Gertrude Stein: Selections 9780520939677

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
TEXTS
DOCUMENTS
Selected Bibliography
Acknowledgments of Permissions

Citation preview

G E R T R U D E

S T E I N

F O R

and Jerome Rothenberg

P O E T S

Edited by Pierre Joris

T H E

María Sabina: Selections. Edited by Jerome Rothenberg. With Texts and Commentaries by Álvaro Estrada and Others Paul Celan: Selections. Edited and with an Introduction by Pierre Joris José Lezama Lima: Selections. Edited and with an Introduction by Ernesto Livon-Grosman Miyazawa Kenji: Selections. Edited and with an Introduction by Hiroaki Sato Gertrude Stein: Selections. Edited and with an Introduction by Joan Retallack

M I L L E N N I U M

André Breton: Selections. Edited and with an Introduction by Mark Polizzotti

SELECTIONS

GERTRUDE

EDITED

AND

WITH

JOAN

UNIVERSITY

AN

STEIN

INTRODUCTION

RETALLACK

OF

CALIFORNIA

Berkeley Los Angeles London

PRESS

BY

Every effort has been made to identify and locate the rightful copyright holders of all material not specifically commissioned for use in this publication and to secure permission, where applicable, for reuse of all such material. Credit, if and as available, has been provided for all borrowed material either on-page, on the copyright page, or in an acknowledgment section of the book. Errors, omissions, or failure to obtain authorization with respect to material copyrighted by other sources has been either unavoidable or unintentional. The editor and publisher welcome any information that would allow them to correct future reprints. University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2008 by The Regents of the University of California See page 347 for acknowledgments of permissions. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Stein, Gertrude, 1874–1946. [Selections. 2008] Gertrude Stein : selections / edited and with an introduction by Joan Retallack. p. cm. — (Poets for the millennium ; 6) Includes bibliographical references. isbn: 978-0-520-22459-9 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn: 978-0-520-24806-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) I. Retallack, Joan. II. Title. III. Series. ps3537.t323a6 2008 818'.5209—dc22 2007048969 Manufactured in the United States of America 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is printed on Natures Book, which contains 50% post-consumer waste and meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z 39.48-1992 (r 1997) (Permanence of Paper). frontispiece: Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas during American tour, November 1934. Photograph by Carl Van Vechten, 1934. Reproduced by permission of the Van Vechten Trust. Courtesy Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

C O N T E N T S

List of Abbreviations .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii

Introduction joan retallack

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

TEXTS

Melanctha (excerpt, from Three Lives, 1905) The Making of Americans (excerpt, 1911) . Picasso (1911)

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104

Flirting at the Bon Marche (1911) . Bon Marche Weather (1911)

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110

Orta or One Dancing (excerpt, 1912) Susie Asado (1912) .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125

Tender Buttons: Objects, Food (1913) .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126

Scenes from the Door (from Useful Knowledge, 1918) . Photograph (1920) . A Movie (1920) .

. . . . . . . . 164

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171

An Elucidation (1923)

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174

If I Told Him, A Completed Portrait of Picasso (1923) Fourteen Anonymous Portraits (1923)

. . . . . . . . 190

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 194

Note: All dates following titles indicate when Stein wrote the texts.

Are There Arithmetics (1923) . Business in Baltimore (1925) .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 198

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201

Composition as Explanation (1926). Patriarchal Poetry (excerpt, 1927) .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 226

Sentences and Paragraphs (from How to Write, 1930) . History or Messages from History (1930) . We Came. A History (1930) .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 254

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 274

Stanzas in Meditation (excerpt, 1932) . Lecture I (from Narration, 1934) . Identity a Poem (1935) .

. . . . . . . . 242

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 280

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 287

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 301

What Are Master-pieces and Why Are There So Few of Them (1936) .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 308

DOCUMENTS

“With Apologies to Gertrude Stein,” newspaper advertisement (n.d.)

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 321

Two love notes from Stein to Toklas (n.d.): “Dear dainty delicious darling” and “Ir/Re/Sis/Ti/Belle” .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . 322

Virgil Thomson, Letter to Gertrude Stein (May 30, 1933)

. . . . . 324

“Stein Opera Sung by All-Negro Cast,” New York Times (February 9, 1934) .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 328

Thornton Wilder, Introduction to Narration (1935) .

Selected Bibliography.

. . . . . . . . . . 332

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 337

Acknowledgments of Permissions .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 347

A B B R E V I A T I O N S

All works listed below are by Gertrude Stein. AABT

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

EA

Everybody’s Autobiography

FQED

Fernhurst, Q.E.D., and Other Early Writings

GSRI

“Gertrude Stein: A Radio Interview”

HWW

How Writing Is Written, vol. 2 of Previously Uncollected Writings of Gertrude Stein

LIA

Lectures in America

MOA

The Making of Americans

MOUA

The Mother of Us All, in Last Operas and Plays

P

Picasso

SR

A Stein Reader

TL

Three Lives

WIHS

Wars I Have Seen

V I I

This page intentionally left blank

G E R T R U D E

S T E I N

This page intentionally left blank

I N T R O D U C T I O N

Gertrude Stein. She came and there she was and here she is still. But what was she and what is this vast and contradictory, wonderful and maddening body of work? It means so much to us, has made so much possible, is so full of pleasure and still constant surprise. Yet there are long stretches that tax one’s attention, putting the reader in a difficult position. The work asks us to invent new ways of reading. —Dita Fröller, New Old World Marvels

I CAME AND HERE I AM

On September 11, 1933, Gertrude Stein’s picture appeared on the cover of Time Magazine. This iconic event followed the success of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, excerpted and serialized in the Atlantic Monthly that summer and published by Harcourt Brace in September to become an instant best-seller. Stein’s opera Four Saints in Three Acts (music by Virgil Thomson) was premiered in Hartford, Connecticut, in February 1934 with an all-black cast chosen by Thomson because, he said, “Negro singers have the most perfect and beautiful diction”—

3

a necessity for Stein’s difficult libretto.1 Four Saints quickly moved to New York City to a combination of acclaim and puzzlement that heightened Stein’s celebrity during its month-long run. William Carlos Williams didn’t care much for Thomson’s music but was amazed by Stein’s language, which he described as “smashing every connotation that words have ever had, in order to get them back clean.”2 Americans all over the country were amused by the news of it and wanted to meet the longtime exStein and Virgil Thomson at 27 rue patriates “Miss Stein” and “Miss Toklas”— de Fleurus, looking at the score of perfect timing for a six-month lecture tour Four Saints in Three Acts (c. 1928–29). 3 Photograph by Therese Bonney. Courtesy Yale initiated by Stein’s American agent. Collection of American Literature, Beinecke On October 24, 1934, Stein and her Rare Book and Manuscript Library. companion-lover Alice B. Toklas sailed to New York from France, where they had lived as expatriates for thirty-one years. They were met at the dock by Bennett Cerf of Random House and Joseph Alsop from the New York Herald Tribune and filmed that evening in their suite at the Algonquin Hotel for a movie newsreel. It was the triumphal return of a woman whom many might have characterized as prodigal after three decades of writing unabashedly strange things in self-chosen cultural exile. Until now, with few—but notable—exceptions, Stein’s chief redeeming trait in the eyes of most American readers had been the company she kept, her association with artists of “genuine” interest like Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Henri Matisse, and Ernest Hemingway. Work now considered among her greatest contributions to a new sense of what literature can be was ridiculed, if known at all. Stein’s Tender But-

4

\

I N T R O D U C T I O N

tons (written in 1912–13) had come out in 1914 in New York from the tiny Claire Marie press to outrage that far outlasted the edition of one thousand canary yellow copies. Her reputation for nonsense had only been fueled by the occasional publication in magazines. Stein was pleased to publish in popular media because she wanted her work to reach a broad audience, but the absence of any context for literary experimentation in these venues had probably done more harm than good. In 1924 Vanity Fair published Stein’s extraordinary (second) word portrait of Picasso, “If I Told Him.” Oddly, one does not find it listed in the table of contents under “Poetry and Verse” with the contributions of Ralph Burton, Ramon Guthrie, John V. A. Weaver, and Arthur Davidson Ficke (hardly heard from after the 1940s). Inside, the piece is preceded by a snide disclaimer: “Miss Stein’s eccentric style will probably be unintelligible to most readers.”4 Life Magazine ran a series called “After Gertrude Stein,” devoted to parodies of her style. Countless poets and other artists have benefited from the excitement of working “after Gertrude Stein,” but for these writers she was a figure of fun. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, written by Stein in the persona of Toklas, appeared to alter her reception. Upon their arrival in New York, Stein and Toklas were treated as bona fide celebrities, launched on a schedule that included appearances in twenty-two states and the District of Columbia, at institutions as varied as Princeton, Harvard, Sweetbriar, Mills College, Stanford, Wesleyan, Bryn Mawr, and the Universities of Texas, Virginia, North Carolina, and Chicago (where she gave four lectures and met with students). Stein saw F. Scott Fitzgerald in Baltimore; she and Toklas had tea with Eleanor Roosevelt at the White House; she met Charlie Chaplin and Dashiell Hammett in Beverly Hills; and she was given the key to the city in San Francisco. She relished the acknowledgment, though it was seasoned with jokes. A 1934 New Yorker cartoon depicted a customs agent saying that Stein

I N T R O D U C T I O N

/

5

had declared, “Four hats is a hat is a hat.” Advertisements (with unprecedentedly interesting copy!) appeared “with apologies to Gertrude Stein.” After the Chicago premiere of Four Saints, the Chicago Herald ran the headline “Understand Einstein? Just Try Stein-Stein.”5 From Stein’s point of view, it was not such a stretch. She herself had noted a connection of more substance than the coincidence of names: “Einstein was the creative philosophic mind of the century, and I have been the creative literary mind of the century.”6 The strength of Stein’s ego was just a bit less remarkable than her forthrightness, yet it is true that both Einstein and Stein changed something fundamental about the understanding of space-time in their respective fields. Stein’s invention of a continuous present experienced in the pulse of her words was part of her project to register a new time sense peculiar to her era—to not write as though it were still the nineteenth century. “A composition of a prolonged present is a natural composition in the world as it has been these thirty years,” she said in a 1926 lecture titled “Composition as Explanation,” delivered to the Literary Club at Cambridge University.7 Stein reported that a member of the audience had called her lecture “his greatest experience since he had read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.” (AABT, 235) As hyperbolic as this may sound, the lecture radically reconceptualized the nature of what the temporal dimension of writing could be, positing the revolutionary idea that one was actually composing the “time of the composition” into “the time in the composition” (italics mine), not by speaking about time but through the arrangement and progression and implied tempi of the words. Grammar could literally score the new time sense. In her lectures in America, Stein was demonstrating what made her writing new and different. One of her innovations was the nonmetaphorical, nonmimetic, virtually nondescriptive word portrait. After reading her second portrait of Picasso at Radcliffe, she looked up

6

\

I N T R O D U C T I O N

Stein writing in her salon (1922). Photograph by Man Ray. © 2006 Man Ray Trust/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Courtesy Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

and remarked, “Now you see in some mysterious way, that is more exciting than if you told what he did.”8 How right she was. Though she later did an excellent job of telling what he did in her monograph on Picasso, her portraits bring him to life. “If I Told Him” struts his character in language evoking a resemblance to Napoleon. The piece is subtly humorous, from its title (he might not want to hear it!) to its martial cadence, interrupted by the double “would” stop in the second line: If I told him would he like it. Would he like it if I told him. Would he like it would Napoleon would Napoleon would would he like it. If Napoleon if I told him if I told him if Napoleon.

I N T R O D U C T I O N

/

7

The piece continues in performative language that is as vigorous a life form as its enacted subject. Stein spoke to curious, enthusiastic, and skeptical audiences, not just at colleges and universities, but also at poetry societies and women’s clubs in places like Detroit, St. Louis, and Charleston, South Carolina. Her flight diverted by a storm, she missed an engagement at a “Gertrude Stein Club” organized by the painter Grant Wood in Iowa City. She signed books in department stores—including Marshall Field’s in Chicago—and chaired a debate on international munitions control at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute Assembly, which was advertised with the promise: “Gertrude Stein will express her views on war and peace.”9 It may seem that Stein was willing to do anything anywhere, but in fact she set out strict conditions for her appearances, one of which was that admission would be free. She canceled what would have been a celebratory final lecture at the French Institute of New York after learning the sponsors had sold tickets—an admirably principled decision since the event was to have included Thomson conducting selections from Four Saints performed by members of the original cast. Stein was treated with more serious interest and respect on this tour than perhaps she herself had expected in her complicated “native land,” but the reputation that had been fostered by prior press coverage couldn’t be entirely countered. Seven months before the American tour, the Atlantic Monthly had run a critical article by the behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner, shortly after selections from Stein’s Autobiography appeared there. Skinner was exercised by what he considered to be the immature gibberish of works like Tender Buttons, which he took to be the result of automatic writing techniques Stein had learned in her psychology studies with William James at Harvard. Skinner’s article (cum exposé) ran in January 1934 under the title (added by the

8

\

I N T R O D U C T I O N

journal’s editors) “Has Gertrude Stein a Secret?” Skinner argued that, although Stein was a perfectly intelligent woman capable of making sense, her experimental writing failed to be meaningful because it did not engage the knowledgeable part of her “fine mind”; instead, he claimed, it resorted to an immature self, activated by the process of automatic writing.10 Stein, who ultimately denied having ever done any real automatic writing, was upset by Skinner’s charges and set out to answer them in Everybody’s Autobiography. Her desire to distance her work from automatic writing was justified, since she did not conceive her projects “without premeditation or vigilance,” as Mark Polizzotti has usefully described the bypassing of consciousness that the surrealist André Breton located in the practice;11 her literary experiments were consciously framed investigations into the evocative powers of grammatical innovation. Stein’s associative logics are multiple in their effects. Prior to Skinner’s attack, she had not minded identifying some of what she did with an imagination “independent of conscious process,” though she had gone on to say, “Every word I write has the same passionate exactness of meaning that it is supposed to have. Everything I write means exactly what it says.”12 The differentiation from the surrealist unveiling of a symbol-stocked unconscious is clear. Works like Tender Buttons are consistent explorations of a particular patterning of language in its relation to a particular kind of experience—in the case of Tender Buttons, the domestic eros of Gertrude and Alice (the work was begun soon after they moved in together). As Stein says in Everybody’s Autobiography, “the more exactly the words fit the emotion the more beautiful the words.” (EA, 275) But Stein’s heart wasn’t in arguing with Skinner. The earlier “Composition as Explanation” makes a much better case for her methods. A radio interview conducted during the tour by one William Lun-

I N T R O D U C T I O N

/

9

dell is startling in its rudeness. After a reasonably polite start (that by conversation’s end is clearly revealed to have been condescending), Lundell goes on to blatantly insult Stein’s work: interviewer: Your coming to the United States to lecture, Miss Stein, seems to me to imply that there are many people who will be able to comprehend your ideas. . . . Although it may seem absurd in them, many American people doubt your ability to speak intelligibly. Just where . . . does Four Saints in Three Acts fit into your scheme of lecturing, which, if it is to be successful, must be at least understandable . . . which is more than most of us can say for your opera. stein: Look here, being intelligible is not what it seems, after all all these things are a matter of habit. . . . You mean by understanding that you can talk about it in the way that you have the habit of talking . . . putting it in other words . . . but I mean by understanding enjoyment. If you go to a football game you don’t have to understand it in any way except the football way and all you have to do with Four Saints is to enjoy it in the Four Saints way. . . . Don’t you see what I mean? If you enjoy it you understand it, and lots of people have enjoyed it so lots of people have understood it. You see that is what my lectures are to be. They are to be a simple way of telling everybody this thing, that if you enjoy it you understand it.

Lundell at this point makes no response to what Stein has said, changing the subject to query her about a life that “has been amazingly full of interest.”13 What would “the Four Saints way” of enjoyment be? One could savor the fact that saints don’t make ordinary sense; in this opera things happen out of the blue, as they should with saints. (Saints are, after all,

1 0

\

I N T R O D U C T I O N

non sequiturs.) The operatic genre itself—its improbable convergence of outsized characters, overcooked narratives, and hypertextual music— is essentially playful when not aspiring to Wagnerian gravitas. It certainly demands complicit suspension of disbelief. Stein and Thomson made the most of the latitude of the form. His score, with its emphatically coherent rhythms—simple, Protestant melodies—smoothes over, contains, converses with, lightly contradicts the disjunctive humor of Stein’s libretto. Stein’s reply to Lundell was incisive. Her work at its best has the evocative intelligence of language that is not explaining what it is doing but, as Thornton Wilder writes in his introduction to her Chicago lectures, “make[s] yourself know yourself knowing it.”14 On meeting Stein in Chicago, Wilder immediately recognized her invention of a new kind of literature, embodying a new epistemology, a new theory of time, and new pleasures. Admiring the American pragmatist spirit in Stein, Wilder could have been paraphrasing John Dewey’s Art as Experience when he said that Stein’s is a “language of colloquial usage . . . [with] that quality of rising from the ‘daily life’ and from our ‘common knowledge’ which is the vitalizing character of [her] ideas.”15 Immediately after Stein’s return to Paris, there was great demand in the United States for more of her writing. Essays appeared in Vogue and Cosmopolitan, the Saturday Evening Post, the New York Times Magazine, and Harper’s Bazaar.16 She had signed on with the Herald Tribune Syndicate for a series entitled “The American Scene.” Bennett Cerf arranged a contract with Random House to publish a book of her own choosing every year as long as she gave them another autobiography, which all assumed would be another best-seller. Everybody’s Autobiography was published in 1937, and, though almost as chatty and full of famous names as the earlier book, its referential obliqueness and zigzagging narrative made it more difficult to read. Sales were disappointing.

I N T R O D U C T I O N

/

1 1

With the exception of Everybody’s Autobiography and Lectures in America (published by Random House in 1935), Stein sent Cerf selections from her backlog of unpublished experimental works, all of which baffled her publisher as well as her steadily diminishing readership. But, in the initial post-tour excitement, Stein was writing about her experiences of America as someone still in conversation with all those intelligent and enthusiastic people she had encountered, the ones genuinely interested in her innovative force. Stein reading aloud, responding to questions, had been more conducive to the pleasure that is understanding than Stein encountered on the page. This is still significantly true today. The oral-musical properties of her texts come most alive in spoken or sung performance. Back in France, Stein wrote “I Came and Here I Am” as something of a working-through of the psychological twists and turns (starting with an initial hesitancy to return to America at all) that must have been a fairly steady subtext to the overall euphoria of the tour.17 Before going, Stein reports, she had wondered, “What will they say to me and what will I say to them, those who make in my native land my native land?” She continues: “And it was all strange and it was all natural, as natural as strange and as strange as natural.” (HWW, 67) It’s clear that the experience was deeply felt and emotionally complicated. For Stein, there was the thrill of fame, of being recognized on the street: “I began to realize that they knew who I was. It was curious, it was pleasant, it was comforting.” (HWW, 69) How poignant to read “everybody knows me,” when most of those smiling people were recalling her unmistakable figure from media images. They knew what has continued to be the most famous thing about Gertrude Stein— what she looked like. America on the whole was hardly more ready for her work than the editors of Life or Vanity Fair. (What would it have meant, what does it mean now to be “ready” for Stein?) She wasn’t

1 2

\

I N T R O D U C T I O N

unaware of this. “I Came and Here I Am” is more nuanced than its cheerful tone at first implies. After all, America was still the site of the culture in which Lundell could so freely insult her and in which it was necessary for her to refer to her lesbian wife as “my secretary, Miss Toklas.”18 But it was her enthusiasm for what she saw as the country’s selfinvention that led her to write: “They were what I knew America was when I used to say what America is, only now it had been done, America had been able to do what America is. And it was very exhilarating to know that this that America was had been done to be what America is.” (HWW, 68) That bundle of swerving tenses is an example of revolutionary grammar as literary innovation as the composing of a new temporal logic. Stein’s sense of a historical-contemporary moment as dynamic equilibrium of past/present/future (“perfected” in her writing mind) is the manifest historical immanence of her America. Such philosophical language is alien to Stein’s writing, but not to the underlying assumptions she brought to her sense of the Americanness of her project. To compose contemporary time into language is an elementally musical ambition, since music is time made sensually present and can accommodate synchronicities. Even Stein’s simple statement “I came and here I am” declares many things at once in its humorous and defiant implications, among them I came and I am what I am; I am what I am here now that I came; and I came and I am here to stay—all of which can be read within the timeframe of her presence in the United States, but also in the act of writing in France (Here I am back in France: now I am what I am because I came to America and now here I am). The play of tenses creates a combinatoric of possibilities in which there are surely disturbances: wounding; disappointment; an aftermath of longing for the recognition, if not acceptance, to continue; and probable questions about just who “I am” who had become “known” for writing a best-seller in someone else’s voice.

I N T R O D U C T I O N

/

1 3

Carl Van Vechten, Toklas, stewardess, pilot, and Stein during Stein’s American tour (November 7, 1934). Courtesy Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

In the midst of “What fun it all was!” here is something else Stein knew about America, located in her experience of flying on an American airline: And also then there is the stewardess and the pilots and that is what makes it all so real and so unreal, she is just nice and talks United States and is helpful and friendly in the best United States way, is well informed and kindly and protective and in the best United States way there is a pistol hanging low to shoot man and the sky in the best United States way, and the pistol is I know a dark steelblue pistol. And so I know everything I know. (HWW, 70–71)

1 4

\

I N T R O D U C T I O N

Stein’s characterization of the “United States way” as “just nice” and “helpful and friendly” and “well informed and kindly and protective” and—not missing a beat—ready “to shoot man and the sky” not only reveals her mixed feelings about the culture she returned to in 1934 but remains deeply true. It was (then as now) the culture that could smile in one moment and mock in the next; one she had reason to be wary of except in her distilled version from afar. “The being here it is so natural that it is not real,” Stein writes of her time in the United States. (HWW, 67) What a thoroughly modernist statement, more resonant with the European avant-garde of the first third of the twentieth century than with America’s invention of “modern times.” Is she practicing the wisdom of necessary distance?

THE MONTH OF FEBRUARY AND ALL THAT FOLLOWS

Stein deftly places her image among the Mount Rushmore crowd in the opening sentence of The Geographical History of America: “In the month of February were born Washington Lincoln and I.” Born on the third of that month in 1874, nine years after the end of the Civil War, in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, Stein liked to think of important things beginning in February and assumed as her birthright what she took to be the uniquely American character of those she considered her country’s most renowned and interesting figures—Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, Walt Whitman, Ulysses S. Grant, Isadora Duncan, Susan B. Anthony, Henry Ford, Wilbur Wright, and others who embodied the self-reliant ingenuity, imagination, and courage she admired. Before realizing any of this, of course, Gertrude had to make her appearance on the scene of the Stein family constellation. She was a (self-described) mostly happy child, pleasantly indulged as the youngest of five siblings in a nevertheless complicated household with an auto-

I N T R O D U C T I O N

/

1 5

cratic father, Daniel Stein, and a mother, Amelia (Milly) Stein, whose early remoteness in the role of highly efficient domestic administrator was to increase because of illness. Business kept the father away for long stretches during Gertrude’s early years, when the family moved almost constantly—from Pennsylvania to Austria to France to Baltimore to Oakland, California by the time she was six. Milly, with a number of servants and, in Europe, a governess, circulated the children through a packed schedule of cultural, educational, and recreational obligations and enrichments, including horseback riding for Milly and the boys. As a toddler in Vienna, Gertrude spoke German and English and later claimed that she frequently saw the Austrian emperor (whom she identified as “Kaiser Francis Joseph”) in the park near their apartment. (AABT, 71) In Paris, where she lived from the ages of four to five, she boarded during the week at a school where she spoke French. When she was five, the family returned permanently to the United States, where Gertrude’s father forbade any further use of German or French to insure the purity of the children’s “American English.” It was then, in English, that she learned to read. When Gertrude was ten, Milly Stein began to have the health problems that became increasingly serious over the next three years. When she died of what turned out to be a protracted, essentially untreated cancer, Milly was forty-five and Gertrude fourteen. (Stein later wrote in a notebook: “All stopped after death of mother.”19 ) Daniel Stein, when not entirely distant, tended to act in an arbitrary, impatient, and tyrannical manner. The children were afraid of his unpredictable moods.20 Gertrude’s main source of solace and companionship was her brother Leo, with whom she shared many interests and who would eventually lead the way to a new life in France. (Close into their young adulthood, they would, after living together in Paris for several years, become permanently estranged.) It was Leo who, three years after the death of their

1 6

\

I N T R O D U C T I O N

The Stein children in Vienna with their Hungarian governess and tutor (Gertrude on far left, c. 1876). Courtesy Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

mother, went in search of Daniel one morning when he did not appear for breakfast and found him dead in his bed of a probable stroke. Gertrude had already been going through a self-described “agony of adolescence,” which might well have been exacerbated by guilt and confusion over her awkwardly directed sexuality. She was lonely and shy in public, with a “desperate inner life.” The youngest of the orphaned children were moved to Baltimore to partake of the “cheerful life” of her aunts and uncles.21 Throughout this turmoil, reading was Gertrude’s constant escape and pleasure. Her tastes were omnivorous: She read anything that was printed that came her way and a great deal came her way. In the house were a few stray novels, a few travel books, her mother’s well bound gift books Wordsworth Scott and

I N T R O D U C T I O N

/

1 7

other poets, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress a set of Shakespeare with notes, Burns, Congressional Records encyclopedias etcetera. She read them all and many times. . . . From her eighth year when she absorbed Shakespeare to her fifteenth year when she read Clarissa Harlowe, Fielding, Smollett etcetera and used to worry lest in a few years more she would have read everything and there would be nothing unread to read, she lived continuously with the english language. (AABT, 74)

Life with the family in Baltimore seems to have been a relief. In any case, Stein Courtesy Yale Collection of American was soon off to Harvard Annex for Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Women (later Radcliffe College), where she was drawn to the study of philosophy and psychology with William James, who greatly appreciated her gifts as a student. Stein’s first published work was an account of experiments she conducted with a fellow student, Leon Solomons, at the Harvard Psychological Laboratory under the direction of Professor James. “Cultivated Motor Automatism: A Study of Character in Its Relation to Attention,” written by Stein (with punctuation supplied by Solomons), appeared in Harvard’s Psychological Review in May 1898, the year she was awarded her B.A.22 To anyone familiar with the studies in experimental psychology published in today’s journals, Stein’s casual, impressionistic approach is unexpected. It doesn’t benefit from comparison with Solomons’s lucid and meticulous 1896 article on the research they conducted to-

Stein as a Radcliffe student (c. 1895).

1 8

\

I N T R O D U C T I O N

gether.23 As the title of her article announces, Stein’s primary interest was character—specifically, one discovers in the text, in terms of typologies. Though the subjects were supposed to have engaged in “automatic writing,” this was not her focus. (There are no samples of the subjects’ writing in the article.) Referring to the work’s character analysis, Stein later remarked: “It is very interesting to read because the method of writing to be afterwards developed in Three Lives and The Making of Americans already shows itself.”24 “I was supposed to be interested in their reactions,” she noted elsewhere, “but I soon found that I was not but instead that I was enormously interested in the types of their characters that is what I even then thought of as the bottom nature of them.”25 In fact, Stein’s fascination with characterological description was later transformed into a literary method, as much through the discovery of a strange book getting a lot of attention in Europe at the turn of the century, Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character, as from her studies with James.26 The descriptions in Stein’s Harvard article employ the kinds of character typologies then current in both scientific and lay literature in the United States and Europe. She identifies subjects using clusters of adjectives with implied connections between temperament and physiognomy. Those characterized as “Type II,” for example, are “often blonde and pale . . . distinctly phlegmatic. If emotional, decidedly of a weakish sentimental order . . . often fatalistic . . . indulge in day-dreams . . . [and] are rather sullen. Many of them are hopelessly self-conscious and rather morbid.” Stein also observes behavior she labels “hysteria” and tendencies toward déjà vu. She goes on to caution that there are many variations in these characteristics, while still maintaining: “In these descriptions it will be readily observed that habits of attention are reflexes of the complete character of the individual [on which depend] the different forms and degrees of automatic writing.” In her “typical cases

I N T R O D U C T I O N

/

1 9

of each group,” character typologies are related to gender, as they will later inform many of her depictions of nationality and race. James suggested that Stein continue work on psychology by going to medical school. She followed his advice, enrolling at Johns Hopkins, where she was recognized as a gifted student, as she had been in her studies of philosophy and psychology at Harvard, but ultimately her performance didn’t live up to what was perceived as her potential. At the outset, she preferred neuroanatomy—analysis of the cellular structures of brain tissue—to the clinical part of the program, though apparently not sufficiently to inspire a commitment to the long haul of painstakingly meticulous work. In the final year of the clinical part of her training, Stein became increasingly careless in her studies; she didn’t carry through on her research and failed four courses. The deterioration was true even of the neuroanatomic studies she briefly took up again before finally leaving for Europe without completing her degree. So, what actually happened at Johns Hopkins? The literary critic Stephen Meyer, who argues that Stein was an essentially scientific mind working in the field of literature, feels that her failure in medical school had most significantly to do with personal problems.27 Bruce Schoenberg, a professor of neurology at Georgetown University School of Medicine, has written compellingly with a decidedly negative assessment of Stein’s scientific work at Hopkins.28 One article can’t resolve the question, but his depiction of Stein as a medical student is coherent with what is known about her temperament and the direction of her most consuming interests. Schoenberg recounts that Stein’s neuroanatomy professor, Dr. Lewellys F. Barker, had become a mentor early on and was extraordinarily kind in continuing to encourage the completion of her work when she began to seriously falter. Consistent with her half-hearted approach to the psychology experiments at Harvard, Stein had made serious mistakes in her preparation of a research

2 0

\

I N T R O D U C T I O N

model, along with other errors of method, in a study she was submitting to the American Journal of Anatomy. The editor pointed out her errors and that much of the material in the article had already been published by others (not an accusation of plagiarism, but of insufficient knowledge of the previous literature). Schoenberg presents a photocopy of Stein’s reply to Barker, who had relayed to her the editor’s comments. To say that it is sloppy is an understatement. Full of spelling errors, typos, crossed-out words, it’s entirely defensive and devoid of interest in the opinions of the editor. Thanking Barker for his “manykindnesses,” Stein ends: “I will not have the time nor do I feel that I can make many changes. I have done with it all that I can and the rest must remain with you.” It’s dismaying to see this letter. Its disarray speaks volumes, but of what? Schoenberg concludes: “There was obvious disagreement concerning the quality of her research efforts.” Further, her reply to the criticisms “does not suggest a careful, meticulous approach that characterizes successful investigations in neuroanatomy. . . . Unfortunately, the subjective, freethinking, artistic spirit so necessary to literary accomplishment has little place in the precise world of neuroanatomic investigation.”29 But it’s not really a matter of “artistic spirit” versus precision. Stein’s strategic precision with method and with words is evident. She had followed her undergraduate mentor James’s (in hindsight, misconceived) advice to attend medical school because of her interest in a scientific approach to character psychology. This, however, was impossible at the time. There simply weren’t technologies to correlate neurophysiological findings with behavior. Prior to recent advances in imaging, neural activity on the cellular level was entirely locked away from visibility. The descriptive nomenclature of neuroanatomy was an exercise in nature mort—a by-product of autopsy. Moreover, Stein was interested in normal, not pathological, psychology at a time when the

I N T R O D U C T I O N

/

2 1

psychological implications of changes in brain tissue were limited to dramatically abnormal behavior, leading to post-mortem analyses that could be retrospectively identified with the pathological symptoms. Almost everything about the Johns Hopkins program was wrong for Stein. That her unhappy personal life was preoccupying her above the “life inside of others” is not surprising in these circumstances. In fact, she was disliked by many of her fellow students, particularly the women (several of whom went on to have brilliant medical careers), who afterwards recalled her as arrogant, unkempt, and careless. (Signs of depression?) Initially impressed by her intelligence, her professors found her increasingly poor work galling. She wrote with sarcasm to one whose course she had failed that she was grateful he had kept her from a degree, for otherwise she might have gone on, not with “the practice of medicine, but at any rate to pathological psychology, and how all medicine bores me.”30 Stein’s interests at Harvard, after all, had to do with philosophy— including an early version of what would today be called philosophy of mind—and the psychology of personality. She was finding the novels she read for pleasure, along with personal experience, the most productive sources for exploring these matters. There’s an interesting parallel with Freud, who, with similar interests and motivations, realized from his own medical training that the science of his time could not yield a physiological grounding for psychology and chose to base his psychoanalytic theory on archeology, anthropology, and literature instead. For insight into the psychodynamics of sexuality, he turned to ancient Greek mythology and drama, and for an understanding of personality, he turned to contemporary dramatists and fiction writers. Freud’s case studies are those of a prose stylist who was particularly drawn to novellas as vehicles of psychological insight.31 Stein, turning to literature for a methodical examination of

2 2

\

I N T R O D U C T I O N

character, chose the novella for her first completed work after leaving medical school. Stein was lucky to have income from a family trust that was adequate to live on. She traveled in Europe in 1902 and spent several months at the British Library—a laboratory of a different kind— where she devoted herself to an intensive study of the great psychological genre of her era, the nineteenth-century novel. This was in conscious preparation for her first novella, Q.E.D., a story of a lesbian love triangle with no chance of publication because of its content. After her return to the United States, Stein’s desire to study her own psychology in relation to her family led her in 1903 to begin The Making of Americans, an ambitious undertaking finished in 1911 only after many interruptions that included work on the three novella-length stories published as Three Lives (1904–5); moving permanently to Europe; and meeting, courting, and setting up house with Toklas in 1910. During this period, Stein avidly consulted Weininger’s Sex and Character, which had been recommended to her by Leo. Part racist and misogynist diatribe, part progressive approach to gender, the book is now almost always described by the adjective “notorious.” What could she have found of value in it? The Viennese Weininger was a kind of stock Romantic hero who had chosen to commit suicide at the age of twenty-three, shortly after the 1903 publication of his book, in the house where Beethoven had died. Translated into English in 1906 (and read by Stein soon after), Sex and Character was affecting the work and thought of many leading European intellectuals. That Weininger, who despised what he considered to be the feminine (therefore weak) characterological essence of his own Jewishness, had so many admirers, many of them Jewish, is puzzling to the contemporary reader. Wittgenstein credited him as one of a small number who had influenced him; August Strindberg,

I N T R O D U C T I O N

/

2 3

Freud, Robert Musil, Karl Kraus, James Joyce, Arnold Schoenberg, and Isaac Bashevis Singer are all said to have been affected by his ideas. This widespread fascination with Sex and Character indicated that it addressed major questions of the era in ways considered useful.32 Weininger wrote from a cultural context, a zeitgeist, of deeply embedded prejudicial attitudes and hatreds in a turbulent Europe full of collisions among competing social groups.33 Catalogs of simplistic, more or less detailed character typologies—temperamental, sexual, racial, ethnic—became explanatory and rationalizing instruments of both popular and intellectual culture and finally, fatally, of the Nazis, who took it as a basic truth that character was embedded in psychophysical traits. It’s actually not so hard to understand Stein’s enthusiasm for Sex and Character. (She pressed friends to read it.) It served many of her interests, in both senses of that word. For one thing, she may have felt she had found what she had long been looking for in Weininger’s claim to have created a scientific character typology. The combination of philosophy, psychology, and impressionistic personal observation no doubt appealed to her. (This wasn’t her only attraction to pseudoscience. She consulted books of astrology and prophesy all her life, particularly in times of stress.) But there must have been particular gratification in Weininger’s positive, forward-looking ideas about the spectrum of sexualities and the biological normalcy of homosexuality. His assertion was that people of either gender could be primarily male or female, but that there was always a mixture of male (strong, culturally productive) and female (weak, culturally insignificant) elements. Homosexual men (his own identity) had a preponderance of the loathed female element, while lesbians were predominantly male and therefore exceptional as women. Since genius was exclusively associated with maleness, among women only lesbians could be geniuses;

2 4

\

I N T R O D U C T I O N

therefore Stein could be a genius. “Pablo & Matisse have a maleness that belongs to genius. Moi aussi perhaps,” Stein wrote in a notebook during this period.34 Weininger’s views on “the woman question”—that is, on essentially female women as being subject to emotions but not ideas—fit well with some of Stein’s own biases. Stein’s female colleagues at Johns Hopkins had noted her disdain and blatant sense of intellectual superiority well before she wrote the famous anecdote about her selective avoidance of artists’ wives in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Like many others who were born of Jewish lineage but had not grown up culturally or religiously Jewish, Stein could apparently ignore Weininger’s heinous treatment of “the Jewish question.” As a motherless adolescent, she had educated herself on British literature; her self-identification with the normative transcategory of Americans, artists, and geniuses overrode a sense of Jewish identity. “The task of science is to define the position of any individual between . . . [male and female] points,” Weininger writes.35 Stein went to work on her own set of descriptive typologies, organizing the notebooks she was keeping for The Making of Americans by taxonomic categories that sorted everyone by degrees of maleness and femaleness, but also into other categories that she labeled “cultural,” “ethical,” “tolerant,” “paternal,” “maternal,” “Keyser,” “Daddy,” “Napoleonic,” and so on. The project of the novel was as much about the making of the kind of writerpsychologist Stein aspired to be as it was about the multiple generations of two immigrant families becoming Americans. The writer, as personanarrator in the work, as much as declares herself a character psychologist trying to get at the “bottom nature” of the other personae and perhaps even of herself as author writing out of “her land” of Americanness an analysis of (her family) the Herslands in their Americanness. That Stein was transferring her interest in psychology to the role

I N T R O D U C T I O N

/

2 5

of novelist is not surprising. What is surprising is what she actually did in her sprawling text. She certainly was not creating characters in the nineteenth-century tradition she had tried to emulate in earlier writing. The final version of The Making of Americans is interestingly full of what we now refer to as postmodern self-consciousness—the foregrounded presence of the author ruminating on what it means to be composing a pattern of words to get at the “bottom nature of a character,” to connect one character to another, one circumstance to another while demonstrating larger patterns of human beings being human. What exceeds anything in Weininger’s philosophically pretentious, utterly congested “deductive morphologies,” as well as Stein’s own reductive cataloging, is the way she has begun to conjecture in the act of her writing that, as Keith Waldrop has put it, “the essential of ‘each human being’ is a rhythm . . . [and] to express that rhythm expresses the person. There is no need actually to talk about the subject.”36 Where Weininger traps the subject in his invidious typologies, reducing them to death-filled caricatures (masculine lesbians being a rare case of somewhat greater complexity), Stein works on releasing the subject from typological containment, to become a living word organism. She gets better at this in her shorter word portraits, where the immense emotional weight of rendering her family is absent. The 1911–12 Isadora Duncan portrait “Orta or One Dancing” is an example of word patterns carrying active principles of being— becoming—into a “character development.” In the course of the portrait, Stein is making a poethical statement (one whose ethos is enacted by its form) about artistic integrity. She is rhythmically propelling the serial presentness of dancing through a semantic flow of living in being in believing in feeling in doing in meaning in dancing . . . in the act of her writing. There is a dynamic feedback loop that is literally the word-dance-music of what the piece is asserting: “She was think-

2 6

\

I N T R O D U C T I O N

ing, she was believing, she was dancing, she was meaning. She was thinking, she was believing in thinking, she was thinking in believing, she was believing in dancing, she was thinking in believing in dancing. She was thinking in believing in dancing having meaning. She was believing in thinking in dancing having meaning. She was dancing in having meaning, she was having meaning in dancing, she was dancing, she was believing.” Stein’s best portraits, like “Orta,” are the fruition of the technique she was inventing in The Making of Americans—an experience of character rendered through repetitions of key words and phrases associated with the persona—compositionally musical, yes, but also visually unfolding across the page like the frames in a film animation or the strung-out pages of a flip book, where successive small changes create a sense of life in action. It had been an enormous struggle for Stein, who was now in her late thirties, to get to this point. She was proud of the struggle and valued work in which the personal struggle remained visible, a stylistic effect she felt she shared with Picasso. But The Making of Americans had been an ordeal in unexpected ways. In a later essay about the process, she writes: “While I was listening and hearing and feeling the rhythm of each human being I gradually began to feel the difficulty of putting it down. Types of people I could put down but a whole human being felt at one and the same time . . . while in the act of feeling that person was very difficult to put into words.”37 The extent to which she was still attempting to apply her characterological templates had the effect of removing her from others even as she was trying to understand the workings of personal relationships. Her much-quoted statement “I am writing for myself and strangers” has been construed as reflecting disdain for her audience, but I read it as the opposite, an expression of the pain she felt in alienating those close to her with work that required her to analyze them in terms of broad patterns of human

I N T R O D U C T I O N

/

2 7

psychology. What she says next is, “This is the only way that I can do it,” followed by a restatement and explanation: I write for myself and strangers. No one who knows me can like it. At least they mostly do not like it that every one is of a kind of men and women and I see it. I love it and I write it. I want readers so strangers must do it. Mostly no one knowing me can like it that I love it that every one is of a kind of men and women, that always I am looking and comparing and classifying of them, always I am seeing their repeating. Always more and more I love repeating, it may be irritating to hear from them but always more and more I love it of them. More and more I love it of them, the being in them, the mixing in them, the repeating in them, the deciding the kind of them every one is who has human being. (MOA, 211)

There’s a surprising mixture of empathy, defiance, apologia, and even appeal for understanding in this disclosure of Stein’s sense of the difficulty for others in what she needs to do. In rendering men and women not as isolated instances but as part of the larger scope of being human, her work on the book appears to have become a kind of self-analysis, rearranging and instantiating her own subjectivity as writer in a deliberate, emotionally charged surface tension of actively realized (not allusive) language. In this writing experiment conducted far from the distancing conditions of the psychological laboratory, she was inventing another distancing mechanism to combat the viscous intimacy of families and other close relationships as she had unhappily experienced them. By turning her quest for a science of character into the discipline of a nondescriptive literary method, she was extricating herself from the kind of (nineteenth-century) novel whose adjectival and metaphorical dramas only heightened the “family romance.” No more climactic paragraphs, no more sweepingly graceful sentences with adjectival vibrato. The writing, as seen above, is not without feeling, but it

2 8

\

I N T R O D U C T I O N

is most definitely not operating in the realm of a William Jamesian primitive self or a Henry Jamesian descriptive logic or the Freudian unconscious, with its vortices of inter- and intrarelationships. The Making of Americans creates a grammar whose structure enacts a differential geometry of attention, resembling what Stein was enjoying in the nascent modernism of the European avant-garde. With the making of her own secure household with Alice, the objects and rhythms of everyday life in the present would become the primary inspiration and source for her work.

