a fiction requiring history and faith
Gertrude Stein Mrs. Reynolds (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1995).
Mrs. Reynolds, the “heroine” of the novel
was indeed a very plain but pretty woman, like the figure in the Matisse
painting, who loves flowers for what they are as opposed to what they might
symbolize or represent: “Mrs. Reynolds liked roses to be roses. This is the way
she felt about roses.” The character, in fact, is a very practical woman, who
“had never been unwell,” a woman who may cry, but does not—at least at first in
this fiction—hint at or outwardly demonstrate something hidden within; “Mrs.
Reynolds never sighed.” Things, Stein suggests, what they appear to be in this
work: “[Mrs. Reynolds’ husband] was a nice man he looked nice and he was nice.”
“Mrs. Reynolds was quiet and easy, when
she said, well, she meant well. She did” (Mrs.
Reynolds, p. 9).
But from the very beginning of the
fiction, Stein also warns us to be careful upon what we focus. Although the
language and events of this book may be very straight-forward, almost
transparent, the real concerns of both the character Mrs. Reynolds and the
fiction Mrs. Reynolds relate to something
far abstract. “Mrs. Reynolds is not all about roses, it is more about Tuesdays
than about roses” (9) The work functions, so Stein straight-forwardly states,
is more about dates, the days of the week and, as we shall soon see, the years
of events, than it is about Mrs. and Mrs. Reynolds’ domestic life.
“Tuesday was when Mrs. Reynolds was
born.” More importantly, Stein continues, Tuesday “was the day they made peace
from war and that was the day they made war from peace.”* And already in the
few first paragraphs Stein briefly shifts attention from her comments about the
book’s central character to memories of World War I, speaking of Mrs. Reynold’s
nephew and his friend, who together “went to be soldiers and they were both
killed by a bomb on the same day.” (10). The intelligent reader perceives, in
another words, that although a great part of this fiction might be
superficially concerned with talk about “bread in soup,” “eggs and butter,” and
“guinea hens and geese” (10), the book’s true subject is a far more profound
one.
The next few pages, devoted to the
process of the young baby growing up to become Mrs. Reynolds, may seem, like
almost anyone’s adolescence, to be very uneventful, with the major subjects
being things such as strawberries, box-hedges, and the girl’s youthful
friendships—innocuous events that might even lull the reader into the believing
that Stein’s fiction will be a strange kind biographical telling of her
heroine, a kind of bildungsroman.
Already by page 20, however, when Mrs. Reynolds turns 22, she suddenly begins
to notice the clouds in the sky:
Then the clouds began to come that
is she began to see the clouds there
were in the sky, rosy clouds and dark clouds and white clouds and silver
clouds. Whichever clouds there were, she noticed them and she looked
at them.
were in the sky, rosy clouds and dark clouds and white clouds and silver
clouds. Whichever clouds there were, she noticed them and she looked
at them.
The
discussion of clouds continues for two more pages until Mrs. Reynolds finally
becomes Mrs. Reynolds at the age of 23: “And now Mrs. Reynolds was twenty-three
and this year she was to be Mrs. Reynolds.” Events, accordingly, are linked up
with the years of being, and the years of being are associated with larger
events in the world.
Mrs. Reynolds coming of age also hints at
another major structural element of the book, that of predictions and
foretellings. The first prediction of a this tale very much centered around one
major prophesy, that of Saint Odile, is uttered by a distant cousin’s brother’s
son when the future Mrs. Reynolds is just seventeen, predicting that at the age
of 23 she will become Mrs. Reynolds. And indeed, through the machinations of
another couple, Epie and Leonardo, the young heroine is introduced to her
future husband. The same morning Mrs. Reynolds dreams that “there were five
artichokes blooming in the garden,” a reference, possibly, to James Joyce’s Ulysses, where Bloom recounts his memory
of the evening in Matt Dillon’s garden with Dillon’s bevy of six daughters
(Tiny, Atty, Floey, Maimy, Lou, Hetty) who with the seventh, Molly, create a
kind of floral landscape: “Open like flowers, know their hours, sunflowers,
Jerusalem artichokes. In ballrooms, chandeliers, avenues under the lamps.”** Just
as this passage calls up Bloom’s marriage to Molly, so does it presage the
young 23-year old girl’s encountering of her life-time companion, Mr. Reynolds.
