Gertrude Stein: An Astonishing Poetry
Lovely snipe and tender turn, excellent vapor and slender butter,
all the splinter and the trunk, all the poisonous darkening drunk,
all the joy in weak success, all the joyful tenderness,
all the section and the tea, all the stouter symmetry.
Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons 1914
I don’t know where it was. Reading a newspaper? Listening to public radio? Skimming a book? Somehow, the phrase “all the” set a tiny anchor in my brain, and I thought, “I know that phrase. It is in a poem.” I searched the web but of course “all the…poem” did not yield what I was looking for. I thought, and then gave my efforts up. And then it hit me, welling up from some reservoir of memory. Gertrude Stein. Tender Buttons. And there it was.
In the passage, the sentence, you have before you there are six “all the”s, a trove of identical rhymes. Plenty of other rhymes, too: tender/slender, trunk/drunk, success/tenderness, tea/symmetry. Joy, joyful. Lots, lots, of alliteration – I will leave you to recognize all the repetitions of sounds. This is a small poem. A poem about, well, food: a snipe (a bird, which is flavorful and can be eaten), vapor and butter, liquor. Someone is cooking here, and drinking wine (“drunk”). Tenderness: cooked just right. Tea.
I was stunned. This sentence is a poem. A poem. As much a poem as the lines from Yeats or O’Hara or Doty that I recently wrote about.
In my teaching I had done a lot of work on Tender Buttons but had never seen it as a series of wonderful short lyric poems. To explain why I could handle the larger view but never really ‘saw’ the smaller structures, the lyric poems, let me talk about Tender Buttons.
Many years ago, at a sidewalk café having lunch with a colleague from a nearby college (her name should be recorded: Lorrie Smith), we talked about modern poetry, which we were both teaching. Lorrie told me she taught Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, and I thought: Hmmm. Why not? A challenging work, by a female writer, a giant of modernism. So I added it to my syllabus. (I had taught Stein’s fiction in other courses.)
It was a challenge. When the work came up, I had no idea how to teach it. Forty or fifty pages of short sections of what looked like prose, without an overarching theme or narrative, or so I thought at first. It had three sections: Objects. Food. Rooms. I did not know what I had let myself in for. (You can read Tender Buttons for yourself, in its entirety. Just type ‘Stein Tender Buttons Gutenberg’ into your browser. But I warn you: It is tough going, even if it is moderately short.)
I managed to teach it, and then kept it in my syllabus. Partly, I used it as a vehicle to bring in Marcel Duchamp, a visual artist who, by putting things like a urinal on its side and signing it with a pseudonym for the artist – this is his most famous work – in a museum show, managed to challenge at very deep levels an agreed-upon sense of what art ‘is.’ (Type “Duchamp’s Fountain” into Google…) Stein, I argued in class, was doing that with language and literature, challenging our belief that literature makes a certain kind of sense.
But I digress. Here is the famous opening section of Tender Buttons, to which I have added the underlining and italics:
A Carafe, That is a Blind Glass
A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange
a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing.
All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling.
The difference is spreading.
What's going on here? 'A spectacle and nothing strange' followed by 'all this and not ordinary.' Something that is 'not resembling' [but] 'not unordered.' Something different, and the difference will be throughout: "The difference is spreading."
We get a clue from the double negative: "not unordered in not resembling." I’d suggest that there is some pattern or order to this, not a conventional order nor 'without order’ but instead the double negative, 'not unordered'. So, although there will be no – or not much – resembling, there will still be something less than disorder : Some kind of order, a new kind ('not disordered'), rather than 'ordered.'
What is she talking about? Let me skip forward in the work to the second page of the last section, “Rooms.” The bolding in what follows is mine.
The sister was not a mister. Was this a surprise. It was.
The conclusion came when there was no arrangement.
All the time that there was a question there was a decision.