HOW AMERICAN IS IT

In the Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein wrote “to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life.” Gertrude Stein set out to imagine a language for the new experience of time brought on by what she thought of as the American invention of the twentieth century. How she managed to do this in her radically novel word compositions is the most interesting of the many puzzles she presents. —Dita Fröller, “Stein Stein Stein Stein Stein”

Is it safe to say, by abundantly informed hindsight, that Gertrude Stein could only become the quintessentially American author she wanted to be by spending her entire writing life in France? Or, to not beg the question, was she as one hundred percent American as she liked to think? Stein arrived in Europe with a taste for American popular culture and everyday speech, as well as the experimental attitude fostered at both Harvard and Johns Hopkins. The aesthetic that led to Stein’s locating the source of her literary art in everyday life was no doubt influenced by the pragmatist philosophical tradition represented by William James. Her literary models, however, had been most consistently British and European. Having moved to Paris, she was developing a poetics still inspired by European art, but now it was the revolu-

I N T R O D U C T I O N

/

2 9

tionary visual art scene that fueled her sense of new possibilities—new geometries of attention created by Paul Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Juan Gris, and Marcel Duchamp. How was Stein to maintain a productive commitment to her Americanness? Her love of Walt Whitman’s expansive poetics helped, but this newly dedicated poet of the quotidian was influenced by Weininger, impassioned by Shakespeare, and surrounded by everyday life taking place in French. The conundrum of expatriate identity was a common one in Paris at the time. If Stein managed to achieve a robust, albeit idiosyncratic identification with her national origins in self-imposed cultural exile, a similar story is true for many other notable artists. Stein herself liked to point out that Picasso and Juan Gris in Paris painted out of a Spanishness that she felt close to since in her opinion it strongly resembled her Americanness. As we know, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett made much, respectively, of lapsed Catholic and Protestant Irishness in the permissive atmosphere of Parisian culture. Beckett, like Stein, developed a distancing method, going so far as to write his plays in French, self-translating them into a spare English with a subtly humorous Irish tone. Henry James and T. S. Eliot eschewed the American plain speech that would be central to Stein’s work and enter the writing of an emergent U.S. avant-garde, preferring instead a Euro-British English. Though Ezra Pound could use an idiosyncratic American slang, he was unabashedly addicted to choice fragments of high literary language from what he considered the genius of the East and West. It was Joyce and Stein who, in different ways, chose to reinvent the language of their youth. Stein walked about Paris composing a new wordscape of American sentences in her head, claiming the straightforward contemporary vitality of the American language as the only viable instrument for a new literature. In her view, America had created “the method of the twen-

3 0

\

I N T R O D U C T I O N

tieth century,” which had to do with the highly charged motion of a new time. It would be her self-appointed role to devise a new grammar for the new time. She was happy to concede nineteenth-century literary predominance to the British, with their method (cum virtue) of “muddling through,” but for her, like Whitman, whose poetry she considered the first instance of twentieth-century writing taking on motion, the freshness, the whole-hog optimism of American culture was about that new sense of time driving language to catch up with what was now possible, what new sensations could now be enjoyed. (HWW, 152–53) Her new grammar would be published in the collection How to Write in 1931. The Toklas persona in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas recounts how Stein protected her American language sensibilities from contamination by the omnipresent French: When I first knew Gertrude Stein in Paris I was surprised never to see a french book on her table, although there were always plenty of english ones, there were even no french newspapers. But do you never read french, I as well as many other people asked her. No, she replied, you see I feel with my eyes and it does not make any difference to me what language I hear, I don’t hear a language, I hear tones of voice and rhythms, but with my eyes I see words and sentences and there is for me only one language and that is english. One of the things I have liked all these years is to be surrounded by people who know no english. It has left me more intensely alone with my eyes and my english. I do not know if it would have been possible to have english be so all in all to me otherwise. And they none of them could read a word I wrote, most of them did not even know that I did write. No, I like living with so very many people and being all alone with english and myself.38

But “English” was now to be “American.” A primary objective was to rescue the pragmatic stock (arising from ordinary usage) from the stilted British English that had dominated anglophone literature

I N T R O D U C T I O N

/

3 1

worldwide. “American speech is very vigorous, more vigorous than English,” Stein said. (GSRI, 94) Her goal, perhaps more than that of any other American modernist, was to create the first great American literature not at all parasitic on British or European cultural inflections. It makes sense that after her long fascination with British literary English, Stein had to methodically organize a working environment that gave her the equivalent of a blank slate. The fact that in Paris her ear was not subjected to a daily bath of stimuli from the cacophonic source—enjambments of everyday American cultural detail—enabled her practice of composing distilled patterns out of the most basic elements of a language: simple, functional vocabulary and dynamically innovative grammars. The French novelist Stein found most interesting in her early years in Paris was Gustave Flaubert, whose Trois contes she translated into English. It provided the tripartite structure of her Three Lives. The first of her Lives, “The Good Anna,” was quite obviously inspired by the first of Flaubert’s contes, “Un coeur simple.”39 In her subsequent reading life—interestingly, always removed from her writing life (she didn’t seem to care about the experiments of her peers)—the novelist she claimed to admire most was Henry James. She liked to say she had taken up where he left off. As counterintuitive as that may seem, he too was chiefly preoccupied with character and with the composition of sentences. At the same time, Stein loved detective stories. After her marathon reading of all the nineteenth-century fiction she could get her hands on, she seems to have lost interest in the literary novel. Dashiell Hammett became a favorite in later years, but the author she most enjoyed and probably set out to emulate in her post-Alice B. Toklas attempt at a detective novel (Blood on the Dining Room Floor) was Edgar Wallace. Born in England and popular in the 1920s and 1930s, Wallace wrote dozens of crime novels in unencumbered prose, with

3 2

\

I N T R O D U C T I O N

titles like Terrible People, Big Foot, The Twister, The Avenger, and Room 13. He spent the last year of his life in Hollywood, writing screenplays, among them King Kong. His sudden death interrupted that project, which was finished by another writer.40 Delight in Hammett and Wallace was just one example of Stein’s lifelong love of American popular culture, which also extended to comics (she and Picasso shared an addiction to the Katzenjammer Kids after she introduced the strip to him), American popular songs (her favorite was “The Trail of the Lonesome Pine,” brought to her by a GI), and the jokes and slang of the soldiers she and Alice befriended during World War I and after the liberation in the 1940s. She asserted that the reason people of all sorts always liked her and wanted to do things for her was that she was truly democratic in her feelings. And indeed, all accounts suggest that she had a genuine rapport with people of all classes. “[She] was good humored, she was democratic, one person was as good as another, and she knew what she wanted done. If you are like that . . . anybody will do anything for you. The important thing . . . is that you must have deep down as the deepest thing in you a sense of equality.” (AABT, 174) By the time she wrote this, Stein was confident of her informal, intuitive assessments of character—her own and that of others. They were coming now less from typologies than from the variety of interactions in her gregarious daily life, both in Paris and in the French villages where she and Alice spent their summers.

HOW ABSTRACT IS IT

So many factors feed consciousness, values, and a sense of self and others that attempts to trace a poetics to one or two explanatory events (as Skinner attempted to do) will always be a reductio ad absurdum. Everything in anybody’s life is overdetermined. It’s easy to imagine that

I N T R O D U C T I O N

/

3 3

the impact of Stein’s childhood—distant parents; diametric extremes of routine and upheaval, happiness and emotional deprivation—would contribute not only to her interest in psychology but to her privileging of the pleasure principle in life and work. The credo of her practice and her sense of the value of art—to enjoy is to understand—also happens to square with the leading edge of the American myth in which Stein immersed herself: the pursuit of happiness. Not surprisingly, Stein’s preoccupation during her adolescence had been love; her romantic desire for women was her first literary subject. When she was a maturing artist, a more complex eros came to charge her work: her fascination with human behavior intersected with a love of words in themselves. It’s easy to see a connection between love and romantic subject matter in a conventional narrative, but I want to stress the continuing presence of love as a moving principle and tropism in Stein’s experimental work, in part to counter the label of abstraction so often applied to it. Stein writes about the role of love in poetry while explaining some of the conception of Tender Buttons (her celebration of the domestic sensuality she shared with Alice) in “Poetry and Grammar,” where she notes that the passion of naming things in the book of Genesis is one of many literary demonstrations that to name is to know and to love: “I know that now but I have only come to that knowledge by long writing,” she states. I remember very well when I was a little girl and I and my brother found as children will the love poems of their very very much older brother. This older brother had just written one and it said that he had often sat and looked at any little square of grass and it had been just a square of grass as grass is, but now he was in love and so the little square of grass was all filled with birds and bees and butterflies, the difference was what love was. The poem was funny we and he knew the poem was funny but he was right, being in love made him make

3 4

\

I N T R O D U C T I O N

poetry, and poetry made him feel the things and their names, and so I repeat nouns are poetry. (LIA, 233–36)

Just as so-called minimalist art maximizes the sensual presence of the matter out of which it’s constructed, Stein’s so-called abstraction— letting the nouns speak for themselves (absent metaphor, unadorned by adjectives and adverbial phrases), letting other words be free of rhetorical gesture—maximizes the sensual presence of forms of life that invest particular words with their energy in the first place. The performance element of language is the enactment of that form of life. In Tender Buttons, everyday objects and the domestic space itself become saturated with the erotic character of the loving domestic relationship. The relationship of words to things named is not mimetic; it’s analogical, in the sense that biologists mean when they note a formal resemblance (wing of butterfly to wing of bird) without an evolutionary link. In Stein’s case, the analogy is more expansive and less direct. Each entry in the text is full of the erotic artifice of words rounding corners of sense with a playful logic of constant delight in surprise.41 “What is the use of a violent kind of delightfulness if there is no pleasure in not getting tired of it,” Stein writes in “A Substance in a Cushion” (126). Tender Buttons is a celebration of a unique domesticity—its pleasures and playful surprises, its dedication to a kind of nineteenthcentury spousal household juxtaposed with the radicality of the work of Stein and her artist friends. Stein enacts this by means of transfiguring swerves of humorous imagination, setting a series of subjects in motion (transfigurative changes) under the categories “Objects,” “Food,” and “Rooms.” “Breakfast” starts with a declaration of change and continues with a bounded pattern of perspectival swerves, not strictly speaking non sequiturs since they are all connected by domestic custom, the radiant center from which the thoughtful eye registers sur-

I N T R O D U C T I O N

/

3 5

prising pleasures.42 Notice the humorous (conceptually fluid) geometry of attention: A change, a final change includes potatoes. This is no authority for the abuse of cheese. What language can instruct any fellow. A shining breakfast, a breakfast shining, no dispute, no practice, nothing, nothing at all. A sudden slice changes the whole plate, it does so suddenly. An imitation, more imitation, imitation succeed imitations. Anything that is decent, anything that is present, a calm and a cook and more singularly still a shelter, all these show the need of clamor. What is the custom, the custom is in the center.

For Stein, the comforting custom of daily life imbued by a loving marriage (in all but social sanction) animated a literary artifice that could release words from habitually abstracted (“boxed-in”) logics. “A Box” in fact ends by exceeding the color game it sets in motion and therefore the limiting conditions of its title: “Out of kindness comes redness . . . it is so rudimentary to be analysed and see a fine substance strangely, it is so earnest to have a green point not to red but to point again.” (128) A second “Box” ends with a series of questions. These are precisely elusive linguistic performance games, both deliberate and unpredictable, as wriggly and full of pleasure as any joyous erotic act.43 Is performance always in some sense erotic? What does an eros of language mean? In part, it’s about pleasure in the words as fondled objects of poesis, radiant in their everyday connotations, not needing to point to transcendent meaning. But the performance of language is also a performance of a particular kind of desire—a desire to touch others, to know and be known through words. When I read Tender Buttons, I’m reminded of Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse: “Language is a skin. I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead

3 6

\

I N T R O D U C T I O N

of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words.”44 Imagine Stein leaving her nightly writing for Alice to type in the morning—pieces like Tender Buttons made, given, and received as offerings to the beloved. This may be an overly romantic depiction of the reality of their lives, but it was much more than the secretarial arrangement some have called it. Alice enjoyed Gertrude’s writing, knew it was important, knew the vital connections to their relationship, knew her own value as muse, lover, and first reader. To understand—enjoy—Stein’s work, it may be helpful to recognize how methodical she was in developing her distinctive presence on the page and in the ear as a kind of performative play that created a sensual apprehension of a new time. In 1926 she wrote of her embrace of the tempo of modern life and the avant-garde conflation of space-time: “it was more and more a prolonged present. . . . it was all so natural to me and more and more complicatedly a continuous present.” (220) But there was also a very personal cast to this—an ardent desire to be fully present moment by moment in the being she was living as a writer and the writing of the living she was doing—a perception of the activity of happiness. There is little that is happy or playful in the almost “thousand pages of a continuous present” (220) Stein had made in The Making of Americans. With Toklas, her now legendary humor flourished. Stein’s early, continuing, and consequential love of Shakespeare— particularly the cross-gendered eros of his comedies—is germane. It was not just the robustly paced presentness enacted via the juxtapositions of stage time that was attractive to Stein, but also the humorously convoluted trajectories of unspoken intentions going inadvertently awry, only to be cheerfully resolved amongst the many gender (and genre) transformations that drive the plots. An interest in the poetics

I N T R O D U C T I O N

/

3 7

of drama had a lot to do with Stein’s search for a means of registering context and emotional tone without direct statement or naturalistic description. She writes in “Poetry and Grammar”: Shakespeare in the forest of Arden had created a forest without mentioning the things that make forest. You feel it all but he does not name its names. Now that was a thing that I too felt in me the need of making it be a thing that could be named without using its name. . . . Of course you all do know that when I speak of naming anything, I include emotions as well as things. (LIA, 236–37)

How can one not think of “the love that dare not speak its name” in relation to this statement? Stein had begun Q.E.D. with a quotation from As You Like It in which the verbal play on switched gender identities is underscored in a repetitive round. Q.E.D. is a thinly disguised autobiographical account of Stein’s (possibly first full-blown) love affair with May Bookstaver.45 It’s written in a British prose style attenuated by regular uses of “rather” and “quite”—and is “quite” witty. In a love story that will end in bitter disappointment as the Gertrude character discovers the true allegiances of the object of her desire, the last sentence of the first paragraph reads: “A little knowledge is not a dangerous thing, on the contrary it gives the most cheerful sense of completeness and content.” (FQED, 53) The tone of Q.E.D., its rhythms and inflections, present—quod erat demonstrandum—a relationship and a prose style from which Stein would have to depart. One of her many extraordinary departures (many years later) is Stanzas in Meditation, which opens with four scannable lines of four iambic feet each: I caught a bird which made a ball And they thought better of it.

3 8

\

I N T R O D U C T I O N

But it is all of which they taught That they were in a hurry yet (280)

The next line departs from this metric scheme, and this is what is happening nine lines down from the balanced (classic) beauty of the opening four: In which case in effect they could Not only be very often present perfectly In each way whichever they chose. All of this never matters in authority (280)

The swerve out of the initial four-line template is a reenactment of the modernist drama-cum-trauma—the literal fall from the familiar grace of the opening lines into a brave new world of disoriented but alert senses. That fall recurs at the start of Part II. Something similar happens in the third and fourth lines of the first stanza of Wallace Stevens’s “Anecdote of the Jar,” after which he restores the opening metrics for the rest of the poem. For Stein, it’s impossible to be “present perfectly” in regular iambs. Stanzas is Stein’s longest poem. (Only a small sample appears in this volume.) It explores an enormous rhythmic range and is perhaps her most complete realization of a context-free forest of Arden. It is another work of love and dailiness (written, astonishingly, the same year as The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas) and, though clearly not a play, it is another work best experienced performatively, if only read aloud. Stein loved the temporal immediacy of plays. She called many of her poetic pieces “plays,” and many more are best enjoyed in performative readings. The play of words in the genre of the play can be generalized to other forms, insofar as it taps into a “sound sense” that comes from tone and timing, a sense that can remain mute/invisible on the page. “If I Told Him” is a clear instance of this, but perhaps more so,

I N T R O D U C T I O N

/

3 9

the pieces that include such long riffs of repeated words they’ve been likened to “wallpaper” in their visual presentation. When such pieces are read aloud, it becomes clear that this device is temporal—holding time in place, speech act by speech act, moment by moment, with effects similar to the rhythmic repetitions (with subtle variations) of Philip Glass, or the serial frames of Eadweard Muybridge’s motion studies. Such effects can be less effective on the page because the eye tends to take in the pattern all at once, thereby arresting temporal development. To discipline the eye to work like an ear (something that seems to have come naturally to Stein) is important if one is to relish the permutations of the word-music or sound-text passages found in amazing (yes, full of mazes too) pieces like “Business in Baltimore” (1925) and Patriarchal Poetry (1927), where Stein applies her method to works embodying powerful social critique. Stein wrote “Business in Baltimore,” with its opening lines, “Nor narrow, long. / Julian is two,” when her cousin Julian’s wife (Rose Ellen Stein) and son, also a Julian, were in France for the summer. The Stein scholar Ulla Dydo reads the poem as “a subtle but scathing satire on the power of business to effect marriages, promote real property, foster or prevent the accumulation of wealth and family power—in short, to determine lives.”46 The recurrent phrase that sets the tone of what is to come is “Thanks to having” (property and money). “Thanks to having.” Stein had every reason to feel anger and hurt at male-dominated heterosexual patterns of property transfer and family lineage. But cultural patriarchy was different. Stein identified with the lineage of male genius as a “mannish” lesbian. (And yet the power and recognition differential had to have been galling.) Patriarchal Poetry, in its productive ambivalence, is a much more extensive and complicated work as it glances off its announced subject with a gamut of sui generis rhetorical devices and a sonnet!

4 0

\

I N T R O D U C T I O N

Patriarchal Poetry can be percussively insistent, but with intricate combinatorics and shifting permutations that engage eye and ear with fluid evocations. It cries out from the page to be performed—in one or many voices, spoken, sung—as great oration (oratorio, opera, play) of being of many minds in the language games of patriarchy and its (dis)contents. It’s full of puzzlements, questions, probative passages, “Little pieces of their leaving” on the edge of being lectures, essays, stories, but eluding those genres—in a de facto refusal of reinscription? There are declamations and hesitancies, agonistic dislogics; glimpses of passages verging, only just—with spates of unassigned pronouns— on anecdote. Like all of Stein’s most innovative work, this poem requires an actively inventive reading poesis, and some parts come to life more than others. Overall, it’s a work of exhilarating gender/genre trouble. Notice how many ways a deceptively simple passage can be construed as, reading it aloud, phrasal patterns shift, ripple the surface with new configurations as the rhythm is controlled (ominously? playfully? both?) as much by “Once” as by the periods: To be we to be. Once. To be. Once. To be. Once. To be. Once. To be. Once. We to be. To be we to be. We to be. To be we to be. We to be. Once. To be to be to be. We to be. We to be. To be. Once. We to be.47

There are so many barely seen (because they never stand alone) but easily heard statements of longing—“to be we” or “to be once we” or “once to be we”—the “we” that exists in full visibility only in unions sanctioned by patriarchy? I don’t see an adequate way to enjoy or understand what can be made of this work apart from performing it. (It’s vertiginous in print.) To skim its visual patterns, as so many readers must do, is to invite defeat by language that neither behaves like proper sentences or lines, nor discloses a cumulative semantic logic. There is, however, a meaningful cumulative experience that comes with some-

I N T R O D U C T I O N

/

4 1

thing like the force of music. The music of patriarchal poetry undone? Or the force of drama, where one’s role as reader approaches that of, for example, a Shakespearian actor making sound sense of the language? Stein repeatedly reminds one that reading is not viewing.

HOW CUBIST IS IT

In Composition As Explanation I said nothing changes from generation to generation except the composition in which we live and the composition in which we live makes the art which we see and hear. —Stein, “Portraits and Repetition”

It’s a commonplace to refer to Stein’s major innovations as a literary form of cubism. While it’s just as reductive to call Stein a cubist—and to leave it at that—as it is to attribute her work to automatic writing, it’s true that Stein’s early exploration of the materiality of content directly intersected with the preoccupations of painters she knew in Paris, Picasso in particular. The contested divide in both the visual and the literary arts of the time was between the artifice of mimetic or descriptive naturalism and the artifice of foregrounding the material medium itself. The sculptural geometry of what came to be known as “analytic cubism” opened the angle of vision to a 360-degree purview. The fragmentation and stylization of key details constructed a multiperspectival object with equal value given to its constituent parts; all became foreground. This created a new geometry of attention that, contrary to clichés about the cold remove of the modernist, highlighted the subjectivity of the artist’s investigation through gestural motifs. The cubist portrait is a record of the painter’s imaginative relation to the model rather than an “objective” depiction of it. Stein liked to say that she was “expressing the same thing in literature” as Picasso was in painting. They even have one title in common—

4 2

\

I N T R O D U C T I O N

Pablo Picasso, Au Bon Marché (spring 1913). © 2006 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

his 1913 collage Au Bon Marché (which she included in her Picasso monograph) was preceded by her two 1911 “Bon Marche” pieces. (Bon Marché, an expression for “cheap,” was the name of a popular department store in Paris.) The two artists were so close during that period, it’s not farfetched to think that the influences traveled in both directions. Stein had witnessed Picasso’s practice of making a progression of sketches, a series of revised drafts, for painting projects. She was visiting his studio in 1906–7 during the time he was filling the walls with his preliminary sketches for Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. The sketches resemble writing drafts, except that they are less palimpsests revealing accumulated changes than they are a series of new takes. Similarly, Stein did very little revision in the usual way of returning to mark and interpolate new material or entirely rewriting and discarding previous drafts. What she did was something more like pinning a succes-

I N T R O D U C T I O N

/

4 3

sion of sketches of the same object next to one another on a wall, where each revisioning leaves the previous one intact. Each moment in the writing is a new take in a process of revision as continuous permutation. This is her “continuous present”—successive words or phrases reconfiguring what precedes them through repetition and variation. Process analogies are more convincing than direct picture-poem comparisons, except perhaps that Stein’s disjunctive contiguities operate something like the multiple planes and perspectives in cubist renderings. One of the most direct visual analogs to the temporal dimension of her word portraits—with their developmental repetitions or “insistences” literally putting words into motion—is the animated cubism of Duchamp’s highly ambiguous Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912). Some of the shorter pieces in Tender Buttons come off as delightfully eclectic still lifes, but even there an unstoppable fluidity distinguishes them from the more balanced juxtapositions and legible representations of Picasso’s (or Braque’s or Gris’s) paintings and collages. In the lecture “Portraits and Repetition,” Stein linked her method of creating an existing person, a living being (personality revealed in movement and change) in the language of her portraits with the multiple frames that create motion in film, a continuous succession of moments that coalesce into a coherent but always moving whole. In this way, she and others concerned with movement were, as she said, of their period. It was, she said, “the period of the cinema and series production.” (LIA, 177) For her, there was the daily delight of the serial graphics of the comic strip, images projected from reels of celluloid, and the new assembly-line manufacture of the Ford motorcar she would take pleasure in driving.48 At the same time, the new physics— Albert Einstein’s groundbreaking 1905 papers on relativity; Werner Heisenberg’s and Niels Bohr’s quantum mechanics—was calling for a renovation of the description of nature, detached from longstanding

4 4

\

I N T R O D U C T I O N

notions of causality and commonsense intuitions. These revolutionary new concepts were reported in the daily newspapers and much discussed in Stein’s circle. Her essay “An Acquaintance with Description”— “Letting it be not what it is like” (SR, 508)—rejects the shortsighted causality the eye had been taught to accept by the stylistic conventions of naturalism. Notice the subtle temporal development Stein is writing into her description by acquaintance with the continuous immediacy of the experience of presentness: She said she did not believe in there having there having been there having been there having been there before. Refusing to turn away. A description refusing to turn away a description. . . . A description simply a description. A sea gull looking at the grain as seen. (SR, 505)

An acquaintance with description is the noticing of differences—both permutations and departures. In “Portraits and Repetition,” Stein told her audience: “As I read you some of the portraits . . . you will see what I mean.” (LIA, 177) It may indeed be easier to “see” something that puts difference and therefore identity in motion with one’s ear aiding the eye, to better sense what Marjorie Perloff calls the “tension between reference and compositional game, between a pointing system and a selfordering system.”49 That is the dynamic—and somewhat agonistic— principle in portraits like “If I Told Him” and “Orta.” Highlighting even more the degree of overdetermination in all that Stein did is her own explanation of the development of cubism in her 1938 monograph on Picasso. Her claim is that three historical facts made cubism not only possible, but also necessary: the new “composition” of living was one in which “each thing was as important as any other thing”; it was no longer true that “things seen with the eyes are the only real things”; and the framing of life had changed (“now

I N T R O D U C T I O N

/

4 5

pictures commenced to want to leave their frames”50). (P, 12) For Stein, things not seen with the eyes importantly included the bottom nature of the subjects of her portraits and, of course, emotions. The not-seen could be replaced by an alphabet of palpable tones and rhythms and associative vectors of words, whose composition became not only analogical enactment, but also embodied their own explanatory value, unadorned by conventional descriptive devices. Nouns can be themselves when placed, unmodified by adjectives and adverbial phrases, as sensual presences in space-time, just as color can be color or a line can be a line. This sets up a force field that exceeds the confines of the familiar framing devices of stories or symbolic structures. Each grammatical moment frames itself, and in so doing is unrestricted in its own right and equal to the next. For this linguistic revolution, Stein had to compose a new grammar; it pervades everything she does, but its most explicit constituents were published in 1931 in How to Write. It’s interesting how Stein sees what Picasso came to be doing in the 1920s in terms of her own medium, strongly implying a bidirectional influence.51 It was no longer a sculptural cubism, she said; in its flat surfaces and calligraphic presentation, “it was writing.” (P, 39) Stein was specifically referring to Picasso’s 1923 Deux Femmes Calligraphiées, which backs away from the kind of drawing in which a line is not just a line but an outline of a volumetric rendering; in Deux Femmes, volume and line coalesce. What a coincidence that the writing this resembles is Stein’s. In 1923 she wrote a highly performative piece called “An Elucidation,” in which words often do coalesce with the experience she is “drawing” into language: The sad procession of the unkilled bull. And they stand around. Two next. To be next to it.

4 6

\

I N T R O D U C T I O N

To be annexed. To be annexed to it. (180)

HOW RACIST IS IT

Here’s a perennial conundrum: to what extent are the exciting formal innovations of the modernists tainted, infected, infiltrated, marred, flawed, blemished, breached, delegitimized by, complicit with the blatant racism of their era? A difficult compound question that complicates any contemporary reading poesis in response to the following lines, not far from the previous extract: Brown and white. The nigger and the night and mistaken for mean. I didn’t mean to. (180)

In our time, the word “nigger” is packed with the visceral power to evoke an agonistic racial history whose consequences tragically endure. The devastation of the slave trade and its degrading (to us all) aftermath in an America not yet reconciled to responsibilities incurred was only partly addressed by the legal reforms that followed the civil rights movement. Linguistic evidence of a seemingly careless racism remains alarming no matter what one feels one understands about the historical context in which it occurred. It doesn’t work to just say it comes from a different historical context and move on, partly because we as a nation haven’t sufficiently moved on. Because we are still struggling with racism, the way we treat our encounter with this language, the way we use that encounter in our present circumstances, carries possibilities for productive dialogue, particularly in educational settings, where Stein is mostly read. As one of my African American students said, to not attend to racist language in historical texts is to “convey that it’s somehow O.K.”

I N T R O D U C T I O N

/

4 7

So, how is one to think of racial matters as they come up in Stein, from the romanticizing and stereotyping in Melanctha to the many other references and treatments of “negroes” in her work? The number of instances is unusual for a white writer of her time. Living in Baltimore, with its large black population, she had developed the kind of fascination with blacks fostered by a strictly segregated society—incubator of countless skewed reactions, exoticism among them. Part of the interest was in speech patterns, which, along with those of white immigrant servants, would show up in Three Lives. But Stein was already writing about blacks in some of her freshman themes at Radcliffe. In one, dated March 21, 1895, there is the “delicious, dreamy south. Baltimore, sunny Baltimore where no one is in a hurry and the voices of the negroes singing . . . lull you into drowsy reveries.” Everyone—black and white—is lazy in this Southern idyll. Instructor’s comment: “Sympathetic.”52 Stein traveled by train between Baltimore and Cambridge while she was a student there. A theme she wrote on March 23, 1895 depicts a “melancholy looking porter [who] seemed more intelligent than most of the men in his class.” (Note the word “class” rather than “race.”) His speech is standard English. In themes written months apart, and in her subsequent transformation of the story of the porter in Melanctha, one sees a transformation of Stein’s language, which moves from a stilted quasi-British literary style to a peppering of stereotypical American descriptors to speech-based constructions replete with dialect and racial clichés. The porter in her freshman theme becomes, in the 1905 novella, “one, big, serious, melancholy, light brown porter who often told Melanctha stories, for he liked the way she had of listening with intelligence and sympathetic feeling.” In the theme, “a roystering, Southern gentleman” says “I don’t pay money to niggers.” The “courageous porter” forcibly puts him off the train, stirring up a white vigilante mob.

4 8

\

I N T R O D U C T I O N

The conductor (white? black? we’re not told, but probably the former) saves his life by hiding him in a dressing room. The theme ends: “He escaped that time but had to leave the road and never more return to his native state.” Instructor: “Last part could be more dramatic.” The author of the theme writes from observation alone; in the (indeed, more dramatic) recounting of the story in Melanctha, the author is omniscient, privy to the feelings of the intelligent porter, who is now “light brown” (skin tone replacing class). The white passenger is now drunk and calls the porter a “damned nigger” (italics mine). Is there by this time a desensitization to the word “nigger”? Without the modifier “damned,” does it no longer seem strong enough to serve as an epithet? I don’t want to make too much of the relatively scant evidence of these subtle shifts in vocabulary—the young woman unconsciously absorbing racist-linguistic forms of life? The worst stereotyping occurs in Melanctha, postdating Stein’s enthusiasm for character typologies at Harvard. In the early 1900s, Stein and others of her era were using “negro” and “nigger” seemingly interchangeably for a range of effects, from epithet to exoticism.53 “Primitive” African forms and things “negro” were in fashion in entre-guerres Paris. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to reconstruct what the now taboo “‘n’ word” sounded like to Stein’s ear or to other white modernists who used it freely in romantic-exotic conjunctions or alliterative phrases—The Nigger of the Narcissus (Joseph Conrad), “singing nigger” (Carl Sandburg), Nigger Heaven (Carl Van Vechten), “Solange . . . a nigger tree and with a nigger name” (Wallace Stevens). Were these comparatively innocent gestures of lyrical “color” that simply fell victim to retrospective misfortune? Following the Civil War, a still active Abolitionist community, along with the black self-determination and New Negro movements (particularly active in Harlem), contested degrading images of blacks

I N T R O D U C T I O N

/

4 9

and offered positive alternatives. How aware of this was Stein? Was she innocent of/oblivious to (which phrase fits best?) the degree to which she was perpetuating racist clichés, particularly in what she termed her “negro novella,” Melanctha? However one wrestles with these questions, there is a concern that is directly connected to Stein’s belief in typology as a source of insight into “bottom nature”: did she mistake invidious stereotypes for characterological truths? In “An Elucidation,” there are other possible references to race. For instance: “An extra wish./Wish and White./Reasons are right./White and wish.” Or perhaps this: I know the difference between white marble and black marble. White and black marble make a checker board and I never mention either. (181)

I say “possible” and “perhaps” because “An Elucidation” is an intractably indeterminate text, resisting one-to-one correspondences of language to interpretation. This doesn’t mean one can’t make sense of it, but the way one construes it will indicate more about one’s own conceptual and value frameworks than Stein’s. The tone is playful; there’s little development of themes or ideas among waves of disassociative logics, apart from coherent contexts or cues to cumulative implications. It’s frequently noted that distinctly modernist and postmodern techniques—collage, disjunctive juxtaposition, fragmentation, sound association, parataxis, non sequitur, and other dissociative devices— effectively render ethical accountability impossible, if not irrelevant (subject of a half-century’s struggle among Ezra Pound scholars). In fact, ethical concerns haven’t disappeared with indeterminate texts, but the site of ethical response is radically relocated from authorial intentions to readers’ poesis, in which the primary issue becomes not so much interpretation as use of the text. “Use” here is meant to connect with

5 0

\

I N T R O D U C T I O N

post-Wittgensteinian “use theories” of meaning, where language games and their construal can never be separated from other forms of life within the culture. Thus, use can include attempts to understand a historical, sociopolitical “then and now” as context for furthering the conversation about racial matters central to our “now.” This is, of course, a very crowded “central” location, including matters of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, religious belief . . . and other perennially troubled sociocultural sites. References to race in a composition like “An Elucidation,” with its riffs and swerves, are weakly verifiable at best. Just as something seems referentially clear or interpretively available, the associative logic may become phonic (musical), while the next phrase may swerve into entirely new semantic territory. The epistemology of such a text—radical undecidability amidst independently lucid, often beguiling, often humorous words, phrases, propositions, and interrogations, often with only a tentative attraction to the filament of the title—leaves the reader in an awkward, intriguing position. Undecidability invites active conversational and investigative relations to the text while potentiating performativity. In “An Elucidation,” the distinct orality (essentially a series of speech acts) suggests a “sound-sense” poesis contingent on the immediate circumstances of any given performance. Performance opens up the discursive capacity that ethical examinations require by allowing multiple voices and alternative, even contradictory, deployments of the text against itself. One passage can interrogate another, playfully, contentiously. It’s Melanctha—centerpiece of Three Lives—that has raised the most questions about Stein’s relation to black-white racism. Her method of characterization is to string adjectives together and repeat them often, with selectively interspersed variations (the method that will become distilled and stylized into a structural device for The Making of Amer-

I N T R O D U C T I O N

/

5 1

icans). Many of these adjectival cataracts are horrific. Rose Johnson, the first character Stein introduces, is “sullen, childish, cowardly, black Rosie,” whose infant has just died because she was “careless and negligent and selfish.” The narrator goes on to explain: “Rose Johnson was careless and lazy, but she had been brought up by white folks and she needed decent comfort. Her white training had only made for habits, not for nature. Rose had the simple, promiscuous unmorality of the black people.” (TL, 47–48) The occasional swerves within these descriptions let in a bit of air: “Why did the subtle, intelligent, attractive, half white girl Melanctha Herbert love and do for and demean herself in service to this coarse, decent, sullen, ordinary, black childish Rose.” (TL, 48) Suddenly Rose not only needs “decent comfort” but is decent. The welcome contradictions in the categories don’t make the overall trajectory of the color hierarchy less distressing (intelligence, subtlety, and complexity rise as melanin falls). They are, however, less determinate than the atrociously airtight racial typologies of so-called social scientists in circulation at the time. Most of the characters are at some point relieved of a totally negative coherence. Melanctha is complex and mysterious in her internal contradictions, as is the other main protagonist, the doctor Jeff Campbell. They become more subtle and complex as their thoughts and feelings become simultaneously more private, their psychological nuances more closely observed. There’s no evidence that the narrator is unreliable, as some readers have hoped to affirm, though the intelligence behind the voice operates in contrasting registers—that of racist social scientist casting everything into stereotypes and that of empathic observer probing individual emotional experience. The latter register to some extent saves the main characters in Melanctha from completely reductive racist caricature and must be responsible for the widespread acclaim this novella had among black readers when it was published.

