o brave new world!
by Douglas Messerli
Gertrude Stein Brewsie and Willie (New York: Random House, 1946)
by Douglas Messerli
Gertrude Stein Brewsie and Willie (New York: Random House, 1946)
In 1946, the same year as Gertrude Stein’s death of stomach cancer in July, Random House published what was to be her last book—with the exception of the numerous volumes published by Harvard University Press as part of the deal to house her archives. Brewsie and Willie stands almost like a comically effervescent Tempest when compared with the darkly brooding works of her other war-time writings.
Despite the serious doubts expressed by the
most of the soldiers, and, in particular, by their lead spokesman, Brewsie,
Stein’s work is a testament to the American future, particularly a future with
will embrace the thousands of GIs about to be “redeployed” back to their home
country. As Stein had made clear in Wars
I Have Seen, there was something “different” about the soldiers she
encountered after World War II from the former doughboys of the First World War.
These soldiers of 1944 and ‘45, unlike their silent, more drunken, and ruminative
World War I brothers, having grown up as sons and daughters during the Great
Depression, were open to their European experiences and interested in the
post-war citizens of France, Germany, England and other countries. And, most
importantly, these men talked and listened; rather than simply accepting their
new experiences and their collective re-internment to the country of their
birth, they doubted and even challenged the values they would face upon their
return. Although, in Stein’s telling, they were nearly all eager to get back
home in order to start over again, they were also afraid, worried by changes in
their country’s economy and politics, and troubled abour how they might fit in
among the others who had not had gained their war-time experiences.
Convincingly using the language of the soldiers—sometimes so eerily on-spot that it is difficult to imagine that behind these young voices is a woman of 73 years of age—Stein is not afraid to breach a wide range of issues, some of them quite controversial, particularly given the fact that these were men and women who even decades later would be described by some as “the greatest generation.” Stein projects these soldier voices in a discussion of edgy issues of race, cultural identity, immigration, religion, history, economics, politics, and the failures of the American imagination.
Convincingly using the language of the soldiers—sometimes so eerily on-spot that it is difficult to imagine that behind these young voices is a woman of 73 years of age—Stein is not afraid to breach a wide range of issues, some of them quite controversial, particularly given the fact that these were men and women who even decades later would be described by some as “the greatest generation.” Stein projects these soldier voices in a discussion of edgy issues of race, cultural identity, immigration, religion, history, economics, politics, and the failures of the American imagination.
One may certainly wince at hearing Stein’s
lead character, Willie, ruminating about Blacks:
It’s funny, said Willie, the way a nigger always finds some little
nigger children to talk
to, you’d think there were no niggers
anywhere and there he
is, he just is sitting on a chair in a garden
and two darky little
boys talking to him and they talking French
and he talking to him
and they talking French and he talking and
go on talking French and
does talk the same to them, and I do
think it is funny. (p.
28)
But one quickly recognizes that that is precisely the way soldiers, particularly several of them being Southern-born, might have spoken; and, more importantly, what is really being described throughout this section (part “Five”) is that in fighting beside Blacks throughout the War, these men are no longer surprised to see Black soldiers dining among them, talking with the French (even possibly in French), and doing everyday things alongside them that would not be permitted for many years in some of their states back home.
Even the everydayness of living and being
with Blacks suddenly begins to make these G.I.s perceive that they now live in
a very different world than the one to
they are about to return.
Does it make one mad or doesnt it make one mad, said Willie.
What you mean, asked Jo.
Well, said Willie, I saw a Negro
soldier sitting on a
bench just looking out into the street, and
next to him were three
white women, not young, not paying
any attention to them and
I didnt know whether it made me mad
or didnt make me
mad. (p. 41)
Jo rightfully argues that it “doesn’t make ‘em mad not even when they see a white woman walking with one of them, the boys like to think it makes ‘em made but it doesnt really make ‘em mad not really it doesnt.”
These are Americans quite quickly coming
to terms with racism almost without quite comprehending the significance of
what they see and hear. The character Brock (one of the most unforgettable
figures in the early part of Stein’s dramatic conversations) expresses a
statement by another Black soldier that is so searing in its critique of
American race relations that it seems to have pulled out of post-war headlines:
You know the other day I heard a colored major say, he hand no
children, although he was
married nine years and I said, how is
that, and he said, is this
America any place to make born a Negro
child.
It’s apparent that many of the ideas the central figure, Brewsie, expresses arise, he puts it, from being “kind of foggy in the head.” For one wonderfully comic instant, Brewsie even ponders the idea of a transgender existence:
I wish I was a girl if I was a girl I would be a WAC and if I was
a WAC and if I was a WAC,
oh my Lord, just think of that. (p. 11)
More intently, Brewsie, his G.I. friends
and nurses explore cultural stereotypes by throwing out pejorative terms such
as “Frog” (for the French), Heinies (for the Germans), and Limies (for the
English) while simultaneously questioning their own prejudices, wondering why,
for example. although they enjoy drinking with German men, they more highly
admire the French women for basically refusing to fraternize with the Germans,
even though the German women readily slept with Americans and Russians. One
young soldier is determined to stay in Europe instead of returning home, to
allow him, he insists, to become educated, to have more time to explore the
differences between the European cultural ideas and those of his homeland.