Replacing a casual acquaintance with an ordinary daughter
does not make a son. [Bolding mine]
To understand this, and the whole of Tender Buttons, it is helpful to visit Gertrude Stein’s biography.
Gertrude had two brothers, one of whom, Leo, we shall be concerned with. Their mother died when they were young, and their father took them to Oakland. (Ever wonder where the famous phrase, ‘There isn’t any there, there,’ comes from? That was Stein’s explanation of why she left Oakland to head east to Harvard, where she followed Leo and studied psychology with Hugo Munsterberg and William James. Oakland is the place where there isn’t any there, there.) She was a brilliant student, and went on to Johns Hopkins as medical student.
Meanwhile, Leo went to Paris. Gertrude dropped out of medical school just before being awarded her degree and went to Paris herself, where she and Leo were roommates at an apartment at 27 rue de Fleurus. Leo got caught up in art. He bought Japanese prints and other eastern artifacts; he also studied the Italian Renaissance with Bernard Berenson. Most important for our story, he became enormously intrigued by modern painting. He was an early collector of Cézanne, and the earliest collector of Picasso, Matisse and Braque. While their brother Michael was back in San Francisco making money, Leo and Gertrude bought paintings together. Gertrude became friends with many of the artists, chief among them Pablo Picasso.
Then came something significant. Perhaps aboard ship on a trip to Europe, Gertrude had a lesbian affair. Her partner, however, had another longer-term lover. Gertrude went on to have several other same-sex relationships.
Gertrude became a writer. No one was interested in her writing, but finally she published Three Lives, three novellas about women, each condemned in one way or another to loneliness and suffering. Leo tried to write art criticism, but had a writer's block of mammoth proportions: He was not be able to produce anything significant for forty years, until just before his death. [For those of you interested in their lives and their relationship, I strongly recommend a wonderfully readable biography by Brenda Wineapple, Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein.]
Gertrude wrote feverishly, embarking on a major huge novel, the Making of Americans, in which she portrayed both family and marriage and tried to present a complete typology of the human psyche, a project she had encountered through her studies with William James.
Then, and this is momentous, Gertrude Stein met a young woman from Oakland, Alice B. Toklas. They began a relationship.
Leo and Gertrude argued, and separated, and split up. He moved out. Alice moved in. Leo and Gertrude – I find this incredible – never spoke with one another again, even though both lived in central Paris for the rest of their lives!
This breakup with her brother Leo and the inauguration of her life-long relation with Alice B. Toklas was the exact point at which Gertrude wrote Tender Buttons. The whole book takes place within the locus of Gertrude’s apartment at 27 Rue de Fleurus. It examines the objects, it considers the food which Alice cooks (Alice is wife and caregiver, cook and housecleaner, in the apartment and in the relationship), and it observes the rooms that they shared. Alice is, and I am using the language of Tender Buttons, the "aider" who is her helper and “Ada,” the adorable.
Alice was not just Gertrude’s lover, but also her secretary. Stein would write in longhand, and Toklas would type up what Stein had written, often making carbons so that the original could be sent to an editor or publisher. So whatever else Tender Buttons is, it is a text that Gertrude Stein wrote knowing that at the end of the day, in the evening, her newly-found lover Alice Toklas would be reading the words as Alice typed them up.
It is possible that Tender Buttons is written in a language so idiosyncratic, so private, that it is Gertrude Stein talking to herself and Alice and not to us. Many critical readers have claimed just this: That she does not make the leap from the self to the social, that her words are merely word games which have meaning to her but lack the comprehensibility that comes from addressing the larger circle of humanity which writers share with their readers.
It is also possible that this is a great, if private, love poem, a garland of words which Gertrude Stein wove for her lover, a statement of their interdependence, a declaration of her love, an explanation of why she has left behind her former life (Leo) and how she is happy to have made the "change" that has made such a "difference" to her life.