5 2

\

I N T R O D U C T I O N

Melanctha and Jeff are as much drawn together as they are troubled by what they don’t understand about each other. The passage in which Melanctha has just written to Jeff to break things off is an example of the empathic subtlety that drew so many black readers to the novella, despite its enormous problems: He sat very still and first he was very angry. As if he, too, did not know very badly what it was to suffer keenly. As if he had not been very strong to stay with Melanctha when he never knew what it was that she really wanted. He knew he was very right to be angry, he knew he really had not been a coward. He knew Melanctha had done many things it was very hard for him to forgive her. He knew very well he had done his best to be kind, and to trust her, and to be loyal to her and now;—and then Jeff suddenly remembered how one night Melanctha had been so strong to suffer, and he felt come back to him the sweetness in her, and then Jeff knew that really, he always forgave her, and that really, it all was that he was so sorry he had hurt her, and he wanted to go straight away and be a comfort to her. Jeff knew very well, that what Jane Harden had told him about Melanctha and her bad ways, had been a true story, and yet he wanted very badly to be with Melanctha. Perhaps she could teach him to really understand it better. Perhaps she could teach him how it could be all true, and yet how he could be right to believe in her and to trust her. (TL, 85)

In a way, that’s exactly what the reader with goodwill wants to know and feel about Stein. Among Stein’s contemporaries who found Melanctha admirable and groundbreaking, many African Americans wrote letters of gratitude for the privileging attention to black protagonists. Richard Wright was excited by the language of Melanctha. In an early draft of his autobiography, he writes: “Under the influence of Melanctha in Stein’s Three Lives, I would spend long hours fashioning sentences which in my opinion approximated the speech of Negro people I heard around me.

I N T R O D U C T I O N

/

5 3

Negro speech was something alive for me; it was vivid in an objective and subjective way. Upon my typewriter I would pound out random and disconnected sentences for the sheer love of words.” In the published version, the last sentence remains, but Wright has deleted all references to “Negro speech.” 54 He would choose not to use dialect in his own writing, though he continued to admire Melanctha. Why did Wright have second thoughts about dialect as literary artifice? One can’t know, but he and other black readers must have at least felt ambivalence toward the characterizations of what turn out to be the blackest characters in the color hierarchy of the novella. Apart from that, there will always be a problem with mimicking the language of any people whose lives are affected by a culturally inscribed power deficit. Leon Katz, in his introduction to a 1971 reprinting of Q.E.D., claims that “‘Melanctha’ is in fact the story of Q.E.D. in disguise, with May Bookstaver as Melanctha and Stein as the tormented doctor [Jeff Campbell].” (FQED, xxxviii) This simple one-to-one correspondence doesn’t work—there are plenty of Steinian characteristics in Melanctha as well—and there’s much that exceeds any overlap in both works, but strong structural and thematic similarities are evident when one reads them side by side. In both, Stein is examining the problem of longing for impossible love; and how can one deny that she’s working— as she always did—from her own experience? Is it possible that, with Melanctha, Stein was just doing Q.E.D. over in blackface? Richard Bridgman thought so, concluding that Melanctha was a “condescending and false” exploitation of its supposedly black protagonists.55 There has been scorn in other quarters for the notion that Stein grafted what was really a lesbian love story onto negro characters. (There is, in fact, a lesbian relationship between Melanctha and Jane Harden.) Some, noting that lesbian and negro sexuality were similarly associated with perversion at the time, have suggested that Stein was unconsciously

5 4

\

I N T R O D U C T I O N

displacing—or prejudicially aggregating—lesbians and negroes into the same category. A more charitable view is that the lesbian Stein could identify with the outcast condition of negroes, that her interest came partly from the capacity for “fellow feeling” on which she prided herself all her life. I think all of the above can be true in part. The question of ratios—how much of this, how much of that fed the mix?—seems an ultimately futile one. If the origin of the remarkable empathy written into the Jeff Campbell-Melanctha Herbert relationship is the Stein-Bookstaver affair, then that cross-identification was positively productive and probably the only way Stein could achieve any emotional verisimilitude amidst the flood of stereotypes and clichés that create the “negro atmosphere” of the novella. In her enduring capacity for contradiction, Stein may well have felt that those exotic negro others, if light-skinned and well-educated, could have thoughts and feelings just like hers. The preceding is intended as a reasonable picture, not a flattering one. But what one must remember is that the color hierarchy in Melanctha is not Stein’s alone; it was tacitly assumed by the whole of American society, black and white, with relatively few exceptions.56

STEIN AND HISTORY

Let me recite what history teaches. History teaches. —Stein, “If I Told Him, A Completed Portrait of Picasso”

What does history teach at this point after the devastation of World War I? It appears to teach itself. Is it then the nature of history to unfold with the internal logic of destiny? If character is the natural force of one’s anatomy and temperament, history may well be the natural force of geography and zeitgeist—both displaying representative rhythms beyond human control. Such a view, laced with sufficient in-

I N T R O D U C T I O N

/

5 5

determinacy, could in fact be closer to chaos theory (a model of history currently favored by some historiographers) than to destiny. But Stein wants to think that history moves along trajectories created by a limited number of identifiable intersecting forces: the character of eras, and national (cultural) character, like that of the Germans, who she thinks tend to elect leaders who pull them in directions they don’t want to go—toward destruction, even suicide.57 For Stein, politics is a function of intertwined characterological force fields rather than a collectivity of individual choices, though the genius of a series of great men, and the occasional exceptional woman (like the suffragist Susan B. Anthony or herself ), can steer things in new directions. This view of history (and politics) becomes most explicit in Stein’s writing during World War II—in the 1940 essay “The Winner Loses: A Picture of Occupied France,” the 1942 allegorical Mrs. Reynolds, the 1943 diaristic Wars I Have Seen, and even the 1946 play The Mother of Us All. But the great remove of the inexorable sweep of history from the foreground of concerns and pleasures of ordinary life is best reflected in the structure of her 1930 prose poem History or Messages from History. “History is placed where it is and hope is full of wishes,” she writes. (263) If one is not a player on the grand stage of history, one can only hope, dream, wish, prophesy, predict. No possibility of direct access or agency is possible for ordinary people. (Stein seems to have categorized herself as ordinary in this single respect.) The primary wish is simply that the goings-on of history won’t intrude into one’s garden or one’s kitchen or one’s atelier. With that in mind, one can make some sense of the otherwise enigmatic distinction between history (“the learning of spectacular consistency” [269]) and what Stein calls “the historical.” “The historical” occurs on the anecdotal scale of everyday life and turns out to be more complicated than the sweep of homogenizing forces driving history.

5 6

\

I N T R O D U C T I O N

The surface indeterminacy of History or Messages from History makes impossible the simplistic certainties of a Weiningerian calculus of characterological destiny. It’s rife with multiple perspectives, contradiction, and oblique commentary. For instance, those—particularly women—living in the sensual presentness of daily life (echoes of Weininger, admittedly) are at odds with the authoritative character of history: “There is no history in gentleness. She gently found mushrooms. She questioned the authority. . . . No history is proof against everything. Moonlight in the valley is before and after history.” Does “she” question authority by turning her attention to mushrooms and moonlight? If so, the resistance to history appears to be less a matter of taking issue than of living well. Since history eventually blows over, like any other storm, one’s foreground is best occupied with pleasures of domesticity—love, sex, food, dogs, gardening, village neighborliness. The first section of History or Messages from History is devoted to these intimate essentials, interspersed with the language of weather reports (“storm followed by rain but no hail”). A feminine landscape at odds with masculinist authority? “Do they feel that this is their donation to lending, alas no, they are caught because they have won the right to be in meaning. I mean I mean was not said of women.” (255) Can women mean? And later: “They were outstanding in coining words without women.” (264) And: “The lesson of history so she says is that he will do it again but will he we hope not. . . . What is history. They make history. . . . What is history they make history. . . . Intention is not history.” (267) The mixture of barbs at patriarchal power (the “they” in these passages?), along with contradictory valuations of the nature of women, against the almost Hegelian backdrop of historical determinism should not be entirely surprising for an American so long in France. Romantic idealist notions of history coursing on autopilot toward its own apotheosis were part of the masculinist “genius” of the

I N T R O D U C T I O N

/

5 7

European zeitgeist. Stein comes off as more European pessimist than American optimist in her attitude toward history. “There are two things that are interesting history and grammar,” Stein writes. (262) As we know all too well, however, history can be in strenuous competition with grammar. Grammar, for Stein, is the logic of composition with words. In her view, it is malleable, subject to reinvention, and in that reinvention new ways of being in one’s time become possible (the argument of “Composition as Explanation”). This is her life’s work; therefore precautions must be taken to prevent the logics of history from interfering with attention to grammar. Stein’s political conservatism, given Europe’s turbulence and her need for domestic order, is also not surprising. The life she carefully composed with Alice was essential for the prodigious flow of her work; nevertheless, history would disrupt it for long stretches during World War I. During World War II, it was transformed. At the outbreak of the first war, Stein and Toklas were caught in England (staying with the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead and his wife, Evelyn). When they returned to France, they became active in the war effort. In 1916, after the battle of Verdun, Stein made arrangements to procure a Ford motor van and have it shipped to France at her expense in order to deliver medical supplies to the front for the American Fund for the French Wounded. At war’s end, she and Toklas continued to contribute to the agency’s efforts to feed and house displaced French civilians. The lighthearted account of their wartime “adventures” in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas may deflect the admiration they deserve for freely choosing (against their friends’ advice) to return to France during wartime and to do volunteer work, not without its dangers, from 1915 to 1917. Their courage and concern for the wounded and displaced brings to mind Walt Whitman during the American Civil War.

5 8

\

I N T R O D U C T I O N

Toklas and Stein (behind the wheel) in a Ford van carrying medical supplies (c. 1917). Courtesy Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

The devastation of World War I of course made the increasing possibility of another “general European war” in the late 1930s particularly terrifying—to such an extent that many, including Gertrude and Alice, managed to reject its inevitability for what seems by hindsight an unreasonably long time. When it did finally became undeniable that history was once again to invade everyday life, Stein reluctantly had to admit that this time, as Jews and lesbians, she and Alice could be direct targets of Germany’s destructive historical logic. Now she didn’t presume to understand it. In Wars I Have Seen (c. 1940–43), Stein writes: The times are so peculiar now, so medieval so unreasonable that for the first time in a hundred years truth is really stranger than fiction. Any truth. . . . How can a nation that feels itself as strong as the Germans do

I N T R O D U C T I O N

/

5 9

be afraid of a small handful of people like the Jews . . . they must be afraid because as Edgar Wallace loves to say over and over again, hate is fear, and why, what can they [the Jews] do to them, after all what can they do to them. (WIHS, 114)

Note the “they” when referring to Jews. Though she knew that racist logics could fatally identify her as Jewish, this did not seem to be her primary self-identification. But for even the most assimilated Jews in Europe, “Jewishness” came into the foreground when it was linked with fear—fear of destructive campaigns launched out of the fears of others. Stein was viscerally terrified; she wrote often of the sick feeling in her stomach, of waking queasy after disturbing dreams full of ominous portents. But, again, she and Alice—this time despite urgent warnings and entreaties from friends and American officials—stayed on in what Stein referred to with emotion as “the country of my adoption.” The decision, encouraged by her country neighbors’ agreement that there couldn’t possibly be another war, indicates not only the degree to which Stein was dependent on familiar domestic routine for her work, but also the intensely intimate connections she and Alice had with the people in the villages where they lived. Books of prophesy and prediction were consulted, primarily an astrological book titled The Last Year of War, by one Leonardo Blake, a book she called her bible, and that, to her credit, she burnt at the signing of the armistice, though, she would later write in “The Winner Loses,” “it certainly had been an enormous comfort to us all in between.” (HWW, 114) But these attempts at escaping the revenge of the real could not work indefinitely. She was finally profoundly shaken by real-life events: We were spending the afternoon with our friends, Madame Pierlot and the d’Aiguys, in September ’39 when France declared war on Germany—England had done it first. They were all upset but hopeful,

6 0

\

I N T R O D U C T I O N

but I was terrible frightened! I had been so sure there was not going to be war and here it was, it was war, and I made quite a scene. I said, “They shouldn’t! They shouldn’t!” and they were very sweet, and I apologized and said I was sorry but it was awful and they comforted me—they, the French, who had so much at stake, and I had nothing at stake comparatively. Well, that was a Sunday. And then there was another Sunday and we were at Béon again that Sunday, and Russia came into the war and Poland was smashed, and I did not care about Poland, but it did frighten me about France—oh dear, that was another Sunday. And then we settled down to a really wonderful winter. (HWW, 113)

Throughout the four years of Vichy and the occupation, Stein and Toklas, with some intermittent scares, managed to live relatively peacefully (along with a considerable number of other Jews protected by the local populace) in two small villages not far from Lyon, near the Swiss and Italian borders. The “wonderful winter” she writes about in “The Winner Loses” was so because she and Alice felt far from Poland and far from bombing raids in the country house they had settled into after a short trip to Paris to put things in order and get extra clothing: “Those few hours in Paris made us realize that the country is a better place in war than a city. They grow things to eat right where you are, so there is no privation. . . . there was plenty of meat and potatoes and bread and honey and we had some sugar and we even had all the oranges and lemons we needed and dates.” (HWW, 113) Stein is writing this in 1940, and she clearly thinks the worst is over now that Maréchal Pétain, the savior of France in World War I, has come, as an old prediction said he would, an old man on a white horse, to once again save France from Germany. Stein’s controversial support of Vichy was related to her conservatism. Her view of the social contract was that it is the job of government to defend its citizens from their enemies so that life can continue

I N T R O D U C T I O N

/

6 1

on peacefully and pleasurably. In return, citizens obey the law and pay taxes. Stein writes of Vichy: “the government of France had changed, but that did not worry anyone. It was natural that, since the Third Republic had not defended them from their enemies, it would end. . . . [T]o the French a government is something outside which does not concern them; its business is policing, defending . . . ; it is to be hoped that it will not cost too much, and naturally it leaves everyone to lead their own French life. . . . Everybody Stein digging in her garden in Bilignin (c. 1937). was happy.” (HWW, 129–30) She also Photograph by Gilbert A. Harrison. Courtesy supported Pétain during the early part Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. of the German occupation (her feelings about him changed over time), and her reasons were as complicated as the many layers of village life at the time. In Wars I Have Seen, it’s clear that Stein sympathized with both the Vichy government and the Resistance fighters known as the Maquis— the Maquis, more wholeheartedly; Vichy, in a spirit of uneasy “pragmatism.” She writes of denunciations, arrests, and the bravery of the “mountain boys” in the Maquis—the hard time they were giving the German soldiers—with relish. When Pétain raised the French flag again in Paris, she was delighted, but “then the next day we were all disappointed because Petain had to go on talking about the partisans and all the rest of it but I suppose he had to quiet the Germans after what he did do.” (WIHS, 175) She stresses many times in Wars I Have Seen how tangled feelings were:

6 2

\

I N T R O D U C T I O N

Stein with one of her beloved dogs, Basket II, in Bilignin (winter 1939–40). Courtesy Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

After the armistice in ’40 I was surprised . . . so many of them were not sure that they did not want the Germans to win. And I said why, I do not understand, how can any Frenchman feel that way. . . . I said why, and I said it pretty violently and pretty often. The man at the bank explained something. He said there are a great many different points of view and one single man can have quite a great number of them . . .

I N T R O D U C T I O N

/

6 3

[he] could want the English to win . . . because he wants business to be secure . . . at the same time he has a son who is a prisoner, his only son, and he wants the Germans to win because his son would come home to him . . . then at that time Germany was allied to Russia and might that mean communism and then he would want the English to win. . . . And then there was Petain. So many points of view about him, so very many. I had lots of them, I was almost French in having so many. (WIHS, 81–82)

This has a ring of truth that postwar certainty about dichotomized clarities of right and wrong positions betrays. The passage is followed by pages of varied and detailed circumstances of peoples’ lives, ending with, “Well anyway there was the armistice. Petain made it and we were all glad in a way and completely sad in a way and we had so many opinions.” (WIHS, 87) Stein’s instinctive solidarity is with the villagers, who hate the occupation yet want to survive. She doesn’t judge those who choose to collaborate with Vichy, as long as they are doing no evident harm to their countrypeople. In her much-criticized 1942 introduction to a planned volume of translations of the essays of Pétain, a project initiated by an old friend, Bernard Faÿ, newly appointed to the Vichy government, Stein wrote: “he is very like George Washington because he too is first in war first in peace and first in the hearts of his countrymen . . . and now he had to defend his armistice as he had defended Verdun.”58 This reading of French politics through a mythic American lens may well have interfered with more useful intuitions. As the war dragged on and Germany’s brutality became more and more clear, Stein’s sentiments changed. In her writing, she registers the dislike of Pétain by the French and Americans, noting a French family that thinks he’s “a cretin.” (WIHS, 92) She doesn’t defend him as she once did, though she remains sympathetic. Remarking that he’s an old man, old and forgotten, she shifts the focus to his heroism during

6 4

\

I N T R O D U C T I O N

Stein and Bernard Fay¨ in Bilignin (c. 1932). Courtesy Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

World War I and remarks, “there are still some firm reactionaries who are convinced that all maquis are terrorists.” (WIHS, 206) But the overriding value she shared with her neighbors was the desire for a relatively peaceful continuance of normal life. Her friendship with Faÿ was part of that. A professor of American culture at the

I N T R O D U C T I O N

/

6 5

Collège de France, he had been a close literary friend and staunch supporter of her work since the early 1920s. During the occupation, Faÿ was appointed director of the Bibliothèque Nationale, and he used his influence to arrange that Stein and Toklas not “be harmed as long as they kept silent and neutral, which they did”—at least publicly.59 The translation project was conceived by Faÿ (who was indicted for collaboration after the war) to ingratiate Pétain to the American public. It seems laughably ironic that he actually thought Pétain’s image would be bolstered by Stein’s “prestige” in America, where she was at the time trying unsuccessfully to get a U.S. publisher for her allegorical satire Mrs. Reynolds (with characters based on Hitler and Stalin). The novel’s only visibility while she was alive was a lampoon in the New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town” pages, written by a staff writer who had somehow acquired the typescript.60 There has been skepticism about how Stein and Toklas managed to remain safe in occupied France, despite their being so obviously the kind of people the Nazi-Vichy government was deporting to concentration camps, without their having at least passively condoned (not cared about) the worst actions of the Vichy government, the facilitation or carrying out of deportations. Faÿ’s connections helped, but there were other, probably more significant, reasons for their undisturbed life during the occupation. Stein functioned best and most happily as a homebody and “villager” (even in Paris). In the countryside, she and Alice had many friends and no enemies (though they once briefly feared they might be denounced by a disgruntled servant). When Stein’s family allowance could no longer be sent from the United States, she was loaned money by a close friend and neighbor, Paul Genin. Joan Chapman, the daughter of Paul and Elena Genin, was in her teens when Stein and Toklas were frequent visitors in their house near Belley. She remembers how the gregarious

6 6

\

I N T R O D U C T I O N

Stein was respected, trusted, and liked by her neighbors. She wrote books and plays for the children and put on theatricals in which they (Joan among them) acted. She was interested in their lives, expressed compassion for their young men affected by the war. She and Toklas were protected by goodwill; anyone could have turned them in, but no one did.61 Stein recounts the decision to stay put in “The Winner Loses.” She asked the advice of a village doctor she and Alice knew. His reply was considered, ending this way: “Everybody knows you here; everybody likes you; we all would help you in every way. Why risk yourself among strangers?” A farmer she met on a walk offered his opinion: “Vous faites bien, mademoiselle. We all said ‘Why should these ladies leave? In this quiet corner they are as safe as anywhere. . . . and we know you will help us out in any way you can and we will do the same for you. Here in this little corner we are en famille, and if you left, to go where?—aller, où?’” (HWW, 121) The most substantial criticisms of Stein may be that she and Toklas availed themselves of a collaborator’s assistance, bought black market goods (an almost universal practice if one could afford them), and did not appear to feel sufficient empathy with the plight of other Jews in Europe. How much Stein and Toklas understood (actually took into their consciousness) about the fate of Jewish deportees is questionable. No doubt there was self-protective denial. Refusal of those not in the thick of it to believe the full horror of what was happening was common. Events like Kristallnacht that were reported in the French papers could seem as far away as Poland to someone who was not inclined to identify with German Jews. Once the Vichy government was in place, all journalism was censored, and no communication with the United States was allowed during the last two years of the war, so everyone lived with only local news. Nonetheless, there was word of mouth, and

I N T R O D U C T I O N

/

6 7

the seeming lack of concern for other Jews is disturbing. Catharine Stimpson brings a helpful perspective: “What hasn’t been said about Stein . . . in this regard is that she was descended from Central European Jews who had left that part of the world and settled and become assimilated to a different kind of reality. She absented herself from that reality and assimilated herself to yet another. . . . The idea of the disembodiment of diasporic experience is something that might be worth thinking about.”62 It seems clear that the vacuum created by “disembodiment” from her Jewish heritage was amply filled by the determined embodiment of her local and domestic life. If one can take Stein at her word in Wars I Have Seen—and I mostly tend to trust that its confusions and contradictions are honest ones— it’s questionable whether full knowledge of the fate of deportees had reached Stein when, late in the war, the American consul in Lyon (near Bilignin, where they were living) joined other friends in urging Stein and Toklas to flee to Switzerland. They became alarmed and then vacillated—thought of going, then not. Here is a passage that describes the final decision to stay (one they worried several times afterward might have been an error): We both felt funny and then I said. No, I am not going we are not going, it is better to go regularly wherever we are sent than to go irregularly where nobody can help us if we are in trouble, no I said, they are always trying to get us to leave France but here we are and here we stay. (WIHS, 50)

Could Stein really have felt it was better to “go regularly” by being “sent” somewhere in a roundup of Jews if she knew it would be not just a temporary inconvenience but a trip to a death camp? She recounts that decision early in Wars I Have Seen; in the epilogue, she writes of talking with American soldiers after the liberation:

6 8

\

I N T R O D U C T I O N

They used all of them to want to know how we managed to escape the Germans and gradually with their asking and with the news that in the month of August the Gestapo had been in my apartment in Paris to look at everything . . . I was quite frightened. All the time the Germans were here we were so busy trying to live through each day that except once in a while when something happened you did not know about being frightened, but now somehow with the American soldiers questions and hearing what had been happening to others, of course one knew it but now one had time to feel it and so I was quite frightened, now that there was nothing dangerous and the whole American army between us and danger. One is like that. (WIHS, 255)

What Stein is saying “one knew” along the way will probably always be a contentious issue because it’s so tied up with the morally imbued question of how much one should have known. Edward R. Murrow, the respected newscaster who had covered the war for its duration, was one of the first to enter Buchenwald after the liberation. He broadcast his report from the site, expressing incredulity at what he saw and, expecting the same from his listeners, concluding: “I pray you to believe what I’ve said about Buchenwald.”63 However much one might have suspected, those inklings—if one could do nothing about them (as Jews, Stein and Toklas were hardly candidates for the Resistance)— had to be submerged in order to “live through each day,” perhaps all the more so the worse the suspicions were. Adorno wrote similarly about the circumstances of the time: “When the National Socialists began to torture, they not only terrorized the peoples inside and outside Germany, but were the more secure from exposure the more wildly the horror increased. The implausibility of their actions made it easy to disbelieve what nobody, for the sake of precious peace, wanted to believe, while at the same time capitulating to it.”64 Stein celebrated the liberation of France with equal pride in the

I N T R O D U C T I O N

/

6 9

Americans and her adopted country. Loyal to someone who had been loyal to them, she and Toklas visited Faÿ after his arrest and wrote a testimonial to aid his defense. It said, among other things: “he certainly did certain things that he should not have done, but that he ever denounced any body, no, that I do not believe.”65 This was the man to whom she had dedicated Lectures in America in 1935: “To Bernard Who Comfortingly and Encouragingly Was Listening as These Were Being Written.” Stein’s politics on the relationship between national governments and their citizens (her considered opinions rather than reactions to peril) had to do with the value of personal freedom. At war’s end, she celebrated the restoration of “liberty.” Her few public postwar statements were strangely devoid of the retrospective horror one expected (or wanted) her to voice. Her story of the greatness of America had to do with inventiveness, individualism, self-reliance, the pursuit of happiness. It was conservatively Emersonian and Republican. She detested Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal because she thought it would sap the energy of individual initiative. American politics, in her opinion, had taken a wrong turn between the two Roosevelts.

THE MOTHER OF US ALL

On Sunday, about two hours before she became unconscious, I talked with Miss Anthony, and she said: “To think I have had more than sixty years of hard struggle for a little liberty, and then to die without it seems so cruel.” —Anna Shaw, quoted in Susan B. Anthony’s obituary in the New York Times

The Mother of Us All, Stein’s last major work (1945), is an operatic treatment (again in a planned collaboration with Virgil Thomson) of two vexed subjects—women’s emancipation and the fate of the ex-

7 0

\

I N T R O D U C T I O N

traordinary woman. That the title of the opera has come to be a characterization of Stein as a model of strength for all women artists is to some extent ironic, since her “Susan B.” is a figure struggling with despondency over the belittling opposition she has suffered and expressing grave doubts about the value of her life’s work. The historical Anthony was anguished that women would not get the vote in her lifetime, but the will she dictated when she knew she was dying expressed defiant optimism: “Write to Anna Shaw immediately, and tell her I desire that every cent I leave when I pass out of this life shall be given to the fund which Miss Thomas and Miss Garrett are raising for the cause. I have given my life and all I am to it, and now I want my last act to be to give it all I have, to the last cent.”66 The operatic Susan B. strikes me as just as much Stein as Anthony in her ruminations about the troubling differences between men and women. It was Stein’s most direct articulation of feminist issues—for example, the question of whether a wife should take her husband’s name. At the same time, Susan B. is given to brooding soliloquies on the distinct natures of men and women and the danger of what women are seeking—if they desire children, they are tied to men; if they achieve liberation, they will become more like their oppressors: What is man, what are men, what are they. I do not say that they haven’t kind hearts, if I fall down in a faint, they will rush to pick me up, if my house is on fire, they will rush in to put the fire out and help me, yes they have kind hearts but they are afraid, afraid, they are afraid, they are afraid. They fear women, they fear each other, they fear their neighbor, they fear other countries. . . . Ah women often have not any sense of danger, after all a hen screams pitifully when she sees an eagle but she is only afraid for her children, men are afraid for themselves, that is the real difference between men and women. (MOUA, 80)

I N T R O D U C T I O N

/

7 1

Stein writing at a desk (c. 1945). Courtesy Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

And later: Yes some day the women will vote and by that time . . . it will do them no good because having the vote they will become like men, they will be afraid. . . . oh I know it, but I will fight for the right, for the right to vote for them even though they become like men, become afraid like men, become like men. (MOUA, 81)

The opera ends after emancipation has been achieved with the voice of Susan B. asking, from beyond the grave, “But do I want what we have got, has it not gone, what made it live, has it not gone because now it is had.” (MOUA, 87–88) She is a tormented soul who calls herself a “martyr all my life not to what I won but what was done.” (MOUA, 88)

7 2

\

I N T R O D U C T I O N

That conclusion seems indicative of a darker aspect of Stein’s postwar mood, but it should not obscure the fact that The Mother of Us All is also playful and psychologically astute. It explores, with earnestness and uncharacteristic irony, emotional, ethical, and legal questions of male and female character(s), male and female power—social, familial, and political—and, though the sustaining passion of the opera is the intellectual and emotional turmoil of Susan B. herself as she moves restlessly through buoyant certainty, near despair, courage, and fear, the continual conversation with a delightfully anachronistic assemblage of historical and fictional characters—the opera’s villagers—is a delight. Susan B. is presented as a heroine—“they listen to nobody the way they listen to you” (MOUA, 80), “you fight and you are not afraid” (MOUA, 81)—but as a troubled, not a monochromatic, one; the opera makes clear that she is afraid, but overcomes her fear to do what must be done.67 It’s interesting that in her last work Stein achieves with Susan B. an empathic psychological verisimilitude unlike any other after Melanctha.

WHAT IS THE QUESTION

The composition is the thing seen by every one living in the living they are doing. —Stein, “Composition as Explanation”

Stein’s death appears to have come as a surprise to her as well as to others. In her letters, she had been mentioning intestinal troubles as a minor bother, but then suddenly she was losing a lot of weight and feeling very weak. Her discomfort became dramatically worse on a trip to the country in July 1946 and turned out to be caused by an advanced malignancy. The doctors, fearing she was too debilitated, didn’t want to operate, but she felt otherwise. “I was not made to suffer,” she instructed the physician who capitulated to her wishes.68 She died in surgery on July 27, after—as it turned out—only two weeks of really in-

I N T R O D U C T I O N

/

7 3

tense pain. Apparently the only apocryphal part of Stein’s famous deathbed “What is the question?” (uttered after she had asked “What is the answer?” with no reply from Alice) is the impression that those words were her last. Alice describes the scene as having occurred early in an afternoon that was “troubled, confused and very uncertain,” as they continued to talk about what to do.69 Stein’s work leaves more questions than answers for her readers, and that’s a good deal of why she’s been so important to succeeding generations of artists of every sort—writers, visual artists, filmmakers, photographers, and composers; feminists, antifeminists; heterosexuals, transgendered persons, gays; practitioners of narrative, formalist, conventional, and innovative work. The ardent and precise suggestiveness of her compositions presents us with a lot of work to do as readers and artists in our own right—work that seems worth doing because of the expansive range of pleasures and stimulation and provocation to be found in her immense oeuvre. It all comes down to just how engaging her language at its best can be. And that means that it needs to be said that her language is not always at its best. Stein was an experimental literary humanist who developed a fundamentally investigative poetics. Not all of the experiments succeeded to the same extent. (Whatever “success” may mean is for each reader to define.) What gives the whole project its force is the resolute poetics of ordinary language made visible/audible through extraordinary composition— exploring common vocabularies in uncommon ways. To come to enjoy (understand) the attention to dailiness inscribed in Stein’s writing can enliven our own common experiences of language use in all its humorous gravity/grave humor. In fact, one’s perception of the best and worst of Stein’s work may change with the nature of one’s attention to it. A performative approach foregrounds the question: What can now

7 4

\

I N T R O D U C T I O N

be seen in the living with these words that we are doing? As a guide to reading Stein, that question encourages use of the work as a way of reading our own contemporary moment. Everybody is contemporary with his period . . . and the whole business of writing [and the whole business of reading] is the question of living in that contemporariness. . . . The thing that is important is that nobody knows what the contemporariness is. In other words, they don’t know where they are going, but they are on their way. (HWW, 151)

The famous Yeats quote is apt: “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.”70 Stein’s work is remarkable in the extent to which it is full of quarrels with itself. One cannot accuse Stein of deploying the persuasive strategies of rhetoric, and that’s a good thing. The self-complicating poethics of her conversational attention to language is importantly counter to much of the politics we deplore in her time and our own.

EDITOR’S NOTE ON TEXTS

Throughout her writing life, Gertrude Stein was inventing new grammars for the new times in which she was living. This was a means both of being in touch with contemporary rhythms and logics and of actively composing new ways of being in the contemporary moment. Her belief in the consequences of linguistic form—that language is actually a way of living in the sensory specificity of one’s world—is similar to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s idea of language as a form of life. In her poetry, Stein was composing forms that were as radical in their departures from norms as those of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in their paintings. In her prose, she worked in revolutionary ways on the

I N T R O D U C T I O N

/

7 5

level of the word, the sentence, and the paragraph—to dislodge received viewpoints from the graphic order of the language. In both cases, she was breaking with many nineteenth-century conventions that still more or less guide proper usage today. I have not, therefore, attempted to “correct” Stein’s spelling, punctuation, or grammar—which are not only idiosyncratic, but often inconsistent—unless there seemed to me to be strong (circumstantial or inferred) evidence of an actual mistake. (She was a spotty speller, apart from her stylistic experimentation.) There were, in fact, a good number of typos and misspellings and occasional omissions (of a letter or a punctuation mark) that resulted from the transmission of her work from handwritten manuscript to typescript, and then to typesetting (no doubt by baffled printers), with Stein rarely having the opportunity to proof the typeset text. That most of her work was published posthumously means that very few printed texts fully reflect her own typographic choices. Some readers may notice both British and American spellings in this volume. The decision to retain British spellings has to do with more than the fact that both Stein and Toklas habitually used them; they are part of the material atmosphere of the linguistic contexts and sites of Stein’s work. Based in Europe from 1903 until her death, straddling British and American literatures and traditions, she was part of the truly international avant-garde of the first part of the twentieth century. It’s my opinion that this fact should not be eradicated from the surface textures of her language in service of standardization. To standardize might indeed make the language more “transparent” (the writing handbook ideal) but would be something of a sad irony for the writer who, as much as any other modernist innovator (James Joyce also comes to mind), had taken it as her project to bring the urgently significant, constitutive materiality of words into the foreground of the reader’s (and auditor’s) attention.

7 6

\

I N T R O D U C T I O N

NOTES

1

2 3

4 5 6

7

8

9 10

11

The epigraphs are from Dita Fröller, “Stein Stein Stein Stein Stein,” in New Old World Marvels; Stein, “Portraits and Repetition,” in LIA, 165; Stein, “If I Told Him, A Completed Portrait of Picasso” (193); New York Times, March 13, 1906; Stein, “Composition as Explanation” (218). Quoted in James R. Mellow, Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company, 369. See also Thomson’s letters to Stein about the production in Tim Page and Vanessa Weeks Page, eds., Selected Letters of Virgil Thomson (New York: Summit Books, 1988). Despite some ambivalence on both their parts, they went forward with what turned out to be a groundbreaking event in the strictly segregated American theater of the time. Quoted in Mellow, Charmed Circle, 369. See William Rice’s chronological account of the tour in Edward M. Burns and Ulla E. Dydo, eds., The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder, Appendix I. Stein met Wilder during her lecture tour, at the University of Chicago, where he was teaching. For information about Stein’s U.S. tour, I’m also indebted to the life chronology compiled by Catharine R. Stimpson and Harriet Chessman in Gertrude Stein: Writings, 1903–1932 and 1932–1946. Vanity Fair, 21, no. 8 (1924), 40. Alyson Tischler, “A Rose Is a Pose: Steinian Modernism and Mass Culture.” Quoted in “Gertrude Stein,” Britannica Concise, http://concise.britannica.com/ ebc/article-9069542/Gertrude-Stein (accessed July 18, 2007). The entry goes on to say that Stein thought she was a genius but is best remembered for the interesting people who visited her in Paris. The lecture was first published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf in The Hogarth Essays, 2nd ser. (London: Hogarth Press, 1926). Burns and Dydo, Letters of Stein and Wilder, 338. What she read was “If I Told Him, A Completed Portrait of Picasso.” Ibid., 348. Skinner’s article is reprinted in Michael J. Hoffman, ed., Critical Essays on Gertrude Stein. See Richard Bridgman’s account of the Skinner episode in Gertrude Stein in Pieces, 135–36. Steven Meyer also writes about it in Irresistible Dictation: Gertrude Stein and the Correlations of Writing and Science, 221–27. André Breton: Selections, ed. Mark Polizzotti, 15.

