Stein, Gertrude

Stein, Gertrude (1874–1946),born in Pennsylvania, was educated abroad, at California schools, and graduated from Radcliffe (1897). She was stimulated at college by William James, and her psychological experiments led her to study the anatomy of the brain at Johns Hopkins. Tiring of scientific work, she went abroad (1902), where she lived until her death, her salon in France attracting prominent writers as well as painters, particularly Matisse, Picasso, and Juan Gris, whose works she collected. Her early fiction, including Three Lives (1909), stories of two servant girls and an unhappy black woman; The Making of Americans (1925); and A Long Gay Book (1932), shows a breakdown of traditional plot structure and discursive writing, and dependence upon intuitive means of expressing the actual present.

Her later writings include Tender Buttons (1914), poetry without conventional logic or grammar, intended to express the qualities of objects; Geography and Plays (1922); Composition as Explanation (1926), lectures given at Oxford and Cambridge; Lucy Church Amiably (1930), a novel; How To Write (1931), a book of examples; The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), her own autobiography, composed as though by her secretary and friend Alice B. Toklas; Four Saints in Three Acts (1934), an opera with music by Virgil Thomson; Portraits and Prayers (1934); Narration (1935), four critical lectures delivered at the University of Chicago; The Geographical History of America (1936), a formless work illustrating her literary theories; Everybody's Autobiography (1937), an account of her American lecture tour; Picasso (1938); The World Is Round (1939), a book for children; Paris France (1940), a sympathetic study of the French way of life; Ida (1941), a “novel”; Wars I Have Seen (1945) and Yes Is For a Very Young Man (1946), about life in France during World War II, respectively in a personal account and a play; and Brewsie and Willie (1946), about lives of American soldiers in France during World War II.

Her Lectures in America (1935) explains her philosophy of composition, which is partly indebted to the aesthetic theories of William James and Bergson's concept of time. She contends that it is the “business of art” to live in “the complete actual present,” and in describing her technique she compares it with that of the cinema. No two frames of a motion picture are exactly alike, yet the sequence presents to the eye a flowing continuity. Similarly, Miss Stein, by the use of partly repetitive statements, each making a limited advance in the theme, presents an uninterrupted series of instantaneous visions, so that one grasps a living moment in precise, ordered forms. This “moment to moment emphasis in what is happening” appears particularly in her early “portraits,” and in Three Lives and The Making of Americans. Another of her concerns was “to tell what each one is without telling stories …so that the essence of what happened would be …the essence of the portraits.” She was also interested in “the relation between color and sound.”

In order to convey her concept of movement in the motion‐picture manner, she set up a rhythmic pattern and placed her emphasis upon the verb. Nouns being names, she felt that “things once they are named the name does not go on doing anything to them and so why write in nouns.” She felt that most punctuation is “an unnecessary name of something.” “It is evident that when you ask a question you ask a question …and so why add to it the question mark.” Other punctuation also interfered with the need for capturing motion: “If writing should go on what had colons and semicolons to do with it.” In her poetry she holds a different theory about language; for, though naming, or noun‐using, does not carry prose forward, “you can love a name and if you love a name then saying that name any number of times only makes you love it more …” and poetry is “really loving the name of anything.” Thus, for her, poetry is a method of dealing “with everything that was not movement in space.”

Her practice of these theories influenced other authors. Sherwood Anderson felt that she revivified language and was stimulated by her method of repetition with minute variations, as was Hemingway, both in the rhythms of his prose and in his way of conveying emotions as immediate experience. Yale, which inherited her manuscripts, in 1951 began printing all unpublished works, initially edited by Van Vechten.