"And does it make any difference to you if you do understand. It makes an awful lot of difference to me. It is very exciting to have all this be."—from Lectures in America

Dustin Kidd

Twentieth Century American Poetry

Professor Nelson

2^nd December, 1998

The literary culture of the late nineteenth century was a culture in crisis. George Steiner refers to the years 1870-1914 as the period of the "crisis of the meaning of meaning." The nineteenth century saw an incredible flattening of cu ltural hierarchies in the West. Mass media and mass-education, along with increasing democratization, led to the growth of a mass-culture, which maintained a precarious relationship with high culture. In response, poets began to search for new uses of l anguage. The symbolist poets, poets such as Stephane Mallarme and Ferdinand de Saussure, turned to anti-representational language around the turn of the century. Later, the modernist poets would continue this pursuit of an autonomous poetry.

Gertrude Stein is born into this crisis of the meaning of meaning, in Allegheny, Pennsylvania in 1874. The product of German-Jewish immigrants, Stein spends her early years in Europe before her family settles in Oakland, California. Later, she li ves briefly in Baltimore before enrolling in Harvard Annex (re-named Radcliffe before Stein leaves). In 1897, Stein enters Johns Hopkins School of Medicine but she never completes her medical degree. Stein sails to Europe in 1902 and remains there for m ost of her lifetime, returning to America for visits and lectures only. In Europe, she centers herself in Paris and remains always with her companion Alice Toklas. Toklas and Stein had been introduced in 1907 and were living together by 1910. Toklas se rves as Stein’s typist and homemaker until Stein’s death in 1946.

Gertrude Stein’s earliest significant literary work is The Making of Americans, a novel about her family history. But the form of the novel has little hold on Stein. Though she will experiment with novels again, as well as with drama, the bulk of Stein’s opus consists of portraits. Stein has an incredible relationship with painting and is a significant patron of modern art. As early as 1904, Stein and her brother Leo were collecting works by Gauguin, Cezanne, Manet, and Degas. Stein bef riends Pablo Picasso in 1905 and he persuades her to let him paint her portrait. According to Stein, the portrait is the product of 80 sittings. Stein would return the favor in 1910 by producing the portrait-poem "Picasso." Indeed, the year 1 910 marks the shift in Stein’s literary work to the form of the portrait.

In "Portraits and Repetition", published in Lectures in America in 1935, Stein elucidates on her fascination with portraits. The key concern behind this interest is that of "repetition." A quick scan of any of Stein ’s short works reveals what appears to be a love for repetition. A particular series of words will appear rapidly repeated, sometimes altered just slightly, or added to, sometimes not altered at all. But Stein insists that her motif is not repetition, b ut insistence or emphasis. "Is there repetition or is there insistence. I am inclined to believe there is no such thing as repetition." She is referring specifically to the production of portraits, suggesting that repetition cannot be present in that production. The problem with repetition is that, like description, repetition is bound up in time and memory. Stein insists that literature based on time and memory is neither interesting nor exciting because it merely repeats that which has al ready happened, that which can simply be observed. Such works require no intervention of genius. Stein chooses the portrait because portrait production is an activity not of identification, but of perception. In writing a portrait, she does not produce a work that merely describes or resembles the subject, or one that identifies the subject through relationships. Instead, Stein is in pursuit of interior qualities, qualities that do not exist in time or relationships, qualities of entity rather than id entity. "I wrote portraits knowing that each one is themselves inside them and something about them perhaps everything about them will tell some one all about that thing all about what is themselves inside them." The talent of identifying thos e interior qualities requires genius, which is why portraits become so integral to Stein’s work. Stein is always pursuing the necessary characteristics for production of works of genius.

