I think of Gertrude Stein as a genius scientist, which means I don’t have to always love or understand her. A scientist is supposed to make great discoveries—or at least one—and never stop experimenting. Some of those experiments, however good, are going to be the fall-by-the-wayside kind, and some are going to be fascinatingly dead-ended, and some are complete in and of themselves and triumphant, and some mean to be taken up, reverently or disputatiously, and carried out by others. Gertrude Stein was well aware of all of this. She was a scientist of language and of thought and music—harmony and melody—in an uncanny way. Words like omniscient and omnivorous come to mind when you think of how she invented and often presented herself (you start rhyming, and going on, when you talk about Gertrude Stein). In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was Gertrude Stein, and the Word was with Gertrude Stein . . .

That’s why when she’s wrong, usually on some social, or worldly, pronouncement, it drives me batty. In 1939, the Partisan Review asked her an admittedly dreary set of questions, and one of them was: “Will Europe go to war?” She answered, with some asperity, “I’ve told you! All Europe won’t be at war. But if it is, all the writers will fight, like everybody else.” Well, Europe was at war, all the writers didn’t fight . . . and Stein didn’t.

When she’s right, though, as she so often is, I feel not just pleased or excited. I feel triumphant, and peacefully blissful. My friend Ann Douglas says that at those times Stein is writing wisdom literature. There is also the pure pleasure of the senses, and that divine child who says, I’m right! I’m completely right! This is who Ernest Hemingway is; this is who Ezra Pound is. Pound was a village explainer—excellent if you’re a village, but if not, not. Hemingway was 90 percent Rotarian. And he said, “Oh, Gertrude, can’t you make it 80?” and she said, “No, I’m afraid not.”

Gertrude Stein always comes through when she writes about the process of language and thinking and literature. For example, there’s not a better description of England at the height of its empire, as an imperial and colonial power, than the one in “What is English Literature.” Stein writes about their use of language over the centuries, and when she gets to the nineteenth century she says that sense of sentences lying cleanly beside each other is gone, and we’re enmeshed in explanation. The nineteenth century, she says with that wonderful, truthful exaggeration, invented explanation. And England is an island, she keeps making clear, an island culture. And in order to understand how phrases came to be phrases, “it must be understood that explaining was invented, naturally invented by those living a daily island life and owning everything else outside.”

They owned everything inside of course but that they had always done, but now they owned everything outside and that reinforced their owning everything inside, and that was as it was only more so but as they owned everything outside, outside and inside had to be told something about all this owning, otherwise they might not remember all this owning and so there was invented explaining and that made nineteenth century English literature what it is. And with explaining went emotional sentimental feeling because of course it had to be explained all the owning had to be told about its being owned about its owning and anybody can see that if island daily life were to continue its daily existing there must be emotional sentimental feeling. . . .

If you live a daily life and it is all yours, and you come to own everything outside your daily life beside and it is all yours, you naturally begin to explain. You naturally continue describing your daily life which is all yours, and you naturally begin to explain how you own everything beside. You naturally begin to explain that to yourself and you also naturally begin to explain it to those living your daily life who own it with you, everything outside, and you naturally explain it in a kind of a way to some of those whom you own. All this leads you to that what you think is not what you say but you say what you think and you are thinking about what you think. Do you understand, if not it is perhaps because after all you have not read all English nineteenth century literature, but perhaps you have and if you have then you do understand. You must also then understand what explaining is and how it came to be.

Perhaps we are still under its shadow a little bit.

She goes on to talk about sentences and paragraphs: The nineteenth century had to “live by phrases, words no longer lived, sentences and paragraphs were divisions because they always are.” They divided. They drew boundaries around emotions.

Gertrude Stein lived in some obscurity—at least to the larger world—through the 1910s and ’20s, though it’s amazing to think that Three Lives came out in 1909. In the ’30s she became a star. It’s a triumphant cultural fact that The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, a great comic work that claims all of art as its province, all the history of art and literature, and Mae West’s two best movies, She Done Him Wrong and I’m No Angel, all issued forth in the same year. (Mae West wrote her own scripts, and had very much invented herself. She too was a great omniscient, omnivorous comic performer.) It was a comedy of triumph and mastery that virtually no women—and very few men—were practicing. Mae West was claiming sex, and Stein was claiming culture (though living out sex), and they both gave us personae that are quite beyond anything our little work-a-day gender imaginings can come up with.

Stein said, “The genius and I am a genius, is talking and listening at the same time,” which is a very interesting way to think not only about any kind of improvisational music that requires talking and listening at the same time but also about the effect her writing has on you. It’s being spoken, it’s being thought through; you’re hearing, you’re feeling, you’re listening, but in some way your senses are talking with it—partly because the rhythm is so palpable. Here’s Stein on the American sense of time and space: “An American knows every American knows just how many seconds, minutes or hours it is going to take to do a whole thing. It is singularly a sense for combination within a conception of the existence of the given space of time. It’s an essentially American thing, this sense of a stiff space of time and what is to be done within it. A space of time is a natural thing for an American to have inside them as something in which they are continually moving.” That’s a wonderful way of thinking about movies, and about American music, as well as about modern language.

