Ed Foster asked me for a review of Ulla Dydo’s new book. Here is what I sent.

 

Stein at Her Word

 

Ron Silliman

 

Gertrude Stein: The Language That Rises 1923-1934, by Ulla E. Dydo with William Rice, Northwestern University Press, 686 pages, $49.95

 

Taking Gertrude Stein at her word is, one would think, the easiest thing in the world. The woman was a literalist, which, as it turns out, is neither the same as an Imagist, nor as an Objectivist, although in fact it proves more of a kin to both than Stein’s elaborate verbal flourishes at first suggest. But it is precisely Stein’s verbal flourishes that render her something akin to a modernist Rorschach test, permitting each critic if not each & every reader to see in her writing just what they want to see. To all of this Ulla Dydo, with the able assistance of William Rice, comes along as a great wet blanket. On the other hand Dydo may well prove to be the best friend Stein’s writing has ever had. For Dydo has a novel approach: read the work. Closely.

 

Dydo has, to the degree possible via the state of Stein’s archives, gone back to trace Stein’s writing process, from an initial stage of making notes in one set of notebooks – there is evidence that Stein herself thought of these gatherings, which Dydo (in order to make a steady distinction) calls carnets, as private & disposable – to the actual construction of the works themselves in a second more permanent set of notebooks – Dydo calls these cahiers – before being typed by Alice B. Toklas. The initial notes are often hodged-podged amidst all manner of other forms of self-writing, from love notes to Alice to fragments from multiple projects that Stein was thinking about at any given moment & even to shopping lists. Most significant, though, is the fact that Stein’s first drafts, which is what these amount to, often are more explicit in determining who said what to whom, what is being cited & quoted, & thus, at least inductively, they reveal also the construction of Stein’s overall surfaces, the process by which disparate bits of writing take on the smooth surfaces (albeit textually dense) familiar readers associate with her texts.

 

This reconstruction of Stein’s writing process is one of Dydo’s two revolutionary accomplishments in this book. The second comes from following through and close reading, in minute detail for over 500 pages, Stein’s work from 1923 through 1934, an eleven year period culminating with the publication of the Toklas “autobiography” that will transform Stein from one of a few dozen American ex-pat modernist writers into an icon of the avant-garde, especially for the American popular media. In rough chronological order, Dydo offers chapters on “An Elucidation,” “Composition As Explanation,” “Patriarchal Poetry,” Four Saints in Three Acts, “Finally George A Vocabulary of Thinking,” “George Hugnet,” “Stanzas in Meditation” & The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, each centered around (although never exclusively) the text from which it derives its title.

 

The famous Hugnet incident, where Stein’s attempts at translating less than great French poetry into English destroyed her relationship with the younger poet, takes up 45 pages here in contrast, say, to the two pages it receives in Dick Bridgman’s Gertrude Stein in Pieces. But where Bridgman concludes that

 

Before the Flowers is not a satisfying composition to read. Its sentiments are as random as those in other of her works, but with the difference that much of the content is imposed by Hugnet’s text

 

Dydo goes to great lengths to first to examine what writing based on a prior text tells us about Stein’s thinking & process, & then to argue that for Stein this act of translation – writing in the voice of another – was, however unexpectedly, a rehearsal for the Toklas “autobiography.”

 

That work, which she was careful to write in the name of another, brought her readers, fame, money – and cost her her voice. She finally gave in and wrote brilliantly and seductively to a blueprint for success. Once she understood where her great need for audience, publication and fame had led her, she recovered a very different voice.

 

This passage, at what is almost exactly the midpoint of this thick, rich book, is to my reading the inflection point of the entire volume. All of Dydo’s careful preparation now comes to fruition – it becomes evident – if indeed it is not already – that her volume is something much more than just the most thorough reading Stein has ever had, it is a vision, fully fledged, of Stein herself, perhaps the most complex member of a remarkably complex generation of writers. Not unlike the sense of vertigo a reader experiences first confronting Cary Nelson’s classic Repression and Recovery, which constructs a sweeping & masterful history of American poetry from 1910 through 1945 by starting at the least likely place, 1930s leftwing doggerel, Dydo from this point forward in the book is positively dizzying. She constructs the most insightful portrait of an artist I have ever read while radically recasting her tools as she uses them. Dydo demonstrates, for example, what is possible when close reading is (a) informed by history, by a thorough archival reach into the background of any given phrase and, even more importantly, (b) is totally interested in the person behind the horizon of the text also. My experience to the last half of this book is much closer to that of reading a great novel than a work of even the highest level of criticism. And because of the extraordinarily rigorous, text-centric strategy of Dydo & her collaborator Rice, the volume never slides into psychobiography.