Mr. Reynolds has also been affected by
war; “He had lost two brothers in the war. …Very much later and in another war
[presumably the war of which Stein’s novel is concerned] he lost his only
nephew.
Over the next couple of pages Stein
recounts the marriage and the relatives that attend the ceremony, but suddenly,
with the introduction of Mr. Reynolds’ younger brother William, who lives next
door with his wife Hope, everything changes. For William, quite obviously a
very different kind of man than his elder brother, has two friends who quickly
become the foreboding figures who consume the days and nights of Mr. and Mrs.
Reynolds’ life.
The parents of the wife [Hope}
sometimes came and stayed with them
[William and his wife] but mostly they had other kind of people with
them.
The ones they knew best were two men.
The one was Angel Harper. He became very well known but they [Mr.
and Mrs. Reynolds] did not know him any more then.
The other was older he was Joseph Lane. He had bushy eyebrows and
was older than any of them and it did not make any difference to him
how young he was or how old he was. (24)
[William and his wife] but mostly they had other kind of people with
them.
The ones they knew best were two men.
The one was Angel Harper. He became very well known but they [Mr.
and Mrs. Reynolds] did not know him any more then.
The other was older he was Joseph Lane. He had bushy eyebrows and
was older than any of them and it did not make any difference to him
how young he was or how old he was. (24)
Stein goes out of her way to dissociate
the central couple of her story from William and Hope, describing William as a
man who stays in bed when anything happens, which did happen very much that
winter. Although Hope, a teacher, does go out and even encounters others, she
too has very little to do with Mrs. Reynolds and her husband. Stein goes even
further in insisting upon the dissociation of the two families:
She [Mrs. Reynolds] and her sister-in-law were
neighbors but would
not be very likely that they would be either going out or coming in at
the same time.
Anyway neither the brothers nor the sisters-in-law met, they really
never met.
not be very likely that they would be either going out or coming in at
the same time.
Anyway neither the brothers nor the sisters-in-law met, they really
never met.
Why, one might well ask, does Stein make
it so evident that Mrs. Reynolds has no relationship with her in-laws and, as
she later reports several times, never met either Angel Harper or Joseph Lane?
Even more importantly, why does she associate these two figures—whom readers
quickly discern represent Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin (only four pages
later Stein writes “Angel Harper later was a dictator.”)—with a relative of Mr.
and Mrs. Reynolds?
Even in these few early pages, Stein has
associated Mrs. Reynolds—through the character’s desire for “roses to be
roses”—with Stein’s own famed maxim, “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose,” from
1913, later restated as “A rose is a rose is a rose” her version of Williams’
later, 1927 dictum, “No ideas but in things.” And. if Mrs. Reynolds’dream is actually reference
to Joyce, she has connected her heroine with the Jewish figure of Leopold Blum,
aligning her character to her own religious beliefs. As the work moves forward,
moreover, we cannot help but feel this woman, walking the streets of a small,
provincial French village, where she regularly speaks with the inhabitants, is extremely
similar to the Stein we come to know in Bilignin as described in her Paris France.
Recognizing that some of those neighbors,
even somewhat distant friends such Stein’s admirer and, some argue, protector,
Bernard Faÿ, may be Nazi-sympathizes (people who knew Angel Harper), Stein goes
out of her way to dissociate herself from them, insisting not only that Mrs.
Reynolds has never meet Angel Harper (that she had no knowledge of him and his
ideas), but that she goes out of her way not even engage with those who do know
of him, including a consorting with her brother and sister in-law.
Soon after his early friendship with
William, Angel Harper leaves: “he went away and they never saw him again” (37).
But William Reynolds and his wife Hope continue to be tainted by their former relationship
to him. Later, he and his wife are visited by a couple, Mr. and Mrs.
Madden-Henry, obviously a British pair, who are admirers of Angel Harper: “Mr.
and Mrs. Madden-Henry admired Angel Harper because he never coughed.” (96) Hope
also expresses her admiration of Harper, in a strange way, by suggesting the
dual meaning of the word “bat”: “Bat is a word that has two meanings, one that
flies by night and one that hits a ball.”
