Tags: Gertrude Stein, Katrina Rodobaugh, Tender Buttons

Read the article and see an excerpt from the film at http://www.scene4.com/0710/renatestendhal0710.html

Here’s my own small anniversary: 50 times Gertie, many more quotes! Inspired by the sisterhood of She Writes, in Oct. 2009, I started sharing my musings about my first Muse — my passion (and sometimes exasperation) for Stein. 50 is a good moment to take a little loop backward and solve one of her mysteries… In post # 2, I had already alluded to Blood on the Dining-Room Floor: A Murder Mystery . Now it’s time to dive in.
In this famous photograph, Gertrude Stein sits with her massive back turned to the world, at her desk in Bilignin, in the southeast of France, writing about being unable to write. She reports what is happening in and around the deceptively dreamy little village while “it” — the writing — is “not happening.”
“Now can I think how I will try.
You will say to me it has not happened and I will answer yes of course it has not happened and you will dream and I will dream and cream.
It has not happened. She slept and it has not happened. He will have been unhappy and it has not happened. They will be dogs dogs and it has not happened.
Shut forty more up and it has not happened.
Prepare sunsets and it has not happened.
Finally decry all arrangement and still, it has not happened.”
It can be considered a true mystery that after some 40 years of a continuous stream of writing, words suddenly didn’t flow for Gertrude Stein, just at the moment when her literary merits bought her a flow of money for the very first time.
This riddle and its related “murder mystery” has vexed many a Sherlock Holmes of Literature Studies and lured them down uncertain tracks. Jane Rule, for example, in the seventies, speculated that perhaps The Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas had been written by Alice, after all. A number of Stein scholars came to the conclusion that the huge success of The Autobiography had created a writing block – the first ever in Stein’s life. Now there was a division between the Gertrude Stein who had been used to “writing for myself and strangers” and the new Gertrude Stein who suddenly had a large audience who was listening in. She was a “lion” with an expecting readership – just what she had dreamed about all her life. This dream come true – being widely read and understood, promptly caused her to fall out of balance. “I am I because my little dog knows me.” She didn’t know any more who she was and what she was writing for. Success and money? Such a tempting idea. She even had a literary agent now who urged her on to produce more bestsellers. A murder mystery would be just the thing for the author who was so fond of detective stories.
So was it really a writing block? Stein expert Ulla Dydo doesn’t think so. Stein never stopped writing. But writing is not like writing; writing and writing aren’t necessarily the same. One kind of writing can be blocked while the other can still go on… mysteriously, perhaps. One kind of writing can try to solve the mystery of the other that is dead. Here we approach the reason why Blood on the Dining-Room Floor is a favorite for many people who like to read Gertrude Stein.
Stay tuned.

In “Alphabets and Birthdays” Gertrude suggests: “And you have to think of alphabets too, without an alphabet well without names where are you, and birthdays are very favorable too, otherwise who are you.”
Who are we? Every day in the pages of She Writes we are defining and redefining who we are in a thousand colors, in radiant, poignant beauty.
Just as Stein wrote in “Last Operas and Plays” (she must have been thinking of She Writes):
“A beauty is not suddenly in a circle. It comes with rapture. A great deal of beauty is rapture. A circle is a necessity. Otherwise you would see no none. We each have our circle.”
Welcome June 29, when we are celebrating our circles. Our literary Muses will be beating their wings over our heads, throwing rapture, quotes & kisses!