 

One might expect the chapter of The Autobiography to occur right at this point in Dydo’s narrative, but it does not. Rather, she prefaces it with two long chapters that are not, for once, the close reading of specific texts, but rather more general discussions – “Grammar” & “History” – that situate Stein’s work into her life more fully right at the moment when she & Toklas make a critical move away from Paris, signing their first lease on a house in Bilignin, northeast of Lyon. In fact, the two have been visiting the area for several years, but in leasing the house they did more than become short-term summer guests, becoming locals, especially as they remained in the year round after the occupation of Paris by the Nazis.

 

As she becomes removed from the modernism of Paris, Stein’s writing changes dramatically. Poems decline, replaced by fiction, Stein’s version of plays & increased critical writing. Indeed, Stein’s last great poetic work, Stanzas in Meditation, proves problematic as Toklas interprets a key word, may, as a reference to an old lover & literally forces Stein to elide its every appearance, even where the alternate can makes no sense. It is at this moment, removed from Paris, increasingly alienated from poetry, sixty years old, that Stein emerges as the author of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.

 

It is interesting to note just how many of the major modernists wrote a major, even defining text late in their years – Pound’s Pisan Cantos, Williams’ Paterson, H.D.’s Trilogy. Placed against the work of these slightly younger writers – all were roughly ten years younger than Stein – Alice B. Toklas represents both an example of the same phenomenon at one level, and its antithesis at another. Indeed, of the four, only Stein ever wrote a best seller. The resulting transformation not just of her persona, but of her work, style, voice, whatever you wish to call it, is remarkable and, precisely because of that, subject to a wide range of narrative frames, everything from Triumph at Last to Total Sell-out. Dydo doesn’t subscribe to the first, but sort of has a remarkably gentle interpretation that tends toward the latter end of that spectrum. Dydo’s most important revelation vis-à-vis the book is, in some ways, also the most obvious – that the “voice” of Toklas is every bit as much (if not more) of a construct than anything one ever found in Stanzas in Meditation or Tender Buttons. Typical of Dydo, she doesn’t just say it, she proves it.

 

It’s worth noting how this scenario reverses exactly the proposed narrative jumbled behind Janet Malcolm’s recent exposé in the June 2, 2003 New Yorker, “Gertrude Stein’s War,” which focuses on Stein’s property dealings & the assistance she got from Bernard Faÿ, a hanger-on from Stein’s days in Paris who as a minor bureaucrat in the Vichy regime becomes a useful sort of protector to a pair of Jewish lesbians living quietly in the Rhone Valley during the war. Malcolm obviously wants to make quite the scandal from this detail, as if Bruno Schulz didn’t have his own Nazi protector (& indeed was killed as a result of a dispute between his “protector” & other Nazis), as if every Jew who didn’t try to survive the war under Nazi occupation didn’t make use of whatever resources were at hand. While Malcolm borrows liberally – I’m being polite – from Dydo’s work, Malcolm’s own argument dissolves, leaving her narrative almost as disjointed & inchoate as she imagines Stein’s work to be.* Reading Dydo, it becomes apparent that any narrative that depends on the transformative “salvation” of Stein’s work by the Autobiography simply fails to understand that it is at least as complex a construction as Stanzas in Meditation & that it’s “clarity” in fact is just an aesthetic effect.

 

While Gertrude Stein: The Language That Rises is a work of criticism, by virtue of how Dydo goes about it, the book is in many ways one of the best biographies of Stein we have been given. As really should seem obvious – but I guess is not – nowhere is a writer’s life more fully documented than in the texts themselves. There are of course biographies that are merely dull readings of the texts, just as there are biographies (Tom Clark’s Olson comes to mind, or Mariani’s Williams) when you sense that the biographer has only the most marginal interest in the poetry. Dydo, on the other hand, has raised the bar for criticism & biography alike.

 

 

 

 

* There was a time in the history of the New Yorker when its penchant for long pieces didn’t mean simply that they went un-edited. That time, unfortunately, is not now.