The greatest expression of Stein’s pursuit of genius is her 1936 essay "What Are Master-pieces and Why Are There So Few of Them". In this essay, first presented as a lecture, Stein offers certain distinct properties that relate to the pr oduction of masterpieces. In the masterpiece, language functions as entity, rather than identity. The words are not divorced from meaning, but their meaning is not dependent upon previous relationships the reader may have had with the words. Indeed, th e language functions outside of any relationship as a "thing-in-itself." The writer who uses language to describe a narrative is dependent upon memory and time, and therefore will not produce a masterpiece. Stein’s use of the language of art, "portrait" and "masterpiece", is more than just the consequence of her relationship with modern art. She uses these terms to distinguish between two fundamentally different forms of writing. The first form, which comprises most writi ng, is an act of description, an activity that requires no genius because anyone may use memory to describe. "The tradition has always been that you may more or less describe the things that happen nowadays everybody all day long knows what is happe ning and so what is happening is not really interesting." The second form is the interesting form, the masterpiece. This form of writing occurs outside of any awareness of time or memory. Stein’s lifetime effort is to find those forms of writing t hat could lead to the production of the masterpiece. She rejects the novel because of its reliance upon description. "As I say all novels are soothing because they make anything happen as they can happen that is by remembering anything. But and I kept wondering as I talked and listened all at once, I wondered is there any way of making what I know come out as I know it, come out not as remembering." Stein rejects oratory, history, and letter writing because of their dependence on a relations hip, on an audience.

For Stein, successful creation is tied to the artist’s understanding of audience.

In The Making of Americans, Stein claims that she writes for herself and for strangers. Stein retracts this claim in "What Are Master-pieces and Why Are There So Few of Them." The writer who seeks to create a work of genius canno t write for an audience. In the production of a masterpiece, the artist must write as an entity apart from any sense of relationship to the external world. The key to this role of entity is listening and talking. "If the same person does the talki ng and the listening why so much the better there is just by so much the greater concentration. One may really indeed say that that is the essence of genius, of being most intensely alive, that is being one who is at the same time talking and listening. It is really that that makes one a genius." The concentration produced through the act of listening and talking is necessary for the production of a masterpiece. Once the writer begins to conceive of an audience, of an ‘other’, the work has failed . The writer must not even conceive of a relationship with himself, he must be a "thing in itself". Through this concentration the writer is able to discern the interior qualities of a subject and give language to those qualities, not to descr ibe them, but to produce them. The portrait is the result of this production.

To explain her commitment to the portrait, Stein often uses the analogy of the detective story. In a real life crime, the general public is concerned about the crime itself, not about the detection. But in the detective story, it is the detection that has entity. The crime is merely the identification of a particular person with a particular misfortune, but in the detection, the human mind emerges above human nature, and it is the human mind, as it detects, that accomplishes that which is intere sting. Stein does not publish "Portraits and Repetition" or "What Are Master-pieces and Why Are There So Few of Them" to identify her own works as masterpieces; she seeks only to emphasize her own commitment to the pursuit of genius a nd an understanding of the necessary conditions for genius. Her works are experiments with those conditions, experiments geared towards pushing the limitations on genius. However, Stein’s purpose is also not to stimulate the production of more masterpie ces. Masterpieces are masterpieces because there are so few of them, they are the summit of man’s creative endeavors. In her experimentation, Stein produces a variety of very different portraits. The nature of her works shifts as her curiosities change .

Stein wrote her first portrait, "Ada", in 1910, for her companion Alice Toklas. This portrait illustrates Stein’s early attempts at production through listening and talking. In "Ada", unlike later portraits, time is still a significant presence. The poem may be divided into two parts: the narrative of Barnes Colhard and the rendering of Ada. The narrative of Barnes Colhard comprises the first three paragraphs of "Ada". Barnes Colhard is the brother of Ada, alt hough her name is not mentioned in this section. The narrative tells of Barnes Colhard’s love life, from the "very nice girl" who would not marry him to the "very rich girl" who did marry him. Time is present in that the events of Ba rnes’ life are given chronologically. But these events are not given as description or identified activities. Rather, they are related through the inner experiences of Barnes Colhard. "Barnes Colhard did not say he would not do it but he did not d o it." Stein does give any sort of dialogue; she never reproduces the words of Barnes Colhard. Instead, Stein portrays the interior activity of the man. Throughout this section, Stein uses non-descriptive words like "it", "thing&quo t;, "something", and "anything" to avoid identifying Barnes Colhard with the object world. It is not his relationship with the external world that is interesting, but his entity inside himself. Strangely, however, the poem does inclu de some description, some activity that resembles the outside world. Barnes is portrayed in relationship to his father, his sister, his wife and his children. He is identified as happy, and after his death, his children remember him. One might explain this presence of description by suggesting that, as Stein’s first portrait, "Ada" is less radical in the application of Stein’s experiments than later poems will be. However, one might also say that description is present only in the Barnes Col hard narrative in juxtaposition to the rendering of Ada.

