During 2010 I
saw a wonderful theater production of Stein’s Brewsie and
Willie. Over the years since, several
Stein scholars and I have increasingly become disturbed by commentaries such as
Janet Malcolm’s of which I wrote in My Year 2008 and Barbara Will’s publication Unlikely Collaboration—books that seemingly intentionally have not
only misinformed the reading public about Stein, but confused many students and
even admirers of her work. Given the situation, accordingly, I perceived in
2014 that the wonderful performance—composed by Marissa Chibas, Erik Ehn, and
Travis Preston—of Stein’s 1946 dialogue represented a great opportunity to
revisit Stein’s World War II writings, with the goal of reevaluating her
personal feelings and allegiances. What I discovered in the year and a half
since, expressed in the “Stein at War” essays included below, was what I can
only describe as a decidedly different perspective from those who seem to
suggest Stein was sympathetic to the Vichy government or Nazi politics.
stein at war
not real but really there
Gertrude
Stein Paris France (New York:
Liveright, 1940). The edition I own is from 1970; a new edition, with an
Introduction of Adam Gopnik was published in 2013.
Gertrude
Stein’s 1940 “memoir” (a term I use with great caution), Paris France might be characterized as one of the most strange of
works in what many would describe as her literary cabinet of curiosities. The
very implication that this work, seemingly evidenced by its title, a work “about” the city of Paris, is belied
by the fact when it was published, Stein had already moved to her and Toklas’
rented country home in Biliginin the Rhône-Alpes.
Although the book begins with her earliest
memories of Paris (“Paris, France is exciting and peaceful. / I was only four
years old when I was first in Paris and talked French there and was
photographed there and went to school there, and ate soup for early breakfast
and had leg of mutton and spinach for lunch….”), most of the book—written,
tellingly, just before Paris fell to the Germans—makes the broadest of
conclusions about France in general, and is “located” in its focus on the
outlying provinces rather than in the capitol city.
The early pages of Paris France may seem to suggest that the remainder of the work will
be about her beloved Paris, but, in fact, Stein’s focus shifts from the city to
the country as early as page 18 (of the book’s 120 pages) as she begins to
speak in broader and broader terms of overall French values, particularly
France’s “feeling about foreigners.”
After all to the
French the difference between being a
foreigner and being
an inhabitant is not very serious. There
are so many
foreigners and all who are real to them are those
that inhabit Paris
and France. In that they are different
other people. Other
people find foreigners more real to them
when they are in
their own country but to the French foreigners
are only real to
them when they are in France. Naturally
they come to France.
What is more natural for them to do
than that.
In this paragraph, Stein reveals much of
the texture of the book at large. As Adam Gopnik has noted in a thoughtful
introduction to the new 2013 edition of Paris
France, “Understanding Steinese,” Stein’s language throughout is a
purposedly stylized representation of everyday speech. As he makes clear, Stein
removes nearly all the interconnections of associative thinking that her
mentor, Henry James embraced, making her “subtle thoughts sound flat and
straightforward, and […letting] straightforward, flat thoughts sound subtle.”
Indeed, Stein’s commentaries—embedded in what sound like maxims, declarative
observations, conversational asides, old wives’ tales, gossip, and, as Gopnik
asserts, sometimes “disingenuous and morally obtuse…remarks”—may sometimes convince
us, as Gopnik suggests, of “the truth of her observations,” but just as often,
I would counter, seem ridiculously personal and hegemonic.
One might almost be tempted to suggest
that Stein’s observations are thrown out in a way that allows one simply to
take them or leave them, perceiving that there are always vast differences in
the ways things are perceived, particularly given not only one’s personal
views, but the vast separation in time since Stein penned her comments. Take,
for the example, Stein’s comments quoted above. Certainly, given the American
(and other international citizen’s) invasion of Paris after World War I, we
might be ready to grant Stein the acuity of her comments. Looking at it today,
however, in a period of increasing French disparagement of Northern African,
Gypsy, Albanian, and other minorities, and in its own wartime and ongoing
attitudes to the Jews—both its own citizens and émigrés—one might “naturally”
(to use Stein’s preemptive assumption) have to immediately disagree with
Stein’s assertion.
