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Rereading Gertrude Stein Rereading Henry James (After a Fashion)

By Eric Haralson, SUNYStony Brook

If the reader threw down the book with the sensation of having been dreaming hard for an hour, he was yet also sensible of the extraordinary vividness of the different episodes . . . [and] arose with his head full of impressions as lively as they were disagreeable. Henry James, Review of Elizabeth Stoddards Two Men (1865)

Do you see by what I mean that Henry James is not a queen but a general. Gertrude Stein, Four in America (193334) Readers of the New York Times Magazine for May 6, 1934, would have learned that Miss [Gertrude] Stein is engaged in writing a book on four Americans, one of them being Henry James, and that she promises . . . [it] will not be difficult to read (Warren 23). Four in America, in other words, would be more like the accessible, best-selling Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (193334) than those earlier wiggy wonders of Steins that had inspired reviewers to new heights of inventive disdain: The mama of dada is going gaga (Sillen 106). As anyone who has attempted the book knows, Stein broke her promise, and eventually even she conceded, somewhat grudgingly, that it was very difficult reading so they said (EA 94). Her friend and would-be explicator Thornton Wilder was undoubtedly right that Stein overwhelmingly loves James and the other culture-heroes in her treatiseUlysses S. Grant, the Wright brothers, and George Washingtonand yet the hermetic manner in which that love is expressed casts doubt on Wilders claim that she showed little disapproval of Jamess concessions to a broad readership, such as making an appreciable amount of sense
The Henry James Review 25 (2004): 239245. 2004, The Johns Hopkins University Press

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(xxii, xxiii). Quite palpable, on the contrary, are the strange sensations of sudden popularity that had put [her] off; sent her seeking renewed contact with things happening inside of her, as there was no use in outside; and prompted her to undertake this long, fractured meditation all about audiences, a very fearful subject (Stein qtd. in Dydo 577, 584). As so often, Stein was writing to get this trouble out of my system, and although Four in America pretends to patiently tell all about everything and to tell it very well, not even the patience of Job would be rewarded by anything as cogent and portable as a reading of Henry James (EA 307; FA 134, 158). Still, as The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas attested and as Steins Chicago lectures collected in Narration (1935) would confirm, James was unquestionably the author on her mind during the mid-1930s.1 And thus one turns, and returns, to Four in America for whatever its hard-dreaming suggestiveness might reveal about the grounds of her very great admiration and avowed affiliationabout what Henry James had meant to and for and within Stein, now that she found herself, as a penalty for readability, the commodified celebrity Gertrude Stein: He knew what was in a name all the same (AAT 78; FA 158). For those who have not yet had the pleasure and frustration, Four in America has been reasonably glossed as addressing American character, alternative vocations for great minds, personality as determinant of greatnesstopics stemming from Steins belated identity crisisand a consensus has grown up as to the basic drift of her conceit that James was a general of the Anglo-American novel (Burns, Dydo, and Rice xix). At the simplest level, Stein takes an almost academic interest in exploring the uses of her metaphor, to see how much it can illuminate about Jamess special character and authority. Thus we have, in its entirety, Volume III: I like to think what he would do if he had been a general (FA 141). But the exercise also harbors searching questions about whether the quality and quantity of geniusJamess or her ownconstitutes an essential, enduring feature of personality irrespective of profession, or maybe even of the most rudimentary expression (Dydo 581): And if you stop writing if you are a genius and you have stopped writing are you still one if you have stopped writing (EA 87). James managed to go on writing, Stein suggests, because his genius included a peculiar gift for a kind of narrative compromise that was not compromising: I often think how Henry James saw. He saw he could write both ways at once (FA 133). Although she never descends to examples, but rather appeals to our intuition (Of course you can understand and imagine), Stein means that James composed at once in the mode of utmost interioritywhat she thought of as entity writing reflecting ones close-to-the-bone internal troublesand in the mode of anticipatory accommodation to readerly tastes, a smoother, less integral identity writing: He never pursued one at a time no not one thing a thing. Although this second mode can be a caress, touching the audience by assimilating to its opinions and emotions, it cannot be tenderness, or a rendering of what pushes the authors deepest buttons (FA 127, 151). How did James incorporate this mode to become general without selling out the self? Loosely correlated with Steins entity/identity schema is another rather collapsing dichotomy that applauds Jamess creative mind for its tactical adapt-