Marcel Duchamp and James Joyce are the focus of vast scholarship; Stein changes too much to be a good scholarly topic. Who to compare her with? Does she have more in common with Duchamp than Joyce? More with Duchamp, in fact, than with Picasso? As much with Duchamp as with John Cage?
A good scholarly topic needs to be criticizable. Is Stein criticizable? To criticize or not to criticize: that is the question. Can you think of any other writer with a monumental output who shares this dilemma?
A new edition of her epic poem Stanzas in Meditation (1932) is planned, based on Stein scholar Ulla Dydo’s sleuthing research, with a foreword by Joan Retallack, highlighting text variations that permit insight into how Stein worked her work.
Stanzas in Meditation attacks the refined language of traditional (patriarchal) poetry, the “language under glass.” Wordsworth, for example. In the Stanzas, Stein sets out to write “a long dull poem” like Wordsworth’s. She is having fun with it. Making fun, in Perloff’s words, of the “gaudiness and inane phraseology of poetry in general” (thank you, Gertie!), taking on the “deconstruction of the poetic diction.” Stein’ herself (in “The Atlantic Interview”) called it “recreation of the word.” I get goose-bumps when I take this in…
There is always autobiographical context and subtext in Stein’s writing, as well as counter-text. In Retallack’s interpretation, the omnipresent pronoun THEY in the Stanzas echos the Greek chorus, the oppressive parental, patriarchal voices. Stanzas is “the murder of they and the exaltation of I — the I of self-love and self-doubt.” A thrilling analysis. I only partly agree. There is much more to they than meets the I.
In the anti-romantic strategy of Stanzas in Meditation, meditation becomes continuous present/ presence. Just what meditation is supposed to achieve, isn’t it? Repetition, of course, also creates continued presence — and, as Perloff reminded us, repetition always creates difference (as when a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose).
Does the “long, dull poem” make sense? Stein knew that it was extremely difficult NOT to make sense. Modern brain research explains why we always perceive patterns, meaning, rhyme and reason: in short, sense. Why do something if it can be done. Does she manage? I would say she sometimes comes close.
See for yourself in this excerpt from Stanzas in Meditation:
“Could anyone influence anyone
One and one.
Or not.
If not why not.
Or if not would they not be more than
If they were changing which way any one
In which way any one would not need one
If not one and one.
Or not by them.
It is made why they do if they call them.
They could recognize the sun if there was another one
Or not at all by me
When this you see.”
Then, if you wish to see someone battle, seriously battle to enter this text, open Ulla Dydo’s Gertrude Stein: The Language That Rises on page 519 and see what you think — and stay tuned.

“Why is Gertrude Stein So Important?” was the title of one panel at the American Literature Association last weekend, with an entire day of panels on Stein. I was invited to talk about her murder mystery “Blood on the Dining-Room Floor” which I had translated into German (“keine keiner. Ein Kriminalroman). You might be surprised — and Stein herself would have been surprised — that this was her maiden voyage into the ivory tour of the ALA. Yes, for the first time, Stein was “important” enough to get all those panels at the ALA. She always wanted to be “historical”, and now she was, in a new way, with a brand-new Gertrude Stein Society created in her honor that same day! 11 professors, some of them star experts on Stein (Marjorie Perloff, Joan Retallack), plus an artist from Australia, and an “independent scholar” — me. Why now? Why so late? you will ask.
The consensus about it was shocking. Whereas Stein is ever present in our world and everybody who is anybody quotes her with a rose or two and no there there, etc., in academe she is still considered an outsider, too far afield, too far ahead, to be studied like Joyce or Pound of Hemingway. Who is afraid of Gertrude Stein? you may ask. Is she the author of masterpieces or of “unreadable monsters” (Joan Retallack)?
The fact that her work is so monumental doesn’t help: who is to say what in the mass of her writing is brilliant and what is not? There is a general fear of criticizing what is hard to understand to begin with. At the same time it is a heresy to admit not having read through the “big book” of almost one thousand pages, The Making of Americans. But Marjorie Perloff bravely admitted to the crime — and I happily join her. But then there was the outsider, the German artist from Australia, Gisela Zuchner-Mogall, who had hand-copied the entire “big book” into multi-layered pages of text which she showed on Power Point and on paper — a text that turns beautifully absurd and utterly unreadable (you can see it on her website; in the photo, she is on the left; on the right, Prof. Kelly Conelly).
Among these topics of talks and discussions arose the question of how to bring young students around to reading Stein?
I had a suggestion for them: encourage students to read Stein “outside the text”: explore the context; bring them into her life story, send them on a pilgrimage to Paris, to 27 Rue de Fleurus, the salon with the scandalous paintings. Get them to Bilignin, the country house (“A house in the country is not the same as a country house,” as she instructs us on page 1 of “Blood on the Dining-Room Floor”). Study her photographs, the Cubist paintings of her time. And, I said, make them listen to Stein’s recordings: she reads her own texts like rap poetry. (You can find the recording on my She Writes page.) Tell them she’s the first Rapper of modernism!
Not too likely, but the suggestion got a good laugh.
Stay tuned.