Stein’s heady considerations of the
difference between British and French culture, for example, seem, to me at
least. to be correct:
….France was so
important in the period between 1900 and 1939,
it was a period when
there really was a serious effort made by hu-
manity to be civilized,
the world was round and there really were
not left any unknown on
it and so everybody decided to be civilized.
England had the
disadvantage of believing in progress, and progress
has really nothing to
do with civilization, but France could be
civilized without
having progress on her mind, she could believe
in civilization in and
for itself, and so she was the natural back-
ground for this period.
But
this is only a matter of my fancophone emotions. Elsewhere, Stein—who one must
always remember, was, like so many progressive and experimental writers of her
generation (Djuna Barnes was another example), a devout conservative when it
came to social and political behavior—argues for the French nature being
inherently conservative. Questioning the revolutionary rhetoric of Napoleon,
for example, Stein attempts to associate the role of revolution to the period
of human adolescence:
How could you be
civilized if you had not passed through a period of
revolt, and then you had to
return to your pre-revolt stage and there
and there you were you
were civilized. All Frenchmen know that
you have to become
civilized between eighteen and twenty-three
and that civilization
comes upon you by contact with an older
woman, by revolution,
by army discipline, by any escape or by any
subjection, and then
you are civilized and life goes on normally in
a latin way, life is
then peaceful and exciting, life is then civilized
logical and fashionable
in short life is life.
In some senses you might almost think that
Stein is arguing here for the life-changing possibilities of war as argued by
the Futurists. But she follows up that paragraph by insisting that “War can not
civilize, it takes life to civilize….” Taking this viewpoint even further, she
contends, in an interesting aside, that such was the problem with the
Surrealists:
That was really the
trouble with the sur-realist crowd, they missed
their moment in
becoming civilised, they used their revolt, not as
a private but as a
public thing, they wanted publicity not civilization,
and so really they
never succeeded in being peaceful and exciting,
they did not succeed in
the real sense in being fashionable and
certainly not in being
logical.
When
one realizes that such commentary is being issued from one of the most noted
self-publicists of the century, it gives pause to nearly anything Stein might
be proclaiming in these kinds of comments throughout her book.
Some of her assumptions, moreover, as
Gopnik posits, are outright stupid and even morally reprehensible. “Well war
does make one realize the march of centuries and the succession of
generations.” Even if we grant the fact that in 1940, just six years before the
end of her life, Stein had seen her share of war, and that for her, perhaps,
the actions of “too many fathers” (Mussolini, Hitler, Trotsky, Stalin, and even
Roosevelt) seemed to her more another bother than anything to be fearful of, or
that, isolated as she was now from her Paris, war was not yet such a serious
thing, nonetheless, the very fact that she and Toklas had had to transfer to
the country in order to save their lives and that, as Jewish women, they were
still very much in danger of being sent to a concentration camp or killed
outright, were realities that she would have had to daily face. Although she
may not have yet known the full extent of the Jewish extermination, she
certainly would by that time (the camps were begun in 1933) have heard rumors
about the camps and their brutal methods. And Stein would have had to be
utterly ignorant—something that she emphatically was not—to be unaware of the German hatred for the Jews and the growing
anti-Semitism across Europe.
While, throughout this work, Stein seems
intent in arguing that the French continue to go on with normal life despite
the war at hand, associating all wars, as being things of “isolation” (“Wars
always take place in vacation time and in vacation weather, so one is not in
Paris”) she, quite obviously knew that things had turned “bad.” As she muses at
the near center-point of Paris France:
It could be a
puzzle why the intellectuals in every country
are always wanting
to form a government which inevitably
treat them badly,
purge them so to speak before anybody
else is
purged. It has always happened from the
French
revolution to
to-day.
Unlike Gopnik, who argues that being
ironic “isn’t her way,” I would argue that irony is very much at the core of
numerous of Stein’s commentaries in this and other works, including her
outrageous 1934 Swiftian-like suggestion, in an interview, of Adolf Hitler for
the Nobel Peace Prize. Even if she could not yet know of all the unimaginable
horror that World War II would bring upon the world in which she was located,
she surely sensed the tensions rising around her, that the world had, once
more, turned “bad.”
Many of the observations and
conversations of Paris France,
moreover, would be repeated in her war-time fiction, Mrs. Reynolds, in far poignant and absolutely terrifying contexts.
