Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
New Literary History.
http://www.jstor.org
Helga L?n?rt-Cheng
*l am grateful to John Stauffer for help and encouragement with this essay.
baby on"3 did not take this hostile reception with a bitter resignation,
but rather as a challenge. She continued to assert with an enviable
conviction that the only reason for her failure was in publishers, who
prevented the wide circulation of her writings. Yet, in spite of her
unwavering self-confidence, her art continued to be the object of
and vehement attacks.
derogatory parodies
However, the year 1933 brought a radical change in Gertrude Stein's
career when the Atlantic Monthly and Harcourt Brace published her
autobiography, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Knowing what had
transpired before, it is telling that in September 1933?only ten days
following the publication?all the copies of the book at Harcourt Brace
were sold and two more editions followed within a year.4 The general
critical reaction was characterized by an appreciative and even praiseful
tone. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is "an altogether delightful book,
rich as a plum-pudding with good-humored, amusing and sensible
tidbits," reported for instance the Washington Post.5 Another contempo
raneous reviewer "the book is far more than a mere
rhapsodized,
rary readers took up the autobiography hoping to have a peek into the
innermost life of a rigid, obscure, eccentric writer; but by the time they
put down the book, Gertrude Stein gave the impression of a kindly,
who was at the same time a remark
good-humored, chatty "neighbor"
ably talented writer. Convincing the audience about the versatility of her
was certainly not a difficult task for Stein, for it iswell known
personality
that itwas precisely this ability that fascinated her admirers most: "In her
maturity, she gave the impression, not merely of doing what she liked
but of being almost anything she wanted to be. She seemed, as the many
once female and male, Jew and
surviving likenesses of her suggest, at
non American sang and artist and
Jew, pur European peasant, public
so on" (GI xi).
figure, and
Thus, Stein's personality became immediately accessible, and this
confidential initiation evoked in the public a feeling of complicity so
for by readers in an era that marked the market's
greatly longed literary
depersonalization. "Mahomets in their own right, they [the readers]
insist that Mountain Stein should come to them. And now [with The
Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas] at last the mountain has come. At one
long deferred bound she has moved from the legendary borders of
literature into the very market place, to face in person a large audience
of men in the street."19
writers were surrounded by the myth of the purity of art, critics did not
the methods used these authors to win over audiences. In
question by
recent years, however, modernist writers have been dragged from their
pedestals and the critically suppressed relationship between canonical
modernist writers and the commercial marketplace has been reconsid
ered. Numerous recent studies aim at a on
providing metacommentary
A strategy ismore effective if only those who initiate it know the tactics
used to reach the goal. In advertising this means that the planners of
advertisements do not reveal to the public the secret methods used to
influence them. Similarly, Stein did not warn her readers in the
introduction that should be on the lookout because her
by saying they
autobiography was self-promoting. Instead she concealed her self
strategy in a way that allowed her to convince her readers
promoting
that the book was not about herself. "My sentences do get under their
skin," she used to say with the satisfaction of someone who managed to
create an influential advertisement, "only they do not know that they do"
(ATT 66). And if Stein's self-advertising strategy escapes our observation
it is because it is precisely from us, readers, the targets of her strategy,
that Stein needed to conceal her methods. This explains why the opinion
is widely held that Stein's autobiography is not primarily about herself,
but rather about Bohemian adventures at the beginning of the century.
In the anecdotes about the evocative Bohemian life in the
reality,
Parisian caf?s and Stein's salon that form the core of the book's
serve as decorations to a more central, but
reputation only important,
well-concealed theme of the book: that of the representation and
of Stein's artistic career. Already the very first sentence of the
promotion
very first chapter describing Gertrude Stein introduces this theme: "This
was the year 1907. Gertrude Stein was just seeing through the press
Three Lives which she was having privately printed, and she was deep in
The Making of Americans, her thousand page book" (A7T6). From this
moment on, Stein does not allow her readers to lose sight of the
230), she confessed. Determined to solicit fame, she set out to create a
market for her own art. But how could an author popularize his own art
in an autobiography written in first person singular without violating the
taboo of direct self-praise? Gertrude Stein tactically escaped this problem
when she decided to write her autobiography in the third person, as the
autobiography of her friend.
Toklas, an unconditional believer of Stein's genius and a loyal
supporter of her art, became in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas an
instrument of Stein's Toklas's famous
easily manipulated self-promotion.
sentence, "I met Gertrude Stein. ... I may that
introductory say only
three times inmy life have Imet a genius and each time a bell within me
rang and I was not mistaken,"(AAT 5) is only one of dozens of
statements in which Stein?in Toklas's name?asserts her own
special
talents. the far from to an inner
"Ultimately, stratagem, corresponding
'doubling' or social anxiety, is a cunning form of self-hagiography which
neutralizes or forestalls criticism," comments on
Philippe Lejeune
Stein's ingenious solution.26 The strategic importance of this idea lies in
the fact that the "ad copy" that Stein could not pronounce directly, seems
perfectly natural and acceptable from Toklas mouth.
Nevertheless, to have one's best friend to one's talent is
only attesting
certainly not very convincing. First, Toklas was too closely associated with
Stein in order for her opinion to be accepted as an independent source.