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ability. Plotting the multi-pronged campaign of his novels with the greatest care and preparation, mapping out everything that could happen or not happen (roughly, identity thinking), James also demonstrates his command by throwing caution to the wind and brilliantly improvising in the thick of battle (or composition in the entity mode): He made nobody care for plans. . . . Henry James cannot be said to come prepared . . . a general is begun (FA 137, 14041). Jamess distinction, then, was to sit down to the writing desk equipped and readythe planful fellow self-remembered in the prefaces, for shorthands sake and then to lose himself utterly to the exigencies and urgencies of his text. All prepared to come unprepared, he stays the course to a glorious victory oh yes, for Henry James did not prepare for flight (FA 138, 151). As this overview of Steins conception of general-ship as a type of formal mastery has been well treated by others, especially Charles Caramello, I wish to turn here to a narrower puzzle that arises in what she playfully designates Volume XXVII of this life history of her famous precursor: a narrative of Henry James told by one who listened to some one else telling about some one entirely different from Henry James (FA 155). Teasing out the terms of this enigmatic, layered narrative, I believe, helps us to discern a submerged motive of queer solidarity in Steins tribute to James, as well as a fund of sympathy for his lifelong uncompanioned state and the displaced desires it generated. If James had both watches and wishes in the freshness of youth, inevitably the watchesboth the habit of vicarious observation and the ticking clock of mortalitygot the better of the wishes (FA 150). Seasoned up, a general was not known to wish, and Come often to see me is not said by a general (FA 147, 154). Particularly an American general can feel that he need never kneel in servitude, but Stein is also adverting to the bent knee of courtship ritual to evoke a James unmarried by every implication of his being: Now I wish to say generously why he was never married either as a general or as a man. . . . As newly as not wed Henry James (FA 141, 142, 148). Jamess general-ity, including his international renown, came at a cost, Stein implies, and what he missed was not so much being kissed (the rhyme is hers) as enjoying the kind of intimate readerintermediate between private preoccupation and public appropriationthat a spouse could embody: He heard nobody care (FA 150). Steins early portrait Adapronounced ardor, as Nabokov instructs celebrated her own muse, Alice, but, more important, it credited her literary productivity to an intense mutuality of oral-aural exchange with an Other so significant as to blur the bounds of Self: Some one who was loving was almost always listening. . . . That one who was loving was telling about being one then listening (SR 10203). Four in America repeats this motif, aligning Jamess emotional power with the poignancy of his aloneness: this is what is painful that when in tears he was never so otherwisethat last word punning multiply to mean other-conscious, gender-deviant (see Dora Forbess The Other Way Round in The Death of the Lion), and possibly sexually otherwise, if never so expressed (FA 154). Being insulated from loves contingencies did not save James, however, from excursions of his acute sensibility: he had no distress and no relief from any pang (FA 158).

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But just how does the staging of unnamed personae in Volume XXVII fortify these claims, understanding that Stein rebuffs any pretensions to a definitive reading? This much we can confidently infer: Stein, as our author, is the one who relates the narrative of Henry James, and the other teller to whom she simultaneously listens (a skill that geniuses possess) is clearly Toklas, who had always admired Henry James (FA 156). Alices unabashed enthusiasm is well documented, including her fan letter to James praising The Awkward Age, her ranking of Nanda Brookenham as my favorite modern heroine, and her abiding fascination with female characters in the grand manner such as Anna Karenina or Christina Light (Toklas 170). But then who is this some one entirely different from Henry James, and why does Stein tell of James through Toklass telling about this mystery woman? In the preceding volume, Stein had stressed Jamess imaginative hospitality to experiencehe was very ready to have it happen for him, everything that happened within to himwhile gently querying whether imagination alone might not have limits even for an artist of Jamess extraordinary range: Can a general be otherwise. Can he play otherwise. Can he play happened to him (FA 155). Evidently, Steins penchant for dialogical development (Now think about what does or does not make any difference) led her next to seek out the living antithesis of James, the most entirely . . . different kind of human being conceivablebut especially in terms of raw exposure to life, love, and misery, for something did happen at least it happened near that one (FA 156). This unidentified woman is not at all at all at all resembling to Henry James (emphatic enough?), which is precisely what recommends her case for comparison, while encompassing Steins own project of self-location. I had always written myself out in relation to something, she reminds us, and here that something seems to include both James and that one (FA 155, 134). Not to be coy, the veiled lady is in all likelihood Madame Godet, an affluent neighbor in Belley, France, as can be gleaned from the data that she was of another nationality and lived in another country (i.e., she was not an AngloAmerican like James) and that she might have killed . . . another woman, although very probably she did not and she was not really suspected of murder (FA 155). The plot thickens, but as Steins vacillations indicate, it does not clarify. The important facts are these: Madame Godet had kept house with an Englishwoman in what sounds like a lesbian relationship (Dydo 565)thus mirroring Steins relationship with Toklasbut tragically the Englishwoman had ended up dead in the ravine with two bullets in her head, as Stein recounts in Everybodys Autobiography (85). Suspicion had fallen on a gardener, but also on Madame Godet herself, and Stein hints at a possible motive of jealousy in a love triangle, assigning to a third woman involved the intriguing pseudonym of Madame Steiner (EA 83). The case was never resolved, and, incredibly, even suicide was not ruled out: nobody paid for the crime. Stein remained haunted by the episode, identifying with Madame Godet, who became completely isolated owing to community fears. Can it be coincidental that Stein, aware of her own resemblance to a certain Roman emperor (as Hemingway duly noted), gave her unfortunate neighbor the pseudonym Madame Caesar?