I N T R O D U C T I O N

/

7 7

12 13

14

15 16

17 18

19 20

21 22

23

24

25 26 27

Bridgman, Gertrude Stein in Pieces, 135–36. “Gertrude Stein: A Radio Interview,” Paris Review, no. 116 (Fall 1990), 88–89. The interview was conducted by NBC reporter William Lundell in writing and then read by Stein and Lundell for broadcast on WJZ and NET radio on November 12, 1934. Wilder, Introduction, in Narration: Four Lectures by Gertrude Stein, ed. Wilder, vi–vii. Ibid. Many of these articles are collected in How Writing Is Written, vol. 2 of Previously Uncollected Writings of Gertrude Stein, ed. Robert Bartlett Haas. Written in 1935, the article appeared in Cosmopolitan in 1936. Stein and Toklas privately referred to one another as husband and wife, as is evident in their playful love notes collected in Kay Turner, ed., Baby Precious Always Shines: Selected Love Notes between Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. Ibid., 30. For accounts of Stein’s childhood, see Bridgman, Gertrude Stein in Pieces, and Brenda Wineapple, Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein. All self-descriptions are from The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Stein’s punctuation and spelling were idiosyncratic long before she argued the logic of her new grammars in How to Write. Solomons’s article, titled “Normal Motor Automatism,” was published in the September 1896 issue of Psychological Review. Stein is credited as second author, but it was actually written by Solomons alone. Reprinted in Gertrude Stein and Leon M. Solomons, with an introduction by Robert A. Wilson, Motor Automatism (New York: Phoenix Book Shop, 1969). AABT, 78. This statement has been misconstrued as referring to the “automatic writing” that she and Solomons and the subjects of the experiments had presumably engaged in. Stein not only denied having done such a thing herself, but held that purely automatic writing was impossible for anyone. “The Gradual Making of the Making of Americans,” in LIA, 137. Weininger, Sex and Character (New York: Howard Fertig, 2003). Meyer, Irresistible Dictation: Gertrude Stein and the Correlations of Writing and Science. Though Meyer’s book is a fascinating account of the scientific milieu

7 8

\

I N T R O D U C T I O N

28 29

30 31

32

33

34

35 36 37 38

39

that stimulated Stein’s experimental attitude, I’m unconvinced by his argument that she was a scientist. To the contrary, Stein invented literary experiments as an alternative to the scientific methods she found so tedious. The result is a poetics whose experimental instruments differ radically from those of the sciences, and that bring us to a substantially different kind of knowledge. Schoenberg, “Gertrude Stein’s Neuroanatomic Investigations: Roses or Thorns?” Steven Meyer credits Schoenberg with giving “the fullest and most evenhanded account to date of Stein’s medical career at Johns Hopkins.” (Irresistible Dictation, 346, 101–2). Schoenberg, “Gertrude Stein’s Neuroanatomic Investigations,” 253–54. See Peter Gay’s revealing discussion of Freud’s literary ambitions with respect to Goethe and Schnitzler, in Freud, Jews and Other Germans: Masters and Victims in Modernist Culture, particularly 51–55. Freud revered and studied novels for their psychological content and confessed he wished he had the talent to be a novelist himself. See, for instance, David G. Stern and Béla Szabados’s Wittgenstein Reads Weininger, particularly the essays by Allan Janik and Joachim Schulte. See also Maria Damon’s “Gertrude Stein’s Jewishness, Jewish Social Scientists, and the ‘Jewish Question’” for a discussion of the racial claims in Weininger’s book. Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin’s Wittgenstein’s Vienna (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973) and Ray Monk’s Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (New York: Free Press, 1990) make excellent sense of the intersecting high- and masscultural complexities of this milieu. Probably written between 1905 and 1911, this excerpt from one of her private notebooks is from Gertrude Stein, Picasso: The Complete Writings, ed. Edward Burns (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), 109. Weininger, Sex and Character, 9. Waldrop, Introduction, in Stein, Useful Knowledge, xxiii. “The Gradual Making of the Making of Americans,” in LIA, 145. AABT, 70. Stein did write her monograph on Picasso in French; Toklas translated it into English. See Lyn Hejinian’s interesting discussion of the Flaubert connection in her essay “Three Lives,” in The Language of Inquiry.

I N T R O D U C T I O N

/

7 9

40

41

42

43

44 45

46 47 48

49

50 51

52

53

For a discussion of Stein as reader and writer in the composition of Blood on the Dining Room Floor, see my essay “The Difficulties of Gertrude Stein, I and II,” in The Poethical Wager. Comparing the constructedness of Tender Buttons with the daily love notes of Gertrude and Alice is interesting. There’s a vast difference between the literature of love and love notes, as one can see in Turner, Baby Precious Always Shines. I discuss the poetics of the swerve in “The Difficulties of Gertrude Stein, I and II,” as well as in my introduction to The Poethical Wager. For an interesting discussion of the sensuality of Stein’s work, see Harriet Scott Chessman’s The Public Is Invited to Dance: Representation, the Body, and Dialogue in Gertrude Stein, particularly Chapter 3, “The Caressing of Nouns,” and her section titled “Patriarchal Poetry.” From “Talking,” in A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, 73. See Ulla Dydo’s Gertrude Stein: The Language That Rises on Q.E.D. and on Shakespeare’s relevance to Stein’s later love poem Stanzas in Meditation. Dydo also recounts her discovery of how Stein’s use of the word “may,” with its perceived connection to Stein’s early love affair with May Bookstaver, led to a melodrama of jealousy and textual revenge on the part of Alice. Ibid., 83. Stimpson and Chessman, Stein: Writings, 1903–1932, 575. See Barrett Watten’s “The Bride of the Assembly Line: Radical Poetics in Construction,” in his The Constructivist Moment, for an interesting interpretation of some of these material correspondences. Perloff, “Poetry as Word-System,” in her The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage. Stein in fact removed her pictures from their frames before hanging them. Picasso’s two portraits of himself and Stein painted in 1905–6 display an uncanny resemblance. In fact, if you were to switch the heads, they would work perhaps even better. My source for Stein’s college writing is “The Radcliffe Manuscripts,” in Rosalind Miller’s Gertrude Stein: Form and Intelligibility. The quotes that appear here are from pp. 139, 143–44. See, for instance, Virgil Thomson’s letter to Stein about the “all-negro cast” of the first Four Saints production (p. 324 of the present volume).

8 0

\

I N T R O D U C T I O N

54

55 56

57

58 59 60 61 62

63

64 65

66

67

68 69 70

Jeff Karem’s “‘I Could Never Really Leave the South’: Regionalism and the Transformation of Richard Wright’s American Hunger” tracks successive drafts of Wright’s autobiographical manuscript to its final publication as Black Boy. The quote that appears here is from p. 697. Bridgman, Gertrude Stein in Pieces, 52. Milton A. Cohen charts a detailed analysis of the color-based hierarchy in Melanctha in “Black Brutes and Mulatto Saints: The Racial Hierarchy of Stein’s ‘Melanctha.’” Interestingly, Theodor Adorno articulated something similar in the early 1940s: “A German is someone who cannot tell a lie without believing it himself.” Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, 110. Burns and Dydo, Letters of Stein and Wilder. Bridgman, Gertrude Stein in Pieces, 316. For the text of this piece, see Burns and Dydo, Letters of Stein and Wilder, 404–5. Joan Chapman, telephone conversation with the author, June 3 and 4, 2005. “A Play to Be Performed: Excerpts from the Gertrude Stein Symposium at New York University,” Theater 32, no. 2 (2002), 16. From excerpts aired on Terry Gross, Fresh Air, National Public Radio, May 8, 2005. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 108. Bridgman, Gertrude Stein in Pieces, 316. It seems highly unlikely that Stein knew what Edward Burns’s continuing research into Faÿ’s activities now make certain, that he did in fact turn in names of Freemasons who, as members of a secret society banned by Pétain and the Nazis, were sent to camps where hundreds were executed. See Janet Malcolm, “Gertrude Stein’s War: The Years in Occupied France,” 80. Quoted in Anthony’s obituary in the New York Times, March 13, 1906, http://www .nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0215.html. I write about this in greater detail in “The Difficulties of Gertrude Stein, I and II.” Mellow, Charmed Circle, 468. Toklas, What Is Remembered, 173. W. B. Yeats, “Anima Hominis,” in Essays (New York: Macmillan, 1924), 492.

I N T R O D U C T I O N

/

8 1

This page intentionally left blank

T E X T S

1 9 0 5 – 1 9 3 6

This page intentionally left blank

MELANCTHA

(

EXCERPT, FROM THREE LIVES)

Melanctha Herbert was sixteen when she first met Jane Harden. Jane was a negress, but she was so white that hardly any one could guess it. Jane had had a good deal of education. She had been two years at a colored college. She had had to leave because of her bad conduct. She taught Melanctha many things. She taught her how to go the ways that lead to wisdom. Jane Harden was at this time twenty-three years old and she had had much experience. She was very much attracted by Melanctha, and Melanctha was very proud that this Jane would let her know her. Jane Harden was not afraid to understand. Melanctha who had strong the sense for real experience, knew that here was a woman who had learned to understand. Jane Harden had many bad habits. She drank a great deal, and she wandered widely. She was safe though now, when she wanted to be safe, in this wandering. Melanctha Herbert soon always wandered with her. Melanctha tried the drinking and some of the other habits, but she did not find that she cared very much to do them. But every day she grew stronger in her desire to really understand. It was now no longer, even in the daylight, the rougher men that these two learned to know in their wanderings, and for Melanctha the better classes were now a little higher. It was no longer express agents

8 5

and clerks that she learned to know, but men in business, commercial travelers, and even men above these, and Jane and she would talk and walk and laugh and escape from them all very often. It was still the same, the knowing of them and the always just escaping, only now for Melanctha somehow it was different, for though it was always the same thing that happened it had a different flavor, for now Melanctha was with a woman who had wisdom, and dimly she began to see what it was that she should understand. It was not from the men that Melanctha learned her wisdom. It was always Jane Harden herself who was making Melanctha begin to understand. Jane was a roughened woman. She had power and she liked to use it, she had much white blood and that made her see clear, she liked drinking and that made her reckless. Her white blood was strong in her and she had grit and endurance and a vital courage. She was always game, however much she was in trouble. She liked Melanctha Herbert for the things that she had like her, and then Melanctha was young, and she had sweetness, and a way of listening with intelligence and sympathetic interest, to the stories that Jane Harden often told out of her experience. Jane grew always fonder of Melanctha. Soon they began to wander, more to be together than to see men and learn their various ways of working. Then they began not to wander, and Melanctha would spend long hours with Jane in her room, sitting at her feet and listening to her stories, and feeling her strength and the power of her affection, and slowly she began to see clear before her one certain way that would be sure to lead to wisdom. Before the end came, the end of the two years in which Melanctha spent all her time when she was not at school or in her home, with Jane Harden, before these two years were finished, Melanctha had come to

8 6

\

T E X T S

see very clear, and she had come to be very certain, what it is that gives the world its wisdom. Jane Harden always had a little money and she had a room in the lower part of the town. Jane had once taught in a colored school. She had had to leave that too on account of her bad conduct. It was her drinking that always made all the trouble for her, for that can never be really covered over. Jane’s drinking was always growing worse upon her. Melanctha had tried to do the drinking but it had no real attraction for her. In the first year, between Jane Harden and Melanctha Herbert, Jane had been much the stronger. Jane loved Melanctha and she found her always intelligent and brave and sweet and docile, and Jane meant to, and before the year was over she had taught Melanctha what it is that gives many people in the world their wisdom. Jane had many ways in which to do this teaching. She told Melanctha many things. She loved Melanctha hard and made Melanctha feel it very deeply. She would be with other people and with men and with Melanctha, and she would make Melanctha understand what everybody wanted, and what one did with power when one had it. Melanctha sat at Jane’s feet for many hours in these days and felt Jane’s wisdom. She learned to love Jane and to have this feeling very deeply. She learned a little in these days to know joy, and she was taught too how very keenly she could suffer. It was very different this suffering from that Melanctha sometimes had from her mother and from her very unendurable black father. Then she was fighting and she could be strong and valiant in her suffering, but here with Jane Harden she was longing and she bent and pleaded with her suffering. It was a very tumultuous, very mingled year, this time for Melanctha, but she certainly did begin to really understand. In every way she got it from Jane Harden. There was nothing good

M E L A N C T H A

/

8 7

or bad in doing, feeling, thinking or in talking, that Jane spared her. Sometimes the lesson came almost too strong for Melanctha, but somehow she always managed to endure it and so slowly, but always with increasing strength and feeling, Melanctha began to really understand. Then slowly, between them, it began to be all different. Slowly now between them, it was Melanctha Herbert, who was stronger. Slowly now they began to drift apart from one another. Melanctha Herbert never really lost her sense that it was Jane Harden who had taught her, but Jane did many things that Melanctha now no longer needed. And then, too, Melanctha never could remember right when it came to what she had done and what had happened. Melanctha now sometimes quarreled with Jane, and they no longer went about together, and sometimes Melanctha really forgot how much she owed to Jane Harden’s teaching. Melanctha began now to feel that she had always had world wisdom. She really knew of course, that it was Jane who had taught her, but all that began to be covered over by the trouble between them, that was now always getting stronger. Jane Harden was a roughened woman. Once she had been very strong, but now she was weakened in all her kinds of strength by her drinking. Melanctha had tried the drinking but it had had no real attraction for her. Jane’s strong and roughened nature and her drinking made it always harder for her to forgive Melanctha, that now Melanctha did not really need her any longer. Now it was Melanctha who was stronger and it was Jane who was dependent on her. Melanctha was now come to be about eighteen years old. She was a graceful, pale yellow, good looking, intelligent, attractive negress, a little mysterious sometimes in her ways, and always good and pleasant, and always ready to do things for people.

8 8

\

T E X T S

Melanctha from now on saw very little of Jane Harden. Jane did not like that very well and sometimes she abused Melanctha, but her drinking soon covered everything all over. It was not in Melanctha’s nature to really lose her sense for Jane Harden. Melanctha all her life was ready to help Jane out in any of her trouble, and later, when Jane really went to pieces, Melanctha always did all that she could to help her. But Melanctha Herbert was ready now herself to do teaching. Melanctha could do anything now that she wanted. Melanctha knew now what everybody wanted. Melanctha had learned how she might stay a little longer; she had learned that she must decide when she wanted really to stay longer, and she had learned how when she wanted to, she could escape. And so Melanctha began once more to wander. It was all now for her very different. It was never rougher men now that she talked to, and she did not care much now to know white men of the, for her, very better classes. It was now something realler that Melanctha wanted, something that would move her very deeply, something that would fill her fully with the wisdom that was planted now within her, and that she wanted badly, should really wholly fill her. Melanctha these days wandered very widely. She was always alone now when she wandered. Melanctha did not need help now to know, or to stay longer, or when she wanted, to escape. Melanctha tried a great many men, in these days before she was really suited. It was almost a year that she wandered and then she met with a young mulatto. He was a doctor who had just begun to practice. He would most likely do well in the future, but it was not this that concerned Melanctha. She found him good and strong and gentle and very intellectual, and all her life Melanctha liked and wanted good and considerate people, and then too he did not at first believe in Melanc-

M E L A N C T H A

/

8 9

tha. He held off and did not know what it was that Melanctha wanted. Melanctha came to want him very badly. They began to know each other better. Things began to be very strong between them. Melanctha wanted him so badly that now she never wandered. She just gave herself to this experience. Melanctha Herbert was now, all alone, in Bridgepoint. She lived now with this colored woman and now with that one, and she sewed, and sometimes she taught a little in a colored school as substitute for some teacher. Melanctha had now no home nor any regular employment. Life was just commencing for Melanctha. She had youth and had learned wisdom, and she was graceful and pale yellow and very pleasant, and always ready to do things for people, and she was mysterious in her ways and that only made belief in her more fervent. During the year before she met Jefferson Campbell, Melanctha had tried many kinds of men but they had none of them interested Melanctha very deeply. She met them, she was much with them, she left them, she would think perhaps this next time it would be more exciting, and always she found that for her it all had no real meaning. She could now do everything she wanted, she knew now everything that everybody wanted, and yet it all had no excitement for her. With these men, she knew she could learn nothing. She wanted some one that could teach her very deeply and now at last she was sure that she had found him, yes she really had it, before she had thought to look if in this man she would find it. During this year ‘Mis’ Herbert as her neighbors called her, Melanctha’s pale yellow mother was very sick, and in this year she died. Melanctha’s father during these last years did not come very often to the house where his wife lived and Melanctha. Melanctha was not sure that her father was now any longer here in Bridgepoint. It was

9 0

\

T E X T S

Melanctha who was very good now to her mother. It was always Melanctha’s way to be good to any one in trouble. Melanctha took good care of her mother. She did everything that any woman could, she tended and soothed and helped her pale yellow mother, and she worked hard in every way to take care of her, and make her dying easy. But Melanctha did not in these days like her mother any better, and her mother never cared much for this daughter who was always a hard child to manage, and who had a tongue that always could be very nasty. Melanctha did everything that any woman could, and at last her mother died, and Melanctha had her buried. Melanctha’s father was not heard from, and Melanctha in all her life after, never saw or heard or knew of anything that her father did. It was the young doctor, Jefferson Campbell, who helped Melanctha toward the end, to take care of her sick mother. Jefferson Campbell had often before seen Melanctha Herbert, but he had never liked her very well, and he had never believed that she was any good. He had heard something about how she wandered. He knew a little too of Jane Harden, and he was sure that this Melanctha Herbert, who was her friend and who wandered, would never come to any good. Dr. Jefferson Campbell was a serious, earnest, good young joyous doctor. He liked to take care of everybody and he loved his own colored people. He always found life very easy did Jeff Campbell, and everybody liked to have him with them. He was so good and sympathetic, and he was so earnest and so joyous. He sang when he was happy, and he laughed, and his was the free abandoned laughter that gives the warm broad glow to negro sunshine. Jeff Campbell had never yet in his life had real trouble. Jefferson’s father was a good, kind, serious, religious man. He was a very steady,

M E L A N C T H A

/

9 1

very intelligent, and very dignified, light brown, grey haired negro. He was a butler and he had worked for the Campbell family many years, and his father and his mother before him had been in the service of this family as free people. Jefferson Campbell’s father and his mother had of course been regularly married. Jefferson’s mother was a sweet, little, pale brown, gentle woman who reverenced and obeyed her good husband, and who worshipped and admired and loved hard her good, earnest, cheery, hard working doctor boy who was her only child. Jeff Campbell had been raised religious by his people but religion had never interested Jeff very much. Jefferson was very good. He loved his people and he never hurt them, and he always did everything they wanted and that he could to please them, but he really loved best science and experimenting and to learn things, and he early wanted to be a doctor, and he was always very interested in the life of the colored people. The Campbell family had been very good to him and had helped him on with his ambition. Jefferson studied hard, he went to a colored college, and then he learnt to be a doctor. It was now two or three years, that he had started in to practice. Everybody liked Jeff Campbell, he was so strong and kindly and cheerful and understanding, and he laughed so with pure joy, and he always liked to help all his own colored people. Dr. Jeff knew all about Jane Harden. He had taken care of her in some of her bad trouble. He knew about Melanctha too, though until her mother was taken sick he had never met her. Then he was called in to help Melanctha to take care of her sick mother. Dr. Campbell did not like Melanctha’s ways and he did not think that she would ever come to any good. Dr. Campbell had taken care of Jane Harden in some of her bad trouble. Jane sometimes had abused Melanctha to him. What right had that

9 2

\

T E X T S

Melanctha Herbert who owed everything to her, Jane Harden, what right had a girl like that to go away to other men and leave her, but Melanctha Herbert never had any sense of how to act to anybody. Melanctha had a good mind, Jane never denied her that, but she never used it to do anything decent with it. But what could you expect when Melanctha had such a brute of a black nigger father, and Melanctha was always abusing her father and yet she was just like him, and really she admired him so much and he never had any sense of what he owed to anybody, and Melanctha was just like him and she was proud of it too, and it made Jane so tired to hear Melanctha talk all the time as if she wasn’t. Jane Harden hated people who had good minds and didn’t use them, and Melanctha always had that weakness, and wanting to keep in with people, and never really saying that she wanted to be like her father, and it was so silly of Melanctha to abuse her father, when she was so much like him and she really liked it. No, Jane Harden had no use for Melanctha. Oh yes, Melanctha always came around to be good to her. Melanctha was always sure to do that. She never really went away and left one. She didn’t use her mind enough to do things straight out like that. Melanctha Herbert had a good mind, Jane never denied that to her, but she never wanted to see or hear about Melanctha Herbert any more, and she wished Melanctha wouldn’t come in any more to see her. She didn’t hate her, but she didn’t want to hear about her father and all that talk Melanctha always made, and that just meant nothing to her. Jane Harden was very tired of all that now. She didn’t have any use now any more for Melanctha, and if Dr. Campbell saw her he better tell her Jane didn’t want to see her, and she could take her talk to somebody else, who was ready to believe her. And then Jane Harden would drop away and forget Melanctha and all her life before, and then she would begin to drink and so she would cover everything all over. Jeff Campbell heard all this very often, but it did not interest him

M E L A N C T H A

/

9 3

very deeply. He felt no desire to know more of this Melanctha. He heard her, once, talking to another girl outside of the house, when he was paying a visit to Jane Harden. He did not see much in the talk that he heard her do. He did not see much in the things Jane Harden said when she abused Melanctha to him. He was more interested in Jane herself than in anything he heard about Melanctha. He knew Jane Harden had a good mind, and she had had power, and she could really have done things, and now this drinking covered everything all over. Jeff Campbell was always very sorry when he had to see it. Jane Harden was a roughened woman, and yet Jeff found a great many strong good things in her, that still made him like her. Jeff Campbell did everything he could for Jane Harden. He did not care much to hear about Melanctha. He had no feeling, much, about her. He did not find that he took any interest in her. Jane Harden was so much a stronger woman, and Jane really had had a good mind, and she had used it to do things with it, before this drinking business had taken such a hold upon her. Dr. Campbell was helping Melanctha Herbert to take care of her sick mother. He saw Melanctha now for long times and very often, and they sometimes talked a good deal together, but Melanctha never said anything to him about Jane Harden. She never talked to him about anything that was not just general matters, or about medicine, or to tell him funny stories. She asked him many questions and always listened very well to all he told her, and she always remembered everything she heard him say about doctoring, and she always remembered everything that she had learned from all the others. Jeff Campbell never found that all this talk interested him very deeply. He did not find that he liked Melanctha when he saw her so much, any better. He never found that he thought much about Melanctha. He never found that he believed much in her having a good mind,

9 4

\

T E X T S

like Jane Harden. He found he liked Jane Harden always better, and that he wished very much that she had never begun that bad drinking. Melanctha Herbert’s mother was now always getting sicker. Melanctha really did everything that any woman could. Melanctha’s mother never liked her daughter any better. She never said much, did ‘Mis’ Herbert, but anybody could see that she did not think much of this daughter. Dr. Campbell now often had to stay a long time to take care of ‘Mis’ Herbert. One day ‘Mis’ Herbert was much sicker and Dr. Campbell thought that this night, she would surely die. He came back late to the house, as he had said he would, to sit up and watch ‘Mis’ Herbert, and to help Melanctha, if she should need anybody to be with her. Melanctha Herbert and Jeff Campbell sat up all that night together. ‘Mis’ Herbert did not die. The next day she was a little better. This house where Melanctha had always lived with her mother was a little red brick, two story house. They had not much furniture to fill it and some of the windows were broken and not mended. Melanctha did not have much money to use now on the house, but with a colored woman, who was their neighbor and good natured and who had always helped them, Melanctha managed to take care of her mother and to keep the house fairly clean and neat. Melanctha’s mother was in bed in a room upstairs, and the steps from below led right up into it. There were just two rooms on this upstairs floor. Melanctha and Dr. Campbell sat down on the steps, that night they watched together, so that they could hear and see Melanctha’s mother and yet the light would be shaded, and they could sit and read, if they wanted to, and talk low some, and yet not disturb ‘Mis’ Herbert. Dr. Campbell was always very fond of reading. Dr. Campbell had not brought a book with him that night. He had just forgotten it. He had meant to put something in his pocket to read, so that he could

M E L A N C T H A

/

9 5

amuse himself, while he was sitting there and watching. When he was through with taking care of ‘Mis’ Herbert, he came and sat down on the steps just above where Melanctha was sitting. He spoke about how he had forgotten to bring his book with him. Melanctha said there were some old papers in the house, perhaps Dr. Campbell could find something in them that would help pass the time for a while for him. All right, Dr. Campbell said, that would be better than just sitting there with nothing. Dr. Campbell began to read through the old papers that Melanctha gave him. When anything amused him in them, he read it out to Melanctha. Melanctha was now pretty silent, with him. Dr. Campbell began to feel a little, about how she responded to him. Dr. Campbell began to see a little that perhaps Melanctha had a good mind. Dr. Campbell was not sure yet that she had a good mind, but he began to think a little that perhaps she might have one. Jefferson Campbell always liked to talk to everybody about the things he worked at and about his thinking about what he could do for the colored people. Melanctha Herbert never thought about these things the way that he did. Melanctha had never said much to Dr. Campbell about what she thought about them. Melanctha did not feel the same as he did about being good and regular in life, and not having excitements all the time, which was the way that Jefferson Campbell wanted that everybody should be, so that everybody would be wise and yet be happy. Melanctha always had strong the sense for real experience. Melanctha Herbert did not think much of this way of coming to real wisdom. Dr. Campbell soon got through with his reading, in the old newspapers, and then somehow he began to talk along about the things he was always thinking. Dr. Campbell said he wanted to work so that he could understand what troubled people, and not to just have excitements, and he believed you ought to love your father and your mother and to be regular in all your life, and not to be always wanting new

9 6

\

T E X T S

things and excitements, and to always know where you were, and what you wanted, and to always tell everything just as you meant it. That’s the only kind of life he knew or believed in, Jeff Campbell repeated. “No I ain’t got any use for all the time being in excitements and wanting to have all kinds of experience all the time. I got plenty of experience just living regular and quiet and with my family, and doing my work, and taking care of people, and trying to understand it. I don’t believe much in this running around business and I don’t want to see the colored people do it. I am a colored man and I ain’t sorry, and I want to see the colored people like what is good and what I want them to have, and that’s to live regular and work hard and understand things, and that’s enough to keep any decent man excited.” Jeff Campbell spoke now with some anger. Not to Melanctha, he did not think of her at all when he was talking. It was the life he wanted that he spoke to, and the way he wanted things to be with the colored people. But Melanctha Herbert had listened to him say all this. She knew he meant it, but it did not mean much to her, and she was sure some day he would find out, that it was not all, of real wisdom. Melanctha knew very well what it was to have real wisdom. “But how about Jane Harden?” said Melanctha to Jeff Campbell, “seems to me Dr. Campbell you find her to have something in her, and you go there very often, and you talk to her much more than you do to the nice girls that stay at home with their people, the kind you say you are really wanting. It don’t seem to me Dr. Campbell, that what you say and what you do seem to have much to do with each other. And about your being so good Dr. Campbell,” went on Melanctha, “You don’t care about going to church much yourself, and yet you always are saying you believe so much in things like that, for people. It seems to me, Dr. Campbell you want to have a good time just like all us others, and then you just keep on saying that it’s right to be good and you ought not to have excitements, and

M E L A N C T H A

/

9 7

yet you really don’t want to do it Dr. Campbell, no more than me or Jane Harden. No, Dr. Campbell, it certainly does seem to me you don’t know very well yourself, what you mean, when you are talking.” Jefferson had been talking right along, the way he always did when he got started, and now Melanctha’s answer only made him talk a little harder. He laughed a little, too, but very low, so as not to disturb ‘Mis’ Herbert who was sleeping very nicely, and he looked brightly at Melanctha to enjoy her, and then he settled himself down to answer. “Yes,” he began, “it certainly does sound a little like I didn’t know very well what I do mean, when you put it like that to me, Miss Melanctha, but that’s just because you don’t understand enough about what I meant, by what I was just saying to you. I don’t say, never, I don’t want to know all kinds of people, Miss Melanctha, and I don’t say there ain’t many kinds of people, and I don’t say ever, that I don’t find some like Jane Harden very good to know and talk to, but it’s the strong things I like in Jane Harden, not all her excitements. I don’t admire the bad things she does, Miss Melanctha, but Jane Harden is a strong woman and I always respect that in her. No I know you don’t believe what I say, Miss Melanctha, but I mean it, and it’s all just because you don’t understand it when I say it. And as for religion, that just ain’t my way of being good, Miss Melanctha, but it’s a good way for many people to be good and regular in their way of living, and if they believe it, it helps them to be good, and if they’re honest in it, I like to see them have it. No, what I don’t like, Miss Melanctha, is this what I see so much with the colored people, their always wanting new things just to get excited.” Jefferson Campbell here stopped himself in this talking. Melanctha Herbert did not make any answer. They both sat there very quiet. ■

9 8

1905

\

■

T E X T S

THE

MAKING

OF

AMERICANS

(

EXCERPT)

I am writing for myself and strangers. This is the only way that I can do it. Everybody is a real one to me, everybody is like some one else too to me. No one of them that I know can want to know it and so I write for myself and strangers. Every one is always busy with it, no one of them then ever want to know it that every one looks like some one else and they see it. Mostly every one dislikes to hear it. It is very important to me to always know it, to always see it which one looks like others and to tell it. I write for myself and strangers. I do this for my own sake and for the sake of those who know I know it that they look like other ones, that they are separate and yet always repeated. There are some who like it that I know they are like many others and repeat it, there are many who never can really like it. There are many that I know and they know it. They are all of them repeating and I hear it. I love it and I tell it, I love it and now I will write it. This is now the history of the way some of them are it. I write for myself and strangers. No one who knows me can like it. At least they mostly do not like it that every one is of a kind of men and women and I see it. I love it and I write it. I want readers so strangers must do it. Mostly no one knowing me can like it that I love it that every one is of a kind of men and women, that always I am looking and comparing and classifying of them, always I am seeing their repeating. Always more and more I love repeating, it may be irritating to hear from them but always more and more I love it of them. More and more I love it of them, the being in them, the mixing in them, the repeating in them, the deciding the kind of them every one is who has human being.

T H E

M A K I N G

O F

A M E R I C A N S

/

9 9

This is now a little of what I love and how I write it. Later there will be much more of it. There are many ways of making kinds of men and women. Now there will be descriptions of every kind of way every one can be a kind of men and women. This is now a history of Martha Hersland. This is now a history of Martha and of every one who came to be of her living. There will then be soon much description of every way one can think of men and women, in their beginning, in their middle living, and their ending. Every one then is an individual being. Every one then is like many others always living, there are many ways of thinking of every one, this is now a description of all of them. There must then be a whole history of each one of them. There must then now be a description of all repeating. Now I will tell all the meaning to me in repeating, the loving there is in me for repeating. Every one is one inside them, every one reminds some one of some other one who is or was or will be living. Every one has it to say of each one he is like such a one I see it in him, every one has it to say of each one she is like some one else I can tell by remembering. So it goes on always in living, every one is always remembering some one who is resembling to the one at whom they are then looking. So they go on repeating, every one is themselves inside them and every one is resembling to others, and that is always interesting. There are many ways of making kinds of men and women. In each way of making kinds of them there is a different system of finding them resembling. Sometime there will be here every way there can be of seeing kinds of men and women. Sometime there will be then a complete history of each one. Every one always is repeating the whole of them and so sometime some one who sees them will have a complete history of every one. Some-

1 0 0

\

T E X T S

time some one will know all the ways there are for people to be resembling, some one sometime then will have a completed history of every one. Soon now there will be a history of the way repeating comes out of them comes out of men and women when they are young, when they are children, they have then their own system of being resembling; this will soon be a description of the men and women in beginning, the being young in them, the being children. There are many that I know and they know it. They are all of them repeating and I hear it. I love it and I tell it. I love it and now I will write it. This is now a history of my love of it. I hear it and I love it and I write it. They repeat it. They live it and I see it and I hear it. They live it and I hear it and I see it and I love it and now and always I will write it. There are many kinds of men and women and I know it. They repeat it and I hear it and I love it. This is now a history of the way they do it. This is now a history of the way I love it. Now I will tell of the meaning to me in repeating, of the loving there is in me for repeating. Sometime every one becomes a whole one to me. Sometime every one has a completed history for me. Slowly each one is a whole one to me, with some, all there living is passing before they are a whole one to me. There is a completed history of them to me then when there is of them a completed understanding of the bottom nature in them of the nature or natures mixed up in them with the bottom nature of them or separated in them. There is then a history of the things they say and do and feel, and happen to them. There is then a history of the living in them. Repeating is always in all of them. Repeating in them comes out of them, slowly making clear to any one that looks closely at them the nature and the natures mixed up in them. This sometime comes to be clear in every one.

T H E

M A K I N G

O F

A M E R I C A N S

/

1 0 1

Every one has their own being in them. Every one is of a kind of men and women. Many have mixed up in them some kind of many kinds of men and women. Slowly this comes clearly out from them in the repeating that is always in all living. Slowly it comes out from them to the most delicate gradation, to the gentlest flavor of them. Always it comes out as repeating from them. Always it comes out as repeating, out of them. Then to the complete understanding they keep on repeating this, the whole of them and any one seeing them then can understand them. This is a joy to any one loving repeating when in any one repeating steadily tells over and over again the history of the complete being in them. This is a solid happy satisfaction to any one who has it in them to love repeating and completed understanding. As I was saying often for many years some one is baffling. The repeated hearing of them does not make the completed being they have in them to any one. Sometimes many years pass in listening to repeating in such a one and the being of them is not a completed history to any one then listening to them. Sometimes then it comes out of them a louder repeating that before was not clear to anybody’s hearing and then it is a completed being to some one listening to the repeating coming out of such a one. Every one always is repeating the whole of them. Every one is repeating the whole of them, such repeating is then always in them and so sometime some one who sees them will have a complete understanding of the whole of each one of them, will have a completed history of every man and every woman they ever come to know in their living, every man and every woman who were or are or will be living whom such a one can come to know in living. This then is a history of many men and women, sometime there will be a history of every one.

1 0 2

\

T E X T S

Always from the beginning there was to me all living as repeating. This is now a description of loving repeating as a being. This is now a history of learning to listen to repeating to come to a completed understanding. To go on now giving all of the description of how repeating comes to have meaning, how it forms itself, how one must distinguish the different meanings in repeating. Sometimes it is very hard to understand the meaning of repeating. Sometime there will be a complete history of some one having loving repeating as being, to a completed understanding. Now there will be a little description of such a one. Sometime then there will be a complete history of all repeating to completed understanding. Sometime then there will be a complete history of every one who ever was or is or will be living. More and more then there will be a history of many men and many women from their beginning to their ending, as being babies and children and growing young men and growing young women and young grown men and young grown women and men and women in their middle living and growing old men and growing old women and old men and old women. More and more then there will be histories of all the kinds there are of men and women. There is then always repeating in all living. There is then in each one always repeating their whole being, the whole nature in them. Much loving repeating has to be in a being so that that one can listen to all the repeating in every one. Almost every one loves all repeating in some one. This is now some description of loving repeating, all repeating, in every one. Many men and many women never have it in them the conscious feeling of loving repeating. Many men and many women never have

T H E

M A K I N G

O F

A M E R I C A N S

/

1 0 3

it in them until old age weakening is in them, a consciousness of repeating. Many have it in them all their living as a conscious feeling as a humorous way of being in them. Some have it in them, the consciousness of always repeating the whole of them as a serious obligation. There are many many ways then of having repeating as conscious feeling, of having loving repeating as a bottom being, of having loving repeating being as a conscious feeling. ■

1911

■

PICASSO

One whom some were certainly following was one who was completely charming. One whom some were certainly following was one who was charming. One whom some were following was one who was completely charming. One whom some were following was one who was certainly completely charming. Some were certainly following and were certain that the one they were then following was one working and was one bringing out of himself then something. Some were certainly following and were certain that the one they were then following was one bringing out of himself then something that was coming to be a heavy thing, a solid thing and a complete thing. One whom some were certainly following was one working and certainly was one bringing something out of himself then and was one who had been all his living had been one having something coming out of him.