Possibly in this passage Stein is simply
satirizing the situation by playing with the satirical notion, held by many and
particularly apparent in Chaplin’s 1940 film The Great Dictator, that Hitler’s rants often sounded very much
like coughing fits; his name in the film, Adenoid Hynkel, reiterates that fact.
Not only is Harper a “bat,” a frightening, vampire-like figure, but like the
little tramp in The Great Dictator,
“hits” the ball, which Chaplin represents in the form of a giant globe of the
world, around the room.***
Others, such as Mrs. Coates, immediately
begin to think very badly about the Madden-Henrys, and, more importantly, Mrs.
Reynolds—who has already prophesized that Angel Harper would be drowned (“She
never knew Angel Harper which was just as well because she would have said of
him that he would be drowned dead….”) (62)—a short while later determines and
tells her husband that she “really never wanted to see or hear William again”
(p. 138). Soon after William and Hope thankfully move away.
If Mrs. Reynolds and most of her
neighbors at first know little about Angel Harper, once his name is invoked,
the fiction is soon overwhelmed with mentions of him and, to a far lesser
degree, of Joseph Lane. After the early naming of Harper, his moniker crops up
throughout the rest of the fiction on nearly every page and, at times, in
nearly every paragraph. In short, as Stein notes, even if Mrs. Reynolds and
most of the others in her village had never “known” him before he “went away,”
it hardly matters: “…Ten years after, it made no difference, because everybody knew
about him and might he might be afraid enough” (37-38).
The fiction itself becomes, just as Angel
Harper is described, more and more gloomy. A hoot-owl hoots “terrifically”
(38), the winters seem colder, it rains for “twenty-eight days in the daytime
and in the evening and at night….” (81). The link between these events and
Hitler are made quite clear, as in the very next paragraph Stein repeats: “By
this time Angel Harper was very well known, so well known that everybody knew
about him.”
Already by page 50, the woman who begin
the work as one who “never sighed,” begins to sigh quite often, an act in which she continues to engage throughout most
of the rest of the fiction.
Gradually, perhaps in imitation of
Hitler’s autobiographical Mein Kampf,
we began to get glimpses of Angel Harper as a child, a young boy, and a
teenager:
When Angel Harper was a little
boy he did not drill other little boys
and make them march. Some do. He did not. He sat and when he sat,
he sat. Enough said.
and make them march. Some do. He did not. He sat and when he sat,
he sat. Enough said.
….
He talked to himself and he said, all the same. And when said all the
same he meant it. (68)
He talked to himself and he said, all the same. And when said all the
same he meant it. (68)
Although
these brief memories have no common thread, they generally show Angel Harper at
a distance others and removed from the rest of world events. He often acts alone,
watching, focusing on his own inner thoughts. Many of them show a person not
knowing how to relate to others around him:
Angel Harper was bitter he was
where he was and he was bitter, he
ate what he ate and he was bitter, nobody saw him just then and he
was bitter and little by little it was as much worse and he water bitter.
(90)
ate what he ate and he was bitter, nobody saw him just then and he
was bitter and little by little it was as much worse and he water bitter.
(90)
This
passage, in particular, reminds one of Hitler’s anger with his father who stood
against his desire to become an artist, described in Mein Kampf.
As Axelrod makes clear in his essay, Mrs.
Reynolds not only recognizes Angel Harper as evil (“Angel Harper is annoysome,
he is dangerous, he is painful, he is owned and is annoysome…”), but she would
have him dead “. “And I would be pleased if they killed him (98).” Mrs.
Reynolds truly wishes that he might become an “angel harper,” a dead man
harping in some vague depiction of an afterlife. In this case, as Axelrod has
argued, I think we have to think of the “angel” as a fallen one, as a satanic
force rather than a creature of paradise.
As the wartime situation grows in its
horrors, Mrs. Reynolds becomes more and more sad (282). She has bad dreams and
fears for the future. What begins as a wish for Angel’s death is transformed
into hate: “If I knew about him I would hate him, and I do know about him and I
do hate him” (298).
Before long what began as descriptions of
simple feelings, emotional responses to Angel Harper that alternate with the
very ordinary and uneventful days of Mr. and Mrs. Reynolds’—as they rise each
morning, leave the house for periods of time, eat dinner, and, ritualistically,
go back to bed—begin to be overshadowed by longer units of time which designate
the dictator’s years of his life.
