but our meet-
ing settled down into a very animated dis-
cussion of literature, of Maxwell Bodenhe'm,
T. S. Eliot, Broadway characters and news-
paper men. We got along rather famously,
but I couldn't help wondering (aside from
a recognition that his way of writing is one
way of earning a living) how he ever
achieved the curious delusions he has about
what he calls the "logrollers." You would
think, to hear him talk or to read what he
writes, that Don Marquis, F. P. A., Alex-
ander Woolcott, George Jean Nathan and
myself are kleagles of a sort of Ku-Klux
Klan which meets secretly every day or so
to plan mischief against arts and letters.
He once designated me as the grand kleagle,
which is something; but then he says The
Daybook is the first thing he turns to on
Sunday mornings. . . . To a party to-
night at Mrs. Schindel's, where Carl Van Vech-
ten talked about Gertrude Stein, T. R. Smith
about children and motherhood, and Ernest
Boyd about . . . well, what do you think
this foremost authority on Irish literature,
this cosmopolite who speaks a dozen lan-
guages and knows a dozen literatures, talks
about in his off moments? The imperative
biological and ethical necessity of strict
monogamy! All the time! I'm getting tired
of hearing it. Home with Bernadine and
Otto Liveright in a taxi, and to bed, where I
read until I dozed off "Doctor Heraclius
Gloss," a newly translated edition of one of
Guy de Maupassant's earliest (but mature)
literary efforts, with an excellent introduc-
tion by Ernest Boyd. This novel, as Boyd
points out, was written when Maupassant
was still under the influence of the tradi-
tion which produced those amiable ironists,
scoffers and satirists, Montaigne, Voltaire,
Renan and Anatole France. "Dr. Heraclius
Gloss" is of the company of "Candide" and
"The Opinions of the Abbé Jerome Coi-
gnard," with an eccentric bibliophile as the
central figure about whom the author weaves
his joking but pertinent comments upon er-
rors and stupidities of mankind.

J. E. STEIN
12 E. 5TH AVENUE

PRESs CLIPPINg
BURRAU
50 Park Place, N. Y., City

Vanity Fair

New York City

AUG. - 1923

H. L. Mencken

It is hard for me to make up a list of books or authors that bore me insufferably, for the simple truth is that I can read almost anything. My trade requires me to read annually all the worst garbage that is issued in belles lettres; for recreation and instruction I read such things as the Congressional Record, religious tracts, Mr. Walter Lippmann's endless discussions of the Simon-Binet tests, works on molecular physics and military strategy, and the monthly circulars of the great bond houses. It seems to me that nothing that gets into print can be wholly uninteresting; whatever its difficulties to the reader, it at least represents some earnest man's efforts to express himself. But there are some authors, of course, who try me more than most, and if I must name ten of them then I name:

1. Dostoievski

2. George Eliot

3. D. H. Lawrence

4. James Fenimore Cooper

5. Eden Phillpotts

6. Robert Browning

7. Selma Lagerlöf

8. Gertrude Stein

9. Björnstjerne Björnson

10. Goethe

As a good German, I should, I suppose, wallow
happily in Faust; I can only report that, when
I read it, it is patriotically, not voluptuously.
Dostoievski, for some reason that I don't know,
simply stumps me; I have never been able to
get through any of his novels. George Eliot I
started to read too young, and got thereby a
distaste for her that has never left me; it is
unsound but incurable. Against Cooper and
Browning I was prejudiced by school-masters
who admired them. Phillpotts seems to me to
be the worst novelist now in practise in Eng-
land: certainly no small eminence. As for
Lawrence and Miss Stein, what makes them
hard reading for me is simply the ineradicable
conviction that beneath all their pompous
manner there is nothing but tosh. The two
Scandinavians I need not explain.

12 E. J. STEIN
HUMSTREET

Vanity Fair

New York City

AUG. - 1923

likes to miss it.

Elinor Wylie

WITH my hand upon the famous Vanity Fair Chain Bible, I hereby swear that the following statement is the truth and nothing but the truth; though space does not permit it to be the whole truth.