The Ada section is found in the last three paragraphs of the portrait and seems devoid of time or description. The section begins by relating the connection between Barnes and Ada. "He had a sister who also was successful enough in being one being living." But that success clearly is not present in the early life of Ada as she tells her father that she "did not like it at all being one being living then." Her successful living comes later chronologically, but for Ada all suc cesses, all perceptions endure backwards and forwards through time and are not experienced chronologically. The interior qualities of Ada do not change through time, only her external circumstances. Consider the ambiguity of the line, "She was twic e as old as her brother." Ada could only have been twice as old as her brother at a single moment in time. But the qualities of that moment endure through time so that Ada seems always to be twice as old as her brother. Compare this rendering of A da with the opening of "Portraits and Repetition": "I said nothing changes from generation to generation except the composition in which we live." This line might be rephrased, "Nothing changes through time except the comp osition in which we live." And to Stein, the changing composition is of little interest compared to the enduring qualities of the person or object. Barnes Colhard is less interesting to Stein because he is successful only in the changing circumstan ces of the exterior world. He accomplishes nothing on the inside. "He just thought some time he might do something," but in fact he does nothing. Ada’s success is very interesting. She is successful despite her circumstances, because she exi sts as entity rather than identity. Although, Ada’s community does not like her as they like her mother, she still "was charming inside in her." Stein is not concerned with the outside but the inside. In "Ada" the significance of li stening and talking is not only in the production of the portrait, but also in the comparison of Ada with her brother. Ada needs to be always listening and talking to endure through life. After her mother dies, she is left at home with no one to share h er stories. She knows then that she has to leave, so she takes her inheritance and departs. She discovers someone with whom she may share her stories, and only then is she successful at living. "And certainly Ada all her living then was happier in living than any one else who ever could, who was, who is, who ever will be living."

Despite Ada’s existence apart from time, time does exist in this portrait. "Ada" has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The narrative of Barnes Colhard can be seen as an illustration of the events of Ada’s life "before she actually enters the story," and seems to have a very different narrator than the later section. The first narrator exists only in the external world and can only describe the external activity through a chronological series. The second narrator is of an in ternal world and "is attempting to present an immediate, continuous progression of states." Barnes, who is an identity living in the world of relationships, can exist only in chronological time. Ada is an entity who is unaware of herself in re lationship to the external world, and exists in these continuous states. Stein is always concerned with subjects that are interesting or exciting, and this portrait reveals Ada to be such a subject, much more so than her brother. "Ada" is not simply a love poem from Stein to her companion Alice; it is also a great experiment with the boundaries of entity and interior quality, an experiment in the portrait.

Stein continues to push boundaries as the subjects of her portraits shift from persons to objects in Tender Buttons. "Later in Tender Buttons I also wanted to make portraits of anything as one thing as one portrait." Stein is now ready to search for the interesting and exciting qualities of objects. Her theme of listening and talking still governs the production of the portrait but with the addition of the problematic element of looking. Stein has realized that in the proce ss of listening and talking she was also always looking, and that looking affected her perceptions as she listened and spoke. Listening, therefore, could not be divorced from the production of the portrait. But listening is problematic because it easily leads to remembering and describing. "The trouble with including looking, as I have already told you, was that in regard to human beings looking inevitably carried in its train realizing movements and expression and as such forced me into recognizi ng resemblances, and so forced remembering and in forcing remembering caused confusion of present with past and future time." To manage this difficulty of looking, Stein begins using objects for her portraits rather than people.

