Gertrude Stein

(1874 – 1946)
A pure Modernist
Importance
  She was at the center of the avant-garde art and literary worlds in
Paris in the first half of the 20th century, a friend of Pablo Picasso and Henri
Matisse as well as Ernest Hemingway and Sherwood Anderson.
 She was a radical experimenter, but her experimentation remained
unassimilated to the movement, divided, as it has been conventionally, into
the two strands of Imagism and Symbolism.
 Her poetry, growing out of her scientific training and her interest in
experimental painting as well as her own experience, ranged in new and
different directions toward both exactitude and nonreferentiality.
 Her first appearance came in the special issue of Camera Work (1912)
published by Alfred Stieglitz as an immediate response to the critical
rejection of Cubism that followed its introduction to the American scene in
the 1911 issue of his journal. Stieglitz printed Stein’s portraits of Matisse
and Picasso along with representative paintings and sculptures by these
two artists and argued that Stein’s articles were examples of a post-
impressionist spirit in prose.
 Stein pushed language to its limits, sometimes to the limit of literal
nonsense. Sherwood Anderson wrote of her “she is laying word against
word, relating sound to sound, feeling for the taste, the smell, the
Life
She was the granddaughter of well-off German Jewish
immigrants who at the time of her birth were established in
business in Baltimore. She was born in Allegheny,
Pennsylvania, in a family of seven children that finally settled
in Northern California. Her parents died when she was an
adolescent and she made a “family” with her brother Leo.
They went to Harvard where she entered the Harvard’s
“annex for women”, now Radcliffe College. She studied
there with the great psychologist William James. She was
probably trying to apply his (and Bergson’s) theories of
consciousness in her first two books—Three Lives (1905) and
The Making of Americans (completed in 1908, publ. in
1925): consciousness is unique to each individual, is an
ongoing stream, a perpetual present; it is experienced in
repetitive, short, incremental stages, not in logical sequences;
from James she also learned theories of personality and at
Harvard she conducted original research on automatic
writing.
The Making of Americans
The Making of Americans is an example of her first interest in representing
time, which is the way she believed life was subjectively experienced.
Experience goes on, and yet changes minutely from instant to instant. In
the book she explained “there was a groping for using everything and
there was a groping for a continuous present and there was an inevitable
beginning of beginning again and again and again.” And, she added
humorously, “I went on and on to a thousand pages of it.”
The book tells the story of Martha Hersland, who represents Stein
herself and her family, so that “making” refers both to family history and
to making the book. Her discourse in the book is basically that people
tend to reproduce similar psychological “kinds”— of people, of personality.
So in knowing them one is always remembering someone else who
resembles the one he/she is looking at. She has now learnt this, which
means that she has learnt that she can learn only by repetition. Of
course, as she once said, repetition is never identical, so one learns
by listening to repetitions and to their minimal, imperceptible
variations. The experimental technique in the book is that Stein makes
differences within basic similarities among people correspond to the
differences within similar sentences employed as the chief experimental
technique in TMoA. And, of course, her wild use of the present
participle is aimed to emphasize current action, present time, and to
encompass every variation of human life.
Life
Both Gertrude and Leo went briefly to medical school (Johns Hopkins) and
then in 1902 moved to Paris. Gertrude had started writing by then and
had become involved with two women (Q. E. D. publ. posthumously in
1950). In Paris, Gertrude and Leo began to collect modern art and became
friends with many of the brilliant, aspiring artists of the day, like Pablo
Picasso, George Braque and Henri Matisse. At a time when they were
totally unknown and unappreciated, the Steins were at times giving them
all the money they were able to make from their works.