1 0 4

\

T E X T S

Something had been coming out of him, certainly it had been coming out of him, certainly it was something, certainly it had been coming out of him and it had meaning, a charming meaning, a solid meaning, a struggling meaning, a clear meaning. One whom some were certainly following and some were certainly following him, one whom some were certainly following was one certainly working. One whom some were certainly following was one having something coming out of him something having meaning and this one was certainly working then. This one was working and something was coming then, something was coming out of this one then. This one was one and always there was something coming out of this one and always there had been something coming out of this one. This one had never been one not having something coming out of this one. This one was one having something coming out of this one. This one had been one whom some were following. This one was one whom some were following. This one was being one whom some were following. This one was one who was working. This one was one who was working. This one was one being one having something being coming out of him. This one was one going on having something come out of him. This one was one going on working. This one was one whom some were following. This one was one who was working. This one always had something being coming out of this one. This one was working. This one always had been working. This one was always having something that was coming out of this one that was a solid thing, a charming thing, a lovely thing, a perplexing thing, a disconcerting thing, a simple thing, a clear thing, a complicated thing, an interesting thing, a disturbing thing, a repellant thing, a very pretty thing. This one was one certainly being one having something com-

P I C A S S O

/

1 0 5

ing out of him. This one was one whom some were following. This one was one who was working. This one was one who was working and certainly this one was needing to be working so as to be one being working. This one was one having something coming out of him. This one would be one all his living having something coming out of him. This one was working and then this one was working and this one was needing to be working, not to be one having something coming out of him something having meaning, but was needing to be working so as to be one working. This one was certainly working and working was something this one was certain this one would be doing and this one was doing that thing, this one was working. This one was not one completely working. This one was not ever completely working. This one certainly was not completely working. This one was one having always something being coming out of him, something having completely a real meaning. This one was one whom some were following. This one was one who was working. This one was one who was working and he was one needing this thing needing to be working so as to be one having some way of being one having some way of working. This one was one who was working. This one was one having something come out of him something having meaning. This one was one always having something come out of him and this thing the thing coming out of him always had real meaning. This one was one who was working. This one was one who was almost always working. This one was not one completely working. This one was one not ever completely working. This one was not one working to have anything come out of him. This one did have something having meaning that did come out of him. He always did have something come out of him. He was working, he was not ever completely working. He did have some following. They were always following

1 0 6

\

T E X T S

him. Some were certainly following him. He was one who was working. He was one having something coming out of him something having meaning. He was not ever completely working. ■

FLIRTING

AT

THE

1911

■

BON

MARCHE

Some know very well that their way of living is a sad one. Some know that their way of living is a dreary thing. Some know very well that their way of being living is a tedious one. Some know very well that they are living in a very dull way of living. Some do not know that a way of living is a tedious one. Some do not know that a way of living is a sad one. Some do not know that a way of living is a dreary way of living. Some do not know that one way of living is a dull one. Some live a dull way of living very quickly and they are not then certain that they are living a dull way of living. Some live in a sad way of living and are quicker and quicker and they are certain that they are not living in a sad way of living. Some are certain that they would be living in a dreary way of living if they were not so quickly living. Some are trying to be quick in being living and some of them are very quick then and these are living a very tedious way of living. Some are slow enough and make a sad way of living lose the sadness of that way of living. Some are slow to make a dull way of living fill up to not being such a dull one. Some make themselves a slow one and these then are having a tedious way of living full up with occupa-

F L I R T I N G

A T

T H E

B O N

M A R C H E

/

1 0 7

tion. Some are making themselves slow ones and they are then not such dreary ones in living in a dreary way of living. Some are coming to know very well that they are living in a very dreary way of living. Some are coming to know very well that they are living in a very sad way of living. Some are coming to know very well that they are living in a very tedious way of living. Some are coming to know very well that they are living in a very dull way of living. These go shopping. They go shopping and it always was a thing they were rightly doing. Now everything is changing. Certainly everything is changing. They go shopping, they are being in a different way of living. Everything is changing. Why is everything changing. Everything is changing because the place where they shop is a place where every one is needing to be finding that there are ways of living that are not dreary ones, ways of living that are not sad ones, ways of living that are not dull ones, ways of living that are not tedious ones. Certainly in a way these are existing. Certainly in a way some are finding a way of living which is not a dull one, which is not a tedious one, which is not a sad one, which is not a dreary one. These are then living in a way of living that is very nearly a completely dreary one, a completely sad one, a completely tedious one, a completely dull one. These are then shopping. Shopping is a thing that is to them, that has been to them a thing that is quite interesting, they are then living in a way of living that is a dreary one, that is a dull one, that is a tedious one, that is in a way a sad one. These are then shopping, certainly shopping is in a way interesting, certainly it is not changing the living they are having, the way of living in which they are living. They are shopping and that is not so interesting and then they are changing in their way of living. They are shopping and slowly they are changing, there is a way of living that is coming then to be in them and it is not completely exciting but it is quite exciting,

1 0 8

\

T E X T S

it is pretty nearly completely exciting. They are living the way they are living, that is a way of living that is a tedious way, that is a sad way, that is a dull way, that is a dreary way and they are living in this way and they are shopping and shopping is not to them very exciting and then it is to them completely exciting and the place where they are shopping is completely existing to those living there in the way they are living, those who are living being ones selling where very many are buying, very many men and very many women, very many women, very many men, very many women. Some are knowing very well that the living they are living is dull enough, is dreary enough, is tedious enough, is sad enough, yes is sad enough. Some of such of them are changing, very many of such of them are changing, some of such of them are completely changing, very many of such of them are not ever very completely changing. Some of such of them are pretty nearly changing. Some do not know very well that their way of living is a dull one, is a tedious enough one, is a dreary enough one. Some of such of them are changing, are shopping, some of such of them are shopping and shopping is something, they are shopping and shopping is something but changing is not in being one buying, changing is in being one having some one be one selling something and not selling that thing, changing is then existing, sometimes in some quite some changing, in some quite completely changing, in some some changing, in some not very much changing. ■

F L I R T I N G

A T

1911

T H E

■

B O N

M A R C H E

/

1 0 9

BON

MARCHE

WEATHER

Very pleasant weather we are having. Very pleasant weather I am having. Very nice weather everybody is having. Very nice weather you are having. Very nice eating everybody is having. Very nice eating I am having. Very nice eating they are having. Very nice eating you are having. Very comfortable travelling they are having. Very comfortable travelling you are having. Very comfortable travelling I am having. Very comfortable travelling everybody is having. A very bad season everybody is having. A very bad season pretty nearly everybody has been having. A very bad season they have been having. A very bad season I have been having. A very bad season you have been having. A very bad season you are having. A very bad season they are having. A very bad season almost everybody is having. A very bad season I am having. There are a very great many things everybody is buying. There are a very great many things you are buying. There are a great many things they are buying. There are a great many things I am buying. There are a great many things not any one is buying. There are a great many things I am not buying. There are a great many things you are not buying. There are a great many things some are not buying. There are a great many things a great many are buying. There are a great many things a very great many are buying. There are a great many things a great many are buying very often. There are a great many things a great many are not buying very often. There are a great many things a good many are buying very often. Very many are being living. A very great many are being living. Some are not going to be any bigger than they are and they are going

1 1 0

\

T E X T S

to be different in their proportions. Very many are going to be bigger than they are and are not going to change much in proportions. Very many are not going to be any taller and their proportions will later be like those of their mother. Very many are not going to be any taller and later their proportions will be different they will be like those of their father. Some are not going to be any taller and they are as tall now as their mother and their proportions will not be like those of their mother later when they are older. Some are not going to be any taller and they are as tall now as their father and their proportions will not be like those of their father. Some are later going to be taller, some are later going to be fatter. Some are quite tall, some are quite small, some are quite fat, some are not so fat, some are quite thin, some are not so thin. Some are ones needing to go very often to buy something they are not then buying. Some are ones not needing to go so often to buy something they are not then buying. Some buy something and it is something they might have been buying somewhere else than where they were buying that thing. Some buy something and they certainly would be buying that thing where they were buying that thing. Certainly a very great many are buying something where they would be buying that thing. Certainly a very great many are buying something and they might not have been buying that thing. Certainly a very great many are buying something and they might have been buying that thing in some other place than where they did buy that thing. ■

B O N

1911

M A R C H E

■

W E A T H E R

/

1 1 1

ORTA

OR

ONE

DANCING

(

EXCERPT)

Even if one was one she might be like some other one. She was like one and then was like another one and then was like another one and then was like another one and then was one who was one having been one and being one who was one then, one being like some. Even if she was one and she was one, even if she was one she was changing. She was one and was then like some one. She was one and she had then come to be like some other one. She was then one and she had come then to be like some other one. She was then one and she had come then to be like some other one. She was then one and she had come then to be like a kind of a one. Even if she was one being one, and she was one being one, she was one being one and even if she was one being one she was one who was then being a kind of a one. Even if she was one being one and she was being one being one, even if she was one being one she was one having come to be one of another kind of a one. Even if she was then being one and she was then one being one, even if she was then being the one she was one being, she was one who had come to be one being of another kind of a one. Even if she was one being one and she was one being one, even if she was one being the one she was one being she was then another kind of a one, she was then being another kind of a one. Even if she was one being one, even if she was one being one and being that one in being one, even if she was being the one she was being in being that one, even if she was being that one she was being a kind of a one she was come to be of a kind of a one, she was coming to be quite of a kind of a one.

1 1 2

\

T E X T S

Even if she was one being the one she was being, even if she was being that one the one she was being, the one she had been being, even if she was being that one, that one she was being, even if in being that one the one she was being she was being that one, being the one she was being, even if she was being the one she was being, even if she was being that one, even if she was being that one she was one coming to be of a kind of a one, coming to be and being of a kind of a one, quite coming to be of a kind of a one, of another kind of a one, of that kind of a one. She was one being one. She was one having been that one. She was one going on being that one. She was one being one. She was one being of one kind of a one. She was one being that kind of a one. She was one being another kind of a one. She was one being another kind of a one. She was one being another kind of a one. She was one being another kind of a one. She was one being one. She was one going on being that one. She was one being that one. She was one being one. She was one always being that one. She was one always having being that one. She was one always going on being that one. She was one being one. She was one being one and that thing, being that one was a thing that had come to be something. She was one being one and that thing, being that one was a thing that did then go on being existing. She was one being that one. She was being one. She was one believing that thing, believing being the one she was being. She was one always believing that thing, always believing being the one she was being. She was one who had been believing being the one she was being. She had been one believing being the one she was being. She is believing being the one she is believing. She has been believing this thing. She always has been, she always is believing being the one she is being.

O R T A

O R

O N E

D A N C I N G

/

1 1 3

She is one doing that thing, doing believing being the one she is being. She is one being the one she is being. She is one being one. She is one being that one. She is one being the one she is being. She is one doing something. She is one being the one she is being. She is one being that one. In doing something that one is being the one doing that thing. In doing something, the one doing the thing is the one being one doing that thing. This one is one doing something. This one is being the one doing the thing. That one is doing the thing. That one has been doing the thing. That one is dancing. Meaning that thing, meaning being the one doing that thing is something the one doing that thing is doing. Meaning doing dancing is the thing this one is doing. This one is doing dancing. This one is the one meaning to be doing that thing meaning to be doing dancing. This one is one having been doing dancing. This one is one doing dancing. This one is one. This one is one doing that thing. This one is one doing dancing. This one is one having been meaning to be doing dancing. This one is one meaning to be doing dancing. This one being one meaning to be doing dancing, this one being one dancing, this one is one, this one is being that one. This one is one. This one is one being one. This one is being one and has been one being one having a kind of a way of being one believing anything, this one is being one and has been one being one having a kind of way of meaning anything. This one is one being one having a way of being one thinking of anything. This one is one having a kind of way of meaning everything. This one is one being that one. This one is one and is that one and is one having had and having a way of being one believing something and meaning something and dancing. This is one being one having a way of dancing. This is one being that one.

1 1 4

\

T E X T S

This is one being one and having been one who is one being one showing being that one in being one changing and being that one, that kind of a one, the one that is the kind of a one that is meaning and believing the way this one is meaning and believing. This one is not changing. This one is changing, that is to say this one is looking like different ones of them who are ones who are believing and feeling and meaning the way this one is meaning and feeling and believing. This one is one who has been, who is meaning and feeling and believing. This one is one who is meaning. This one is one who has been meaning. This one is one who has a way of meaning. This one is one who has been one who is one meaning in the kind of way that some looking like this one are meaning. This one has a way of believing, this one has a way of feeling. This one has a way of feeling, this one has a way of believing and that is a way of feeling, and that is a way of believing that some have who sometimes look very much like this one looks some of the time. This one is one being one. This one is one dancing. This one has a way of believing and feeling and meaning. This one has a way of feeling, believing and meaning in dancing. Being one having meaning, being one believing, being one dancing, being that one is what this one is one doing. This one is one who has meaning, this one is one who is dancing and is one having meaning in that thing in dancing. This one is one meaning to be having meaning in dancing. This one is one believing in having meaning. This one is one thinking in believing in having meaning. This one is the one being dancing. This one is the one thinking in believing in dancing having meaning. This one is one believing in thinking. This one is one thinking in dancing having meaning. This one is one believing in dancing having meaning. This one is one dancing. This one is one being that one. This one is one being in being one

O R T A

O R

O N E

D A N C I N G

/

1 1 5

being dancing. This one is one being in being one who is dancing. This one is one being one. This one is one being in being one. This one is one changing. This one is one who has been, who always has been one being living in being that one. This one was one quite living in being that one. This one is one finishing living in being that one. This one is that one. This one has been that one. This one is one having been in the beginning been that one. This one has been going on being that one. This one is quite finishing being living in being that one. This one is one who has been one being dancing. This one has been one beginning in being one being dancing. This one has been going on being living in being one being dancing. This one has been ending in being one going to be dancing. This one is finishing living in being one dancing. This one is one not changing. This one is one coming to be one completely believing in thinking. This one is one beginning in being one coming to be believing. This one is going on in being one believing in meaning. This one is one going on thinking in believing in meaning. This one is going on believing in thinking in having meaning. This one is going on in believing, this one is one going on in believing in thinking, this one is one going on in believing in having meaning. This one is one going on. This one is one finishing in thinking in believing having meaning in dancing. This one is finishing in being one thinking in believing in meaning. This one is finishing in believing in thinking. This one is finishing in believing in having meaning. This one is finishing in believing. This one is finishing in thinking in believing. This one is finishing in believing. This one is one who is that one, who is one dancing, who is one being one doing that thing, who is one being one believing in meaning. This one is one being one believing in thinking having meaning. This one is one being one believing that meaning is existing. This one

1 1 6

\

T E X T S

is one meaning to be thinking in believing. This one is one believing in meaning. She was not needing to be one believing in meaning being existing. She was not one needing this thing, needing being such a one. Needing being such a one, needing that meaning is existing is something, needing that meaning is existing is something that some one being one is having. Very many being one are having that thing, are having that needing of meaning being existing. Very many are being one having it that being that one they are the one the one that is needing that meaning is existing. This one is one being one having it that being that one she is one the one needing that meaning is existing. She was one beginning being living and there were then others who were ones doing that thing, being living. Her mother was being living and was living then with four children. The mother was one having been married to some one and she was one then not needing that thing enough not needing that thing so that the one to whom she had been married could then marry another one. She was living then with four children and all of them all the four children were being living then, were quite commencing then being ones being living. There were four children. The oldest one was a son, the second one was not a son, the third one was this one, the fourth one was a boy and all four of them were living then and the mother was living then and all five of them were living together then. The mother came to be one believing that meaning was something that could be exciting to any one. She had come to be one knowing that meaning was completely interesting to her youngest one and to the one who was a little older than her youngest one. She had come to be forgetting that her oldest son had not any meaning, was not remembering that he was the oldest one, was not forgetting that he was being one having been in the family living. She had come to be re-

O R T A

O R

O N E

D A N C I N G

/

1 1 7

membering that her daughter, the one who had not been a son was one who could be supporting that meaning is existing, could be quite supporting some. She went on then being living and she was finishing in being one fading in meaning, fading and meaning and greeting meaning and fading and being then anything being faded and having meaning. She was then one not completely fading, she was then knowing that every one could be greeting meaning being existing. She was then still not yet being come to be a dead one. She was fading then and asking any one to be one greeting meaning being existing. She was asking any one to do this thing. She was fading enough then. She was a dead one sometime. She was not living with any children then when she was greeting meaning being existing. She was then not living with any child she had been having. All four were being living then. All four of them were being living and any one of them might be one being dancing. Any one of the four of them might then be one being dancing. The oldest one of them was not then being one dancing. He was not doing that thing, he was not dancing. The second one was one not then dancing, she was then completely knowing everything about all dancing. She was then being one living in dancing being existing. She was then living in this thing. The third one was one dancing. She was quite doing that thing quite dancing. She was one dancing. The fourth was one who in a way was one dancing. He was in a way being one doing that thing. He was one in a way completely meaning that thing completely meaning being one being dancing. He was in a way then dancing. He was one being one asking and answering in dancing being asking. He was one asking in dancing being existing. He was one answering in dancing being existing. He was one in a way dancing that is he was one coming to be one asking and answering. He was one asking. Dancing was existing. He was one answering.

1 1 8

\

T E X T S

Dancing was existing. He was one asking and answering. He was one meaning that thing meaning that dancing had come to be existing. He was one not dancing. He certainly was not dancing. Any one could be one dancing. He was not then dancing. He was then meaning the thing meaning that something is existing and that something is one thing. In a way he was doing nothing that was not something that was meaning something had been existing, that dancing had been existing. He could be one dancing. Dancing was existing. She, Orta Davray, was one being of a kind of a one. That is to say she was one looking like some. She was changing. In the beginning she was one and then she was one having the same look as some other one and that one is of a kind of a one. Then she was changing and she was looking as another one was looking and that one was of a kind of a one. Then she was changing and she was looking as another one was looking and that one was of a kind of one. Then she was changing and she was looking like another one who was of a kind of a one. All four of them were quite different kinds of ones all four whom she was resembling. All four were in a way of a kind of a one. All four could be ones being ones needing believing that meaning is existing. All four could be ones expecting something from such thing. All four of them could be ones expecting something in meaning being existing. They were quite different ones these four of them. She was one beginning being living and then she was one being that one being dancing. She was beginning then being one being existing. She was then being one and every one in her family living was needing then needing being completing that thing, completing her being one being dancing. She was then beginning being living. She was then one being like some and she was then one being existing, being one who was a young one and family living was being existing and she was then one completing that thing completing family living in being one

O R T A

O R

O N E

D A N C I N G

/

1 1 9

being dancing and being the one each one was then completing as being one being dancing. She was being then quite like some. She was then feeling anything in any one being one completing her being one being dancing. She was then being one feeling anything in being one completing the family living in being one being dancing. She was then being one feeling anything in being one needing being that one, the one she was then. She was then an older one, she was then like some. She was then dancing. She was then creating family living being existing. She was then completely creating that thing. She was then one of them one of all of them who were all ones who had been ones completing her being one being dancing. She was then one being dancing. She was then being one exceeding in being that one. She was then being one who was being dominated by being one dominating anything. She was dancing then. She was exceeding everything. She was one dancing. She was one who would be contradicting any one if she had not been one exceeding in affirming everything. She was one not contradicting every one. She was one contradicting. She could contradict any one. She was dancing. She was not contradicting she was dancing. She was exceedingly dancing. She was not contradicting every one. She was one dancing. She was one meaning something in being one not contradicting every one. She was one meaning something in being one contradicting any one. She was one being one meaning in being one not contradicting any one. She was one having meaning in being one who was contradicting any one. She was one having meaning in being one who was not contradicting every one. She was one having meaning in dancing. She was one having meaning in exceeding in being the one being one dancing. She was having meaning in being that one the one con-

1 2 0

\

T E X T S

tradicting every one. She was having meaning in being that one the one not contradicting every one. She was having meaning in being the one contradicting any one. She was having meaning in being the one not contradicting any one. Contradicting every one was existing. She was affirming dancing. She was exceeding in not contradicting every one. She was exceeding in not contradicting any one. Dancing was what she was doing then. She was doing dancing. She was doing dancing and she was that one she was the one dancing. She was doing dancing and she was then one having meaning in being that one. She was then one being that one, she was then one being dancing, she was then one having meaning, she was then one dancing in being that one, she was then one being one dancing in being that one the one having meaning. She was dancing then. She was being that one. She was meaning that thing quite meaning being that one. She was dancing. She was being that one. She was dancing. She was one needing meaning being existing. She was not then showing needing meaning being existing. Not anything then was showing anything in her being one then needing that meaning is existing. She was thinking then. She was not then meaning everything in thinking. She was thinking then. She was dancing. She was thinking then and dancing had been existing. She was dancing then, she was thinking then, she was meaning everything, she was completely then being dancing, she was exceeding then exceeding in being that one the one then dancing. She was dancing then. She certainly was thinking then. She had been thinking some. She was meaning everything then. She was completely then meaning everything then and thinking then thinking that meaning is existing and she was dancing then, quite dancing then. She was dancing then, she was meaning that thing, meaning dancing, she

O R T A

O R

O N E

D A N C I N G

/

1 2 1

was dancing then, she was meaning thinking then, she was thinking then, she was meaning everything, she was dancing. She went on then dancing. She was dancing again and again. She went on then being one being dancing. She went on then being that one. She went on then being one being dancing. She went on then being that one being that one being dancing. She went on dancing. She was then one looking like some one. She was then one looking like some. She was then one looking like some one who was one needing to be thinking in meaning being existing. She was then one looking like some one and that one was one living in believing in thinking in meaning being existing. She was then one looking like some one and that one was one moving in every direction in believing meaning is existing. She was then one looking like one and that one was straining in being one thinking in believing that meaning is existing. She was looking like this one and she was dancing then, she was quite dancing then. She was dancing then she was being strained then quite strained then by meaning being existing. She was strained then quite strained then in believing in thinking in meaning being existing. She was quite strained then. She was dancing then. She was quite moving in every direction in meaning being existing. She was dancing, she was answering, she was carelessly domineering, she was domineering, she was dancing, she was answering. She was dancing, she was that one then, the one dancing and answering, the one domineering and answering, the one having meaning in believing in thinking in meaning having the condition of being in a direction. She was one dancing she was one answering. She was that one the one dancing. She was that one the one dancing, the one answering. She was that one the one answering and dancing. She was that one the one dancing and answering. She was worn some then, she

1 2 2

\

T E X T S

was not quite at all worn then, she was dancing then, she was answering then, she was moving in every direction in being one being worn some then. She was believing in thinking having meaning in meaning being existing. She was thinking, she was believing, she was dancing, she was meaning. She was thinking, she was believing in thinking, she was thinking in believing, she was believing in dancing, she was thinking in believing in dancing. She was thinking in believing in dancing having meaning. She was believing in thinking in dancing having meaning. She was dancing in having meaning, she was having meaning in dancing, she was dancing, she was believing, she was thinking, she was answering, she was domineering, she was going on answering, she was worn with believing, she was careless in domineering, she was energetic in answering, she was believing in going in any direction, she went on in changing, she was simple in not going on questioning, she was moving changing, she was changing in connecting, she was seeing feeling in connecting dancing, she was feeling in careless domineering, she was needing dancing in believing. She would be dancing in being that one the one having been dancing. She was that one the one having been dancing. She was dancing. She was dancing in being that one the one dancing. She was dancing. She was dancing in being that one believing that thinking in having meaning in meaning being existing. She was dancing in this thing. She was dancing. She was dancing in moving in every direction being something having meaning. She was dancing in this thing. She was dancing. She was dancing, she was using then being one believing in meaning being existing. She was dancing in being one having feeling of anything being cheering. She was dancing in feeling that something had been coming. She was dancing in feeling that something having been coming is having meaning. She was dancing in feel-

O R T A

O R

O N E

D A N C I N G

/

1 2 3

ing that feeling has a meaning. She was dancing in feeling that any one coming to be one being asked something would be one answering that meaning is existing. She was one dancing in feeling certain that some doing something are ones being certain that meaning is existing. She was one dancing in being one being that one being the one dancing then. ■

1 2 4

1912

\

■

T E X T S

SUSIE

ASADO

Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea. Susie Asado. Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea. Susie Asado. Susie Asado which is a told tray sure. A lean on the shoe this means slips slips hers. When the ancient light grey is clean it is yellow, it is a silver seller. This is a please this is a please there are the saids to jelly. These are the wets these say the sets to leave a crown to Incy. Incy is short for incubus. A pot. A pot is a beginning of a rare bit of trees. Trees tremble, the old vats are in bobbles, bobbles which shade and shove and render clean, render clean must. Drink pups. Drink pups drink pups lease a sash hold, see it shine and a bobolink has pins. It shows a nail. What is a nail. A nail is unison. Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea. ■

S U S I E

1912

■

A S A D O

/

1 2 5

TENDER

B U T T O N S:

OBJECTS,

FOOD

OBJECTS

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. Glazed Glitter. Nickel, what is nickel, it is originally rid of a cover. The change in that is that red weakens an hour. The change has come. There is no search. But there is, there is that hope and that interpretation and sometime, surely anys is unwelcome, sometime there is breath and there will be a sinecure and charming very charming is that clean and cleansing. Certainly glittering is handsome and convincing. There is no gratitude in mercy and in medicine. There can be breakages in Japanese. That is no programme. That is no color chosen. It was chosen yesterday, that showed spitting and perhaps washing and polishing. It certainly showed no obligation and perhaps if borrowing is not natural there is some use in giving. A Substance in a Cushion. The change of color, is likely and a difference a very little difference is prepared. Sugar is not a vegetable. Callous is something that hardening leaves behind what will be soft if there is a genuine interest in there being present as many girls as men. Does this change. It shows that dirt is clean when there is a volume. A cushion has that cover. Supposing you do not like to change, sup-

1 2 6

\

T E X T S

posing it is very clear that there is no change in appearance, supposing that there is regularity and a costume is that any the worse than an oyster and an exchange. Come to season that is there any extreme use in feather and cotton. Is there not much more joy in a table and more chairs and very likely roundness and a place to put them. A circle of fine card board and a chance to see a tassel. What is the use of a violent kind of delightfulness if there is no pleasure in not getting tired of it. The question does not come before there is a quotation. In any kind of place there is a top to covering and it is a pleasure at any rate there is some venturing in refusing to believe nonsense. It shows what use there is in a whole piece if one uses it and it is extreme and very likely the little things could be dearer but in any case there is a bargain and if there is the best thing to do is to take it away and wear it and then be reckless be reckless and resolved on returning gratitude. Light blue and the same red with purple makes a change. It shows that there is no mistake. Any pink shows that and very likely it is reasonable. Very likely there should not be a finer fancy present. Some increase means a calamity and this is the best preparation for three and more being together. A little calm is so ordinary and in any case there is sweetness and some of that. A seal and matches and a swan and ivy and a suit. A closet, a closet does not connect under the bed. The band if it is white and black, the band has a green string. A sight a whole sight and a little groan grinding makes a trimming such a sweet singing trimming and a red thing not a round thing but a white thing, a red thing and a white thing. The disgrace is not in carelessness nor even in sewing it comes out out of the way. What is the sash like. The sash is not like anything mustard it is not

T E N D E R

B U T T O N S

/

1 2 7

like a same thing that has stripes, it is not even more hurt than that, it has a little top. A Box. Out of kindness comes redness and out of rudeness comes rapid same question, out of an eye comes research, out of selection comes painful cattle. So then the order is that a white way of being round is something suggesting a pin and is it disappointing, it is not, it is so rudimentary to be analysed and see a fine substance strangely, it is so earnest to have a green point not to red but to point again. A Piece of Coffee. More of double. A place in no new table. A single image is not splendor. Dirty is yellow. A sign of more in not mentioned. A piece of coffee is not a detainer. The resemblance to yellow is dirtier and distincter. The clean mixture is whiter and not coal color, never more coal color than altogether. The sight of a reason, the same sight slighter, the sight of a simpler negative answer, the same sore sounder, the intention to wishing, the same splendor, the same furniture. The time to show a message is when too late and later there is no hanging in a blight. A not torn rose-wood color. If it is not dangerous then a pleasure and more than any other if it is cheap is not cheaper. The amusing side is that the sooner there are no fewer the more certain is the necessity dwindled. Supposing that the case contained rose-wood and a color. Supposing that there was no reason for a distress and more likely for a number, supposing that there was no astonishment, it is not necessary to mingle astonishment.

1 2 8

\

T E X T S

The settling of stationing cleaning is one way not to shatter scatter and scattering. The one way to use custom is to use soap and silk for cleaning. The one way to see cotton is to have a design concentrating the illusion and the illustration. The perfect way is to accustom the thing to have a lining and the shape of a ribbon and to be solid, quite solid in standing and to use heaviness in morning. It is light enough in that. It has that shape nicely. Very nicely may not be exaggerating. Very strongly may be sincerely fainting. May be strangely flattering. May not be strange in everything. May not be strange to. Dirt and Not Copper. Dirt and not copper makes a color darker. It makes the shape so heavy and makes no melody harder. It makes mercy and relaxation and even a strength to spread a table fuller. There are more places not empty. They see cover. Nothing Elegant. A charm a single charm is doubtful. If the red is rose and there is a gate surrounding it, if inside is let in and there places change then certainly something is upright. It is earnest. Mildred’s Umbrella. A cause and no curve, a cause and loud enough, a cause and extra a loud clash and an extra wagon, a sign of extra, a sac a small sac and an established color and cunning, a slender grey and no ribbon, this means a loss a great loss a restitution. A Method of a Cloak. A single climb to a line, a straight exchange to a cane, a desperate adventure and courage and a clock, all this which is a system, which

T E N D E R

B U T T O N S

/

1 2 9

has feeling, which has resignation and success, all makes an attractive black silver. A Red Stamp. If lilies are lily white if they exhaust noise and distance and even dust, if they dusty will dirt a surface that has no extreme grace, if they do this and it is not necessary it is not at all necessary if they do this they need a catalogue. A Box. A large box is handily made of what is necessary to replace any substance. Suppose an example is necessary, the plainer it is made the more reason there is for some outward recognition that there is a result. A box is made sometimes and them to see to see to it neatly and to have the holes stopped up makes it necessary to use paper. A custom which is necessary when a box is used and taken is that a large part of the time there are three which have different connections. The one is on the table. The two are on the table. The three are on the table. The one, one is the same length as is shown by the cover being longer. The other is different there is more cover that shows it. The other is different and that makes the corners have the same shade the eight are in singular arrangement to make four necessary. Lax, to have corners, to be lighter than some weight, to indicate a wedding journey, to last brown and not curious, to be wealthy, cigarettes are established by length and by doubling. Left open, to be left pounded, to be left closed, to be circulating in summer and winter, and sick color that is grey that is not dusty and red shows, to be sure cigarettes do measure an empty length sooner than a choice in color.

1 3 0

\

T E X T S

Winged, to be winged means that white is yellow and pieces pieces that are brown are dust color if dust is washed off, then it is choice that is to say it is fitting cigarettes sooner than paper. An increase why is an increase idle, why is silver cloister, why is the spark brighter, if it is brighter is there any result, hardly more than ever. A Plate. An occasion for a plate, an occasional resource is in buying and how soon does washing enable a selection of the same thing neater. If the party is small a clever song is in order. Plates and a dinner set of colored china. Pack together a string and enough with it to protect the center, cause a considerable haste and gather more as it is cooling, collect more trembling and not any even trembling, cause a whole thing to be a church. A sad size a size that is not sad is blue as every bit of blue is precocious. A kind of green a game in green and nothing flat nothing quite flat and more round, nothing a particular color strangely, nothing breaking the losing of no little piece. A splendid address a really splendid address is not shown by giving a flower freely, it is not shown by a mark or by wetting. Cut cut in white, cut in white so lately. Cut more than any other and show it. Show it in the stem and in starting and in evening coming complication. A lamp is not the only sign of glass. The lamp and the cake are not the only sign of stone. The lamp and the cake and the cover are not the only necessity altogether. A plan a hearty plan, a compressed disease and no coffee, not even a card or a change to incline each way, a plan that has that excess and that break is the one that shows filling.

T E N D E R

B U T T O N S

/

1 3 1

A Seltzer Bottle. Any neglect of many particles to a cracking, any neglect of this makes around it what is lead in color and certainly discolor in silver. The use of this is manifold. Supposing a certain time selected is assured, suppose it is even necessary, suppose no other extract is permitted and no more handling is needed, suppose the rest of the message is mixed with a very long slender needle and even if it could be any black border, supposing all this altogether made a dress and suppose it was actual, suppose the mean way to state it was occasional, if you suppose this in August and even more melodiously, if you suppose this even in the necessary incident of there certainly being no middle in summer and winter, suppose this and an elegant settlement a very elegant settlement is more than of consequence, it is not final and sufficient and substituted. This which was so kindly a present was constant. A Long Dress. What is the current that makes machinery, that makes it crackle, what is the current that presents a long line and a necessary waist. What is this current. What is the wind, what is it. Where is the serene length, it is there and a dark place is not a dark place, only a white and red are black, only a yellow and green are blue, a pink is scarlet, a bow is every color. A line distinguishes it. A line just distinguishes it. A Red Hat. A dark grey, a very dark grey, a quite dark grey is monstrous ordinarily, it is so monstrous because there is no red in it. If red is in everything it is not necessary. Is that not an argument for any use of it and

1 3 2

\

T E X T S

even so is there any place that is better, is there any place that has so much stretched out. A Blue Coat. A blue coat is guided guided away, guided and guided away, that is the particular color that is used for that length and not any width not even more than a shadow. A Piano. If the speed is open, if the color is careless, if the event is overtaken, if the selection of a strong scent is not awkward, if the button holder is held by all the waving color and there is no color, not any color. If there is no dirt in a pin and there can be none scarcely, if there is not then the place is the same as up standing. This is no dark custom and it even is not acted in any such a way that a restraint is not spread. That is spread, it shuts and it lifts and awkwardly not awkwardly the center is in standing. A Chair. A widow in a wise veil and more garments shows that shadows are even. It addresses no more, it shadows the stage and learning. A regular arrangement, the severest and the most preserved is that which has the arrangement not more than always authorised. A suitable establishment, well housed, practical, patient and staring, a suitable bedding, very suitable and not more particularly than complaining, anything suitable is so necessary. A fact is that when the direction is just like that, no more, longer, sudden and at the same time not any sofa, the main action is that without a blaming there is no custody.

T E N D E R

B U T T O N S

/

1 3 3

Practice measurement, practice the sign that means that really means a necessary betrayal, in showing that there is wearing. Hope, what is a spectacle, a spectacle is the resemblance between the circular side place and nothing else, nothing else. To choose it is ended, it is actual and more than that it has it certainly has the same treat, and a seat all that is practiced and more easily much more easily ordinarily. Pick a barn, a whole barn, and bend more slender accents than have ever been necessary, shine in the darkness necessarily. Actually not aching, actually not aching, a stubborn bloom is so artificial and even more than that, it is a spectacle, it is a binding accident, it is animosity and accentuation. If the chance to dirty diminishing is necessary, if it is why is there is no complexion, why is there no rubbing, why is there no special protection. A Frightful Release. A bag which was left and not only taken but turned away was not found.The place was shown to be very like the last time. A piece was not exchanged, not a bit of it, a piece was left over. The rest was mismanaged. A Purse. A purse was not green, it was not straw color, it was hardly seen and it has a use a long use and the chain, the chain was never missing, it was not misplaced, it showed that it was open, that is all that it showed. A Mounted Umbrella. What was the use of not leaving it there where it would hang what was the use if there was no chance of ever seeing it come there and show that it was handsome and right in the way it showed it. The lesson is

1 3 4

\

T E X T S

to learn that it does show it, that it shows it and that nothing, that there is nothing, that there is no more to do about it and just so much more is there plenty of reason for making an exchange. A Cloth. Enough cloth is plenty and more, more is almost enough for that and besides if there is no more spreading is there plenty of room for it. Any occasion shows the best way. More. An elegant use of foliage and grace and a little piece of white cloth and oil. Wondering so winningly in several kinds of oceans is the reason that makes red so regular and enthusiastic. The reason that there is more snips are the same shining very colored rid of no round color. A New Cup and Saucer. Enthusiastically hurting a clouded yellow bud and saucer, enthusiastically so is the bite in the ribbon. Objects. Within, within the cut and slender joint alone, with sudden equals and no more than three, two in the center make two one side. If the elbow is long and it is filled so then the best example is all together. The kind of show is made by squeezing. Eye Glasses. A color in shaving, a saloon is well placed in the center of an alley.

T E N D E R

B U T T O N S

/

1 3 5

A Cutlet. A blind agitation is manly and uttermost. Careless Water. No cup is broken in more places and mended, that is to say a plate is broken and mending does do that it shows that culture is japanese. It shows the whole element of angels and orders. It does more to choosing and it does more to that ministering counting. It does, it does change in more water. Supposing a single piece is a hair supposing more of them are orderly, does that show that strength, does that show that joint, does that show that balloon famously. Does it. A Paper. A courteous occasion makes a paper show no such occasion and this makes readiness and eyesight and likeness and a stool. A Drawing. The meaning of this is entirely and best to say the mark, best to say it best to show sudden places, best to make bitter, best to make the length tall and nothing broader, anything between the half. Water Raining. Water astonishing and difficult altogether makes a meadow and a stroke. Cold Climate. A season in yellow sold extra strings makes lying places.

1 3 6

\

T E X T S

Malachite. The sudden spoon is the same in no size. The sudden spoon is the wound in the decision. An Umbrella. Coloring high means that the strange reason is in front not more in front behind. Not more in front in peace of the dot. A Petticoat. A light white, a disgrace, an ink spot, a rosy charm. A waist. A star glide, a single frantic sullenness, a single financial grass greediness. Object that is in wood. Hold the pine, hold the dark, hold in the rush, make the bottom. A piece of crystal. A change, in a change that is remarkable there is no reason to say that there was a time. A woolen object gilded. A country climb is the best disgrace, a couple of practices any of them in order is so left. A Time to Eat. A pleasant simple habitual and tyrannical and authorised and educated and resumed and articulate separation. This is not tardy. A Little Bit of a Tumbler. A shining indication of yellow consists in there having been more of the same color than could have been expected when all four were bought. This was the hope which made the six and seven have no use for any more places and this necessarily spread into nothing. Spread into nothing.

T E N D E R

B U T T O N S

/

1 3 7

A Fire. What was the use of a whole time to send and not send if there was to be the kind of thing that made that come in. A letter was nicely sent. A Handkerchief. A winning of all the blessings, a sample not a sample because there is no worry. Red Roses. A cool red rose and a pink cut pink, a collapse and a sold hole, a little less hot. In Between. In between a place and candy is a narrow foot path that shows more mounting than anything, so much really that a calling meaning a bolster measured a whole thing with that. A virgin a whole virgin is judged made and so between curves and outlines and real seasons and more out glasses and a perfectly unprecedented arrangement between old ladies and mild colds there is no satin wood shining. Colored Hats. Colored hats are necessary to show that curls are worn by an addition of blank spaces, this makes the difference between single lines and broad stomachs, the least thing is lightening, the least thing means a little flower and a big delay a big delay that makes more nurses than little women really little women. So clean is a light that nearly all of it shows pearls and little ways. A large hat is tall and me and all custard whole.

1 3 8

\

T E X T S

A Feather. A feather is trimmed, it is trimmed by the light and the bug and the post, it is trimmed by little leaning and by all sorts of mounted reserves and loud volumes. It is surely cohesive. A Brown. A brown which is not liquid not more so is relaxed and yet there is a change, a news is pressing. A Little Called Pauline. A little called anything shows shudders. Come and say what prints all day. A whole few watermelon. There is no pope. No cut in pennies and little dressing and choose wide soles and little spats really little spices. A little lace makes boils. This is not true. Gracious of gracious and a stamp a blue green white bow a blue green lean, lean on the top. If it is absurd then it is leadish and nearly set in where there is a tight head. A peaceful life to arise her, noon and moon and moon. A letter a cold sleeve a blanket a shaving house and nearly the best and regular window. Nearer in fairy sea, nearer and farther, show white has lime in sight, show a stitch of ten. Count, count more so that thicker and thicker is leaning. I hope she has her cow. Bidding a wedding, widening received treading, little leading, mention nothing. Cough out cough out in the leather and really feather it is not for. Please could, please could, jam it not plus more sit in when.

T E N D E R

B U T T O N S

/

1 3 9

A Sound. Elephant beaten with candy and little pops and chews all bolts and reckless reckless rats, this is this. A Table. A table means does it not my dear it means a whole steadiness. Is it likely that a change. A tale means more than a glass even a looking glass is tall. A table means necessary places and a revision a revision of a little thing it means it does mean that there has been a stand, a stand where it did shake. Shoes. To be a wall with a damper a stream of pounding way and nearly enough choice makes a steady midnight. It is pus. A shallow hole rose on red, a shallow hole in and in this makes ale less. It shows shine. A Dog. A little monkey goes like a donkey that means to say that means to say that more sighs last goes. Leave with it. A little monkey goes like a donkey. A White Hunter. A white hunter is nearly crazy. A Leave. In the middle of a tiny spot and nearly bare there is a nice thing to say that wrist is leading. Wrist is leading.