Second, the name "Toklas" did not evoke reputation that would have
lent weight to her opinion. Stein had to within the
Consequently, place
pages of her book a series of independent, distinguished "experts"
who?through Toklas, in a doubly indirect way?bore witness to the
unique values of Stein's writings. Most readers are likely to smile at a less
known friend's na?ve about Stein's name never
indignation why ap
peared in Who's Who ("I hate to look atWho's Who in America . . .when
I see all those insignificant people and Gertrude's name not in,"[A7T
183]), but a similarly enthusiastic recommendation from a famous T. S.
Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, or Pablo Picasso certainly has its intended
effects.
Sometime every one becomes a whole one to me. Sometime every one has a
for me. . . .There is then a of the
completed history history things they say and
do and feel, and to them. . . . is always in all of them.
happen Repeating
in them comes
them, out of clear to any one that looks
Repeating slowly making
at them the nature
the natures and
mixed in them. . . . is
closely up Repeating
a wonderful in living Sometime then the nature of one comes to
thing being. every
be clear to some one listening
to the
coming
out of each one. (MA 265)
repeating
narrator, Toklas, is telling her story orally and that this is why she keeps
losing her thread. She regularly suspends the chronological order to tell
of an event that happened only later, which gives her later on a chance
to repeat the same incident a second time. Curiously enough, Stein uses
almost all these narrative detours to reflect on a positive moment in her
own career.
writing
describing Stein "Gertrude at work. Stein was just seeing through the
press Three Lives which she was having privately printed, and she was
deep in The Making of Americans, her thousand page book"(A7T6),
she remarks first. Two later she the same statement:
chapters repeats
"GertrudeStein was writing The Making of Americans and she had just
commenced correcting the proofs of Three Lives. I helped her correct
them"(A7T 65). Later, the same episode gets another mentioning: "I
helped Gertrude Stein with the proofs of Three Lives and then I began
to typewrite The Making of Americans" (ATT 81). Finally, as an ultimate
proof of her absent-mindedness, Toklas describes the same scene for a
fourth time: "When I first came to the rue de Fleurus Gertrude Stein was
the of Three Lives. I was soon helping her with this
correcting proofs
and before very long the book was published"(ATT 105).
Why all these repetitions? According to Stein's theoretical argument,
this technique of repetition serves the purpose of character develop
ment. In The Autobiography ofAlice B. Toklas just like in her other writings,
a character?in this case Stein herself?is accompanied by a set of
constant attributes, and it is through the repetition of this set of
attributes that the "whole" of the character is to emerge at the
supposed
end. Evidently, this set of attributes should not be understood as short
that are repeated each time word by word, but rather as a
epithets
collection of a few typical activities, behaviors, and poses that constitute
the character.
writings are repeated with such frequency, that even the most superficial
reader cannot escape the influence of these reiterated images. And if
the advertising manuals are right in that "an
claiming impression, when
often received, some in the nervous that
produces change system, causing
impression to be received more easily a second time" (AR 18), then Stein
to facilitate the subsequent
certainly managed reception of her writings.
Finally, the endless repetition of the name of Gertrude Stein deserves
a closer look. On Gertrude Stein's name is mentioned
average, approxi
mately five times on each page, which means that by the time the reader
finishes The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, s/he has seen Gertrude
Stein's name more than a thousand times: Gertrude Gertrude
Stein,
Stein, Gertrude Stein, Gertrude Stein, Gertrude Stein, . . .Are we not
right then to suppose that this kind of repetition has some kind of
hypnotic effect on the reader?
One might also wonder why Toklas talks about her closest friend and
life-mate as "Gertrude Stein," rather than just simply "Gertrude,"
especially
since she remarks that at the time, in Paris,
everybody called her "Gertrude."
(An interesting contrast: in Alice B. Toklas's own autobiography entitled
What isRemembered, she consistently uses Stein's first name without the last
name.) However, logically, if Stein intended her autobiography to serve
as self advertisement, she had to use the more distinctive and public last
name, rather than a "I" or "Gertrude." One could that the
simple argue
constant repetition of her full name is yet another attempt on Stein's
part to (pre) condition her name in the public memory.
Seeing that (thanks to her method of reiteration) her unique,
Steinese became more and more well-known
phrases among readers,
she declared proudly: "My sentences do get under their skin"(A7T66).
Conscious of the powerful influence of repetition, Stein actually carried
out her own under the of
self-promoting advertising campaign guise
character development. To her great satisfaction, her theory underlying
her technique of repetition was proved:
people repeat what they love,
but also love what . .
they they repeat.
Final Flash
Harvard University
NOTES
Quoted in Ray Lewis White, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. A Reference Guide (Boston,
1984), p. 42. Further references to this book in the endnotes will be signaled by the
abbreviation RLW.
6 Ann Sprague MacDonald, "The Business Woman's Bookshelf," Independent Woman,
(November 1933). Quoted in RLW, p. 45.
7 Lindley Williams Hubbell, "The Plain Edition of Gertrude Stein," Contempo 3 (25
October 1933). Quoted in RLW, p. 43.
8 Ola M.Wyeth, "Gertrude Stein's Autobiography," Savannah News, 22 October 1933.
pp. 35-36.
20 See "Introduction" to Marketing Modernisms: Self-Promotion, Canonization, and Rereading,
ed. Kevin J. H. Dettmar and Stephen Watt (Ann Arbor, 1996), p. 3.
21 Articles by Karen Jackson Ford and Timothy Materer, respectively, published in