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This capable, trouser-wearing big good-looking woman with pleasant ways seemed to hold a key for Stein during her period of authorial crisis and, indeed, writers blockher sustained experimenting as to whether she could achieve, like James, a combination of the two ways of writing, if not recover the entranced, unremunerated self (I am I not any longer when I see) which had produced all those precious words before the unsettling success of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas: every time I want to write I want to write about what happened to [Madame Caesar] . . . we do not know what happened to her (EA 82; FA 137, 119; EA 85). But we do know one thing that happened to Madame Godet/Caesar, at least in Steins kindling imagination as she listened to Toklas retelling their neighbors sorrowful tale: this heavy set and seductive Frenchwoman, solitary, ponderous, modulating her cadences from delicate and witty to slow and troubling, transmogrified into Henry James, if not vice versa, despite all superficial differences. A certain pathos of forlornness attaches to both figures, expressing itself in a compensatory gift of style, an agile light[ness] in speech that combines with gravity of carriage to make them attractive and winsome (any general worth his or her salt must of course win some). Both figures have vitality enough, and to spare, bearing out Steins dictum: It is not clarity that is desirable but force (FA 155, 127). This moment of gender crossing, if not gender fusion, foregrounds Steins longstanding interest in a zone of cultural life and self-constitution in which the erasing or obscuring of difference carries the most far-reaching implications. If Stein emphasizes Madame Godets female masculinity, just as she did her own as author, she also attenuates the masculinity of the construct Henry James to gesture toward a half-feminine, possibly queer component to his genius. The rank of general would seem to carry a salient gender coding, especially since Four in America also contains chapters on two real generals of undisputed battlefield mastery, Washington and Grant. Yet Steins profession-switching fantasia undermines this association by trying out these two men in the guise of a novelist and a religious leader, respectively. There are further clues that Stein exempted James from her frequent stricture: What is the use of being a little boy if you are going to grow up to be a man (qtd. in Wilder xxvii). Having borne himself manfully enough as a small boy among others (If the little boy was afraid there were no tears), James as accomplished general nonetheless retained a keen susceptibility to feeling, if not necessarily a tendency to luxurious sensual indulgence: his name Henry James was a name, and weeping he wept (FA 155, 149). Jamess affective immaturity is positively construed here as a type of resistance to gender calcification that, perforce, annexes sexual discourse. Henry James was was was a young thing, Stein insists, and the fact that he went on as if he had been young, with his emotive-expressive paraphernalia intact, seems to be part and parcel of his having kept away from the usual patterns of romantic investment: Henry James never came amiss. He did not come slowly nor did he come to kiss . . . Added bliss to miss and miss to kiss and kiss to remember . . . This made him be have been young (FA 15152). No miss to kiss nor wedded bliss for this perennial youngster, who, alas, did not have or did not seize