1 4 0

\

T E X T S

Suppose an Eyes. Suppose it is within a gate which open is open at the hour of closing summer that is to say it is so. All the seats are needing blackening. A white dress is in sign. A soldier a real soldier has a worn lace a worn lace of different sizes that is to say if he can read, if he can read he is a size to show shutting up twenty-four. Go red go red, laugh white. Suppose a collapse in rubbed purr, in rubbed purr get. Little sales ladies little sales ladies little saddles of mutton. Little sales of leather and such beautiful beautiful, beautiful beautiful. A Shawl. A shawl is a hat and hurt and a red balloon and an under coat and a sizer a sizer of talk. A shawl is a wedding, a piece of wax a little build. A shawl. Pick a ticket, pick it in strange steps and with hollows. There is hollow hollow belt, a belt is a shawl. A plate that has a little bobble, all of them, any so. Please a round it is ticket. It was a mistake to state that a laugh and a lip and a laid climb and a depot and a cultivator and little choosing is a point it. Book. Book was there, it was there. Book was there. Stop it, stop it, it was a cleaner, a wet cleaner and it was not where it was wet, it was not high, it was directly placed back, not back again, back, it was returned, it was needless, it put a bank, a bank when, a bank care. Suppose a man a realistic expression of resolute reliability suggests pleasing itself white all white and no head does that mean soap. It does

T E N D E R

B U T T O N S

/

1 4 1

not so. It means kind wavers and little chance to beside beside rest. A plain. Suppose ear rings, that is one way to breed, breed that. Oh chance to say, oh nice old pole. Next best and nearest a pillar. Chest not valuable, be papered. Cover up cover up the two with a little piece of string and hope rose and green, green. Please a plate, put a match to the seam and really then really then, really then it is a remark that joins many many lead games. It is a sister and sister and a flower and a flower and a dog and a colored sky a sky colored grey and nearly that nearly that let. 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 This 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.

FOOD

studies in description. Roastbeef Mutton Breakfast Sugar Cranberries Milk Eggs Apple Tails Lunch Cups Rhubarb Single Fish Cake Custard

1 4 2

\

T E X T S

Potatoes Asparagus Butter End of Summer Sausages Celery Veal Vegetable Cooking Chicken Pastry Cream Cucumber Dinner Dining Eating Salad Sauce Salmon Orange Cocoa and Clear Soup and Oranges and Oat-meal Salad Dressing and an Artichoke A Center in a Table. Roastbeef. In the inside there is sleeping, in the outside there is reddening, in the morning there is meaning, in the evening there is feeling. In the evening there is feeling. In feeling anything is resting, in feeling anything is mounting, in feeling there is resignation, in feeling there is recognition, in feeling there is recurrence and entirely mistaken there is pinching. All the standards have steamers and all the curtains have bed linen and all the yellow has discrimination and all the circle has circling. This makes sand. Very well. Certainly the length is thinner and the rest, the round rest has a longer summer. To shine, why not shine, to shine, to station, to enlarge, to hurry the measure all this means nothing if there is singing, if there is singing then there is the resumption. The change the dirt, not to change dirt means that there is no beefsteak and not to have that is no obstruction, it is so easy to exchange meaning, it is so easy to see the difference. The difference is that a pliant resource is not entangled with thickness and it does not mean that thickness shows such cutting, it does mean that a meadow is useful and a cow absurd. It does not mean that there are tears, it does not mean that exudation is cumbersome, it means no more than a memory, a choice and a reestablishment, it means more than any escape from a surrounding extra. All the time that there is use there is use and any time there is a surface there is a surface, and every time there is an exception there is an exception and every time there is a division there is

T E N D E R

B U T T O N S

/

1 4 3

a dividing. Any time there is a surface there is a surface and every time there is a suggestion there is a suggestion and every time there is silence there is silence and every time that is languid there is that there then and not oftener, not always, not particular, tender and changing and external and central and surrounded and singular and simple and the same and the surface and the circle and the shine and the succor and the white and the same and the better and the red and the same and the center and the yellow and the tender and the better, and altogether. Considering the circumstances there is no occasion for a reduction, considering that there is no pealing there is no occasion for an obligation, considering that there is no outrage there is no necessity for any reparation, considering that there is no particle sodden there is no occasion for deliberation. Considering everything and which way the turn is tending, considering everything why is there no restraint, considering everything what makes the place settle and the plate distinguish some specialties. The whole thing is not understood and this is not strange considering that there is no education, this is not strange because having that certainly does show the difference in cutting, it shows that when there is turning there is no distress. In kind, in a control, in a period, in the alteration of pigeons, in kind cuts and thick and thin spaces, in kind ham and different colors, the length of leaning a strong thing outside not to make a sound but to suggest a crust, the principal taste is when there is a whole chance to be reasonable, this does not mean that there is overtaking, this means nothing precious, this means clearly that the chance to exercise is a social success. So then the sound is not obtrusive. Suppose it is obtrusive suppose it is. What is certainly the desertion is not a reduced description, a description is not a birthday. Lovely snipe and tender turn, excellent vapor and slender butter, all the splinter and the trunk, all the poisonous darkning drunk, all

1 4 4

\

T E X T S

the joy in weak success, all the joyful tenderness, all the section and the tea, all the stouter symmetry. Around the size that is small, inside the stern that is the middle, besides the remains that are praying, inside the between that is turning, all the region is measuring and melting is exaggerating. Rectangular ribbon does not mean that there is no eruption it means that if there is no place to hold there is no place to spread. Kindness is not earnest, it is not assiduous it is not revered. Room to comb chickens and features and ripe purple, room to curve single plates and large sets and second silver, room to send everything away, room to save heat and distemper, room to search a light that is simpler, all room has no shadow. There is no use there is no use at all in smell, in taste, in teeth, in toast, in anything, there is no use at all and the respect is mutual. Why should that which is uneven, that which is resumed, that which is tolerable why should all this resemble a smell, a thing is there, it whistles, it is not narrower, why is there no obligation to stay away and yet courage, courage is everywhere and the best remains to stay. If there could be that which is contained in that which is felt there would be a chair where there are chairs and there would be no more denial about a clatter. A clatter is not a smell. All this is good. The Saturday evening which is Sunday is every week day. That choice is there when there is a difference. A regulation is not active. Thirstiness is not equal division. Anyway, to be older and ageder is not a surfeit nor a suction, it is not dated and careful, it is not dirty. Any little thing is clean, rubbing is black. Why should ancient lambs be goats and young colts and never beef, why should they, they should because there is so much difference in age. A sound, a whole sound is not separation, a whole sound is in an order.

T E N D E R

B U T T O N S

/

1 4 5

Suppose there is a pigeon, suppose there is. Looseness, why is there a shadow in a kitchen, there is a shadow in a kitchen because every little thing is bigger. The time when there are four choices and there are four choices in a difference, the time when there are four choices there is a kind and there is a kind. There is a kind. There is a kind. Supposing there is a bone, there is a bone. Supposing there are bones. There are bones. When there are bones there is no supposing there are bones. There are bones and there is that consuming. The kindly way to feel separating is to have a space between. This shows a likeness. Hope in gates, hope in spoons, hope in doors, hope in tables, no hope in daintiness and determination. Hope in dates. Tin is not a can and a stove is hardly. Tin is not necessary and neither is a stretcher. Tin is never narrow and thick. Color is in coal. Coal is outlasting roasting and a spoonful, a whole spoon that is full is not spilling. Coal any coal is copper. Claiming nothing, not claiming anything, not a claim in everything, collecting claiming, all this makes a harmony, it even makes a succession. Sincerely gracious one morning, sincerely graciously trembling, sincere in gracious eloping, all this makes a furnace and a blanket. All this shows quantity. Like an eye, not so much more, not any searching, no compliments. Please be the beef, please beef, pleasure is not wailing. Please beef, please be carved clear, please be a case of consideration. Search a neglect. A sale, any greatness is a stall and there is no memory, there is no clear collection. A satin sight, what is a trick, no trick is mountainous and the color, all the rush is in the blood. Bargaining for a little, bargain for a touch, a liberty, an estrangement, a characteristic turkey.

1 4 6

\

T E X T S

Please spice, please no name, place a whole weight, sink into a standard rising, raise a circle, choose a right around make the resonance accounted and gather green any collar. To bury a slender chicken, to raise an old feather, to surround a garland and to bake a pole splinter, to suggest a repose and to settle simply, to surrender one another, to succeed saving simpler, to satisfy a singularity and not to be blinder, to sugar nothing darker and to read redder, to have the color better, to sort out dinner, to remain together, to surprise no sinner, to curve nothing sweeter, to continue thinner, to increase in resting recreation to design string not dimmer. Cloudiness what is cloudiness, is it a lining, is it a roll, is it melting. The sooner there is jerking, the sooner freshness is tender, the sooner the round it is not round the sooner it is withdrawn in cutting, the sooner the measure means service, the sooner there is chinking, the sooner there is sadder than salad, the sooner there is none do her, the sooner there is no choice, the sooner there is a gloom freer, the same sooner and more sooner, this is no error in hurry and in pressure and in opposition to consideration. A recital, what is a recital, it is an organ and use does not strengthen valor, it soothes medicine. A transfer, a large transfer, a little transfer, some transfer, clouds and tracks do transfer, a transfer is not neglected. Pride, when is there perfect pretence, there is no more than yesterday and ordinary. A sentence of a vagueness that is violence is authority and a mission and stumbling and also certainly also a prison. Calmness, calm is beside the plate and in way in. There is no turn in terror. There is no volume in sound. There is coagulation in cold and there is none in prudence. Something is preserved and the evening is long and the colder spring has

T E N D E R

B U T T O N S

/

1 4 7

sudden shadows in a sun. All the stain is tender and lilacs really lilacs are disturbed. Why is the perfect reestablishment practiced and prized, why is it composed. The result the pure result is juice and size and baking and exhibition and nonchalance and sacrifice and volume and a section in division and the surrounding recognition and horticulture and no murmur. This is a result. There is no superposition and circumstance, there is hardness and a reason and the rest and remainder. There is no delight and no mathematics. Mutton. A letter which can wither, a learning which can suffer and an outrage which is simultaneous is principal. Student, students are merciful and recognised they chew something. Hate rests that is solid and sparse and all in a shape and largely very largely. Interleaved and successive and a sample of smell all this makes a certainty a shade. Light curls very light curls have no more curliness than soup. This is not a subject. Change a single stream of denting and change it hurriedly, what does it express, it expresses nausea. Like a very strange likeness and pink, like that and not more like that than the same resemblance and not more like that than no middle space in cutting. An eye glass, what is an eye glass, it is water. A splendid specimen, what is it when it is little and tender so that there are parts. A center can place and four are no more and two and two are not middle. Melting and not minding, safety and powder, a particular recollection and a sincere solitude all this makes shunning so thorough and so unrepeated and surely if there is anything left it is a bone. It is not solitary. Any space is not quiet it is so likely to be shiny. Darkness very dark

1 4 8

\

T E X T S

darkness is sectional. There is a way to see in onion and surely very surely rhubarb and a tomato, surely very surely there is that seeding. A little thing in is a little thing. Mud and water were not present and not any more of either. Silk and stockings were not present and not any more of either. A receptacle and a symbol and no monster were present and no more. This made a piece show and was it a kindness, it can be asked was it a kindness to have it warmer, was it a kindness and does gliding mean more. Does it. Does it dirty a ceiling. It does not. Is it dainty, it is if prices are sweet. Is it lamentable, it is not if there is no undertaker. Is it curious, it is not when there is youth. All this makes a line, it even makes no more. All this makes cherries. The reason that there is a suggestion in variety is due to this that there is a burst of mixed music. A temptation any temptation is an exclamation if there are misdeeds and little bones. It is not astonishing that bones mingle as they vary not at all and in any case why is a bone outstanding, it is so because the circumstance that does not make a cake and character is so easily churned and cherished. Mouse and mountain and a quiver, a quaint statue and pain in an exterior and silence more silence louder shows salmon a mischief intender. A cake, a real salve made of mutton and liquor, a specially retained rinsing and an established cork and blazing, this which resignation influences and restrains, restrains more altogether. A sign is the specimen spoken. A meal in mutton, mutton, why is lamb cheaper, it is cheaper because so little is more. Lecture, lecture and repeat instruction. Breakfast. A change, a final change includes potatoes. This is no authority for the abuse of cheese. What language can instruct any fellow.

T E N D E R

B U T T O N S

/

1 4 9

A shining breakfast, a breakfast shining, no dispute, no practice, nothing, nothing at all. A sudden slice changes the whole plate, it does so suddenly. An imitation, more imitation, imitation succeed imitations. Anything that is decent, anything that is present, a calm and a cook and more singularly still a shelter, all these show the need of clamor. What is the custom, the custom is in the center. What is a loving tongue and pepper and more fish than there is when tears many tears are necessary. The tongue and the salmon, there is not salmon when brown is a color, there is salmon when there is no meaning to an early morning being pleasanter. There is no salmon, there are no tea cups, there are the same kind of mushes as are used as stomachers by the eating hopes that makes eggs delicious. Drink is likely to stir a certain respect for an egg cup and more water melon than was ever eaten yesterday. Beer is neglected and cocoanut is famous. Coffee all coffee and a sample of soup all soup these are the choice of a baker. A white cup means a wedding. A wet cup means a vacation. A strong cup means an especial regulation. A single cup means a capital arrangement between the drawer and the place that is open. Price a price is not in language, it is not in custom, it is not in praise. A colored loss, why is there no leisure. If the persecution is so outrageous that nothing is solemn is there any occasion for persuasion. A grey turn to a top and bottom, a silent pocketful of much heating, all the pliable succession of surrendering makes an ingenious joy. A breeze in a jar and even then silence, a special anticipation in a rack, a gurgle a whole gurgle and more cheese than almost anything, is this an astonishment, does this incline more than the original division between a tray and a talking arrangement and even then a calling into another room gently with some chicken in any way. A bent way that is a way to declare that the best is all together, a

1 5 0

\

T E X T S

bent way shows no result, it shows a slight restraint, it shows a necessity for retraction. Suspect a single buttered flower, suspect it certainly, suspect it and then glide, does that not alter a counting. A hurt mended stick, a hurt mended cup, a hurt mended article of exceptional relaxation and annoyance, a hurt mended, hurt and mended is so necessary that no mistake is intended. What is more likely than a roast, nothing really and yet it is never disappointed singularly. A steady cake, any steady cake is perfect and not plain, any steady cake has a mounting reason and more than that it has singular crusts. A season of more is a season that is instead. A season of many is not more a season than most. Take no remedy lightly, take no urging intently, take no separation leniently, beware of no lake and no larder. Burden the cracked wet soaking sack heavily, burden it so that it is an institution in fright and in climate and in the best plan that there can be. An ordinary color, a color is that strange mixture which makes, which does make which does not make a ripe juice, which does not make a mat. A work which is a winding a real winding of the cloaking of a relaxing rescue. This which is so cool is not dusting, it is not dirtying in smelling, it could use white water, it could use more extraordinarily and in no solitude altogether. This which is so not winsome and not widened and really not so dipped as dainty and really dainty, very dainty, ordinarily, dainty, a dainty, not in that dainty and dainty. If the time is determined, if it is determined and there is reunion there is reunion with that then outline, then there is in that a piercing shutter, all of a piercing shouter, all of a quite weather, all of a withered exterior, all of that in most violent likely.

T E N D E R

B U T T O N S

/

1 5 1

An excuse is not dreariness, a single plate is not butter, a single weight is not excitement, a solitary crumbling is not only martial. A mixed protection, very mixed with the same actual intentional unstrangeness and riding, a single action caused necessarily is not more a sign than a minister. Seat a knife near a cage and very near a decision and more nearly a timely working cat and scissors. Do this temporarily and make no more mistake in standing. Spread it all and arrange the white place, does this show in the house, does it not show in the green that is not necessary for that color, does it not even show in the explanation and singularly not at all stationary. Sugar. A violent luck and a whole sample and even then quiet. Water is squeezing, water is almost squeezing on lard. Water, water is a mountain and it is selected and it is so practical that there is no use in money. A mind under is exact and so it is necessary to have a mouth and eye glasses. A question of sudden rises and more time than awfulness is so easy and shady. There is precisely that noise. A peck a small piece not privately overseen, not at all not a slice, not at all crestfallen and open, not at all mounting and chaining and evenly surpassing, all the bidding comes to tea. A separation is not tightly in worsted and sauce, it is so kept well and sectionally. Put it in the stew, put it to shame. A little slight shadow and a solid fine furnace. The teasing is tender and trying and thoughtful. The line which sets sprinkling to be a remedy is beside the best cold. A puzzle, a monster puzzle, a heavy choking, a neglected Tuesday.

1 5 2

\

T E X T S

Wet crossing and a likeness, any likeness, a likeness has blisters, it has that and teeth, it has the staggering blindly and a little green, any little green is ordinary. One, two and one, two, nine, second and five and that. A blaze, a search in between, a cow, only any wet place, only this tune. Cut a gas jet uglier and then pierce pierce in between the next and negligence. Choose the rate to pay and pet pet very much. A collection of all around, a signal poison, a lack of languor and more hurts at ease. A white bird, a colored mine, a mixed orange, a dog. Cuddling comes in continuing a change. A piece of separate outstanding rushing is so blind with open delicacy. A canoe is orderly. A period is solemn. A cow is accepted. A nice old chain is widening, it is absent, it is laid by. Cranberries. Could there not be a sudden date, could there not be in the present settlement of old age pensions, could there not be by a witness, could there be. Count the chain, cut the grass, silence the noon and murder flies. See the basting undip the chart, see the way the kinds are best seen from the rest, from that and untidy. Cut the whole space into twenty four spaces and then and then is there a yellow color, there is but it is smelled, it is then put where it is and nothing stolen. A remarkable degree of red means that, a remarkable exchange is made. Climbing altogether in when there is a solid chance of soiling no more than a dirty thing, coloring all of it in steadying is jelly. Just as it is suffering, just as it is succeeded, just as it is moist so is there no countering.

T E N D E R

B U T T O N S

/

1 5 3

Milk. A white egg and a colored pan and a cabbage showing settlement, a constant increase. A cold in a nose, a single cold nose makes an excuse. Two are more necessary. All the goods are stolen, all the blisters are in the cup. Cooking, cooking is the recognition between sudden and nearly sudden very little and all large holes. A real pint, one that is open and closed and in the middle is so bad. Tender colds, seen eye holders, all work, the best of change, the meaning, the dark red, all this and bitten, really bitten. Guessing again and golfing again and the best men, the very best men. Milk. Climb up in sight climb in the whole utter needles and a guess a whole guess is hanging. Hanging hanging. Eggs. Kind height, kind in the right stomach with a little sudden mill. Cunning shawl, cunning shawl to be steady. In white in white handkerchiefs with little dots in a white belt all shadows are singular they are singular and procured and relieved. No that is not the cows shame and a precocious sound, it is a bite. Cut up alone the paved way which is harm. Harm is old boat and a likely dash. Apple. Apple plum, carpet steak, seed clam, colored wine, calm seen, cold cream, best shake, potato, potato and no no gold work with pet, a green

1 5 4

\

T E X T S

seen is called bake and change sweet is bready, a little piece a little piece please. A little piece please. Cane again to the presupposed and ready eucalyptus tree, count out sherry and ripe plates and little corners of a kind of ham. This is use. Tails. Cold pails, cold with joy no joy. A tiny seat that means meadows and a lapse of cuddles with cheese and nearly bats, all this went messed. The post placed a loud loose sprain. A rest is no better. It is better yet. All the time. Lunch. Luck in loose plaster makes holy gauge and nearly that, nearly more states, more states come in town light kite, blight not white. A little lunch is a break in skate a little lunch so slimy, a west end of a board line is that which shows a little beneath so that necessity is a silk underwear. That is best wet. It is so natural and why is there flake, there is flake to explain exhaust. A real cold hen is nervous is nervous with a towel with a spool with real beads. It is mostly an extra sole nearly all that shaved, shaved with an old mountain, more than that bees more than that dinner and a bunch of likes that is to say the hearts of onions aim less. Cold coffee with a corn a corn yellow and green mass is a gem. Cups. A single example of excellence is in the meat. A bent stick is surging and might all might is mental. A grand clothes is searching out a candle not that wheatly not that by more than an owl and a path. A ham is proud of cocoanut.

T E N D E R

B U T T O N S

/

1 5 5

A cup is neglected by being all in size. It is a handle and meadows and sugar any sugar. A cup is neglected by being full of size. It shows no shade, in come little wood cuts and blessing and nearly not that not with a wild bought in, not at all so polite, not nearly so behind. Cups crane in. They need a pet oyster, they need it so hoary and nearly choice. The best slam is utter. Nearly be freeze. Why is a cup a stir and a behave. Why is it so seen. A cup is readily shaded, it has in between no sense that is to say music, memory, musical memory. Peanuts blame, a half sand is holey and nearly. Rhubarb. Rhubarb is susan not susan not seat in bunch toys not wild and laughable not in little places not in neglect and vegetable not in fold coal age not please. Single Fish. Single fish single fish single fish egg plant single fish sight. A sweet win and not less noisy than saddle and more ploughing and nearly well painted by little things so. Please shade it a play. It is necessary and beside the large sort is puff. Every way oakly, please prune it near. It is so found. It is not the same. Cake. Cake cast in went to be and needles wine needles are such. This is to-day. A can experiment is that which makes a town, makes a town dirty, it is little please. We came back. Two bore, bore

1 5 6

\

T E X T S

what, a mussed ash, ash when there is tin. This meant cake. It was a sign. Another time there was extra a hat pin sought long and this dark made a display. The result was yellow. A caution, not a caution to be. It is no use to cause a foolish number. A blanket stretch a cloud, a shame, all that bakery can tease, all that is beginning and yesterday yesterday we had it met. It means some change. No some day. A little leaf upon a scene an ocean any where there, a bland and likely in the stream a recollection green land. Why white. Custard. Custard is this. It has aches, aches when. Not to be. Not to be narrowly. This makes a whole little hill. It is better than a little thing that has mellow real mellow. It is better than lakes whole lakes, it is better than seeding. Potatoes. Real potatoes cut in between. Potatoes. In the preparation of cheese, in the preparation of crackers, in the preparation of butter, in it. Roast Potatoes. Roast potatoes for. Asparagus. Asparagus in a lean in a lean to hot. This makes it art and it is wet wet weather wet weather wet.

T E N D E R

B U T T O N S

/

1 5 7

Butter. Boom in boom in, butter. Leave a grain and show it, show it. I spy. It is a need it is a need that a flower a state flower. It is a need that a state rubber. It is a need that a state rubber is sweet and sight and a swelled stretch. It is a need. It is a need that state rubber. Wood a supply. Clean little keep and a strange, estrange on it. Make a little white, no and not with pit, pit on in within. End of Summer. Little eyelets that have hammer and a check with stripes between, a lounge, in wit, in a rested development. Sausages. Sausages in between a glass. There is read butter. A loaf of it is managed. Wake a question. Eat an instant, answer. A reason for bed is this, that a decline, any decline is poison, poison is a toe a toe extractor, this means a solemn change. Hanging. No evil is wide, any extra in leaf is so strange and singular a red breast. Celery. Celery tastes tastes where in curled lashes and little bits and mostly in remains. A green acre is so selfish and so pure and so enlivened. Veal. Very well very well, washing is old, washing is washing. Cold soup, cold soup clear and particular and a principal a principal question to put into.

1 5 8

\

T E X T S

Vegetable. What is cut. What is cut by it. What is cut by it in. It was a cross a crescent a cross and an unequal scream, it was upslanting, it was radiant and reasonable with little ins and red. News. News capable of glees, cut in shoes, belike under pump of wide chalk, all this combing. Way Lay Vegetable. Leaves in grass and mow potatoes, have a skin, hurry you up flutter. Suppose it is ex a cake suppose it is new mercy and leave charlotte and nervous bed rows. Suppose it is meal. Suppose it is sam. 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 a extra succession, sticking in.

T E N D E R

B U T T O N S

/

1 5 9

Chain-boats. Chain-boats are merry, are merry blew, blew west, carpet. Pastry. Cutting shade, cool spades and little last beds, make violet, violet when. Cream. In a plank, in a play sole, in a heated red left tree there is shut in specs with salt be where. This makes an eddy. Necessary. Cream. Cream cut. Any where crumb. Left hop chambers. Cucumber. Not a razor less, not a razor, ridiculous pudding, red and relet put in, rest in a slender go in selecting, rest in, rest in in white widening. Dinner. Not a little fit, not a little fit sun in sat in shed more mentally. Let us why, let us why weight, let us why winter chess, let us why way. Only a moon to soup her, only that in the sell never be the cocups nice be, shatter it they lay. Egg ear nuts, look a bout. Shoulder. Let it strange, sold in bell next herds. It was a time when in the acres in late there was a wheel that shot a burst of land and needless are niggers and a sample sample set of old eaten butterflies with spoons, all of it to be are fled and measures make it, make it, yes all the one in that we see where shall not it set with a left and more so, yes there add when the longer not it shall the best in the

1 6 0

\

T E X T S

way when all be with when shall not for there with see and chest how for another excellent and excellent and easy easy excellent and easy express e c, all to be nice all to be no so. All to be no so no so. All to be not a white old chat churner. Not to be any example of an edible apple in. Dining. Dining is west. Eating. Eat ting, eating a grand old man said roof and never never re soluble burst, not a near ring not a bewildered neck, not really any such bay. Is it so a noise to be is it a least remain to rest, is it a so old say to be, is it a leading are been. Is it so, is it so, is it so, is it so is it so is it so. Eel us eel us with no no pea no pea cool, no pea cool cooler, no pea cooler with a land a land cost in, with a land cost in stretches. Eating he heat eating he heat it eating, he heat it heat eating. He heat eating. A little piece of pay of pay owls owls such as pie, bolsters. Will leap beat, willie well all. The rest rest oxen occasion occasion to be so purred, so purred how. It was a ham it was a square come well it was a square remain, a square remain not it a bundle, not it a bundle so is a grip, a grip to shed bay leave bay leave draught, bay leave draw cider in low, cider in low and george. George is a mass. Eating. It was a shame it was a shame to stare to stare and double and relieve relieve be cut up show as by the elevation of it and out out more in the steady where the come and on and the all the shed and that. It was a garden and belows belows straight. It was a pea, a pea pour

T E N D E R

B U T T O N S

/

1 6 1

it in its not a succession, not it a simple, not it a so election, election with. Salad. It is a winning cake. Sauce. What is bay labored what is all be section, what is no much. Sauce sam in. Salmon. It was a peculiar bin a bin fond in beside. Orange. Why is a feel oyster an egg stir. Why is it orange center. A show at tick and loosen loosen it so to speak sat. It was an extra leaker with a see spoon, it was an extra licker with a see spoon. Orange. A type oh oh new new not no not knealer knealer of old show beefsteak, neither neither. Oranges. Build is all right. Orange in. Go lack go lack use to her. Cocoa and clear soup and oranges and oat-meal. Whist bottom whist close, whist clothes, woodling.

1 6 2

\

T E X T S

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. Salad Dressing and an Artichoke. Please pale hot, please cover rose, please acre in the red stranger, please butter all the beef-steak with regular feel faces. Salad Dressing and an Artichoke. It was please it was please carriage cup in an ice-cream, in an icecream it was too bended bended with scissors and all this time. A whole is inside a part, a part does go away, a hole is red leaf. No choice was where there was and a second and a second. A Center in a Table. It was a way a day, this made some sum. Suppose a cod liver a cod liver is an oil, suppose a cod liver oil is tunny, suppose a cod liver oil tunny is pressed suppose a cod liver oil tunny pressed is china and secret with a bestow a bestow reed, a reed to be a reed to be, in a reed to be. Next to me next to a folder, next to a folder some waiter, next to a foldersome waiter and re letter and read her. Read her with her for less. ■

T E N D E R

1913

■

B U T T O N S

/

1 6 3

SCENES (

FROM

THE

DOOR

FROM USEFUL KNOWLEDGE)

THE FORD

It is earnest. Aunt Pauline is earnest. We are earnest. We are united. Then we see.

RED FACES

Red flags the reason for pretty flags. And ribbons. Ribbons of flags. And wearing material. Reason for wearing material. Give pleasure. Can you give me the regions. The regions and the land. The regions and wheels. All wheels are perfect. Enthusiasm.

1 6 4

\

T E X T S

WHAT IS THIS

You can’t say it’s war. I love conversation. Do you like it printed. I like it descriptive. Not very descriptive. Not very descriptive. I like it to come easily. Naturally. And then. Crystal and cross. Does not lie on moss. The three ships. You mean washing the ships. One was a lady. A nun. She begged meat. Two were husband and wife. They had a rich father-in-law to the husband. He did dry cleaning. And the third one. A woman. She washed. Clothes. Then this is the way we were helped. Not interested. We are very much interested.

S C E N E S

F R O M

T H E

D O O R

/

1 6 5

DAUGHTER

Why is the world at peace. This may astonish you a little but when you realise how easily Mrs. Charles Bianco sells the work of American painters to American millionaires you will recognise that authorities are constrained to be relieved. Let me tell you a story. A painter loved a woman. A musician did not sing. A South African loved books. An American was a woman and needed help. Are Americans the same as incubators. But this is the rest of the story. He became an authority.

A RADICAL EXPERT

Can you please by asking what is expert. And then we met one another. I do not think it right. Marksman. Expert. Loaf. Potato bread. Sugar Card. Leaf. And mortar. What is the meaning of white wash. The upper wall. That sounds well. And then we sinned. A great many jews say so.

AMERICA

Once in English they said America. Was it English to them. Once they said Belgian. We like a fog. Do you for weather. Are we brave. Are we true. Have we the national colour.

1 6 6

\

T E X T S

Can we stand ditches. Can we mean well. Do we talk together. Have we red cross. A great many people speak of feet. And socks. ■

1918

■

PHOTOGRAPH A PLAY IN FIVE ACTS

For a photograph we need a wall. Star gazing. Photographs are small. They reproduce well. I enlarge better. Don’t say that practically. And so we resist. We miss stones. Now we sing. St. Cloud and you. Saint Cloud and loud. I sing you sing, birthday songs tulip belongs to red cream and green and crimson so that the house chosen has a soft wall. Oh come and believe me oh come and believe me to-day oh come and believe me oh come just for one minute.

P H O T O G R A P H

/

1 6 7

Age makes no difference. Neither does the Vieux Colombier. Why do you think of that at all. I describe a different house. So does Gabriella. Twins. There is a prejudice about twins. Twins are one. Does this mean as they separate as they are separate or together. Let me hear the story of the twin. So we begin. Photograph. The sub title. Twin. Two a twin.—Step in. Margot.—Not a twin. Lilacs.—For a twin. Forget me nots.—By a twin. Twin houses. We are considering twin houses. I say. Have I read all about twins. And now to walk as twins walk. Two twins have two doors. One twin is a bore. I exercise more. I walk before the twins door. Dozens above the eggs dozens above. Afternoons seen. Mrs. Roberts. Mrs. Lord. Mr. Andrew Reding. Miss Nuttall. Mrs. Reading.

1 6 8

\

T E X T S

Come in and be lame. Come in together Alsatian. A language tires. A language tries to be. A language tries to be free. This can be called Twinny. She had one god-daughter. Burning. We are very bitter. We are bitter. Railroads are mistaken. They insult us. Now I can occasion remonstrance. Miss Nuttall was born in America. Mrs. Roberts was also born there. Mr. Andrew Reding went to America. Mrs. Reading was born in America. Mrs. Lord was born on the boat. Now indeed this is not what I meant to say for this does not describe my feeling. My feeling is that one comes in more frequently than another and yet they always come together. This is not exactly so. They do come together but some come more frequently than others and we like to see them all. I can sigh to play. I can sigh for a play. A play means more. Act Second Two authors. Rabbits are eaten. Dogs eat rabbits.

P H O T O G R A P H

/

1 6 9

Snails eat leaves. Expression falters. Wild flowers drink. The Star Spangled banner. Read the notices. Act III A photograph. A photograph of a number of people if each one of them is reproduces if two have a baby if both the babies are boys what is the name of the street. Madame. Act IV We say we were warm. Guess McAdam. We say we talked about them. Joseph moan, Edith atone, the bird belongs to the throne. Birdie sing about an intention. Did you intend to depress me. Certainly not I asked for a translation. Do not compromise my father. Zero. Baby was so interested in one part of the story. And I, I was interested. And what can pearls mean. Pearls can mean some sort of reason. It is very reasonable. I am very sleepy and burned. Burned by the sun to-day. Stand up to sing. Act V I make a sentence in Vincennes. It is this. I will never reason away George. ■

1 7 0

1920

\

■

T E X T S

A

MOVIE

Eyes are a surprise Printzess a dream Buzz is spelled with z Fuss is spelled with s So is business. The UNITED STATES is comical. Now I want to tell you about the Monroe doctrine. We think very nicely we think very well of the Monroe doctrine. American painter painting in French country near railroad track. Mobilisation locomotive passes with notification for villages. Where are American tourists to buy my pictures sacre nom d’un pipe says the american painter. American painter sits in café and contemplates empty pocket book as taxi cabs file through Paris carrying French soldiers to battle of the Marne. I guess I’ll be a taxi driver here in gay Paree says the american painter. Painter sits in studio trying to learn names of streets with help of Brettonne peasant femme de menage. He becomes taxi driver. Ordinary street scenes in war time Paris. Being lazy about getting up in the mornings he spends some of his dark nights in teaching Brettonne femme de menage peasant girl how to drive the taxi so she can replace him when he wants to sleep. America comes into the war american painter wants to be american soldier. Personnel officer interviews him. What have you been doing, taxiing. You know Paris, Secret Service for you go on taxiing. He goes on taxiing and he teaches Brettonne f. m. english so she can take his place if need be.

A

M O V I E

/

1 7 1

One night he reads his paper under the light. Police man tells him to move up, don’t want to wants to read. Man comes up wants to go to the station. Painter has to take him. Gets back, reading again. Another man comes wants to go to the station. Painter takes him. Comes back to read again. Two american officers come up. Want to go to the station. Painter says Tired of the station take you to Berlin if you like. No station. Officers say Give you a lot if you take us outside town on way to the south, first big town. He says alright got to stop at home first to get his coat. Stops at home calls out to Brettonne f. m. Get busy telegraph to all your relations, you have them all over, ask have you any american officers staying forever. Be back to-morrow. Back to-morrow. Called up by chief secret service. Goes to see him. Money has been disappearing out of quartermaster’s department in chunks. You’ve got a free hand. Find out something. Goes home. Finds f. m. brettonne surrounded with telegrams and letters from relatives. Americans everywhere but everywhere. She groans. Funny americans everywhere but everywhere they all said. Many funny americans everywhere. Two americans not so funny here my fifth cousin says, she is helping in the hospital at Avignon. Such a sweet american soldier. So young so tall so tender. Not very badly hurt but will stay a long long time. He has been visited by american officers who live in a villa. Two such nice ladies live there too and they spend and they spend, they buy all the good sweet food in Avignon. “Is that something William Sir,” says the brettonne f. m. It’s snowing but no matter we will get there in the taxi. Take us two days and two nights you inside and me out. Hurry. They start, the

1 7 2

\

T E X T S

funny little taxi goes over the mountains with and without assistance, all tired out he is inside, she driving when they turn down the hill into Avignon. Just then two americans on motor cycles come on and Brettonne f.m. losing her head grand smash. American painter wakes up burned, he sees the two and says by God and makes believe he is dead. The two are very helpful. A team comes along and takes american painter and all to hospital. Two americans ride off on motor cycles direction of Nimes and Pont du Gard. Arrival at hospital, interview with the wounded american who described two american officers who had been like brothers to him, didn’t think any officer could be so chummy with a soldier. Took me out treated me, cigarettes, everything fine. Where have they gone on to, to Nimes. Yes Pont du Gard. American painter in bed in charge of french nursing nun but manages to escape and leave for Pont du Gard in mended taxi. There under the shadow of that imperishable monument of the might and industry of ancient Rome exciting duel. French gendarme american painter, taxi, f. m. brettonne, two american crooks with motor cycles on which they try to escape over the top of the Pont du Gard, great stunt, they are finally captured. They have been the receivers of the stolen money. After many other adventures so famous has become the american painter, Brettonne femme de menage and taxi that in the march under the arch at the final triumph of the allies the taxi at the special request of General Pershing brings up the rear of the procession after the tanks, the Brettonne driving and the american painter inside waving the american flag Old Glory and the tricolor. curtain ■

A

1920

M O V I E

/

■

1 7 3

AN

ELUCIDATION

Halve Rivers and Harbors. Elucidation. First as Explanation. Elucidate the problem of halve. Halve and have. Halve Rivers and Harbors, Have rivers and harbors. You do see that halve rivers and harbors, halve rivers and harbors, you do see that halve rivers and harbors makes halve rivers and harbors and you do see, you do see that you that you do not have rivers and harbors when you halve rivers and harbors, you do see that you can halve rivers and harbors. I refuse have rivers and harbors I have refused. I do refuse have rivers and harbors. I receive halve rivers and harbors, I accept halve rivers and harbors. I have elucidated the pretence of halve rivers and harbors and the acceptation of halve rivers and harbors. This is a new preparation. Do not share He will not bestow They can meditate I am going to do so. I have an explanation of this in this way. If we say, Do not share he will not bestow they can meditate I am going to do so, we have organised an irregular commonplace and we have made excess return to rambling. I always like the use of these, but not particularly.

1 7 4

\

T E X T S

Madrigal and Mardigras. I do not deny these except in regard to one thing they remind me of Em which is a nickname for Emma. I have always been fond of writing the letter M. and so although Mardigras and Madrigal have more appreciation from me than they might they do not make more questions and more answers passing. He was as if he were going to pass an examination. I will now give more examples. She is in and out It is placed in there Happily say so Too happily say so Very communicative. I will give other examples to you. I will give the same example to you and to you. Place. In a place, A place for everything and everything in its place. In place in place of everything, in a place. Again search for me. She looked for me at me. May we seat. May we be having a seat May we be seated May I see May I see Martha

A N

E L U C I D A T I O N

/

1 7 5

May I see Martha May I see. May I see. I have written the best example of all before Able Idle. There are four words in all. There Why There Why There Able Idle. There are seven in all. A stall for each. As tall as each one. As there are all and four and seven, and seven and four and are four in all and a stall for each one. We do not think at all of a stall as a box, there used to be a box a loose box and now there are no loose boxes. Boxes are arranged with cement, and so our fancy pleases, and so we may fancy as we please, we may fancy what we please. There is an excellent example and now I will explain away as if I have been sitting for my portrait every day. In this way I have made every one understand arithmetic. To begin elucidating.