Stein divides her first set of non-human portraits, Tender Buttons, into portraits of objects, food, and rooms. Stein produces Tender Buttons in 1912 using language increasingly as an anti-representational entity. As such, "Ste phane Mallarme (1842-1898) is Gertrude Stein’s most immediate predecessor in the use of words as nonrepresentational entities." Stein searched for word pairs that carried equal weight, equal volume in an attempt to discover new meanings in language and to return language to the world of entity. In "Book.", one of the object portraits, Stein explores the many qualities of being a book as a thing in itself. "Book was there, it was there. Book was there." The book is not only th e story or information contained within, it also has physical qualities. The book occupies a certain physical space; it has "there"ness. Here Stein uses the emphasis that she must later defend in "Portraits and Repetition." In the a bove quote Stein seems to say that the book was there three times; she appears to repeat herself. But Stein claims that repetition can be no part of the production of a portrait. Repetition is the remembrance of something said before for the purpose of saying it again. In her portraits, Stein does not repeat, she insists and emphasizes. In the quote, Stein declares the physical space of the book, then she emphasizes the veracity of that declaration, and then insists on the presence of that space. The basic statement, "book was there," has three words, each of which may be the emphasis in one of the insistences. It was definitely a "book" that was there; the book definitely "was" there, and the book was definitely " there".

Stein then explores the needs of that book, particularly its need to be dry and protected. The portrait expresses a concern that the book must not get wet from the cleaner. The book needs to be placed up high to be safe. "It was directly pl aced back, not back again, back, it was returned, it was needless, it put a bank, a bank when, a bank care." The combination of the book being placed "back", and the similarity of the words back and bank, give the book not only the qualiti es of being "back", but also the qualities of being "bank". Through sounds, the book takes on economy. This economy exists in both time ("when"), and emotion ("care"). Stein pushes the boundaries on language to t heir limit by relating the book, in rather unintelligible ways, to such dissimilar objects as soap, ear rings, and a pillar. She returns to accessible images by stating, "Chest not valuable, be papered." The precious nuggets of understanding, those that are not physical jewels, are commanded to take paper, to find words and be housed in the treasure chest of the book. In the close of the poem, Stein states that if the physicality of the book were destroyed, if the book were burned, then the b ook would be reduced to mere ideas, to being "a remark." Truly "being" a book, requires being a physical presence of a book.

Being breakfast, on the other hand, might involve being a great number of things, from a piece of fish to a centerpiece. The section "Breakfast.", from the food chapter of Tender Buttons, emphasizes the incredible capacity for cha nge that breakfast carries. "A change, a final change includes potatoes." Any given breakfast might change at the last moment with the addition of potatoes. But potatoes are not the last change listed in "Breakfast." Having establi shed the theme of change, Stein then develops the entity of breakfast. "A shining breakfast" is a breakfast that is favorable when compared to other possible breakfasts, but "a breakfast shining" is that successful breakfast that has entity. It is not in relationship to other breakfasts. Breakfast is always in change; it is never served the same twice. A single "slice" of a particular breakfast element creates a whole new breakfast. The physical space of breakfast is the breakfast table and the center of that table is the unchanging still point. "What is the custom, the custom is in the center." The rest of the poem explores the many conditions of breakfast, each of which may be altered to render a new breakf ast. While listing these conditions, "a steady cake", "an ordinary color", "an excuse", Stein moves increasingly towards abstraction. "Seat a knife near a cage and very near a decision and more nearly a timely working cat and scissors." The reader is hard pressed to follow this language back to the subject of the portrait, breakfast.

