I think about Gertrude Stein just about every day. Only last term, as I was handing back term papers to my Cinema Studies class, I quoted Stein. Commas are the slaves of the sentence, according to Stein, and we know that slavery is never a good thing. If the sentence can’t make sense without multiple commas, rewrite it. My students weren’t particularly happy about a grammar lesson, but I felt they needed it. Even in third year courses, they make a lot of mistakes. And Gertrude Stein can always tell you what they are. The elements of grammar were matters of passionate commitment for Stein.
Lynne Truss has nothing on Gertrude Stein, let me tell you. Truss’s bestselling Eats, Shoots & Leaves (2003) is a cri de coeur for the niceties of classical grammar. She rails about “plummeting punctuation standards,” especially the “satanic sprinkling of redundant apostrophes” in the contemporary world of family-store signs, graffiti, advertising, and even journalism. Excess commas and apostrophes, for Truss, “will trigger a ghastly private emotional process similar to the stages of bereavement, though greatly accelerated. First there is shock. Within seconds, shock gives way to disbelief, disbelief to pain, and pain to anger. Finally (and this is where the analogy breaks down), anger gives way to a righteous urge to perpetrate an act of criminal damage with the aid of a permanent marker.”
Stein was also something of a grammarian, but of a decidedly different sort, and there is no rule or convention in Eats, Shoots & Leaves that Stein didn’t already know. After a brief sojourn at the vast British Museum Library, Stein claimed that she had read every word. She had ideas to burn, and in the fast, new, modern world everything was up for grabs. Stein’s iconoclastic views couldn’t provide a more telling contrast to Truss’s curmudgeonly reflections on today’s grammatical catastrophes.
I have to admit that I’m of two minds about all this. Yes, we know that language changes and new ideas come about in the process. Yet I find myself reverting to the clarities of grammar as a tool for thinking. Stein wouldn’t agree with me, I know—and that’s why, perversely, I find myself entranced with her notions about language. It’s good to be shaken up, to encounter a thoroughly provocative view.
Gertrude Stein will do that for you. An eccentric figure in English literature, she nevertheless left a legacy of witty observations about life in the modern world, which resulted in several enduring classics and a devoted fan base. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) remains one of the great books on the first decades of modernity.
Even if readers haven’t heard of Stein, they will likely recognize the phrase “A rose is a rose is a rose.” Or they will have seen a New Yorker cartoon that refers to a Stein anecdote or phrase—some take on “pigeons on the grass, alas” was once a consistent beat. Even in more popular and unlikely contexts, references to Stein, probably unrecognized, turn up regularly. When I was doing my Ph.D. on Stein, there was a sports headline about a hockey player: “Larose is Larose is Larose.”
Stein was above all a modernist, and as such she speaks vibrantly to our times, when hopes and fears for the future preoccupy us more than ever. Today, the great utopian aspirations of modernity, the urge to create something new and wonderful using ordinary means for the benefit of all (industrial design, new materials, democratic institutions) are objects of nostalgic longing. In the twenty-first century, postmodern dystopias surround us—globalization, loss of national and cultural identities, fundamentalism, environmental disasters—and theorists of the contemporary world scramble to find a positive spin to reinvigorate our dreams for the future. Stein spoke to the struggles of modernity from the point of view of an insider, and her reflections, while radical, remain pertinent.
Stein’s embrace of modernism was ecstatic. She ordered a Model T Ford from the United States to barrel around France during World War I, delivering supplies to hospitals and giving lifts to soldiers. When they first got the car, Stein’s partner, Alice B. Toklas, suggested that Stein should take it apart completely and put it back together again so that she would know how it worked. Although she declined to dismantle the car, Stein could change a spark plug herself. With Toklas as the navigator, Stein drove as idiosyncratically as she wrote, at top speed and always against the lines. A friend later commented that Stein “regarded a corner as something to cut, and another car as something to pass, and she could scare the daylights out of all concerned.”
Imperious hostess of a legendary salon on the rue de Fleurus near the Luxembourg Gardens, which was frequented by the likes of Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thornton Wilder, and modernist composer Virgil Thomson, Stein finally had a hit with The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, an audacious paean to her own genius purportedly written in Toklas’s voice. Stein had always insisted that writing was very different from talking, but in this book she put her own vivacious style of conversation into prose, creating a figure of herself as a brilliant chronicler of nearly thirty years in one of the most stimulating and important periods of modern culture. Irreverent, grandly egotistical, and chock full of gossip, the book immediately became a bestseller and made her a star—something she had always wanted.
In 1934, in the wake of her success, Stein returned to the United States—her arrival at the New York seaport greeted by adoring fans—for a triumphal lecture tour before sold-out audiences. She traversed the country by airplane, her first trips in the sky. Those flights over the American prairies, with their two-dimensional flatness and geometrical shapes, confirmed her view that Cubism was the authentic modern vision of the world, and as a result of this, language and grammar were also available for renovation. The text of those talks, Lectures in America (1935), sets out her radical ideas about life, writing, politics, and modern culture in a unique and engaging style.