These friendships were very important for Stein because she started to
reproduce some of these painters’ experiments in the very different
medium of words. She came to think of words as they were thinking of
brush strokes on canvas, that is, as tangible things in themselves
rather than vehicles conveying meaning or representing reality. The
Cubist movement in painting affected her in the sense that painters like
Picasso and Braque believed that so-called representational paintings
conveyed not what people actually saw, but rather what they had learned
to think they saw. The cubists wanted to reproduce a pure visual
experience unmediated by cultural ideas. So they painted a human form
reduced to various geometrical shapes as they might be seen from
different angles when the form moved or the observer changed position.
 Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein
According to Stein, she
visited Picasso's studio
90 times. And at the
end, he actually scraped
away what he had done
on the face and came
back to it later, so
although he spent 90
sittings, the face itself
was not painted with
Stein in front of him,
when people saw this
portrait, they said this
looks nothing like her,
and Picasso is said to
have responded:
«Everybody thinks she
is not at all like her
portrait. "But
nevermind, in the end
she will manage "to look
just like it."
Life
In 1909 Gertrude separated from her brother and moved in at 27, rue
de Fleurus with Alice B. Toklas, another American in Paris, who
became her lifelong companion and secretary, housekeeper, typist
and editor. Their apartment became a famous gathering place for
French artists and intellectuals, American expatriates and American
visitors. Stein even became the advisor of younger writers like Ernest
Hemingway and Francis Scott Fitzgerald.
This glorious time is recounted in her The Autobiography of Alice
Toklas, which is actually her own autobiography but written in the
voice and point of view of her partner. Together with Hemingway’s
Fiesta and Cowley’s Exiles’ Return and Boyle and McAlmon’s They
Were Being Geniuses Together, it portrays the Parisian scene of those
years.
In the twenties, Gertrude and Alice moved to a small house in the
South of France. Gertrude volunteered in the Red Cross during WW2.
She returned to the US only once in 1934 on a successful lecture tour,
but despite all her love for France she always felt American.
27 Rue de Fleurus: The Stein Salon.
 Stein and Hemingway
She was mentioned to Hemingway by Sherwood Anderson

in a letter, and he soon became a frequent visitor at her

salon.

When he and Hadley had first arrived in Paris, he was

unexperienced in fiction writing, having only written in a

journalistic style up until that time. Stein gave him some of

her previous novels to read, in which he could observe her

use of automatic writing, repetition, and short, declarative

sentences (Hemingway continued to use this style

throughout the rest of his writing career).

Stein is reported to have said to Hemingway about the

draft of his first novel: “A great deal of description, and not

particularly a good description. Begin over again and

concentrate.”

Stein convinced Hemingway to quit his job as a journalist

Gertrude Stein babysitting
because it forced him to work too hard and left little time
Ernest Hemingway’s son Jack
for him to concentrate on his fiction writing. Some critics (she was his godmother)
claim that without her influence, Hemingway would have
Last phase of production: the
autobiographies

 In the last phase of her work, in the late 1930s, she set out
popularizing herself by means of narratives in which her
techniques are very much simplified and project a strong
independent personality. They are the autobiography series:
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933),
Everybody’s Autobiograhy (1937) and Wars I Have Seen
(1945).
 She’s mainly become an historical figure, especially now that
her role in Anglo-american modernism is being recognized in
terms of the influence she had on later writers, and
especially now that women are trying to bring to light
women’s lives of all times to point to their cultural
significance.
 Poetry
Given that Stein was interested in reinventing poetry and creating entirely
new forms, it's naturally difficult to place many of her writings into any
obvious poetic category. While many of her poems appear scattered in a
variety of publications, the collection of short prose poems titled Tender
Buttons that was published in 1912 is one of her most notable direct
contributions to modernist poetry.
The poems of Gertrude Stein appear more as meditative free-verse
than standard formal poetry and often involved a large amount of
repetition. In 'Susie Asado', repetition is particularly clear:

Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea.

Susie Asado.
Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea.
Susie Asado.
Susie Asado which is a told tray sure.

Here the word 'sweet' reads almost like a tongue twister; it's repeated so
many times that it seems to lose some of its meaning, requiring the
reader to experience the fragility of meaning in language.
Moreover, the repetition forces the reader to actually participate in the act
of listening to the poem and thereby acknowledge that the act of reading
is a participatory process that requires work on the part of the reader.
from “Patriarchal Poetry”

For before let it before to be before spell to be before to be before to

have to be to be for before to be tell to be…
How do you do it.
Patriarchal Poetry might be withstood.
Patriarchal Poetry at peace.
Patriarchal Poetry a piece.
Patriarchal Poetry in peace.
Patriarchal Poetry in pieces.
Patriarchal Poetry as peace to return to Patriarchal Poetry at peace.
Patriarchal Poetry or peace to return to Patriarchal Poetry or pieces of
Patriarchal Poetry.
Very pretty very prettily very prettily very pretty very prettily.
A CARAFE, THAT IS A BLIND GLASS.

A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a

single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All
this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The
difference is spreading.