Stein’s abstraction can appear as much through the absence of words as through the presence of them. The section "Salad." consists of a single five-word line, "It is a winning cake." The reader is left to imagine the many ways that salad is like cake, or can be understood as cake. It is a cake of vegetables. Unlike normative cakes, the salad cake offers nutrients. Dressing is like icing. The possibilities are endless and Stein offers no limits to the imaginative connection s between the two key terms, salad and cake. Stein’s portraits take on the characteristics of cubist paintings in their attempts to flatten the dimensions of space and time, as they surround the subject of the poem, and place them on the canvas of the pa ge. The subject is rendered not as it is seen or as it appears, but as it is perceived and felt.

Perception is central to "Rooms", the final chapter of Tender Buttons. Unlike "Objects" and "Food", which have numerous sub-headings, "Rooms" consists of only one section, which seems to suggest that the section paints a single portrait. The material in "Rooms" offers no concrete images to guide the reader. Only rarely is the language suggestive of a room. The chapter opens with, "Act so that there is no use in a center." Is th is the center of a room? Stein does not say. The ambiguity of the poem is best illustrated by the constant use of the interrogative "Why." In one paragraph the word is used 22 times. The poem breezes through such abstractions as a sister who "was not a mister," and "a can containing a curtain." This chapter does not lend itself to readings of deconstruction, but can be extremely pleasant to read aloud. "Tender Buttons does not mean to be more literature or t he explanation of home life but simply something to read, as a rose is something to look at or smell or as a chair is something to sit in." "Rooms" best exemplifies this remark about Tender Buttons. The final line is unfathomable, but wholly enjoyable: "The care with which there is incredible justice and likeness, all this makes a magnificent asparagus, and also a fountain."

In seeking to add looking to the productive activity of listening and talking, Stein understands cinematic film to be her model. "Funnily enough the cinema has offered a solution of this thing. By a continuously moving picture of any one the re is no memory of any other thing and there is that thing existing, it is in a way if you like one portrait of anything not a number of them." Stein sees the moving picture as constantly dwelling in the present and facing forward, rather than livin g in the past through memory and description. This leads her to produce portraits that seem to move through time without being narrative. "One Carl Van Vechten" contains characteristics of the film. The portrait is divided into five sections. The first section is not numbered, the second and third sections are both numbered "ONE.", the fourth section is numbered "TWO.", and the fifth section is numbered "FOUR." These are dis-ordered film reels, each of which pre sents a frozen moment. Each number offers peculiar renditions of the subject, Carl Van Vechten, who was a writer, a friend to Stein, and the editor of a collection of her works. Those traits did not concern Stein as much as Van Vechten’s interior qualit ies. Why, one might ask, did Stein produce this portrait in a time when she was so concerned with the object world? However, a read of the poem reveals that, after the title, there is nothing in the language that suggests a human entity. Compare this t o "Ada", which has very definite characters, "One Carl Van Vechten" has only a continuous stream of objects: an "ample checked fur", a "stable", "an oil in a can", "a touching white satin sash", and "a great big so colored dog". Stein gives the reader no bridge between the subject and the language of the poem. The function of the poem is to challenge the boundaries of language, to test the performance of language in very strained uses . To issue a statement like, "A touching box is on the touching so helping held," is to place each of those words under immense pressure. Producing portraits with no awareness of herself in relationship to others, Stein had no regard for how h er readers might understand her work, or even if they could understand.

Stein’s determination to pressurize language in the production of the portrait was sometimes hindered by her fascination with sounds. "I found that I was for a little while very much taken with the beauty of the sounds as they came from me as I made them. This is a thing that may be at any time a temptation." In "Susie Asado" Stein reveals an interest in the "s" sound and tests the sound against other consonants. The word "sweet" is issued ten times in th e first five lines. Stein is testing the "s" sound against the "t" sound. The word sweet offers both sounds, as does the surname Asado when pronounced with a Spanish accent. Later, the "s" sound is held beside the "n& quot; sound: "What is a nail. A nail is unison." Other lines suggest the "s" running and tripping over other consonants that stand in the way of the issuance of "s": "Drink pups drink pups lease a sash hold, see it shi ne and a bobolink has pins." "Susie Asado" is an indulgence of sounds that offers another means of portraying the interior qualities of the subject.