This begins with a brief mention of Hitler
being thirty-eight (“Angel Harper was now thirty-eight and it was not at all
too late.” (108). And in the next line Stein warns the reader to pay attention:
“Listen here,” she insists. Something is about the change, she hints, as if
warning us that a new element of narrative structure is about to be introduced.
On the very next page (109), Angel Harper
is described as being forty-three. A couple of pages later he becomes
forty-four, which takes us through a great many further pages. Narrative time
in Mrs. Reynolds shifts as the Hitler
figure grows older. The numerous figures of the earlier pages begin to
disappear; life becomes more difficult as people aimlessly pass by the
Reynolds’ window. Food becomes scarce. The small daily events that were so
crucial to the narrative pattern of the fiction, becomes more and more vague as
Mrs. Reynolds increasingly fears to even leave the house.
To understand this shift, I argue, one has
to further make sense of Mrs. Reynolds’ increasing fixation with Angel Harper’s
age, particularly since, we quickly perceive, more and more pages are devoted
to each passing year. Stein hints at the key to comprehending this shift by noting
that in the year 1942 one naturally thinks of Columbus’ voyage of 1492, a
voyage which her husband links to wider world events that embrace even the
distant USA:
Mr. Reynolds came in,
he did not meditate but he told Mrs.
Reynolds what every one said. They said that suddenly in
September 1940 the United States of America instead of being
a big flat land illimitably flat, the land against which Christopher
Columbus bumped himself in 1492 became a part of the round
world that goes around and around.****
Reynolds what every one said. They said that suddenly in
September 1940 the United States of America instead of being
a big flat land illimitably flat, the land against which Christopher
Columbus bumped himself in 1492 became a part of the round
world that goes around and around.****
In another words, through the Columbus
simile, the reader is asked to see the very flat world, where hardly anything
happens, as a multi-dimensional reality, as a world in real time and space; the
sympathetic reader is asked to infuse the flat narrative of Stein’s Mrs. Reynolds with events in the real
world to make sense of the emotional responses of Mrs. Reynolds and others
described in the book in order to make it, too, part the “round world that goes
around and around.” If, as Stein claims in her final “Epilogue,” “There is
nothing historical about this book except the state of mind,” she asks that the
reader bring with him that “state of mind,” that impose historicity upon her
flat fiction to comprehend the significance of the author’s and character’s
observations.
When Angel Harper/Hitler was 44, for
example, the year would have been (given Hitler’s birth year of 1889), 1933, an
important year for Hitler: for in that year he was named Chancellor of the
Reich, which, in turn, allowed him to gain control over the German police. On
February 27 that same year, The Reichstag was set afire, after which, with
Hindenberg’s support, led to the suspension of basic rights and permitted
detention without trial. In March of that year, Hitler’s German National
People’s Party acquired the largest number of seats in parliament, and with the
“Enabling Act” transformed Hitler’s government into a legal dictatorship.
An even longer chapter is devoted to Angel
Harper at age forty-six (128), when the people of the Saarland voted to unite
with Germany and Hitler expanded the Wehrmacht to 600,000. At forty-seven
(133), Hitler reoccupied the Saarland, breaking the Versailles Treaty of World
War I. He sent troops to Spain to support General Franco.
As events get worse and worse, as I said,
more and more time is given over to each year of Angel Harper’s life. Quite
clearly, Stein is paralleling her character’s increasing fears with the flurry
of events surrounding Hitler and his Third Reich. By the time he becomes
fifty-one (1940), the year Germany attacked France, conquered Luxembourg,
Netherlands, and Belgium, nearly everything in Mrs. Reynolds life has stopped:
…in every way it was a
day in which Angel Harper was more
fifty-one than he had been then it was time that trains stopped
puffing and that chairs were not there to sit in and that hens
stopped laying eggs and when cows saw snow it excited them
and they jumped around and perhaps some of them broke their
leg. Angel Harper was fifty-on and there was no longing no
longing for anything.
fifty-one than he had been then it was time that trains stopped
puffing and that chairs were not there to sit in and that hens
stopped laying eggs and when cows saw snow it excited them
and they jumped around and perhaps some of them broke their
leg. Angel Harper was fifty-on and there was no longing no
longing for anything.