1. William Shakespeare as a Comic Writer.
Because I am sadly deficient in humor.

2. Dante Alighieri. Because I can't read Italian.

3. Walt Whitman. Because I can't read Whitman.

4. George Eliot. Because her dark brown
binding got into her style.

5. Robert Louis Stevenson. Because his admirers call him R. L. S.

6. Walter Pater. Because of his infinite capacity for taking pains.

7. Selma Lagerlöf. Because an English
lady read her aloud to me.

8. Henry James. Because of Mrs. Wharton and Mrs. Gerould.

9. Paul Claudel. Because he has a beautiful mind.

10. Gertrude Stein. Because ...

Edmund Wilson
(over)

**T**HERE is, perhaps, no other American writer of importance who has been so badly underestimated as Gertrude Stein. And this critical neglect would seem chiefly to be due to an unfortunate accident. The earlier half of Miss Stein's literary work has never really had a fair chance of recognition: it was one of her most advanced and most daring experiments which first attracted public attention. The first most of us heard of Gertrude Stein was when Tender Buttons was published in 1914 and was greeted with raucous guffaws as an example of exotic Greenwich Villagism. Yet Miss Stein had already published at this time, besides two curious and interesting brochures, one of the most distinguished works of fiction by any living American author—a book which had far more claim to serious recognition than the works of most of the Hergesheimers and the Cathers which followed it and which were raised to the dignity of masters by the eagerness of the new literary generation to discover authentic American talent. It was a little as if Henry James had first attracted attention with The Wings of the Dove or George Meredith with One of Our Conquerors. No one realized that the strange looking stuff which diverted him as a form of literary lunacy was really only a comparatively late phase of a genius extraordinarily conscientious and sane, which had been working steadily for many years to express itself in prose.

### "Three Lives"

GERTRUDE STEIN'S first book, *Three Lives*, appeared, in 1909, at a time when there was little audience, either popular or critical, for serious American fiction. If *Three Lives* were published today we should probably hear much more about it. Indeed, have we not done honor to Sherwood Anderson, who is essentially a disciple of Miss Stein and whose very best stories, I think, are no better than *Three Lives*?

*Three Lives* was a work of realism but realism of rather a novel kind. There had come to be a sort of realistic formula for writing about domestic servants, invented perhaps by Flaubert and fostered, I suppose, by the Goncourts. But Miss Stein, though she shared with these writers their ironic sense and their detachment, had discovered a technique of her own. When we read *Un Coeur Simple* of Flaubert we are continually thinking about Flaubert—of his technical virtuosity, of his *tour de force* of the imagination in being able to put before us so lowly a creature at all—his researches into her simple heart are like a last triumph of sophistication. But Gertrude Stein, in her treatment of her servant girls, occupies no such acrid literary altitudes. Her portraits, though no less ruthless than Flaubert's, are far closer to the originals. Indeed they are not dazzling feats of ingenuity like Flaubert's, at all, but rather the projection of three actual human beings as complex and as complete as life. The style itself, which seems to owe nothing to that of any other novelist, takes on the very accents and the rhythms of the minds whose adventures it is recording. We have ceased to see the nurse-girl as an insect to be examined at arm's length; we find ourselves

living in her own world and watching it through her own eyes. And far from proving sordid or boring, it becomes extraordinarily beautiful and noble.

In *Three Lives* the style, though extremely individual, is not yet especially eccentric—though some of the author's characteristic tricks have already begun to appear. You have the rhythmic repetitions, like the refrain of a ballad, which we find imitated in Sherwood Anderson, and you have the strange stringing together of present participles which seems at first merely an attempt to reproduce some mannerism of Negro conversation, but which was afterwards to grow on Miss Stein as a mannerism of her own. "I never did use to think I was so much on being real modest, Melanchta, but now I know really I am, when I hear you talking. I see all the time there are many people living just as good as I am, though they are a little different to me. Now with you, Melanchta, if I understand you right what you are talking, you don't think that way of no other one that you are ever knowing."