Let’s return to that second excerpt I cited. To me, it seems likely that Alice Toklas shared in understanding the text, or some of it. "The sister is not a mister. Was this a surprise. It was. All the time there was a question there was a decision." [The decision was whether to embrace Alice – not just physically, but as part of Gertrude's life, as part of her family – with the closeness she had with her brother: Now with a woman not a man, a sister not a mister. The decision was also about replacing affairs with other lovers – who would remain casual acquaintances as long as no deeper bond was cemented -- with someone who would be family, "an ordinary daughter." Which "does not make a son," since a woman is not a man. I will repeat:
The sister was not a mister. Was this a surprise. It was.
The conclusion came when there was no arrangement.
All the time that there was a question there was a decision.
Replacing a casual acquaintance with an ordinary daughter
does not make a son.
I think Alice understood what Gertrude was writing, since the writing was to her and not only to a future public readership. Each evening, as she typed up Gertrude’s words, Alice would read them as a message to her, Alice.
Wouldn't Alice Toklas have understood the preceding paragraph as well?
A fact is that when the place was replaced all was left
that was stored and all was retained that would not satisfy
more than another. The question is this, is it possible to suggest
more to replace that thing. This question and this perfect denial
does make the time change all the time.
Leo left and was replaced by Alice, he left behind the paintings and then they were divided and some were stored for him, and some that he didn't want as much as others – that didn’t satisfy him as much – were retained by Gertrude, in the apartment. But of course the separation and division is not just of paintings, but of relationships, of family. Gertrude has replaced her old family, her brother, with her sister. "The question is this, is it possible to suggest more to replace that thing." Of course it is. That is why Gertrude in significant part is writing Tender Buttons: To tell Alice that she has replaced Leo in Gertrude's heart, in her home, as her new family. And “This question and this perfect denial does make the time change all the time.”
So there is a new household, a new family constellation, a new love.
Years ago, I taught a student, Robin Zappala, who in fact taught me more than I taught her. She wrote the single best student paper I ever received. In the paper, which was about Gertude Stein, she explained that homosexuals often have recourse to a language that is meaningful to those who are initiated – homosexuals – but not to others. They need that language to say the things they have to say, but which a wider and disapproving public will now allow them to say.
One of the euphemisms used for many years to describe same sex relationships was that they were a “love without a name," a love so ostracized by social convention that it could not even be named by language. The behavior was not tolerated, the relationship was not tolerated, even talking about such behavior and such relations was not tolerated.
If what Gertrude Stein had to say, wanted to say, could not be said in language, she had two choices. She could retreat into silence. In fact, silence is often a mode of denial: Not to say something is not to let it into consciousness or into the social.
Or she could use a language that was double, that seemed to say one thing (to society) even if that saying was close to meaningless, and said another thing to those who wanted to listen to what was being said beneath or between the words. Alice, I think, understood Gertrude; other readers did, to some extent or another.
I know that this is so serious it may seem tedious. I apologize, but difficult texts often require difficult approaches. Yet what I am saying is perhaps not so difficult: Tender Buttons was a lover's discourse, a celebration of a lesbian love which could not say its name in any plain fashion. Gertrude wrote by day, and Alice transcribed by night, and these are love letters, one to the other.
Don’t worry. I’ll get back to that “Lovely snipe” passage I began with. And, never fear, the complexities we are looking at in Gertrude Stein are not necessary to understand that this short passage is a wondrous, and wondrously beautiful, lyric poem. The issues I am confronting have to do with the larger project of Tender Buttons and not with the passage that so resonantly swam into my consciousness as I made my way through my daily activities.
Back to difficulty. (Tender Buttons can also be devastatingly funny and immensely sexual, so bear with me a moment longer. The fun and sex are coming. But for now….)