1 7 6

\

T E X T S

If I say I stand and pray. If I say I stand and I stand and you understand and if I say I pray I pray to-day if you understand me to say I pray to-day you understand prayers and portraits. You understand portraits and prayers. You understand. You do understand. An introduction and an explanation and I completely introduce as you please. I completely introduce. Yes you do. Yes you do. Yes you do is the longest example and will come at the end. The longest example. Yes you do. Will come at the end. Disturb Seated here I know how to please her. If I know If you know how to throw how to throw or to go. I feel that you easily understand that preparation is not everything I understand everything. And now to explain where preparation and preparing show this as an expedition. An expedition is a journey to and for. Dealing in accelerated authority. Do not notice this. Dealing in their delight or daylight. Do not notice this properly. Dealing in a regularly arranged decision. When you wish to diminish.

A N

E L U C I D A T I O N

/

1 7 7

Let me explain properly. Properly speaking there is no fear that he will not be prayed for out loud. Properly speaking there is no fear of neglect. And all words furnish here. I have a great many examples very often. We do very often, An explanation of not at all. Not at all very nearly furnishes us with an illustration. We have mainly added to that. Now to seriously mean seldom. It is only seldom that we are selected. And she knows me. I will now explain dishes. I have explained that. I never do see that I never do see you do see me. You do see me. A serious explanation. To explain means to give a reason for in order. He adores her. You must not be excited before and after. You must make a choice. I thought perhaps he would not make a choice. Before and after. This is an example a very good example or an example. This is an example or a very good example. Let me lead you to find this. If in beginning you mention explaining, could he be angry could he really be angry that you had not explained it to him. Suppose or supposing that you had an invitation, suppose some one had been very inviting supposing some one had given him an invitation supposing you had been inviting him to listen to an explanation suppose there had been an explanation supposing you had given an ex-

1 7 8

\

T E X T S

planation, I can explain visiting. I can explain how it happened accidentally that fortunately no explanation was necessary. I explain wording and painting and sealing and closing. I explain opening and reasoning and rolling, I was just rolling. What did he say. He said I was not mistaken and yet I had not when he was not prepared for an explanation I had not begun explaining. It is in a way a cause for congratulation. It is in a way cause for congratulation. And now to seriously discuss my needing and to discuss very seriously why they have asked for my mediation. To begin now. Small examples are preferable. They are preferred. And do they stop them. And yet do they stop them. Preferred as to preference I prefer them. If you connect them do you connect them. In this way. If small examples are preferable and are preferred and they are connected in this way we may say yesterday was nearly seventeen days earlier than to-day, seventeen days earlier in any way. It is connected in this way. Small examples are preferable. They are preferred. An instance. Tremble for small examples. I hope you received the three volumes safely. Tremble for small examples. It is not easy. A third part is added to the top and bottom and the middle part is added in between. Some examples simply

A N

E L U C I D A T I O N

/

1 7 9

I tire more quickly than you do. Some examples simply. Small examples are preferable. Small examples are preferred. Brown and white. The nigger and the night and mistaken for mean. I didn’t mean to. I do read better there. Come on He consolidated it. That you must not do. Elucidation. The sad procession of the unkilled bull. And they stand around. Two next. To be next to it. To be annexed. To be annexed to it. We understand that you undertake to overthrow our undertaking. This is not originally said to frame words this is originally said to underestimate words. Do you believe in stretches, stretches of time stretches of scenery and stretches of thirds. Every third time we rhyme, in this way influence is general. Let me recognise copies. Extra gum. Gum extra. Extra gum. An extra gum. An extra rubber. An extra oil. An extra soap.

1 8 0

\

T E X T S

And an extra wish. Wish and White. Reasons are right. White and wish. Reasons for which they have most occasion. They have more occasion for one wish than for another wish. Do you all understand if you please. Do you all understand why I explain. Do you all understand elucidation and extra addresses. Do you all understand why she sees me. Do you all understand practice and precept. Do you all understand principal and secondary. Do you all understand extraneous memory. Let me see how earnestly you plead for me. Let me see. More beginning. I begin you begin we begin they begin. They began we began you began I began. I began you begin we begin they begin. They begin you begin we begin I began. You began and I began. I feel the need of a walk in ceremony, of a talk in ceremony of chalk in ceremony. I feel the need of chalk in ceremony. And it was used too, it was used too. A settled explanation. I know the difference between white marble and black marble. White and black marble make a checker board and I never mention either. Either of them you know very well that I may have said no.

A N

E L U C I D A T I O N

/

1 8 1

Now to explain. Did I say explanations mean across and across and carry. Carry me across. Another Example. I think I won’t I think I will I think I will I think I won’t. I think I won’t I think I will I think I will I think I won’t. I think I won’t I think I will I think I will I think I won’t I think I will I think I won’t I think I will I think I won’t. I think I will I think I won’t I think I won’t I think I won’t I think I won’t I think I will I think I won’t Of course I think I will

1 8 2

\

T E X T S

I think I won’t I think I won’t I think I will This is a good example if you do not abuse it. Where they like. Can follow where they like. I think this is a good example. I think I will. I am afraid I have been too careful. I think I will. Two examples and then an elucidation and a separation of one example from the other one. I think I will. Then very certainly we need not repeat. Can there at this rate can there have been at this rate more and more. Can at this rate can there have been at this rate can there have been more and more at this rate. At this rate there can not have been there can not have been at this rate there can not have been more and more at this rate. At this rate there can not have been more and more. There can not have been at this rate, there can not have been more and more at this rate there can not have been more and more at this rate. What did I say. Full of charms I said. Full of what. Full of charms I said. What did I say, full of charms I said. If in order to see incidentally incidentally I request to see extraordinarily. If in order to see incidentally I request to see. I see you I see you too.

A N

E L U C I D A T I O N

/

1 8 3

A Question. Should you see me too. Not a question. How to combine all this together to make more. I stopped, I stopped myself. Combine all these together to make more. Elucidation. If in beginning, if in a beginning, I begin to be connectedly and carefully and collectedly if I agree, if in beginning I agree, then I agree you agree and we agree. If he can recall a boast of victory, I can refuse to be resolutely sure of what he and I both mean to collect. Now do you see that this is a thing to erase and eradicate. Do you not see it clearly. Let me refuse to repair it. He said that repairs are excellently made. We have combined to be not at all principally paid. Paid and paid. Do you see halve rivers and harbors and there is no connection. An example of an event. If it is an event just by itself is there a question. Tulips is there a question. Pets is there a question. Furs is there a question. Folds is there a question. Is there anything in question. To begin to be told that after she had seen and said she wrote and read. She read it and she said, she said it and she read it, she wrote and she did indeed change her residence. I have been told that this is an event. If it is an event just by itself is there a question. A great many

1 8 4

\

T E X T S

climates have been quoted. In this way we may expect to see that they have this to see to too. May we quote again. Should you see me too. All events, Carrie all events. All events carry. In this way researches are easily read. A short example of stretches of variety. She made white flowers resemble lilies of the valley and she said do not mean to be prepared to have a goddess of plenty stand in front of a picture. In this way you see that I have not succeeded. If at first you don’t succeed try try again. She found china easily adaptable. In using the word china she had in mind porcelain and also painted wood and even painted tin and dishes. She sometimes felt the need of silver and radishes. Do you measure this by this measure. And altogether what did you say you were to elucidate to-day. By this I mean for this to be seen. You know how we make it do so and more so, how we make it more so, how we make it even more so. I lead up to a description of all the birds. The birds have meant to interest me so have the horses and so indeed have the preparations for cows. So indeed have the preparations so indeed have the preparations, so indeed. I can see and you can see, you can see and so can I see that I have not made more of it than needs to be made of it. In every way you are satisfied and we have given satisfaction and we have not meant to be swamped by other considerations. And again and once more and frequently from time to time no one has suffered in any way and we are satisfied. It may even be said as if in a joke those who might have to be considered are satisfied. Can you kindly smile.

A N

E L U C I D A T I O N

/

1 8 5

And now we add that which makes a whole makes history plainer. What did I say. I said he would tell me the complete history of his life and times. And in this way we recollect perfectly just when he was prepared and just when he was prepared. Suppose for instance suppose as an instance we mention success. I succeed and you succeed. Yes you succeed very well. You do succeed very well. You do succeed very very well. Five examples and then the long example entitled Yes you do. First Example. How pleasantly I feel contented with that. Contented with the example, content with the example. As if one example was meant to be succeeded by an example. I remember that he said they can prepare to have it here and to have it there to have it here and there. We have said there to have it there. First Example. Suppose, to suppose, suppose a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose. To suppose, we suppose that there arose here and there that here and there there arose an instance of knowing that there are here and there that there are there that they will prepare, that they do care to come again. Are they to come again. In this way I have explained that to them and for them that for them alone that to them alone that to them and for them we have no depression. The law covers this, if you say made of fruit or if you say made by the aid of or made with the aid of fruit, or made by using fruit or made with fruit, for the fruit, you see how suddenly if there is in question if there can be any question, what would then compare with their description, with the description of this description. I describe all the time. The second example is an example of action.

1 8 6

\

T E X T S

What action. If you arrange the door, if you arrange the door and the floor. I have lost most of my interest in politics, still it is more interesting than the theater. Brenner says that. In action. In every action we can take he knows that if the hair is there and the ears hear and the Caesars share and they linger and if they linger and finger if they finger their pair, if they finger the pair and care to be more hesitant than before if they are to partake in this action, the action is memorable. They can be declared colored by their wish. Wish how can we who are Americans and not credulous remember that there has been written the wished on wish. Do you smile if you do you please you applaud me you say action to take action to behave in action to see their action to dominate their action and their action and do you expect what has been said that some are attempting to hit some one hit some one who was not the one intended to be hit and this is not common this is not common this does not commonly happen in action in their action. Example third is the one that will show how often every one has cause abundant cause for this and for that. To explain I will explain. To take the place to take the place of this. In that way. Please help to avail yourself will you please avail yourself of your opportunities. In this way and in that way they may or they may not, they may avail themselves of their opportunities. We had a long conversation about the way they may and they may not about the way they may avail themselves of their opportunities. Let us imagine that every one is interested in my wife and children. One and a million. A million or three. There are three there and here and there there are a hundred and three here and here and there there they are.

A N

E L U C I D A T I O N

/

1 8 7

How do you do. We know why we compare we compare this to that, and we share we can share we do share what do they share what do they happen to do what do they to do, what do they do, what do they happen to do why do they do they do it, why do they not do it, why they do they not do this. Do it, oh do do it. Do you do it. How do you do, how do you do it, how do you do it in this way in that way, in the way. They are not in the way. We say they are not there and they say they are here and we say they are here and there. Continue to expect me. I do expect you. You do expect me. We do expect you. We do. We do expect to have you we do expect, do you expect, do you, do you how do you do, how do you do this, how do I do this, how do I do it, how do I do it. How do I do it, I do it, you do it, yes I do do it. A third example can be too long. A fourth example shows more plainly what it does show, what does it show, I see you and you see me, I see that you see and you see that I see. A fourth example shows a tendency to declaration. I declare that they say from Tuesday till Saturday and Friday afternoon too. I declare I do declare. And he when we see that they are not as we understood they would be when we see, when we say we see we hear, and when we say we hear we feel and when we say we feel we see and when we say we see we hear. In this we declare we declare all of us declare what do you declare, declare to me. Declarations rapidly reunited. Action and reaction are equal and opposite. Astonishment means list of persons and places and if she were to be represented there if she were to be represented there. Call me a smiler and fit the fifth exactly. I fit the fifth exactly.

1 8 8

\

T E X T S

Yes you do. This is not an instance. Fit the fifth exactly. Exactly fit the fifth fit it for the fifth. The fifth in this way makes rounding out rounder. If it is round around and rounder if it is around and we tell all we know let me explain directly and indirectly. In the fifth instance there was no coincidence. Every night generally. I lead to Yes you do. You lead to yes you do, we lead to yes you do they lead to yes you do. Yes you do otherwise understood. Otherwise understood. Yes you do. We understand you undertake to overthrow our undertaking. We understand you do understand that we will understand it correctly. Correctly and incorrectly, prepare and prepared, patiently and to prepare, to be prepared and to be particularly not particularly prepared. Do prepare to say Portraits and Prayers, do prepare to say that you have prepared portraits and prayers and that you prepare and that I prepare. Yes you do. Organisers. Yes you do. Organisation. Yes you do and you, you do. To portraits and to prayers. Yes you do. ■

A N

1923

■

E L U C I D A T I O N

/

1 8 9

IF

I

TOLD

HIM

A COMPLETED PORTRAIT OF PICASSO

If I told him would he like it. Would he like it if I told him. Would he like it would Napoleon would Napoleon would would he like it. If Napoleon if I told him if I told him if Napoleon. Would he like it if I told him if I told him if Napoleon. Would he like it if Napoleon if Napoleon if I told him. If I told him if Napoleon if Napoleon if I told him. If I told him would he like it would he like it if I told him. Now. Not now. And now. Now. Exactly as as kings. Feeling full for it. Exactitude as kings. So to beseech you as full as for it. Exactly or as kings. Shutters shut and open so do queens. Shutters shut and shutters and so shutters shut and shutters and so and so shutters and so shutters shut and so shutters shut and shutters and so. And so shutters shut and so and also. And also and so and so and also. Exact resemblance to exact resemblance the exact resemblance as exact as a resemblance, exactly as resembling, exactly resembling, exactly in resemblance exactly a resemblance, exactly and resemblance. For this is so. Because.

1 9 0

\

T E X T S

Now actively repeat at all, now actively repeat at all, now actively repeat at all. Have hold and hear, actively repeat at all. I judge judge. As a resemblance to him. Who comes first. Napoleon the first. Who comes too coming coming too, who goes there, as they go they share, who shares all, all is as all as as yet or as yet. Now to date now to date. Now and now and date and the date. Who came first Napoleon at first. Who came first Napoleon the first. Who came first, Napoleon first. Presently. Exactly do they do. First exactly. Exactly do they do too. First exactly. And first exactly. Exactly do they do. And first exactly and exactly. And do they do. At first exactly and first exactly and do they do. The first exactly. And do they do. The first exactly. At first exactly. First as exactly. As first as exactly. Presently As presently.

I F

I

T O L D

H I M

/

1 9 1

As as presently. He he he he and he and he and and he and he and he and and as and as he and as he and he. He is and as he is, and as he is and he is, he is and as he and he and as he is and he and he and and he and he. Can curls rob can curls quote, quotable. As presently. As exactitude. As trains. Has trains. Has trains. As trains. As trains. Presently. Proportions. Presently. As proportions as presently. Father and farther. Was the king or room. Farther and whether. Was there was there was there what was there was there what was there was there there was there. Whether and in there. As even say so. One. I land. Two. I land. Three. The land. Three

1 9 2

\

T E X T S

The land. Three. The land. Two I land. Two I land. One I land. Two I land. As a so. They cannot. A note. They cannot A float. They cannot. They dote. They cannot. They as denote. Miracles play. Play fairly. Play fairly well. A well. As well. As or as presently. Let me recite what history teaches. History teaches. ■

I F

I

1923

T O L D

■

H I M

/

1 9 3

FOURTEEN

ANONYMOUS

PORTRAITS

1

Harold Stephens His name is George. George can see that he can come and stay. George can come and stay. Harold Stephens came to-day Harold Stephens will go away. Harold Stephens I say.

2

We will find out. She will find out He will find out. He will not find out for himself. She will find out for herself. We will find out. Not necessarily.

3

Portrait of So and So She did know Why he loved her so. She does know Why he loves her so And so and so She can know that he loves her so.

1 9 4

\

T E X T S

4

Portrait of When When I say go and come he comes at a run. When I say hear and see he hears and sees me When I say sing and dance he does and he does prance When I say how do you care he says for your lovely hair and all. Husband so tall.

5

They tell us so. They tell us so. They tell us so.

6

She would not wonder if this were not thunder it should not thunder and she should not wonder. She would not wonder if this were not thunder.

7

Anonymous Portrait I know I know I know you. You know you know that.

8

Another Anonymous Portrait How can a person who was there before be invited to a dinner of twenty.

F O U R T E E N

A N O N Y M O U S

P O R T R A I T S

/

1 9 5

9

An Anonymous Portrait When he knew you and she too was to know you did he decide and had she beside and had she beside had she confided it to him to decide. She had tried.

10

An Anonymous Portrait Too If they meant to keep it there did they mean to ask if the child had been born. And it had. If the child had been born and it had did she mention it in that way. Did she preside beside. She did and very nicely.

11

Anonymous Portrait I see the moon and the moon sees me. God bless the moon and God bless me and when this you see remember me. In this way one fifth of the bananas bought are shown.

12

Anonymous Portrait Immediately she will find out when I say hear and see he hears and sees me. He is not necessarily heard and seen.

1 9 6

\

T E X T S

13

Anonymous Portrait She forgot to say did I leave my pencil here to-day my lead pencil here to-day. She did not forget to say that she had been here to-day and that she would ask them this ask them for this ask them this and for this. In the meanwhile tube roses and roses. Tube roses smell strongly and roses fall in pieces easily that is to say when it is said that some Islanders consider everything well.

14

Anonymous Portrait of Then To introduce a melon, two melons, to introduce two melons, sugared melons candied melons to them, to introduce them to produce for them to send to them a melon to send them to send melons two melons to them, this makes them give to you their blessing. ■

F O U R T E E N

1923

A N O N Y M O U S

■

P O R T R A I T S

/

1 9 7

ARE

THERE

ARITHMETICS

Are there arithmetics. In part are there arithmetics. There are in part, there are arithmetics in part. Are there arithmetics. In part. Another example. Are there arithmetics. In part. As there are arithmetics. In part. As a part. Under. As apart. Under. This makes. Irresistible. Resisted. This makes irresistible resisted. Resisted as it makes. First one to be noticed. Another one noticed. To be noticed. The first one to be noticed. First one to have been noticed. Are there arithmetics, irresistible, a part. Are there arithmetics irrestible resisted a part. Are there arithmetics irresistible apart. Ever say ever see, as ever see, ever say. Notably. Arithmetics.

1 9 8

\

T E X T S

Are there arithmetics, a part. Bowing and if finished. Are there arithmetics a part. Ever say. Are there arithmetics if finished, bowing if finished are there arithmetics ever say, are there arithmetics apart. Not four. No sense in no sense innocence of what of not and what of delight. In no sense innocence in no sense and what in delight and not, in no sense innocence in no sense no sense what, in no sense and delight, and in no sense and delight and not in no sense and delight and not, no sense in no sense innocence and delight. Alright. Don’t you think it would go into arithmetic nicely. If and intend if and intend, if and to attend, if and if to attend if to attend if and intend, or and nearly equal, two ahead and four behind, two ahead and two behind, two ahead as two, and two, and two ahead and have to, and have it or in needles in case of. I am not sure I like that one there are arithmetic one day. If in it as if in it as as has if in it as it has if in it as it has been, if it has been as if it had had as if it had had it as it was, as it were if it were to be captivated, if it were in this and that way very fairly stated, state it. To state it. Gradually in counting as gradually as counting. If there are more. Now see here. Plain plain plain. To be plain, it is plain it is made very plain, plainly. And arithmetic and more so, and more or so. Grapes and chocolate. Name it flourish to flourish to flower, name it as flower or flourish or name it as flourish as flower or flower. How large is a field when fenced. How many are there of hats and

A R E

T H E R E

A R I T H M E T I C S

/

1 9 9

hats, how many are there of cows and cows how many are there how many are there are there many and how many and who says so, so and so. Now repeat it. Can I repeat it. I can repeat it. As I repeat it, as I repeat it, they and they do, do and do do, do and do too, do and do do. As to a shot, and as to a shot and as to and as as to a shot, a shot or anyway they and to-day very industriously the nearly finished. It had no intention, it as it had it and it it had no intention, Dora Katorza and it had no intention it had no intention. Or or or will they plunge us into or, or or or will they will they will they or, or or or will they plunge or will they, they will not. What, rice, what rice or what pears or or what rice or what or not, pears rice, will they or will they not. And what do they mean. They mean to keep by this they mean to keep it or by this means by this means they mean to keep it. Or or or do they mean to bring some more. Double cover and a double cover. Double cover a double cover. Double cover. A double cover. Double cover. A double cover is used when the one and the double cover is used not used up. The double cover. A double cover and a double cover. Cover. Shove her. Not a knee not a knee, see knee. Not a knee not a knee see me. Knot a knee not knot a knee to me. So Mike did. In funny too funny, too funny for funny for funny as funny as funny is funny. Is funny. It is funny. Be can be back, be can be back. For this because of this reduplication. Arithmetic or more. Cora Moore. They cannot forget interesting days. Nice little new little new little nice little nice little new little three.

2 0 0

\

T E X T S

New little nice little nice little new little new little new little as three. Three. Three. Then seated. Then sit as if to be seated. I newly carried I carried it away. Why and why, why and why, not nearly astonished enough. ■

BUSINESS (

IN

1923

■

BALTIMORE

FROM USEFUL KNOWLEDGE)

Nor narrow, long. Julian is two. How many and well. And days and sank. Thanks to having. Business in Baltimore thanks to having and days and sank how many and well Julian is two not narrow, long. Julian is two how many and well thanks to having. Once upon a time Baltimore was necessary. How and would it be dressed if they had divided a bank and tan. It connected at once it connected twice it connected doors and floors. This is in May. So they say. How many places for scales are there in it. Weigh once a day.

B U S I N E S S

I N

B A L T I M O R E

/

2 0 1

In Baltimore there are the ferns the miles the pears the cellars and the coins. After that the large and small stones or stepping stones. This is why they have every reason to be arranged and every morning to be morning and every evening to be evening. This is the reason why they have every Sunday and Tuesday and Monday. Who finds minds and who lines shines and two kinds finds and two kinds minds. Minds it. She never wanted to leave Baltimore anywhere and was it. Business in Baltimore. He did and peppers see he did and three. He did and three he did and see he did and three and see and he did and peppers see and peppers see and three he did. It is so easy to have felt needed and shielded and succeeded and decided and widened and waited. No waiting for him Saturday Monday and Thursday. All of them are devoted to it to doing what was done when it was begun and afterwards all sashes are old. Forget wills. The best and finally the first, the first and formerly the rest all of it as they have it to do to do to do already in their house. Suppose in walking up and down they sat around. Imagine vines, vines are not had here imagine vines that are not to be had here and imagine rubbers had here and imagine working working in blue that means over it. Each one of these had to give away had to have to had to give way. How many others brothers and fathers. He had held him he had held her he had held it for him he had held it for her, he had hold of it, and he had had days. How many days pay, how much of a day pays and how difficultly from thinking. I think I thought I said I sought I fell I fought I had I ought to have meant to be mine.

2 0 2

\

T E X T S

Not as funny as yet. Imagining up and down. How many generations make five. If another marries her brother, if another marries their brother, if their brother marries another, if their brother and a brother marry another and the sister how many pairs are there of it. It is easy not to be older than that. Do you hear me. It is easier. How many papers can make more papers and how many have to have her. Have to have her. How many papers can make more papers and how many have to have to have it. How many have to have to have it and how many papers make more papers. It makes a little door to-day. Put it there for him to see. He knew how and how to have he knew how to have and accepted so much as much or much much of it for it, for it is and in either direction might be saved, saved or so and while it is while it is while it is near near while it is while it is near having monthly in use. To hear them and as it has to be at and for and as it has to be for and mine and as it has to be powder and ice and as it has to be and as it has to be louder and there and as it has to be louder and there and I hear it. And in there. When he could not remember that when he could not remember it at all when he could remember it all and when he could remember it all. It started and parted, partly to them and for most. Foremost is a way they have to have used here. The first time they ever had it, heard it and had it, the first time they ever had it. In their favor as a favor as a favor or favorable. Having forgotten how it sounds, have they forgotten all the sound remind them.

B U S I N E S S

I N

B A L T I M O R E

/

2 0 3

The first reason for having seven is six and a half, six and a half and as seldom. After that the real reason for six more than a half and as seldom the real reason for six more and a half and as seldom is six more six more and a half more and six more and a half more and six more and a half more and seldom. Please put it in paper there. A little place and for fortunately. Did he and they have a lake today. Nearly. Having at it and at once a noise and it, it could be just as much more also. Have a sound of or a sound of or, or Alice. Miss Alice is might it. The very easy how do red horses have a pair. This makes Arthur and no name. He made him go. Come near come nearly come nearly come near come near come nearly. Come near. Come near come nearly. He had a haul and I said do you do that and he did and he said not to-day. Anybody can say not to-day. There was once upon a time a selfish boy and a selfish man, there was once upon a time a selfish man. There was once upon a time a selfish man. There was once upon a time there was once upon a time a selfish man there was once upon a time a selfish boy there was once upon a time a selfish boy there was once upon a time a selfish boy there was once upon a time a selfish man. How selfish. There was once upon a time a selfish man. There was once upon a time a selfish boy, how once upon a time a selfish boy how once upon a time a selfish man. Nobody knows whose wedding shows it to them. Business in Baltimore makes a wedding first at first business in Baltimore makes a wedding at first first. Business in Baltimore makes a wedding at first at first. Business in Baltimore makes a wedding at first at first first. Business in Baltimore makes a wedding first at first. Business in Bal-

2 0 4

\

T E X T S

timore at first makes a wedding first makes a wedding at first. Business in Baltimore makes a wedding at first. Business in Baltimore makes a wedding at first. Business in Baltimore at first. In heights and whites, in whites and lights, in lights in sizes, in sizes in sides and in wise, or as wise or wiser. This not to be the first to know. To know. Altogether older, older altogether. Not following hearing or a son or another. No one spells mother or brother. To them or then or then by then it was mostly done by them. Who has had had it had. Had it, he had it and following he had it, he had it. Following he had it. Business in Baltimore following he had it. Business in Baltimore following he had it following he had had it. Business in Baltimore following he had had it. Following he had had it following he had had it business in Baltimore following he had had it. Business in Baltimore. How easy it is to see voices. How easy it is to see. How easy it is to see voices and very much of it put as a rug. Supposing a whole floor was covered and on the cover where he stands has a place for it which is attached to them and of this kind. Could it have been made before a boat and no one follows. How many have had hands. When they were sung to sung to see when they were sung to sung among when they were snugly sung to see, see seeds for that to eat and for and have the size and no more satchels made at all. Satchels may be held loosely. When they are sung and sung and sung and little have to have a hand and hand and two and two hands too, and too and two and handled too to them, handed to them, hand and hands. Hands

B U S I N E S S

I N

B A L T I M O R E

/

2 0 5

high. This can be Baltimore and or and Baltimore and for and Baltimore and more and Baltimore and for and Baltimore and or. It does not sound like it. When he older than that when he older than this when he older than this when he as old as he is, he is as old as he is, he is as old he is as old and would they know that fifty are fairly plenty of later hats. Hats cannot be used as mats not for selling or for much as much. He certainly was amused by it. Devoted to having a whole a half a half a whole, a whole or told it. Devoted to having a half, a whole a whole or told or it. Devoted to having a whole a half a half a whole a whole or told it. Devoted to having a half a whole a whole a whole a half a whole or told it. She did see fortunes fade. Who did see fortunes fade. Nobody saw fortunes fade. Nobody saw fortunes nobody saw fortunes fade. A whole a half a half a whole, fortunes fade who never saw fortunes fade he never saw fortunes fade. A half a whole he never saw he never saw fortunes he never saw fortunes fade or faded. He never saw fortunes he never saw fortunes fade. How much business is there in Baltimore. And how many are there in business in Baltimore. And how have they had to have business in Baltimore. And how has it been how has it been how has he been in business in Baltimore. He has been in business in Baltimore and before and before he was in business in Baltimore he was not in business he was not in business before he was in business in Baltimore. He had been in business before he had been in business in Baltimore he had been in business before in Baltimore. How had he been in busi-

2 0 6

\

T E X T S

ness in Baltimore. He had been in business before in Baltimore he had not been in business before he was in business in Baltimore. Business in Baltimore before, before business, before business in Baltimore. Business in Baltimore is business in Baltimore. Business in Baltimore in business in Baltimore and business in Baltimore is this business in Baltimore. How many more are there in business in Baltimore than there were before. How many more are in business in Baltimore than were in business in Baltimore before. This business in Baltimore. That business in Baltimore. A business in Baltimore. Business in Baltimore. Who says business in Baltimore. Who says business in Baltimore and before, and who says business in Baltimore more business in Baltimore more business in Baltimore than before. Pleases me, and while they have to have eaten eaten it, and eaten eaten it and eaten eaten it eaten eaten eaten eaten eaten it. Then a list is useful. Useful soon, useful as soon. As useful as soon. As useful as soon. Some time and shown. Who has to say so say so. They easily have after and soon. It was said at once to them that they had it. Afterwards it was said at once to them that they had it. Afterwards it was at once said to them that they had it. It was said to them it was afterwards said to them at once that they had it. It was afterwards said at once said to them afterwards said to them that they had it. It was afterwards said to them that they had it. It was afterwards at once said to them that they had it. How much easier how much easier, how much easier and how much easier. Forty makes forty and forty-four makes forty-four and

B U S I N E S S

I N

B A L T I M O R E

/

2 0 7

forty-four makes four and forty four makes forty-four. Business in Baltimore makes counting easy. If he had had and had had given and had had given to him what he had had how many more are there to have held it in this way away. One and he was famous not for that nor for provision nor for in addition nothing, nothing too much, not anything more and it was not said to be said. It takes many times more to make many times more and not to make many times more and not to make many times more many times more. Not many times more. Read riches. Anything that begins with r makes read riches and this is as twice and once and once. Once is it once, twice is it twice is it twice once and is it once twice. This is the way they make the day they make the day they make the day this is the way they make the day, once a day and it is a reason for having heard of it. Now at last it is well known that not because he did he did not hurry he did not hurry because he did and did not hurry and who asked him. That is what they say who asked him. Forgetting a name. Not to be transferred to Baltimore and so to say so so much. If you do not hear him speak at all louder then not to speak at all louder, not to speak at all louder not to hear him speak at all louder not to hear him speak at all louder and so not to speak at all louder. He does not speak louder and so not to speak louder and so not to speak louder at all. She was as well as he was as well as he was as well as she was as well as all that. All that as well as all that and having forgotten all the same having forgotten having forgotten and all the same all the same as having forgotten and to hear it hear it heard it heard it hear heard it heard it, heard it and all the same as forgotten having heard it all the same and all the same and having forgotten and having heard and all the same. Having heard it all the same having heard hear it hear it all the same

2 0 8

\

T E X T S

having forgotten and hear it and having forgotten and hear it and all the same and all the same and hear it and heard it. So much and so much farther as much and as much farther, and as much farther and so much and hear it and having heard it and all the same and having heard it and all the same and hear it and all the same and hear it and heard and having heard and all the same and hear it. Here and hear it. They are all the same as heard it as hear it all the same as heard it all the same and as heard it. All the same and heard and as heard it and as heard it and as all the same and heard it. All the same. Hear it. All the same hear it all the same. The same examples are the same and just the same and always the same and the same examples are just the same and are the same and always the same. The same examples are just the same and they are very sorry for it. So is not business in Baltimore. And so it is not and so is it not and as it is not and as it is and as it is not the same more than the same. This sounds as if they said it and it sounds as if they meant it and it sounds as if they meant it and it sounds as if they meant and as if they meant it. Everybody is disappointed in Julian’s cousin Julian’s cousin too, everybody is also disappointed is disappointed in Julian’s cousin too. Julian and everybody is disappointed in Julian’s cousin and everybody too is disappointed in Julian’s cousin too. How many days are there for it. There are as many days for it as there are ways to see how they do it. Do it too. Julian and a cousin too. Two and two, and two and two and lists and remembered and lists. To commence back further and just as far and as far back and just as far back. Just as far back as that. Just as far back as that and Julian remembers just as far back as that and Julian remembers just as far back and remembers Julian remembers just as far back as that. Everybody knows that anybody shows shows it as soon as soon and at noon as carefully noon as carefully soon, everybody knows, every-

B U S I N E S S

I N

B A L T I M O R E

/

2 0 9

body shows, everybody shows anybody knows carefully as soon carefully and noon carefully at noon everybody knows everybody shows carefully at noon carefully soon carefully soon carefully at noon, everybody knows carefully at noon carefully as soon anybody knows everybody shows everybody shows everybody knows carefully as soon, anybody knows carefully as soon, anybody knows carefully at noon everybody knows carefully as soon everybody knows carefully as soon, anybody knows carefully as soon everybody knows carefully as soon. Everybody knows carefully as soon, everybody knows carefully at noon everybody knows carefully as soon. Entirely exposed too. And how many in passing turn around. Just how many in passing just how many turn around. One can always tell the difference between snowy and cloudy everybody can always tell some difference between cloudy and snowy. Every one can always tell some difference. Every one can always tell some difference between cloudy and cloudy between snowy and snowy between cloudy and snowy between snowy and cloudy. Not as to dinner and dinner. How many are a hundred and how many are two hundred and how many are a million and three. This is for them to answer and in this way more in Baltimore. Business in Baltimore consists of how many and how often and more at once and a half of them there. Business in Baltimore is always a share a share and care to care and where where in Baltimore. Where in Baltimore. How many kinds are there in it. There are many and as many there are as many as there are streets, corners, places, rivers and trees in Baltimore. Squares can be mentioned too and stones and little and at once to approach. Who changes all changes.

2 1 0

\

T E X T S

All changes who changes. Do not hurry to winter and to summer. Do not hurry to winter. Do not hurry to summer. Do not hurry to summer. Not to hurry to winter. Not to hurry to winter and to summer and to winter and not to hurry to summer and not to hurry to winter. He can hear they can hear they can hear that they do hear her. They can hear that they do hear him. They can hear that they do hear him. They can hear that they do hear her. They can hear that they can hear him. They can hear winter, they can hear summer they can hear that they do hear summer, they can hear that they do hear that they can hear winter, they can hear summer they can hear winter. They can hear that they hear him they can hear that they can hear her they do hear that they can hear that they do hear her that they do hear winter that they do hear her that they can hear her that they can hear that they do hear him that they do hear him that they can hear that they do hear that they hear that they can hear summer and hear hear her here hear him here that they can hear her that they can hear. They do hear that they can hear winter. They do hear that they can hear summer. Business in Baltimore for them and with them with them and as a tree is bought. How is a tree bought. Business in Baltimore and for them and by them and is bought how is it to be bought and where is it to be bought. Business in Baltimore and for them and adding it to them and as it has the half of the whole and the whole is more if it is best shown to be more used than it was here and nearly. This and a result. Take it in place, take it to a place take it for a place and places and to place and placed. Placed and placing should a daughter be a mother. Placed and placing should a father be a brother. Placed and placing should a mother be a sister altogether. All this makes it easy that very many say so and very many do so and very many do so and very many say so.

B U S I N E S S

I N

B A L T I M O R E

/

2 1 1

He can so easily amuse himself and so can he so very easily amuse himself and so can he so very easily and so can he so very easily amuse himself and so can he so very easily and so can he so very easily amuse himself and as it were to be they had to have it largely and more and when they needed it all. To begin. How many houses were there in it. And to go on. And how many houses were there in it. How to depend upon it. And how many houses were there in it. And how to depend upon it and how many houses were there in it. How many houses are there in it. There were as many houses as there were in it. There were as many houses in it as there were as many houses in it. There are as many houses in it. How many houses are there in it. There are as many houses as there are in it. After that streets, corners, connections and ways of walking. There were more houses than there were in it. There were more corners than there were in it. There were more streets than there were in it. How many streets are there in it. How many corners are there in it. How many streets are there in it. How many houses were there in it. Everybody counting. Call somebody Hortense. Please do. And David. Please do. A little makes it all stop and stopped. A little makes it all stopped and stop. A little makes it all stop. A little makes it all stopped. It is a great pleasure for Hilda and for William for William and for Hilda. It is a great pleasure for either. If a home and a house and as often as hurry and hurried, they need to and do, they need to do they did need to they did and they did need to and they do and they do and they did need to do it too. Does she look as much like it as the newspaper would suggest. Plainly make it mine. Plainly make it plainly make it mine. This is as least not as well said as ever.