### The Beginnings of Eccentricity

**T**HREE *Lives* and the gigantic *History of a Family* constitute Miss Stein's first period. The latter found no publisher when it was first written and has remained in obscurity ever since, though those who have read it in manuscript consider it her most important work and, with the example of Proust and *Ulysses*, it is to be hoped that some publisher will undertake it. Her middle manner—a logical elaboration of the earlier style of *Three Lives*—first appears in 1912 in the portraits of Matisse and Picasso, published by Mr. Stieglitz in *Camera Work*, and in a sketch of the Galeries Lafayette, in a defunct magazine called *Rogue*. I shall quote the beginning of the portrait of Matisse: "One was quite certain that for a long part of his being one being living he had been trying to be certain that he was wrong in doing what he was doing and then he could not come to be certain that he had been wrong in doing what he had been doing, when he had completely convinced himself that he would not come to be certain that he had been wrong in doing what he had been doing he was really certain then that he was a great one and he certainly was a great one. Certainly every one could be certain of this thing that this one is a great one." This was a little queer but still intelligible; but, about this time another "portrait" appeared which presented far greater difficulties. It suddenly became evident that Gertrude Stein had abandoned the intelligible altogether.

The *Portrait of Mabel Dodge of the Villa Curonia*, printed privately in Florence, remained the flowing manner of the other portraits but had begun speaking in a strange and disturbing language, rather like Mallarmé's language of Symbolism; and finally, in *Tender Buttons* Miss Stein abandoned even her long limpid sentences and began expressing herself in fantastic strings of words without syntax or connection. This was the sort of thing that astonished the world in 1914:

> Red Roses. A cool red rose and a pink cut pink, a collapse and a sold hole, a little less hot.

A Sound. Elephant beaten with candy and little pops and chews all bolts and reckless reckless rats, this is this.

Custard. Custard is this. It has aches, aches when. Not to be. Not to be narrowly. This makes a whole little hill.

It is better than a little thing that has mellow real mellow. It is better than lakes whole lakes, it is better than seeing.

Chicken. Alas a dirty word, alas a dirty third alas a dirty third, alas a dirty bird.

It appeared that Miss Stein had decided to try using words for the values which she believed them to possess apart from those inherent in their actual meanings. We are told that she used to shut herself up at night and try utterly to banish from her brain all the words ordinarily associated with the ideas she had fixed upon. Concentrating upon the given image she would make her mind a blank to its ordinary vocabulary, invoking other, more subtly relevant words to render it anew.

But the real key to understanding *Tender Buttons* is to be found in Miss Stein's preoccupation with modern painting. Long a friend of Matisse and Picasso, and one of the earliest of their admirers, she has for many years been living in Paris in the full excitement of the new movement and has accumulated a collection of modern paintings, which is one of the most remarkable in Europe. It is not surprising that she should have come to wonder whether analogous effects might not be produced in literature. We are all more or less familiar by this time with the theory of cubism and its sister genres—that violent reaction from naturalism, which holds that by splitting up or distorting an object you can give a far truer impression of its effect on the beholder than by any literal representation—and it is not difficult to see how Miss Stein's later work attempts the same fresh rendering in prose.

### The Progress of Aesthetic Thrills

**T**HE *Portrait of Mabel Dodge* was merely a portrait in the manner of Picasso, and the sketches in *Tender Buttons*, of which the subtitle was *Objects, Food, Rooms* were simply a series of cubist still-lifes in the manner of Gleize or Braque. She had cut down her long repetitive ruminations to telegraphic economic strokes; instead of turning the object over and over, like the ocean lapping a pebble, she had begun dropping the pebble in a well and recording only the ripples on the surface, when the pebble itself had disappeared and sunk many yards out of sight. It is not the object which we see but the vibrations caused by the object—not a focussing of something outside the artist, but the consciousness of the artist herself.

Her next publication, a small pamphlet called, felicitously, *Have They Attacked Mary. He Giggled—A Political Satire* (1917), and her most recent book, *Geography and Plays* (1922) which contains also specimens of almost all her other manners, seem to apply the method of the still-lifes in *Tender Buttons* to more complicated subjects. You have travel, anecdotes, conversations, all splintered up and

*(Continued on page 80)*