Stein's writing is also an attack on Western writing, with its masculine, paternal assertion of meaning and authority. From this perspective, Stein is subverting language by undermining the idea that language represents reality. Her language is an attack – long before deconstruction – on logocentrism, on the authority of the noun. Indeed, Stein claimed that such subversion was what she was doing, attacking the centrality and unassailable there-ness and dominance of nouns. She preferred verbs, which connote actions and process, not things and stasis, and she preferred metaphor and play to definition and certainty. She was presenting, she believed, a woman's world and a woman's way of speaking, too often silenced under the aegis, the dominating rule, of the noun and the sentence which makes sense.
“The question is, is it possible to suggest more to replace that thing” or, as she writes on the first page of “Rooms,” (the references to a lion and Chinese chair seem to indicate her brother Leo, whose name means lion and who collected Chinese antiques):
A little lingering lion and a Chinese chair, all the handsome cheese
which is stone, all of it and a choice, a choice of a blotter. If it is
difficult to do it one way there is no place of similar trouble.
None. The whole arrangement is established. [Bolding mine]
This is not just Leo, but the world of men, with their one way, which is the male way; and of heterosexuality, with its one way, which is the straight man-woman way. But let us read on:
The end of which is that there is a suggestion, a suggestion that there can be a different whiteness to a wall. This was thought.
That there can be a different way of being – not male, not heterosexual – from the way "the whole arrangement is established" is something that is possible in thought, but only in thought which uses a language that itself is not arranged and established by male or heterosexual arrangements.
Yikes. This is difficult going. I apologize. Stein’s writing can be difficult, and her subject – that there a way of thinking that is not familiar to us – can require that we slow down our reading so as to learn something new.
Stein is, one can claim, breaking up language and reference to break up the established arrangement, to allow suggestions, to be able to suggest “that there can be a different whiteness to a wall.” Certainly she claims that for herself, and many readers – a large number of them women who find her writing liberating, a lot of them gay who find her writing empowering – make similar claims for her revolutionary incursions beyond the boundaries of what is conventionally thought and said. There can, in fact, “be a different whiteness to a wall.”
Let’s move on to easier stuff: There is a way in which Stein’s writing is sexually playful, a game we can enjoy if only we give up our compulsion to be ‘serious’ readers. We are so accustomed to the work of making sense out of what people say and write, that we ignore another dimension to what we can do with words, which is to play games (and in particular, to play games about sex), to pleasure ourselves with and through words.
Here are a few examples from Tender Buttons, which I suppose are an attack on male notions of order, authority, hierarchy. In them, we find a playfulness that undermines both authority and order. But, heck, they are just plain fun.
Here is sentence from the first part, “Objects,” pure fun (and right too, though not sexual):
Sugar is not a vegetable.
Pretty fine stuff! But very, very often the fun and sex are conjoined. (Remember, Alice is typing Stein’s handwritten text up in the evenings: These are dirty jokes, in-jokes.) Consider the ending of “Objects.” Sex, sex, sex. Funny as well as erotic and descriptive and even pornographic. Remember, ‘Aider’ refers to her aide (and lover), Alice.
PEELED PENCIL, CHOKE.
Rub her coke.
IT WAS BLACK, BLACK TOOK.
Black ink best wheel bale brown.
Excellent not a hull house, not a pea soup, no bill no care,
no precise no past pearl pearl goat.
THIS IS THE DRESS, AIDER.
Aider, why aider why whow, whow stop touch, aider whow,
aider stop the muncher, muncher munchers.
A jack in kill her, a jack in, makes a meadowed king,
makes a to let.
There is a lot of this, as we can see from the second section, “Food:” (Again, we find a pseudonym/pun for Alice: ‘Alas.’) Hmmm. Again, a lot of sexual entendre.
COOKING.
Alas, alas the pull alas the bell alas the coach in china,
alas the little put in leaf alas the wedding butter meat,
alas the receptacle, alas the back shape of mussle,
mussle and soda.
CHICKEN.
Pheasant and chicken, chicken is a peculiar third.
CHICKEN.
Alas a dirty word, alas a dirty third alas a dirty third,
alas a dirty bird.