The various questionings of her friends and neighbors that take place
throughout Paris France become the
pattern of Mrs. Reynolds’ encounters in the later book. If anything, one might
argue, Paris France is a book in
which the narrator is trying her hardest to forget everything going on around
her. In its intense discussions of dogs, French cooking, the use of French
loan-words in Shakespeare, remembrances of the quays of Paris—and perhaps even
her rather homophobic insistence that in every French village there “is a man
who has not married,” (who they [the local women] cannot take seriously and
call “a hen, and most of the time he does go a little funny…and once in a while
goes quite queer…[one] shot a woman just any woman as he saw her at a
distance.”)—reiterates Stein’s determination to deflect the war-time world in
which she has suddenly discovered herself
Yet again and again, despite all the
seeming chatter of ordinary living, war rears its ugly face, often in the very
moments when the narrator is thinking about the most mundane of subjects:
You talk to yourself
about chestnuts and walnuts and hazelnuts
and beechnuts, you
talk to yourself about how many you find and
whether they have worms
in them. You talk to yourself about
apples and pears and
grapes and which kind you like best. You
just go on talking to
yourself in war-time. You talk to yourself
about spiders or
lizards, you talk to yourself about dogs and cats
and rabbits but not
about bats or mice or moths.
The
worm, as she notes, is always a possibility in the isolated world she now
inhabits. It is a world even populated by spiders or lizards, but she will not
go so far as to focus, she suggests, on the even more frightening specters of
“bats or mice or moths.” If the first two animals are obviously frightening,
even moths, one might recall, help to unravel the fabric of the world they
inhabit. As Mrs. Reynolds comes to perceive in Stein’s long fiction, despite
the always welcoming presence of Mr. Reynolds, war creates so much empty space;
as Stein writes in Paris France,
“There are so many people who go away in war-time here there and everywhere."
Finally, I would argue, the reader of Paris France might be better off to see
the book as less a gathering of Steinian “truisms” about French culture, than
as a constantly shifting and very personal apologia
for the author’s remaining in France during such difficult and morally
abhorrent times. This is no memoir in the usual sense, but an impassioned plea
for the reader to share or least comprehend Stein’s own commitment, despite her
love of American culture, to all things French.
France, for Stein, represents a kind of
inner being, the core of self that is clearly not always rational (or as Stein
would put it, “logical”) in its perception of things. From early on in her
life, Stein ruminates, she came to realize that even as a young girl in San
Francisco “there was more french””
After all everybody, that is, everybody who
writes is interested
in living inside
themselves. That is why writers have to have two
countries, the one
where they belong and the one in which they
live really. The second one is
romantic, it is separate from them
selves, it is not real
but it is really there.
This is perhaps one of the most important
statements in understanding Stein’s aesthetics and, particularly, her need to
remain in France, despite whatever it may have cost her and Alice, throughout
the war. Even from afar, one might empathetically comprehend why two lesbian
women, having lived most of their lives abroad, would find it nearly impossible
to suddenly reassimilate themselves to the far more parochial and unaccepting
world that repatriation to the US might have represented. Stein would simply no
longer be the figure she was if she had returned, let us imagine, to Baltimore!
The six last years of her life would have been lived in even greater isolation
than that she describes in the pages of Paris
France. We have only to look at an example such as the former expatriate
Djuna Barnes— in Paris perceived as one of the great wits of the age, a woman
without whom no party could be complete—who, upon returning to the US because
of World War II, quickly developed a life that has correctly been described as
being life of a hermit who scared away almost anyone who might have wanted to
visit. Yes, Barnes continued to live for several more decades and even wrote.
But she was no longer a joyful human being in touch with other human lives.
Perhaps Barnes was never a truly a joyful
human being, but Stein was! Stein desperately depended upon the social interrelationships
with artists and writers that she had had in Paris, even with the natives of
village where she hunkered down during the War, and, after, the hundreds of
soldiers who accepted her open visits to her dinner table.
Stein’s France, moreover, as she makes
clear in Paris France, was not anybody else’s France. If at
times it may seem to related to others’ perceptions of that country or, even,
if, as Gopnik imagines, “we are convinced by the truth of her
observations”—something that, for all my love of Stein, I seldom was—we
recognize that Stein’s version is a Romantic one, “not real,” but for her,
alone, “really there.”
Los Angeles,
January 10, 2015
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