The
world in motion has become almost dead, a world of stasis.
Contrary to the forces of Angel Harper, however,
are two major dynamisms. The first is the vague and distant (he is after all, as Mrs. Reynolds notes, “a
foreigner”) presence of Joseph Lane. As Axelrod has observed, if one supposed,
given Stein’s “sometimes conservative personal politics,” Stein might focus on
Lane/Stalin’s evil capacities, she surprisingly, through Mrs. Reynolds, sees
him to be in opposition to Harper, arguing at one point, “It is very nice and
quiet of him to go on…and Mrs. Reynolds gave a sigh of relief” (237)—passages,
which Axelrod points out, clearly “refer to Soviet successes on the eastern
front beginning in late 1941.”
The second opposing force to Harper/Hitler
comes from Mrs. Reynolds’ belief in predictions and prophesies, in particular
the somewhat surprising prognostication of the seventh century Saint Odile. It
is clear that, as she says of her heroine, Stein was not so interested in the
Catholic convictions of Saint Odile and others, but found their holiness to lie
in their faith expressed through their visions of the future, their commitment
to the future through the evidence of their predictions:
To prophesy for years is
more difficult than to prophesy for months.
This is perfectly well known. She said spiders can exaggerate but
months and days. She was fairly fortunate because after all prophecies
do come true yes they do.
This is perfectly well known. She said spiders can exaggerate but
months and days. She was fairly fortunate because after all prophecies
do come true yes they do.
As
world events grow more and more dire throughout the book, the years of Harper’s
life growing into longer and longer events which outweigh the daily comings and
goings of the Reynolds’, Mrs. Reynolds belief in the saint’s seventh-century
prediction permits her to grow stronger in the face of current events.
Saint Odile had said,
listen to me my brother, I have seen the terror
in forests and mountains where the Germans shall be called the most
war-like people of the earth.
It will happen that the time will come when a war the most terrible
war in the world will happen and mothers will weep for their children
and will not be consoled.
From the Danube the war will commence and will be a horrible war
on earth, on the sea and even in the air, and warriors will rise in the
air to seize stars to throw them down upon cities and make them the
cities burst into flames.
in forests and mountains where the Germans shall be called the most
war-like people of the earth.
It will happen that the time will come when a war the most terrible
war in the world will happen and mothers will weep for their children
and will not be consoled.
From the Danube the war will commence and will be a horrible war
on earth, on the sea and even in the air, and warriors will rise in the
air to seize stars to throw them down upon cities and make them the
cities burst into flames.
Odile evidently made several prophesies,
mostly about local events; but the one referred to by Mrs. Reynolds, is believed to speak of the German’s defeat in
1941, when the eternal city of Rome will burn, and the Huns will be forced to
fight a new army that will come from across an ocean (55).*****
By the end of Mrs. Reynolds, although still unsure of the precise date in which
the terrible events will end, the heroine is so convinced of the Saint’s
predictions that she serves almost as a proselytizer for Odile’s predictions of
the future, sharing her knowledge with nearly everyone with whom she meets. By
the year in which Angel Harper is fifty-two. Mrs. Reynolds, convinced in
Odile’s prediction, is certain that “he is nearly through.”
Accordingly, Stein asks that just as the
reader has infused the book with an historical reality, so too must he bring to
it a faith that might justify Mrs. Reynolds’ belief in what lies ahead in order
to make certain that Harper, like Hitler, is not “fifty-five” alive.*****
As
Axelrod’s and my own readings make quite clear, finally, is that attending to Mrs. Reynolds helps one to perceive a Gertrude
Stein who—far different from the one hazily described by writers such as Janet
Malcolm in her rather scurrilous study Two
Lives: Gertrude and Alice (2007) and who stands apart from the even more
disparaging attack on Stein by Barbara Will in Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and the Vichy
Dilemma (2011), as well as behaving far differently from the figure described
by numerous other rumor-mongers—empathically expressed a strong hatred for
Nazism in her writing of the period, values that are just as apparent in her
sensitive dialogue with American soldiers in her Brewsie and Willie that followed. If in Paris France Stein seems to be attempting to keep her mind off of
the horrible realities hovering over her, in Mrs. Reynolds she and her heroine squarely face those horrors of
what she admits has tragically resulted in “so many deaths.”