In “Poetry and Grammar,” from Lectures in America, Stein lays out her opinions about the uses of various parts of speech:

One of the things that is a very interesting thing to know is how you are feeling inside you to the words that are coming out to be outside of you. . . .  A noun is a name of anything, why after a thing is named write about it. A name is adequate or it is not. If it is adequate then why go on calling it, if it is not then calling it by its name does no good. . . .

Adjectives are not really and truly interesting. In a way anybody can know always has known that, because after all adjectives affect nouns and as nouns are not really interesting the thing that affects a not too interesting thing is of necessity not interesting. In a way as I say anybody knows that because of course the first thing that anybody takes out of anybody’s writing are the adjectives. You see of yourself how true it is that which I have just said. . . .

 Verbs and adverbs are more interesting. In the first place they have one very nice quality and that is that they can be so mistaken. It is wonderful the number of mistakes a verb can make and that is equally true of its adverb. Nouns and adjectives never can make mistakes, can never be mistaken but verbs can be so endlessly, both as to what they do and how they agree or disagree with whatever they do. The same is true of adverbs. . . . 

Beside being able to be mistaken and to make mistakes verbs can change to look like themselves or to look like something else, they are, so to speak on the move and adverbs move with them and each of them find themselves not at all annoying but very often very much mistaken. . . .  Prepositions can live one long life being really being nothing but absolutely nothing but mistaken and that makes them irritating if you feel that way about mistakes but certainly something that you can be continuously using and everlastingly enjoying. . . .

Then there are articles. Articles are interesting just as nouns and adjectives are not. And why are they interesting just as nouns and adjectives are not. They are interesting because they do what a noun might do if a noun was not so unfortunately so completely unfortunately the name of something. Articles please, a and an and the please as the name that follows cannot please. They the names that is the nouns cannot please, because after all you know well after all that is what Shakespeare meant when he talked about a rose by any other name. . . .

Beside that there are conjunctions, and a conjunction is not varied but it has a force that need not make any one feel that they are dull. Conjunctions have made themselves live by their work.

Gertrude Stein was always generous to the future as an experimenter, but in the last passage she is generous in a more individual human way. By the 1930s Gertrude Stein the popular writer also become a populist in, of course, a very idiosyncratic way—

Each generation has to do with what you call the daily life, and the writer, painter, or any sort of creative artist is not at all ahead of his time, he is contemporary. He can’t live in the past because it is gone, he can’t live in the future because no one knows what it is. He can only live in the present of his daily life. He is expressing the thing that is being expressed by everybody else in their daily lives. The thing you have to remember is that everybody lives a contemporary daily life. The writer lives it too and expresses it imperceptibly. The fact remains that in the act of living everybody has to live contemporarily. But in the things concerning art and literature they don’t have to live contemporarily because it doesn’t make any difference. And they live about forty years behind their time. And that is the real explanation of why the artist or painter is not recognized by his contemporaries he is expressing the time-sense of his contemporaries, but nobody is really interested. After the new generation has come, after the grand-children, so to speak, then the opposition dies out. Because, after all, there is then new contemporary expression to oppose. That is really the fact about contemporariness. As I see the whole crowd in front of you, if there are any of you who are going to express yourselves contemporarily, you will do something which most people won’t want to look at. Most of you will be so busy living the contemporary life that it will be like the tired businessman in “The Things of the Mind,” you will want the things you know. And two, if you don’t live contemporarily you are a nuisance. That is why we live contemporarily. If a man goes along the street with horse and carriage in New York in the snow that man is a nuisance, and he knows it. So now he doesn’t do it. He would not be living or acting contemporarily, he would only be in the way; a drag. The world can accept me now because there is, coming out of your generation, something they don’t like, and therefore they accept me because I am sufficiently past in having been contemporary. So they don’t have to dislike me.

And then she talks a little about how each period has its own sense of time. And that stymies us all, and then she says:

There’s a third element, everyone in the generation has this sense of time which belongs to his crowd, but then you always have the memory of what you were brought up with. In most people that makes a double time, which makes confusion. We’re syncopated psychologically. When one is beginning to write he is always under the shadow of the thing that is just passed, and that is the reason why the creative person always has the appearance of ugliness. There is this persistent drag of the habits that belong to you, and in struggling away from that thing there is always an ugliness. That is the other reason why the contemporary writer is always refused. It is the effort of escaping from the thing which is a drag upon you that is so strong that the result is an apparent ugliness, and the world always says of the new writer, “it is so ugly,” and they are right, because it is ugly. If you disagree with your parents there is an ugliness in the relation. There is a double resistance that makes the essence of the thing ugly. You always have in your writing the resistance outside of you and inside of you—a shadow upon you and the thing which you must express. In the beginning of your writing this struggle is so tremendous that the result is ugly, and that is the reason why the followers are always accepted before the person who made the revolution. But the essence of that ugliness is the thing which will always make it beautiful. I myself think it is much more interesting when it seems ugly because in it you are the element of the fight. The literature of one hundred years ago is perfectly easy to see because the sediment of ugliness is settled down, and you get the solemnity of beauty. But, to a person of my temperament, it is much more amusing when it has the vitality of the struggle.