"Susie Asado" was published in 1913 and signifies Stein’s shift away from her brief focus on the object world. The issue of looking began suddenly to disappear. "And then suddenly it changed again, talking and listening came sl owly to be more important than that at which I was looking". With this shift, the subjects of Stein’s portraits were once again human beings. Stein had a great many subjects throughout the nineteen-teens, and in the early nineteen-twenties she bega n to revisit previous subjects. She produced "Cezanne" in 1923. Stein had just begun collecting Cézanne’s works when he died in 1906. She was influential in promoting his work thereafter, and finally celebrated the artist in this portr ait. Unlike many earlier works, the language of "Cezanne" can be constructed into images. The opening paragraph offers two characters with differing perspectives, the Irish lady who says that "to-day is every day," and Caesar who say s that "every day is to-day." Each of these characters insists that their perspective is the correct perspective. How these characters relate to Cezanne is unclear. They may be characters in one of his paintings or characters discussing one o f his paintings, or any of a number of other possibilities. Although Stein uses the metaphor of the detective story, she does not ask her readers to practice detection, but perception, to experience the images and language and understand that they provid e a substantial portrait of the subject. In the second paragraph of the poem, Stein practices the art of emphasis.

She says of a man, "he was settled to stay," but then emphasizes that he was not just settled, but settled to stay. Then she adds that he was settled to stay Saturday. So no true repetition has occurred, only emphasis and insistence, which are necessary to adequately convey all important details. She repeats this exercise of insistence with the "if in as a mouth" lines and the "believe they have water" lines. Throughout the portrait Stein uses the phrase, "In this way," by which she takes the entirety of the images previously given and rolls them through a new set of imagery. It may be a stretch to suggest that Stein means the closing lines of the poem to be her response to Cezanne, but certainly that is one of the possible interpretations. "And was I surprised. Was I very surprised. Was I surprised. I was surprised and in that patient, are you patient when you find bees. Bees in a garden make a specialty of honey and so does honey. Honey and pray er. Honey and there. There where the grass can grow nearly four times yearly."

The closing lines of "Cezanne" offer an adequate description of the response of Western Culture to the writings of Gertrude Stein. The West was very surprised that an artist, and a female at that, could be so bold as to manipulate la nguage in such a phenomenal manner. Stein became a sort of physician for language. "You had to recognize words had lost their value in the Nineteenth Century, particularly towards the end, they had lost much of their variety, and I felt that I coul d not go on, that I had to recapture the value of the individual word, find out what it meant and act within it." Certainly, this is a fair analysis of Stein’s works, which should be understood then as experiments. Many of these experiments might h ave been failures, but each of them produced a wealth of data regarding the use of words.

Stein’s ideology of words intersects that of T. S. Eliot at several points. "Breakfast." from Tender Buttons has strikingly similar images to "Burnt Norton." The changing elements of breakfast as they move around the cu stom of the centerpiece are very much like Eliot’s (from Heraclitus) flux of life revolving around the still point in the center. But ultimately, Stein’s experiments with words are completely contrary to Eliot’s notion of the "Historical Sense." ; Eliot suggests that the great work of literature can be produced only when the writer understands the relationship of his work to the long line of writings that came before. To Stein this historical sense would negate the creation of a work of genius. And yet, the two writers agree that the poet must lose all sense of himself in the production of the poetry, what Eliot calls the "process of depersonalization." For Stein, this depersonalization is a lifestyle that permeates her art to the c ore. Both writers use the term "concentration" to describe the production of the literary work. No concentration could match Stein’s sobriety: "And I am always one to prefer being sober. I must be sober. It is so much more exciting to b e sober, to be exact and concentrated and sober." And the fruit of her sober labor is the portrait.