Los Angeles,
September 4-5, 2014
*Presumably the “peace” of which Stein is writing is the end of World War I. In actuality, the armistice that ended that War was on Monday (“the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month”), but we can forgive Stein’s carrying it over until the next day, perhaps the day when she first heard the news. The same war, however, is generally cited as having begun on a Tuesday, July 28, 1914, just as she claims in Mrs. Reynolds.
**”Blooming
artichokes,” in fact, are thistles, and have little to do with Jerusalem
artichokes (Helianthus
tuberosus), which are the
roots of plants related to Sunflowers. The name bears no relationship to the
city of Jerusalem, but derives instead from the Italian word girasole because of the plants’
similarity to the garden sunflower (the word literally meaning “sunflower
artichoke”), which somehow became corrupted in English to the word “Jerusalem.”
Yet the dream of Mrs. Reynolds bears a great deal of resemblance to the Ulysses passage. However, one might
observe that if it is a literary reference, it would be one a very few in all
of Stein’s writing.
***As
far-fetched as this may sound, such an allusion to cinema would have again tied
Stein to the Jewish issues very much at the center of that film. Similarly,
only a few pages later (121), a guest in Mrs. Reynold’s house, Valerie Harland,
jokes “To be or not to be Angel Harper,” in response to which everyone laughs.
This may simply be a joke based on the Hamlet speech, but it might also refer to
Ernst Lubitsch’s 1942 satire To Be or Not
to Be, in which Jack Benny portrays Hitler. Clearly, both of my statements
are pure speculation. There is no evidence of which I am aware that Stein saw
either of these movies or even heard of them. It does not change Stein’s
heroine’s clear abhorrence of Mr. Reynolds’ brother, William, his wife, and
others like him.
****Throughout
the quiet and patient Mr. Reynolds is associated with the US in his numerous
comments about what Stein calls “the romance of America.” See pages 58-59.
*****A
translation of the Odile prophesy I found on the internet reads:
"There
will come a time when war will break out, more terrible than all other wars
combined, which have ever visited mankind. A horrible warrior will unleash it,
and his adversaries will call him Antichrist. All nations of the
earth will fight each other in this war. The fighters will rise up to the
heavens to take the stars and throw them on the cities, to set ablaze the
buildings and to cause immense devastations. Oceans will lie between the great
warriors, and the monsters of the sea, terrified by everything that happens on
or under the sea, will flee to the deep. Battles of the past will only be
skirmishes compared to the battles that will take place, since blood will flow
in all directions.
The earth will shake from the violent
fighting. Famine and pestilence will join the war. The nations will then cry
"Peace, peace", but there will be no peace. Thrice will the sun rise
over the heads of the combatants, without having been seen by them. But
afterwards there will be peace, and all who have broken peace will have lost their
lives. On a single day more men will have been killed than the catacombs of
Rome have ever held. Pyres will be erected greater than the greatest city, and
people will ascend the highest mountains to praise God, and nobody will want to
make war anymore. Strange signs will appear in the skies: both horns of the
moon will join the cross. Happy will be those who will have survived the war,
since the pleasures of life will begin again, and the sun will have a new
brilliance...
"Woe to those who, in those days, do
not fear the Antichrist, for he is the father of those who are not repelled by
crime. He will arouse more homicides and many people will shed tears over his
evil customs. Men will set themselves one against the other and at the end will
want to re-establish order. Some will try to do so, but this will not succeed
and thus will end up even worse off than before! But if things will have
reached the summit and if the hand of man can no longer do anything, it will be
put in the hands of Him, who can send down a punishment so terrible that it
will not have been seen before. God has already sent the Flood, but he has
sworn never to send one again. What he will do will be something unexpected and
terrible."
******Although
Stein scholars (Ulla Dydo and others) report that Stein completed Mrs. Reynolds in 1942, if you follow the
years of Angel Harper’s life which the fiction describes, the work indeed does
end, as did the real war, in 1945, with Harper/Hitler’s death. Perhaps Stein
went back and revised these sections later.
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