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options to be or to play otherwise, either himself to come amiss (a miss) or to find a confidential mate and collaborator, his particular Alice, of the same gender: how [one] can quiver and not quiver at like and alike. . . . Nobody is alike Henry James (FA 14849). With nobody alike to like, there is nothing left for this all-feeling boy-general but to write his heart out, as it were. Any time Henry James wept it was his name (FA 149). It is no accident that Stein links Jamess mixed gendering (fluent as tears) and creative solitude with his name, given her virtual obsession with nomination as a motor of vocation, the quasi-mystical power she imputed to names to denote character and career (3). The singularity of Henry Jamesboth his exceptional talent and the singleness it seems to have requiredis inscribed in his name, she asserts, which is wholly unlike that of any other manHenry James could not have been named David James or William Jamesor even [even?] a very different name from Ethel James although that is not far away, Ethel James and Henry James. Entirely different from Madame Godet and essentially her double, Henry James also bears a name that is almost the antonym of Ethel James and yet not far away: So there you are. That is the connection (15657). Arcane as it is, Steins sportive assault on the cultural logics of discrimination, similitude, and stereotyping within the charged fields of gender and sexuality encourages us to see connections where we had not expected to find them: Think how you can change your mind concerning this matter (FA 128). As part of her own caginess toward an audience that she is not sure she wants to attract, Stein punctuates the text with what can only be called mock-rhetorical questionsIs it all clear. Is it all plain (127)that capture as well a philosophical skepticism about how near . . . anybody can come to understanding any one, Alice Toklases notwithstanding (FA 12728). Do I see what she means by saying that Henry James is not a queen but a general? Not completely, no, but enough to be continually enticed, or at the very least to wonder what might have happened to the king, who is nowhere in this picture. In any case, we are invited to keep up the good effort of connecting and understanding (I will try you will try), or as Stein put it more patently elsewhere: My writing is clear as mud, but mud settles and clear streams run on and disappear (FA 133; EA 126). Wherever this given stream of thought tends or ends, there can be no quarrel about Steins earnest engagement with her premier forerunner among American, if not world, writers (AAT 78). I wish every one knew exactly how to feel, about Henry James, she movingly proclaims (FA 152), and presumably we should take her at her word, approaching this piece of misty rumination as a working-through or a working-toward rather than as an abortive essay at conclusive, comprehensive statement (How can you say I do anything as foul and abject as to state? as James chided his own reductive readers [LHJ 245]). As my tone has betrayed, I still dont know exactly how to feel about Gertrude Stein, much less Henry James, after re-reading Four in America, but even as I drop the book with relief, the lively impressions it has engendered predict another go on another occasion. As the young reviewer James had to admit about even certain novels that brought on a bad headache, all this [is] done with great energy, with an undoubted sincerity, which alone may ensure future rounds of fascination and analytical exertion (EL

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615). In the meantime, I will naturally heed Steins admonition, whoever or whatever the potent name Henry James may have signified for her: But Henry James was a general. And now read what he says (FA 154).
NOTES 1 As with many statements in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, it cannot be literally true that Stein had only very lately been reading James in depth. More likely Stein had been reading James admiringly for decades but was only then, in the ripeness of her own authority, prepared to acknowledge his importance as a precursor. This much is hinted when Toklas belabors the strangeness of such a delayed exposure to James (think of brother Williams deep, durable impress on Steins career) as well as when she overtly theorizes an anxiety of influence, with Henry in the role of a hovering parent who threatened to hamper Steins development (AAT 78). But many other clues give the lie to Steins claim to have neglected James, starting with her self-conscious troping of his love triangles (from Roderick Hudson to The Wings of the Dove ) in the early, suppressed novel Q.E.D. (see also Dydo 329). Stein cites him as immediate forebear in the quirky lineage she draws up in the Narration lectures: think about American writing from Emerson, Hawthorne Walt Whitman Mark Twain Henry James myself Sherwood Anderson Thornton Wilder and Dashiell Hammitt [sic], she urges, and you will see the qualities of abstraction and perpetual motion that define American literary exceptionalism (NA 10). WORKS BY HENRY JAMES EL Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers. Ed. Leon Edel. New York: Library of America, 1984. Vol. 1 of Literary Criticism. LHJ The Letters of Henry James . Ed. Percy Lubbock. Vol. 2. New York: Scribners, 1920. WORKS BY GERTRUDE STEIN AAT The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. New York: Vintage, 1990. EA Everybodys Autobiography. Cambridge: Exact Change, 1993. FA Four in America. New Haven: Yale UP, 1947. NA Narration: Four Lectures by Gertrude Stein. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1935. SR A Stein Reader. Ed. Ulla E. Dydo. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1993. OTHER WORKS CITED Burns, Edward M., Ulla E. Dydo, with William Rice, eds. The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder. New Haven: Yale UP, 1996. Caramello, Charles. Henry James, Gertrude Stein, and the Biographical Act. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1996. Dydo, Ulla E., with William Rice. Gertrude Stein: The Language That Rises, 19231934. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2003. Nabokov, Vladimir. Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969. Sillen, Samuel. Obituary of Europe and Gertrude Stein. The Critical Response to Gertrude Stein . Ed. Kirk Curnutt. Westport: Greenwood, 2000. 10607. Toklas, Alice B. Staying on Alone: Letters of Alice B. Toklas . Ed. Edward Burns. New York: Liveright, 1973. Warren, Lansing. Gertrude Stein Views Life and Politics. New York Times Magazine 6 May 1934: 9+. Wilder, Thornton. Introduction. Four in America . New Haven: Yale UP, 1947. vxxvii.