Buried under much of our poetry, even when we think it as "modest", non-
modernist as you like, are aperçus and procedures that the modernists helped
to put into our contemporary consciousness.  Gertrude Stein, even though she
has so often been overlooked, was a peer of -- and in advance of -- writers
such as Max Jacob and Apollinaire, whose quasi-cubist approaches to literature
taught our whole century how to lay down language in planes of light, like a
Cézanne painting in Stein's case, and how to play upon the time relations in a
passage of literature to throw humorous, ironic, or richer light yet onto
single expression.

This can sometimes be hilarious, sometimes beautiful.  There are passages in
Tender Buttons (really early for such adventurousness) which outshine Jacob,
for all my love for his work.

The repetitions of Stein, which our list seems to find so tiresome, pick up,
perhaps for the first time in literature, something authentic in the American
speaking voice (if Alison will let me add), especially in the female speaking
voice -- perhaps something in the relations between her and Alice B. T.  You
hear, in Stein, as in Whitman, what American voices sound like.  Please,
please listen to her on tape.

Alice N. is speaking now:  It isn't necessary to listen to Stein on tape.  The
point is that she was the first to really catch the sound of the white
American speaking voice and particularly the sound of women speaking to each
other, but this didn't preclude Hemingway from learning from her...Doug says
I've interrupted, this is a male channel for godsake.  It's just that I've
learned so much from her too.  Dickinson's voice is particularly New England,
and Whitman's is literary cum journalistic; it's with Stein that you first
hear It, the sound of the middle and western American speaking, partly because
she was listening to that voice in her head from a distance and then arranging
it in planes, as Doug says, according to principles she observed in the art of
Cézanne and Picasso.  The repetitions are not based on literary influence.
And they have a lot to do with life as it is lived, how it repeats, how
consciousness repeats.  If one thinks about the mind's processes and how to
reproduce them in poetry -- and why not do so? -- one then contends with
Stein.  However a great deal of Stein is not particularly difficult and that
is how she got on the American best-seller list in the 30s with The
Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.  It's possible that you accuse her, Peter,
of being  -- I forget what word you used -- I'll use the most 'farout' of the
10 writers on your list since the nine others being men managed to define what
was not farout by being nine and by being more accepted and admired early-on. 

(She did try to catch something of the black voice in Melanctha.  But for
reasons not really connected with that, out of her general style, she has
influenced the very interesting black poet Harryette Mullen, for example --
see her book Trimmings.  (This is the way Americans think: it's an American
distinction I have to make.))

Rather rude of Alice to interrupt but she can put all this better than I can.
It would feel sort of ignorant in me not to know how for an American writer
like Alice and her con-soeurs Stein has been such a major influence.  See, too
Lee Ann Brown's Tender Buttons publishing outfit.  We're really speaking out
of a very narrow corner.  When at 15 I failed to go on the university track, I
developed a learning principle which has been the most important of all my
poetry ideas: if you see a large body of obviously talented people going for a
particular writer and you yourself fail to appreciate that writer the most
interesting thing to do is to return to the text and see what's not opened out
yet in your own mind.  Huffing and puffing about your own taste seems to me
the least important thing I do, though of course I do it.

Try this piece of Stein and ask the other most important poetic question I ask
myself:  could I/you have written it?  Even better, could I/you have written
it at its historical period?

     "Let us talk not about disease but about death.  If nobody had to die how
would there be room enough for any of us who now live to have lived.  We never
could have been if all the others had not died.  There would have been no
room.
     Now the relation of human nature to the human mind is this.
     Human nature does not know this.
     Human nature cannot know this.
     What is it that human nature does not know.  Human nature does not know
that if every one did not die there would be no room for those who live now.
     Human nature can not know this.
     Now the relation of human nature to the human mind is this.
     Human nature cannot know this.
     But the human mind can.  It can know this.
     In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where
anybody is.
     This is what makes America what it is.
     Does it make human nature in America what it is.  If not it does make the
human mind in America what it is.
     But there being so much space in America where nobody is has nothing to
do with this that if nobody had ever died that is if everybody had not died
there would not be room here for anybody who is alive now.
     This is the way human nature can sleep, it can sleep by not knowing this.
The human mind can sleep by knowing this.  Until it knows this the human mind
cannot sleep, and sleep well human nature and the human mind can sleep.
     After all would do we like to live to have lived, then if we do then
everybody else has had to die and we have to cry because we too one day we too
will have to die otherwise the others who will like to live could not come
by."
                   (The Geographical History of America)

On this, first you see the sheer wit of repetition, the different weightings
of each, sometimes subtly adjusted phrase, to give the very motion of the mind
puzzling over what turns out to be a profound question expressed with terrific
clarity and simplicity.  Has anyone on this list ever been brought like this
to a realisation of the difference between our body's blindness at its own
quailing and our ability to rationalise our fate?  And listen to the music of
it, the turning back on its own phrasing until it has yielded, really yielded,
its meaning -- given us enough emotional time through repetition to take that
meaning in and down into our psyche.  It's not a quick hit, but its topic
isn't a quick hit either.

No, I could not have written this, not at all.  But to have written like this
for the first time in history (nothing like Péguy, I'm afraid, Ernest -- for
that kind of repetition you can search French rhetoric, a different thing from
these cubist, experimental shifts) ... to have found out how to have done that
takes my breath away.

We're both quite emotional about this!

Doug




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