Others find some aspects of European life far more “up-to-date” than the
“old-fashioned” constructions and the concepts behind them of the United
States:
Jo said, what do you think, one of those frog girls said, I showed ‘em
Jo said, what do you think, one of those frog girls said, I showed ‘em
a picture of my wife and
the baby in the baby carriage and she said,
what, do you have those old
fashioned baby-carriages with high wheels
and a baby can fall out, no
we French people, we have up-to-date
baby-carriages,
streamlined, she said. (p. 25)
Jo immediately wants to get home and buy himself one of the new baby-carriages. But much of the conversation between these soldiers, especially as Willie articulates Stein’s ideas, is that the U.S. is doomed in its reliance on industrialism. Like England and other countries which have already gone through vast industrial growth, the U.S., he argues, will eventually use up so many of its resources and will fall into decline. The very thing they all look forward to, to find a decent job that will permit them to buy new goods, will, in fact, give them no time to talk and think, no time and space in which to embrace the very activities they have now begun to enjoy and that have suggested to them new ways perceiving. They will become subjects to a system that ultimately will steal away their possibilities for exploring the new potentialities with which they have just begun to come into contact. And it is these complex ideas that take up much of Stein’s dialogue, particularly since Willie struggles to intelligently express them. Speaking of the English, Willie begins a long spiel which we will continue and expand upon from time to time throughout the remainder of the book:
Well anyway they had lots
of coal and iron ore and tin right there
on that island and they
just made and made, and everybody gave
up every kind of way of
living excepting jobs in factories and
mines, even little
children, and they made all their colonies and
empire buy them, and it
was swell just like us and they got richer
and richer. Well we horned
in after our Civil War we went in-
dustrial and we got richer
and they got poorer and their markets
that is the people in
their empire slowed down in buying and they
used up their raw
material, and then they tried to take new places
to sell to, like Egypt
which they took from the French and Africa
from the Dutch. The lousy
Limies, said Willie. You just wait, said
Brewsie, and there we were
getting richer and richer and why be-
cause we had our outside
market right at home that is we had
emigration, thousands and
millions in every year into our country…
(pp 35-36)
After
a summarization of the developing industrialization in Russian, German, and
Japan as well, he continues:
And it’s all because
everybody just greedy wants to manufacture
more than anybody can buy,
well then you know what happened
after the last war we cut
off immigration, we hoped to sell to
foreign countries, foreign
countries didnt want to buy and we had
the depression. …Yes and
then we had to fight, and yes we won
but we used up a hell of a
lot of raw material and now we got to
make a club to make those
foreign countries buy from us, and we
all got to go home of make
some more of those things that use up
the raw material and that
nobody but own little population wants
to buy. Oh dear, said
Brewsie. (pp. 36-37)
But how can they effect a change back
home? At first Brewsie and others suggest an active participation in unions;
and in connection to participation, one of the Red Cross nurses, Janet, argues
that together as a generational force, “we got to make a noise, a loud noise, a
big noise, we got to be heard” (p. 89).
Brewsie and others soon recognize,
however, that, in the end, they probably will be unable to change the course of
American economics. As an alternative they suggest the possibility of
“pioneering,” of each going their own way, living in a world apart from the
corporate-dominated factories in which they are expected to find jobs. What
their concept of “pioneering” actually entails is a little vague, at times
sounding a bit like the alternative choices some of their own children would
make in the 1960s—a kind of perpetual hippedom, a life lived apart, at the very
least, as Lawrence suggests, from being middle aged:
I tell you old and young
are better than tired middle-aged,
is so dead dead-tired, dead
every way as middle-aged, have
got the guts to make a noise while we are
still young before
we get middle-aged, tired
middle-aged, no we haven’t, said
Willie, and you know it, no
we haven’t, said Willie. (p. 90)
Their
fears of what they believe will be their future are so bleak, even frightening
that it makes another nurse, Pauline, want to cry. All look to Brewsie for some
sort of solution, but the more they wait for him to speak, the less he has to offer,
and the more the others finally do speak out.
The marvel of Stein’s dialogue is that, if
it begins as a kind of one-man monologue, it quickly grows into a chorus of
contradictory voices, some throwing out ideas, others dismissing them, while
others work to suggest various points of compromise. By the time they finally
get their orders to move on, they have all changed from passive beings speaking
in clichés to somewhat articulate individuals who no longer want to answer only
yes or no like the questions in the Gallup polls, but are determined to challenge
their contemporaries, to speak out, and, most importantly, to listen. As future
job-hunters, however, they doubt they will ever again be able to join others in
such intense discussions in the future:
And tell me, said Janet,
wont you miss talking when you get
home, you do know dont
you all of you nobody talks like you
you were boys were always
talking, not back home. Yes we
know, said Jo. Yes we
know, said Jimmie. Not Brewsie, said
Willie, he’ll talk but,
said Willie, Brewsie will talk but we
wont be there to listen,
we kind of will remember that he’s
talking somewhere but we
wont be there to listen, there wont
be anybody talking where
we will be. But, said Jo, perhaps
they will talk now, why
you all so sure they wont talk over
there, perhaps they will
talk over there. Not those on the job
they wont, said Willie,
not those on the job. (p. 110).
Stein saw the moment as a precipitous one:
…I am sure that this
particular moment in our history is more
important than anything
since the Civil War. (p. 113)
We
have to find a new way, she argued, or we will go poor like other industrial
countries before us. “Don’t think that communism or socialism will save you,”
argued the conservative but perhaps prescient writer: “you have to find a new
way out” (p. 113).
If there was ever moment to care about
one’s country, to be truly “patriotic,” Stein insisted, it was at this moment.
“I have always been patriotic,” insisted Stein. And she could not have revealed
it more persuasively than in this loving and moving document in which her
beloved G.I.s speak out for themselves.
Los Angeles,
February 4, 2015
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