The Story of the Safety Pin. Gertrude was the guest of honor at the Diane Middlebrook Salon in San Francisco, this past Sunday, May 23rd, and what a ball she had! Another heroine pioneer of her time, Amelia Earhardt, shared the spotlight — together with her biographer, Susan Wels. The two revolutionaries were impressed by the elegance of this gathering, hosted by She Writer Marilyn Yalom.”Books and food, food and books — both excellent things,” Gertrude cheerfully quoted herself as she beheld the luscious chocolate cake, the big bowl of cherries, Sancerre wine and many other delicacies served to enliven the conversation.
Wouldn’t you know that in the charmed circle of writers and intellectuals, there was another aviator — a young book fanatic and philantropist named Kim Anstatt Morton — as well as a personal family connection to Gertrude Stein? Writer Maria Espinosa offered the following hilarious story:
“My grandmother, Ruth Friedman, went to Radcliffe while her brother Leo was a student at Harvard. While there, Leo and Ruth were good friends with Gertrude and Leo Stein. They were connected both by family connections (I believe their parents knew each other), by their assimilated German Jewish roots.
My grandmother, a lady with a commanding presence, knew that she could only spend a year at Radcliffe because her mother was ill. She wished to share housing that year with her brother Leo to whom she was close. The Radcliffe Dean said no, this was not proper, at which my grandmother simply stated that this was non-negotiable …and got her way.
So they spent a merry year all four evidently socializing quite a bit.
Several years later the Friedman and Stein families embarked on the same steamer for Europe. I think it was on-board (or maybe earlier at Radcliffe–Harvard) that, according to family stories, Gertrude developed a crush on Leo Friedman.
But Leo scorned Gertrude because she had terrible table manners…spilled egg on her skirt, and fastened the skirt with a safety pin.”
Alas, all we know from the Gertie of her student years, confirms the story of the safety pin.
The story continues with the two Leos and their sisters arriving in Paris, where Gertrude invited Ruth to live with her. But Ruth’s mother “did not think that was a good idea and nixed it.” Could Ruth Friedman have been the Alice B. Toklas in Gertrude’s life? An interesting question and fodder for the Stein sleuths everywhere…
Stay tuned.

“I am writing for myself and strangers.” Quoting Stein leads to inevitable creativity. I enjoyed the comment to my last blog (# 44) that offered a Stein quote: “I am writing for myself and strangers. The strangers, dear Reader, are an afterthought.” This came from Germany, from She Writer Ginster Votteler who got it from Wilson Sherwin’s group “Favorite Quotes About Writing” contributed by She Writer Amy-Jo Sprague, who got it…? I wonder excitedly. Did she invent it? Does it sound like Stein?
Here is the fact. Stein wrote in The Making of Americans:
“I am writing for myself and strangers. This is the only way that I can do it. Everybody is a real one for me, everybody is like some one else too to me. No one of them that I know can want to know it and so I write for myself and strangers.”
In this early period of her writing, around 1906, she had, in fact, no reader. Her brother Leo Stein, with whom she shared the studio apartment at 27, rue de Fleurus, and the weekly salon, did not understand what she was trying to do — which was to do in writing what her friend Picasso was doing in painting. In 1913, when the siblings had separated forever, Leo lumped Picasso and Gertrude together in a letter to their friend Mabel Weeks: “Both he and Gertrude are using their intellects, which they ain’t got, to do what would need the finest critical tact, which they ain’t got neither, and they are in my belief turning out the most Godalmighty rubbish that is to be found.”
What had not yet been found by Gertrude was The Reader, HER reader, with whom writing would turn into a daily blessing, into a frequent inner dialogue and sometimes a real dialogue: Alice, of course. Before that turn of events, she confessed in what some readers later considered her “great American novel”:
“I am all unhappy in this writing. I know very much of the meaning of the being in men and women. I know it and feel it and I am always learning more of it and now I am telling it and I am nervous and driving and unhappy in it.
Sometimes I will be all happy in it.”
Stay tuned.