CHICKEN.
Alas a doubt in case of more go to say what it is cress.
What is it.
Mean. Why. Potato. Loaves.
CHICKEN.
Stick stick call then, stick stick sticking, sticking with
a chicken.
Sticking in an extra succession, sticking in.
Funny, right? Despite the sexual politics: The “dirty third” way to the duality of bisexuality, the “sticking with a chicken” which is that “dirty third.” Which for Stein has displaced bisexuality, and her brother and the ‘normal’ family, so that she sticks with the new arrangement. Which is a sexual arrangement. (“Sticking in,” and I am probably explaining too much, refers both to a sexual experience and to her commitment to a new relationship.) There is no way to explain to someone why something is ‘funny,’ but this passage is funny, isn’t it?
A bit later, Stein is quite explicit. We will be in the realm of pun, here. ‘Pain soup” is a reference to a French staple, bread [pain] soup. But bilingually it is what it appears: Pain soup, which she partakes of each day. The antidote to pain? She draws upon an archaic term, or maybe is just making it up: To ‘excreate.’
Cocoa and clear soup and oranges and oat-meal.
Pain soup, suppose it is question, suppose it is butter,
real is, real is only, only excreate, only excreate a no since.
A no, a no since, a no since when, a no since when since,
a no since when since a no since when since, a no since,
a no since when since, a no
since, a no, a no since a no since,
a no since, a no since.
In earlier times, ‘excreate’ meant ‘to spit out.’ Stein wants to spit out the traditional, male/female binary. There is a second pun, repeated often. ‘No since’ sounds, when we say it, like ‘nonsense.’ But to make no sense does not mean, exactly, to make nonsense. There is a different whiteness to this wall, for she is sticking with that chicken, which is a peculiar third. What Stein is writing makes, to many readers, no sense. But it is not nonsense. It wasn’t to Alice, who typed it up, who knew that ‘no since’ Leo meant: A relationship with her.
A private language, or a ‘folie a deux,’ the psychiatric term for a shared delusion? Perhaps. But maybe in ‘excreating,’ Stein is working to create a new language. It is hard work for us as readers to encounter a new language, one that we are not accustomed to. Sometimes the experiments are too private, and we are lost. Sometimes, though, we may cackle with delight….
Oof. Consider my predicament. Wanting to write letters which don’t sound academic and literary, I fear I have ventured dangerously close to the academic. I have ventured into terrain where I have ‘academicized’ Tender Buttons. But it is not academic. I taught Stein for a number of years in a university, and in that context I learned to value her language and what she had tried to do, and had done.
But let me return to where I started. I somehow, in grappling with the ‘larger’ Stein, I ignored that what she was writing were lyric poems. Her short pieces are collations of words which sound beautiful, which ‘mean’ more than more usual collations of words, mean in the way that those things we call ‘poems’ mean. So I return to where I began.
Lovely snipe and tender turn, excellent vapor and slender butter,
all the splinter and the trunk, all the poisonous darkening drunk,
all the joy in weak success, all the joyful tenderness,
all the section and the tea, all the stouter symmetry.
These words make a music that entrances us. These words are a poem. A poem. And if we go on beyond the sound, there is signifying going on, also. In this sentence about cooking there is, in fact, “all the joyful tenderness.” Tenderness, joy, can be found, Stein tells us, in the “stouter symmetry, her short therenesss (type ‘stein picasso’ into Google and you will see before you a copy of Picasso’s famous portrait of the writer, which hung in her living room at 27 Rue de Fleurus) and the taller, thinner woman who cooks for both of them. Yes, the line is a praise of Alice, of their relationship and the “joyful tenderness” it engenders. These words are an evocation of food, beauty, the fullness of a life lived with another person. They are also a lovely love poem, one of surpassing beauty.
And that beauty, the instance in which joyfulness becomes language, is something I could not entirely see – until I saw this sentence, this paragraph, as what it is: A poem.