2 1 2

\

T E X T S

Having forgotten to hear, what and having forgotten to hear what had not been forgotten and not forgotten to hear. They have please they have please they have please. Business in Baltimore they have please. Did they like five. Did they like five of five. Business in Baltimore and more. More seated. Business in Baltimore need never be finished here when it is there when it is commenced there when it is completed here when it is added to here when it is established there. In this they mean he means to too and two. Never to be used at last to last and never as it was as if it was a horse. They have no use for horses. Never as it was as if it was because they had to have a way of counting one to make one. Could be sitting around faced that way and lean and if he did would he not having been as payed follow to a home. Follow to a home for him. Two cannot make room for two and two both seated cannot make room for two both seated. Two both seated cannot make room for two both seated. This is one date. Two cannot make room for two both seated. Yes and yes and more and yes and why and yes and yes and why and yes. A new better and best and yes and yes and better and most and yes and yes and better and best and yes and yes and more and best and better and most and yes and yes. And yes and yes and better and yes and more and yes and better and yes, and yes and yes and more and yes and better and yes and more and yes and yes and yes and more and best and yes and yes and better and most and yes and yes and more

B U S I N E S S

I N

B A L T I M O R E

/

2 1 3

and better and best and most and yes and yes and most and better and yes and yes and most and more and yes and yes, and more and yes and yes and better and yes and yes and most and yes and yes and best and yes and yes and better and yes and more and yes and best and yes and better and yes and more and yes and most and yes and more and yes and yes and better and yes and yes and most and yes and yes and best and yes and yes and yes and yes and better and most and yes and yes and better and most and yes and yes and more and most and yes and yes and better and most and yes and yes and more and better and yes and yes and yes and yes and more and best and yes and yes and more and best and yes and yes and more and yes and yes and best and yes and yes and more and yes and yes and better and yes and yes and best and yes and yes and more and yes and yes and better and yes and yes. And yes and yes and and more and better and yes and yes and better and yes and yes and more and yes and yes and better and and yes and yes and better and yes and yes and more and yes and yes and best and better and yes and yes and most and more and yes and yes and yes and yes and better and yes and best and most and better and more and best and better and yes and yes and yes and yes and yes and yes and more and yes and yes and better and yes and yes and more and yes and yes. And more and yes and yes. And more and better and yes and yes and best and more and yes and yes and better and yes and yes and most and yes and yes and best and more and yes and yes and yes and yes and better and more and better and yes and yes and most and better and more and yes and yes and yes and yes. And better and yes and yes and more and yes and yes and yes and yes and more and best and better and most and best and better and most and more and more and most and better and yes and yes. ■

2 1 4

1925

\

■

T E X T S

COMPOSITION

AS

EXPLANATION

AN ADDRESS GIVEN IN CAMBRIDGE AND OXFORD, JUNE 1926

There is singularly nothing that makes a difference a difference in beginning and in the middle and in ending except that each generation has something different at which they are all looking. By this I mean so simply that anybody knows it that composition is the difference which makes each and all of them then different from other generations and this is what makes everything different otherwise they are all alike and everybody knows it because everybody says it. It is very likely that nearly every one has been very nearly certain that something that is interesting is interesting them. Can they and do they. It is very interesting that nothing inside in them, that is when you consider the very long history of how every one ever acted or has felt, it is very interesting that nothing inside in them in all of them makes it connectedly different. By this I mean this. The only thing that is different from one time to another is what is seen and what is seen depends upon how everybody is doing everything. This makes the thing we are looking at very different and this makes what those who describe it make of it, it makes a composition, it confuses, it shows, it is, it looks, it likes it as it is, and this makes what is seen as it is seen. Nothing changes from generation to generation except the thing seen and that makes a composition. Lord Grey remarked that when the generals before the war talked about the war they talked about it as a nineteenth century war although to be fought with twentieth century weapons. That is because war is a thing that decides how it is to be when it is to be done. It is prepared and to that degree it is like all academies it is not a thing made by being made it is a thing prepared. Writing and painting and all that, is like that, for those who occupy themselves with it and don’t make it as

C O M P O S I T I O N

A S

E X P L A N A T I O N

/

2 1 5

it is made. Now the few who make it as it is made, and it is to be remarked that the most decided of them usually are prepared just as the world around them is preparing, do it in this way and so I if you do not mind I will tell you how it happens. Naturally one does not know how it happened until it is well over beginning happening. To come back to the part that the only thing that is different is what is seen when it seems to be being seen, in other words, composition and time-sense. No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who also are creating their own time refuse to accept. And they refuse to accept it for a very simple reason and that is that they do not have to accept it for any reason. They themselves that is everybody in their entering the modern composition and they do enter it, if they do not enter it they are not so to speak in it they are out of it and so they do enter it. But in as you may say the non-competitive efforts where if you are not in it nothing is lost except nothing at all except what is not had, there are naturally all the refusals, and the things refused are only important if unexpectedly somebody happens to need them. In the case of the arts it is very definite. Those who are creating the modern composition authentically are naturally only of importance when they are dead because by that time the modern composition having become past is classified and the description of it is classical. That is the reason why the creator of the new composition in the arts is an outlaw until he is a classic, there is hardly a moment in between and it is really too bad very much too bad naturally for the creator but also very much too bad for the enjoyer, they all really would enjoy the created so much better just after it has been made than when it is already a classic, but it is perfectly simple that there is no reason why the contemporaries should see, because it would not make any difference as they lead their lives

2 1 6

\

T E X T S

in the new composition anyway, and as every one is naturally indolent why naturally they don’t see. For this reason as in quoting Lord Grey it is quite certain that nations not actively threatened are at least several generations behind themselves militarily so aesthetically they are more than several generations behind themselves and it is very much too bad, it is so very much more exciting and satisfactory for everybody if one can have contemporaries, if all one’s contemporaries could be one’s contemporaries. There is almost not an interval. For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling. Now the only difficulty with the volte-face concerning the arts is this. When the acceptance comes, by that acceptance the thing created becomes a classic. It is a natural phenomena a rather extraordinary natural phenomena that a thing accepted becomes a classic. And what is the characteristic quality of a classic. The characteristic quality of a classic is that it is beautiful. Now of course it is perfectly true that a more or less first rate work of art is beautiful but the trouble is that when that first rate work of art becomes a classic because it is accepted the only thing that is important from then on to the majority of the acceptors the enormous majority, the most intelligent majority of the acceptors is that it is so wonderfully beautiful. Of course it is wonderfully beautiful, only when it is still a thing irritating annoying stimulating then all quality of beauty is denied to it. Of course it is beautiful but first all beauty in it is denied and then all the beauty of it is accepted. If every one were not so indolent they would realise that beauty is beauty even when it is irritating and stimulating not only when it is accepted and classic. Of course it is extremely difficult nothing more so than to remember back to its not being beau-

C O M P O S I T I O N

A S

E X P L A N A T I O N

/

2 1 7

tiful once it has become beautiful. This makes it so much more difficult to realise its beauty when the work is being refused and prevents every one from realising that they were convinced that beauty was denied, once the work is accepted. Automatically with the acceptance of the time-sense comes the recognition of the beauty and once the beauty is accepted the beauty never fails any one. Beginning again and again is a natural thing even when there is a series. Beginning again and again and again explaining composition and time is a natural thing. It is understood by this time that everything is the same except composition and time, composition and the time of the composition and the time in the composition. Everything is the same except composition and as the composition is different and always going to be different everything is not the same. Everything is not the same as the time when of the composition and the time in the composition is different. The composition is different, that is certain. The composition is the thing seen by every one living in the living they are doing, they are the composing of the composition that at the time they are living is the composition of the time in which they are living. It is that that makes living a thing they are doing. Nothing else is different, of that almost any one can be certain. The time when and the time of and the time in that composition is the natural phenomena of that composition and of that perhaps every one can be certain. No one thinks these things when they are making when they are creating what is the composition, naturally no one thinks, that is no one formulates until what is to be formulated has been made. Composition is not there, it is going to be there and we are here. This is some time ago for us naturally.

2 1 8

\

T E X T S

The only thing that is different from one time to another is what is seen and what is seen depends upon how everybody is doing everything. This makes the thing we are looking at very different and this makes what those who describe it make of it, it makes a composition, it confuses, it shows, it is, it looks, it likes it as it is, and this makes what is seen as it is seen. Nothing changes from generation to generation except the thing seen and that makes a composition. Now the few who make writing as it is made and it is to be remarked that the most decided of them are those that are prepared by preparing, are prepared just as the world around them is prepared and is preparing to do it in this way and so if you do not mind I will again tell you how it happens. Naturally one does not know how it happened until it is well over beginning happening. Each period of living differs from any other period of living not in the way life is but in the way life is conducted and that authentically speaking is composition. After life has been conducted in a certain way everybody knows it but nobody knows it, little by little, nobody knows it as long as nobody knows it. Any one creating the composition in the arts does not know it either, they are conducting life and that makes their composition what it is, it makes their work compose as it does. Their influence and their influences are the same as that of all of their contemporaries only it must always be remembered that the analogy is not obvious until as I say the composition of a time has become so pronounced that it is past and the artistic composition of it is a classic. And now to begin as if to begin. Composition is not there, it is going to be there and we are here. This is some time ago for us naturally. There is something to be added afterwards. Just how much my work is known to you I do not know. I feel that perhaps it would be just as well to tell the whole of it. In beginning writing I wrote a book called Three Lives this was writ-

C O M P O S I T I O N

A S

E X P L A N A T I O N

/

2 1 9

ten in 1905. I wrote a negro story called Melanctha. In that there was a constant recurring and beginning there was a marked direction in the direction of being in the present although naturally I had been accustomed to past present and future, and why, because the composition forming around me was a prolonged present. A composition of a prolonged present is a natural composition in the world as it has been these thirty years it was more and more a prolonged present. I created then a prolonged present naturally I knew nothing of a continuous present but it came naturally to me to make one, it was simple it was clear to me and nobody knew why it was done like that, I did not myself although naturally to me it was natural. After that I did a book called The Making of Americans it is a long book about a thousand pages. Here again it was all so natural to me and more and more complicatedly a continuous present. A continuous present is a continuous present. I made almost a thousand pages of a continuous present. Continuous present is one thing and beginning again and again is another thing. These are both things. And then there is using everything. This brings us again to composition this the using everything. The using everything brings us to composition and to this composition. A continuous present and using everything and beginning again. In these two books there was elaboration of the complexities of using everything and of a continuous present and of beginning again and again and again. In the first book there was a groping for a continuous present and for using everything by beginning again and again. There was a groping for using everything and there was a groping for a continuous present and there was an inevitable beginning of beginning again and again and again. Having naturally done this I naturally was a little troubled with it

2 2 0

\

T E X T S

when I read it. I became then like the others who read it. One does, you know, excepting that when I reread it myself I lost myself in it again. Then I said to myself this time it will be different and I began. I did not begin again I just began. In this beginning naturally since I at once went on and on very soon there were pages and pages and pages more and more elaborated creating a more and more continuous present including more and more using of everything and continuing more and more beginning and beginning and beginning. I went on and to a thousand pages of it. In the meantime to naturally begin I commenced making portraits of anybody and anything. In making these portraits I naturally made a continuous present an including everything and a beginning again and again within a very small thing. That started me into composing anything into one thing. So then naturally it was natural that one thing an enormously long thing was not everything an enormously short thing was also not everything nor was it all of it a continuous present thing nor was it always and always beginning again. Naturally I would then begin again. I would begin again I would naturally begin. I did naturally begin. This brings me to a great deal that has been begun. And after that what changes what changes after that, after that what changes and what changes after that and after that and what changes and after that and what changes after that. The problem from this time on became more definite. It was all so nearly alike it must be different and it is different, it is natural that if everything is used and there is a continuous present and a beginning again and again if it is all so alike it must be simply different and everything simply different was the natural way of creating it then. In this natural way of creating it then that it was simply different

C O M P O S I T I O N

A S

E X P L A N A T I O N

/

2 2 1

everything being alike it was simply different, this kept on leading one to lists. Lists naturally for awhile and by lists I mean a series. More and more in going back over what was done at this time I find that I naturally kept simply different as an intention. Whether there was or whether there was not a continuous present did not then any longer trouble me there was or there was not, and using everything no longer troubled me if everything is alike using everything could no longer trouble me and beginning again and again could no longer trouble me because if lists were inevitable if series were inevitable and the whole of it was inevitable beginning again and again could not trouble me so then with nothing to trouble me I very completely began naturally since everything is alike making it as simply different naturally as simply different as possible. I began doing natural phenomena what I call natural phenomena and natural phenomena naturally everything being alike natural phenomena are making things be naturally simply different. This found its culmination later, in the beginning it began in a center confused with lists with series with geography with returning portraits and with particularly often four and three and often with five and four. It is easy to see that in the beginning such a conception as everything being naturally different would be very inarticulate and very slowly it began to emerge and take the form of anything, and then naturally if anything that is simply different is simply different what follows will follow. So far then the progress of my conceptions was the natural progress entirely in accordance with my epoch as I am sure is to be quite easily realised if you think over the scene that was before us all from year to year. As I said in the beginning, there is the long history of how every one ever acted or has felt and that nothing inside in them in all of them makes it connectedly different. By this I mean all this. The only thing that is different from one time to another is what is seen and what is seen depends upon how everybody is doing everything.

2 2 2

\

T E X T S

It is understood by this time that everything is the same except composition and time, composition and the time of the composition and the time in the composition. Everything is the same except composition and as the composition is different and always going to be different everything is not the same. So then I as a contemporary creating the composition in the beginning was groping toward a continuous present, a using everything a beginning again and again and then everything being alike then everything very simply everything was naturally simply different and so I as a contemporary was creating everything being alike was creating everything naturally being naturally simply different, everything being alike. This then was the period that brings me to the period of the beginning of 1914. Everything being alike everything naturally would be simply different and war came and everything being alike and everything being simply different brings everything being simply different brings it to romanticism. Romanticism is then when everything being alike everything is naturally simply different, and romanticism. Then for four years this was more and more different even though this was, was everything alike. Everything alike naturally everything was simply different and this is and was romanticism and this is and was war. Everything being alike everything naturally everything is different simply different naturally simply different. And so there was the natural phenomena that was war, which had been, before war came, several generations behind the contemporary composition, because it became war and so completely needed to be contemporary became completely contemporary and so created the completed recognition of the contemporary composition. Every one but one may say every one became consciously became aware of the existence of the authenticity of the modern composition. This then the contem-

C O M P O S I T I O N

A S

E X P L A N A T I O N

/

2 2 3

porary recognition, because of the academic thing known as war having been forced to become contemporary made every one not only contemporary in act not only contemporary in thought but contemporary in self consciousness made every one contemporary with the modern composition. And so the art creation of the contemporary composition which would have been outlawed normally outlawed several generations more behind even than war, war having been brought so to speak up to date art so to speak was allowed not completely to be up to date, but nearly up to date, in other words we who created the expression of the modern composition were to be recognized before we were dead some of us even quite a long time before we were dead. And so war may be said to have advanced a general recognition of the expression of the contemporary composition by almost thirty years. And now after that there is no more of that in other words there is peace and something comes then and it follows coming then. And so now one finds oneself interesting oneself in an equilibration, that of course means words as well as things and distribution as well as between themselves between the words and themselves and the things and themselves, a distribution as distribution. This makes what follows what follows and now there is every reason why there should be an arrangement made. Distribution is interesting and equilibration is interesting when a continuous present and a beginning again and again and using everything and everything alike and everything naturally simply different has been done. After all this, there is that, there has been that that there is a composition and that nothing changes except composition the composition and the time of and the time in the composition. The time of the composition is a natural thing and the time in the composition is a natural thing it is a natural thing and it is a contemporary thing.

2 2 4

\

T E X T S

The time of the composition is the time of the composition. It has been at times a present thing it has been at times a past thing it has been at times a future thing it has been at times an endeavour at parts or all of these things. In my beginning it was a continuous present a beginning again and again and again and again, it was a series it was a list it was a similarity and everything different it was a distribution and an equilibration. That is all of the time some of the time of the composition. Now there is still something else the time-sense in the composition. This is what is always a fear a doubt and a judgement and a conviction. The quality in the creation of expression the quality in a composition that makes it go dead just after it has been made is very troublesome. The time in the composition is a thing that is very troublesome. If the time in the composition is very troublesome it is because there must even if there is no time at all in the composition there must be time in the composition which is in its quality of distribution and equilibration. In the beginning there was the time in the composition that naturally was in the composition but time in the composition comes now and this is what is now troubling every one the time in the composition is now a part of distribution and equilibration. In the beginning there was confusion there was a continuous present and later there was romanticism which was not a confusion but an extrication and now there is either succeeding or failing there must be distribution and equilibration there must be time that is distributed and equilibrated. This is the thing·that is at present the most troubling and if there is the time that is at present the most troublesome the time-sense that is at present the most troubling is the thing that makes the present the most troubling. There is at present there is distribution, by this I mean expression and time, and in this way at present composition is

C O M P O S I T I O N

A S

E X P L A N A T I O N

/

2 2 5

time that is the reason that at present the time-sense is troubling that is the reason why at present the time-sense in the composition is the composition that is making what there is in composition. And afterwards. Now that is all. JUNE

PATRIARCHAL

1926

POETRY

(

EXCERPT)

Patriarchal Poetry defined. Patriarchal Poetry should be this without which and organisation. It should be defined as once leaving once leaving it here having been placed in that way at once letting this be with them after all. Patriarchal Poetry makes it a master piece like this makes it which which alone makes like it like it previously to know that it that that might that might be all very well patriarchal poetry might be resumed. How do you do it. Patriarchal poetry might be withstood. Patriarchal Poetry at peace. Patriarchal Poetry a piece. Patriarchal Poetry in peace. Patriarchal Poetry in pieces. Patriarchal Poetry as peace to return to Patriarchal Poetry at peace. Patriarchal Poetry or peace to return to Patriarchal Poetry or pieces of Patriarchal Poetry. Very pretty very prettily very prettily very pretty very prettily.

2 2 6

\

T E X T S

To never blame them for the mischance of eradicating this and that by then. Not at the time not at that time not in time to do it. Not a time to do it. Patriarchal Poetry or not a time to do it. Patriarchal Poetry or made a way patriarchal Poetry tenderly. Patriarchal Poetry or made a way patriarchal poetry or made a way patriarchal poetry as well as even seen even seen clearly even seen clearly and under and over overtake overtaken by it now. Patriarchal Poetry and replace. Patriarchal Poetry and enough. Patriarchal Poetry and at pains to allow them this and that that it would be plentifully as aroused and leaving leaving it exactly as they might with it all be be careful carefully in that and arranging arrangement adapted adapting in regulating regulate and see seat seating send sent by nearly as withstand precluded in this instance veritably in reunion reunion attached to intermediate remarked remarking plentiful and theirs at once. Patriarchal Poetry has that return. Patriarchal Poetry might be what is left. Indifferently. In differently undertaking their being there there to them there to them with them with their pleasure pleasurable recondite and really really relieve relieving remain remade to be sure certainly and in and and on on account account to be nestled and nestling as understood which with regard to it if when and more leave leaving lying where it was as when when in in this this to be in finally to see so so that that should always be refused refusing refusing makes it have have it having having hinted hindered and implicated resist resist was to be exchanged as to be for for it in never having as there can be shared sharing letting it land lie lie to adjacent to see me. When it goes quickly they must choose Patriarchal Poetry originally originate as originating believe believing repudiate repudiating an impulse. It is not left to right

P A T R I A R C H A L

P O E T R Y

/

2 2 7

to-day to stay. When this you see remember me should never be added to that. Patriarchal Poetry and remind reminding clearly come came and left instantly with their entire consenting to be enclosed within what is exacting which might and might and partaking of mentioning much of it to be to be this is mine left to them in place of how very nicely it can be planted so as to be productive even if necessarily there is no effort left to them by their having previously made it be nearly able to be found finding where where it is when it is very likely to be this in the demand of remaining. Patriarchal Poetry intimately and intimating that it is to be so as plead. Plead can have to do with room. Room noon and nicely. Even what was gay. Easier in left. Easier in an left. Easier an left. Easier in an left. Horticulturally. Easier in august. Easier an august. Easier an in august Howard. Easier how housed. Ivory Ivoried. Less Lest. Like it can be used in joining gs. By principally. Led

2 2 8

\

T E X T S

Leaden haul Leaden haul if it hails Let them you see Useful makes buttercup buttercup hyacinth too makes it be lilied by water and you. That is the way they ended. It. It was was it. You jump in the dark, when it is very bright very bright very bright now. Very bright now. Might might tell me. Withstand. In second second time time to be next next which is not convincing convincing inhabitable that much that much there. As one to go. Letting it letting it letting it alone. Finally as to be sure. Selecting that that to that selecting that to that to that all that. All and and and and and and it it is very well thought out. What is it. Aim less. What is it. Aim less Sword less. What is it Sword less What is it Aim less What is it.

P A T R I A R C H A L

P O E T R Y

/

2 2 9

What is it aim less what is it. It did so. It did so. Said so Said it did so. Said it did so did so said so said it did so just as any one might. Said it did so just as any one might said it did so said so just as any one might. If water is softened who softened water. Patriarchal Poetry means in return for that. Patriarchal poetry means in return. Nettles nettles her. Nettle nettle her. Nettle nettle nettle her nettles nettles nettles her nettle nettle nettle her nettles nettles nettles her. It nettles her to nettle her to nettle her exchange it nettles her exchange to nettle her exchange it nettles her. Made a mark remarkable made a remarkable interpretation made a remarkable made a remarkable made a remarkable interpretation made a remarkable interpretation now and made a remarkable made a remarkable interpretation made a mark made a remarkable made a remarkable interpretation made a remarkable interpretation now and here here out here out here. The more to change. Hours and hours. The more to change hours and hours the more to change hours and hours. It was a pleasant hour however however it was a pleasant hour, it was a pleasant hour however it was a pleasant hour resemble hour however it was a pleasant however it was a pleasant hour resemble hour assemble however hour it was a pleasant hour however. Patriarchal Poetry in assemble. Assemble Patriarchal Poetry in assemble it would be assemble assemble Patriarchal Poetry in assemble.

2 3 0

\

T E X T S

It would be Patriarchal Poetry in assemble. Assemble Patriarchal Poetry resign resign Patriarchal Poetry to believe in trees. Early trees. Assemble moss roses and to try. Assemble Patriarchal Poetry moss roses resemble patriarchal Poetry assign assign to it assemble Patriarchal Poetry resemble moss roses to try. Patriarchal Poetry resemble to try. Moss roses assemble Patriarchal Poetry resign lost a lost to try. Resemble Patriarchal Poetry to love to. To wish to does. Patriarchal Poetry to why. Patriarchal Poetry ally. Patriarchal Poetry with to try to all ally to ally to wish to why to. Why did it seem originally look as well as very nearly pronounceably satisfy lining. To by to by that by by a while any any stay stationary. Stationary has been invalidated. And not as surprised. Patriarchal Poetry surprised supposed. Patriarchal Poetry she did she did. Did she Patriarchal Poetry. Is to be periwinkle which she met which is when it is astounded and come yet as she did with this in this and this let in their to be sure it wishes it for them an instance in this as this allows allows it to to be sure now when it is as well as it is and has ever been outlined. There are three things that are different pillow pleasure prepare and after awhile. There are two things that they prepare maidenly see it and ask it as it if has been where they went. There are enough to go. One thing altogether altogether as he might. Might he.

P A T R I A R C H A L

P O E T R Y

/

2 3 1

Never to do never to do never to do to do to do never to do never to do never to do to do to do to do never to do never never to do to do it as if it were an anemone an anemone an anemone to be an anemone to be to be certain to let to let it to let it alone. What is the difference between two spoonfuls and three. None. Patriarchal Poetry as signed. Patriarchal Poetry might which it is very well very well leave it to me very well patriarchal poetry leave it to me leave it to me. Leave it to leave it to me naturally to see the second and third first naturally first naturally to see naturally to first see the second and third first to see to see the second and third to see the second and third naturally to see it first. Not as well said as she said regret that regret that not as well said as she said Patriarchal Poetry as well said as she said it Patriarchal Poetry untied. Patriarchal Poetry. Do we. What is the difference between Mary and May. What is the difference between May and day. What is the difference between day and daughter what is the difference between daughter and there what is the difference between there and day-light what is the difference between day-light and let what is the difference between let and letting what is the difference between letting and to see what is the difference between to see immediately patriarchal poetry and rejoice. Patriarchal Poetry made and made. Patriarchal Poetry makes a land a lamb. There is no use at all in reorganising in reorganising. There is no use at all in reorganising chocolate as a dainty. Patriarchal Poetry reheard. Patriarchal Poetry to be filled to be filled to be filled to be filled to method method who hears method method who hears who hears who hears method method method who hears who hears who hears and

2 3 2

\

T E X T S

method and method and method and who hears and who who hears and method method is delightful and who and who who hears method is method is method is delightful is who hears is delightful who hears method is who hears method is method is method is delightful is delightful who hears who hears of of delightful who hears of method of delightful who of whom of whom of of who hears of method method is delightful. Unified in their expanse. Unified in letting there there there one two one two three there in a chain a chain how do you laterally in relation to auditors and obliged obliged currently. Patriarchal Poetry is the same. Patriarchal Poetry thirteen. With or with willing with willing mean. I mean I mean. Patriarchal Poetry connected with mean. Queen with willing. With willing. Patriarchal Poetry obtained with seize. Willing. Patriarchal Poetry in chance to be found. Patriarchal Poetry obliged as mint to be mint to be mint to be obliged as mint to be. Mint may be come to be as well as cloud and best. Patriarchal Poetry deny why. Patriarchal Poetry come by the way to go. Patriarchal Poetry interdicted. Patriarchal Poetry at best. Best and Most. Long and Short. Left and Right. There and More.

P A T R I A R C H A L

P O E T R Y

/

2 3 3

Near and Far. Gone and come. Light and Fair. Here and There. This and Now. Felt and How. Next and Near. In and On. New and Try In and This. Which and Felt. Come and Leave. By and Well. Returned. Patriarchal Poetry indeed. Patriarchal Poetry which is let it be come from having a mild and came and same and with it all. Near. To be shelled from almond. Return Patriarchal Poetry at this time. Begin with a little ruff a little ruffle. Return with all that. Returned with all that four and all that returned with four with all that. How many daisies are there in it. How many daisies are there in it. How many daisies are there in it. How many daisies are there in it. A line a day book. How many daisies are there in it.

2 3 4

\

T E X T S

Patriarchal Poetry a line a day book. Patriarchal Poetry. A line a day book. Patriarchal Poetry. When there is in it. When there is in it. A line a day book. When there is in it. Patriarchal Poetry a line a day book when there is in it. By that time lands lands there. By that time lands there a line a day book when there is that in it. Patriarchal Poetry reclaimed renamed replaced and gathered together as they went in and left it more where it is in when it pleased when it was pleased when it can be pleased to be gone over carefully and letting it be a chance for them to lead to lead to lead not only by left but by leaves. They made it be obstinately in their change and with it with it let it let it leave it in the opportunity. Who comes to be with a glance with a glance at it at it in palms and palms too orderly to orderly in changes of plates and places and beguiled beguiled with a restless impression of having come to be all of it as might as might as might and she encouraged. Patriarchal Poetry might be as useless. With a with a with a won and delay. With a with a with a won and delay. He might object to it not being there as they were left to them all around. As we went out by the same way we came back again after a detour. That is one account on one account. Having found anemones and a very few different shelves we were for a long time just staying by the time that it could have been as desirable. Desirable makes it be left to them.

P A T R I A R C H A L

P O E T R Y

/

2 3 5

Patriarchal Poetry includes not being received. Patriarchal Poetry comes suddenly as around. And now. There is no difference between spring and summer none at all. And wishes. Patriarchal Poetry there is no difference between spring and summer not at all and wishes. There is no difference between spring and summer not at all and wishes. There is no difference not at all between spring and summer not at all and wishes. Yes as well. And how many times. Yes as well and how many times yes as well. How many times yes as well ordinarily. Having marked yes as well ordinarily having marked yes as well. It was to be which is theirs left in this which can have all their thinking it as fine. It was to be which is theirs left in this which is which is which can which can which may which may which will which will which in which in which are they know they know to care for it having come back without and it would be better if there had not been any at all to find to find to find. It is not desirable to mix what he did with adding adding to choose to choose. Very well part of her part of her very well part of her. Very well part of her. Patriarchal Poetry in pears. There is no choice of cherries. Will he do. Patriarchal Poetry in coins. Not what it is. Patriarchal Poetry net in it pleases. Patriarchal Poetry surplus if

2 3 6

\

T E X T S

rather admittedly in repercussion instance and glance separating letting dwindling be in knife to be which is not wound wound entirely as white wool white will white change white see white settle white understand white in the way white be lighten lighten let letting bear this nearly nearly made in vain. Patriarchal Poetry who seats seasons patriarchal poetry in gather meanders patriarchal poetry engaging this in their place their place their allow. Patriarchal Poetry. If he has no farther no farther no farther to no farther to no farther to no to no to farther to not to be right to be known to be even as a chance. Is it best to support Allan Allan will Allan Allan is it best to support Allan Allan patriarchal poetry patriarchal poetry is it best to support Allan Allan will Allan best to support Allan will patriarchal poetry Allan will patriarchal poetry Allan will patriarchal poetry is it best to support Allan patriarchal poetry Allan will is it best Allan will is it best to support Allan patriarchal poetry Allan will best to support patriarchal poetry Allan will is it best Allan will to support patriarchal poetry patriarchal poetry Allan will patriarchal poetry Allan will. Is it best to support patriarchal poetry Allan will patriarchal poetry. Patriarchal Poetry makes it incumbent to know on what day races will take place and where otherwise there would be much inconvenience everywhere. Patriarchal Poetry erases what is eventually their purpose and their inclination and their reception and their without their being beset. Patriarchal poetry an entity. What is the difference between their charm and to charm. Patriarchal Poetry in negligence. Patriarchal Poetry they do not follow that they do not follow that this does not follow that this does not follow that theirs does not follow that theirs does not follow that the not following that the not follow-

P A T R I A R C H A L

P O E T R Y

/

2 3 7

ing that having decided not to abandon a sister for another. This makes patriarchal poetry in their place in their places in their places in the place in the place of is it in the next to it as much as aroused feeling so feeling it feeling at once to be in the wish and what is it of theirs. Suspiciously. Patriarchal poetry for instance. Patriarchal poetry not minded not minded it. In now. Patriarchal poetry left to renown. Renown. It is very certainly better not to be what is it when it is in the afternoon. Patriarchal poetry which is it. Which is it after it is after it is after it is after before soon when it is by the time that when they make let it be not only because why should why should why should it all be fine. Patriarchal poetry they do not do it right. Patriarchal poetry letting it be alright. Patriarchal poetry having it placed where it is. Patriarchal poetry might have it. Might have it. Patriarchal poetry a choice. Patriarchal poetry because of it. Patriarchal poetry replaced. Patriarchal Poetry withstood and placated. Patriarchal Poetry in arrangement. Patriarchal Poetry that day. Patriarchal Poetry might it be very likely which is it as it can be very precisely unified as tries. Patriarchal poetry with them lest they be stated. Patriarchal poetry. He might be he might be be might be be might be. Patriarchal poetry a while a way. Patriarchal poetry if patriarchal poetry is what you say why do you delight in never having positively made it choose.

2 3 8

\

T E X T S

Patriarchal poetry never linking patriarchal poetry. Sometime not a thing. Patriarchal poetry sometimes not anything. Patriarchal Poetry which which which which is it. Patriarchal Poetry left to them. Patriarchal poetry left together. Patriarchal Poetry does not like to be allowed after a while to be what is more formidably forget me nots anemones china lilies plants articles chances printing pears and likely meant very likely meant to be given to him. Patriarchal Poetry would concern itself with when it is in their happening to be left about left about now. There is no interest in resemblances. Patriarchal poetry one at a time. This can be so. To by any way. Patriarchal poetry in requesting in request in request best patriarchal poetry leave that alone. Patriarchal poetry noise noiselessly. Patriarchal poetry not in fact in fact. After patriarchal poetry. I defy any one to turn a better heel than that while reading. Patriarchal poetry reminded. Patriarchal poetry reminded of it. Patriarchal poetry reminded of it too. Patriarchal Poetry reminded of it too to be sure. Patriarchal Poetry reminded of it too to be sure really. Really left. Patriarchal Poetry and crackers in that case. Patriarchal Poetry and left bread in that case. Patriarchal Poetry and might in that case.

P A T R I A R C H A L

P O E T R Y

/

2 3 9

Patriarchal Poetry connected in that case with it. Patriarchal Poetry make it do a day. Is he fond of him. If he is fond of him if he is fond of him is he fond of his birthday the next day. If he is fond of his birthday the next day is he fond of the birthday trimming if he is fond of the birthday the day is he fond of the day before the day before the day of the day before the birthday. Every day is a birthday the day before. Patriarchal Poetry the day before. Patriarchal Poetry the day that it might. Patriarchal Poetry does not make it never made it will not have been making it be that way in their behalf. Patriarchal Poetry insistance. Insist. Patriarchal Poetry insist insistance. Patriarchal Poetry which is which is it. Patriarchal Poetry and left it left it by left it by left it. Patriarchal Poetry what is the difference patriarchal Poetry. Patriarchal Poetry. Not patriarchal poetry all at a time. To find patriarchal poetry about. Patriarchal Poetry is named patriarchal poetry. If patriarchal poetry is nearly by nearly means it to be to be so. Patriarchal Poetry and for them then. Patriarchal Poetry did he leave his son. Patriarchal poetry Gabrielle did her share. Patriarchal poetry it is curious. Patriarchal poetry please place better. Patriarchal poetry in come I mean I mean. Patriarchal poetry they do their best at once more once more once

2 4 0

\

T E X T S

more once more to do to do would it be left to advise advise realise realise dismay dismay delighted with her pleasure. Patriarchal poetry left to inundate them. Patriarchal Poetry in pieces. Pieces which have left it as names which have left it as names to to all said all said as delight. Patriarchal poetry the difference. Patriarchal poetry needed with weeded with seeded with payed it with left it with out it with me. When this you see give it to me. Patriarchal poetry makes it be have you it here. Patriarchal poetry twice. Patriarchal Poetry in time. It should be left. Patriarchal Poetry with him. Patriarchal Poetry. Patriarchal Poetry at a time. Patriarchal Poetry not patriarchal poetry. Patriarchal Poetry as wishes. Patriarchal poetry might be found here. Patriarchal poetry interested as that. Patriarchal Poetry left. Patriarchal Poetry left left. Patriarchal poetry left left left right left. Patriarchal poetry in justice. Patriarchal poetry in sight. Patriarchal poetry in what is what is what is what is what. Patriarchal poetry might to-morrow. Patriarchal poetry might be finished to-morrow. Dinky pinky dinky pinky dinky pinky dinky pinky once and try. Dinky pinky dinky pinky dinky pinky lullaby. Once sleepy one once does not once need a lullaby. Not to try.

P A T R I A R C H A L

P O E T R Y

/

2 4 1

Patriarchal Poetry not to try. Patriarchal Poetry and lullaby. Patriarchal Poetry not to try Patriarchal poetry at once and why patriarchal poetry at once and by by and by Patriarchal poetry has to be which is best for them at three which is best and will be be and why why patriarchal poetry is not to try try twice. Patriarchal Poetry having patriarchal poetry. Having patriarchal poetry having patriarchal poetry. Having patriarchal poetry. Having patriarchal poetry and twice, patriarchal poetry. He might have met. Patriarchal poetry and twice patriarchal poetry. ■

SENTENCES (

AND

1927

■

PARAGRAPHS

FROM HOW TO WRITE)

A Sentence is not emotional a paragraph is.

Dates of what they bought. They will be ready to have him. We think so. He looks like a young man grown old. That is a sentence that they could use. I was overcome with remorse. It was my fault that my wife did not have a cow. This sentence they cannot use. A repetition of prettiness makes it repeated. With them looking. A repetition of sweetness makes it not repeating but attractive and

2 4 2

\

T E X T S

making soup and dreaming coincidences. The sentence will be saved. He raises his head and lifts it. A sentence is not whether it is beautiful. Beautiful is not thought without asking as if they are well able to be forgiving. George Maratier in America. The sexual life of Genia Berman. A book of George Hugnet. The choice of Eric Haulville. The wealth of Henri d’Ursel. The relief of Harry Horwood. The mention of Walter Winterberg. The renown of Bernard Fay. The pleasure of prophecy concerning Rene Crevel. Titles are made of sentences without interruption. Sucking is dangerous. The danger of sucking. With them. In itself. Within itself. A part of a sentence may be a sentence without their meaning. Think of however they went away. It looks like a garden but he had hurt himself by accident. Every sentence has a beginning. Will he begin. Every sentence which has a beginning makes it be left more to them. I return to sentences as a refreshment. Howard opposes them less. That is nice. George is wonderfully well. How does he like ability. A sentence should be arbitrary it should not please be better. It should not be disturbed. A sentence has colors when they mean I liked it as selling salt should be very little used in dishes.

S E N T E N C E S

A N D

P A R A G R A P H S

/

2 4 3

That is one of the best I have done. Pleasantly or presently. How or have. A sentence is. Made or make a meaning. Now feebly commence a sentence. How has he hurried. That is a paragraph because it means yes. How has he hurried. Now for a sentence. Welcome to hurry. That is either a sentence or a part of a sentence if it is a part of a sentence the sentence is he is welcome to hurry. Welcome is in itself a part of a sentence. She prefers them. I have told her where the place which is meant is. Welcome when they come. Are they welcome when they come. A sentence instead of increases. It should be if they are. Welcome when they come. That so easily makes a paragraph. Try again. They made made them when they were by them. This is a sentence. It has no use in itself because made is said two times. Way-laid made it known as quince cake. This is a perfect sentence because it refers to regretting. They regret what they have given. So far there is no need for a paragraph. I cannot see him. This is a paragraph. Think of a use for a paragraph. A sentence is exhausted by have they been there with him. A useful and useful if you add house you have a paragraph. He looks like his brother. That is a whole sentence. Dogs get tired and want to sleep. This is not a sentence to be abused. He has had his portrait painted by a Frenchman a Dutchman an Englishman and an American. Pleases by its sense. This is a fashion in sentences. A dog which you have never had before has sighed. This is a fixture in sentences it is like a porcelain in plaster. All this together has no re-

2 4 4

\

T E X T S

verses. What is the difference between reserve and reverse. They can be beguiled. Beguiled and belied. It was famous that a woman who was a wife to him. A veritable hope. Hurry with a sentence. This are our announcements. A sentence. She owes him to her. A sentence. He ought to own mines. He heard her come in. Laughed is a word. If a word reminds you that is a preparation which they do in time so that it is with all. Candied is a word we were mistaken she can have a lake. There is no use in weapons of precision for them formerly. Think of imagination as has to do for you. Door handles which he likes. Now there is no use in stopping when they went in. She mentioned edging edging is used in having sewing surrounding something. It is very difficult to think twice. This is very well done because it does not stop. Eggs are of fish and fowl. This is perfectly reasonable. Tell them how to finish. Now this is a new paragraph. The ending tell them how to finish makes it an importance. First-rate has relation to tires. How are they. That is a way to please a paragraph. Think if you can. I find it difficult to know yes or no. I find no difficulty in yes I said no. I said I would and I did. I did not used to. This is an ordinary paragraph made different by content. As they asked for it. Why is as they asked for it a sentence. Think of how do you do as very necessary.

S E N T E N C E S

A N D

P A R A G R A P H S

/

2 4 5

He gave it to them to-day. Now think carefully of monstrosity. He gave it to them to give away. Which one threw it away. It is to be certain that love is lord of all. This sentence has hope as origin. A tapestry made easy by being seen. Think of all these sentences and not to be annoyed. After all what is the difference between it and you. Everybody has said they are happy. If two sentences make a paragraph a little piece is alright because they are better apart. They are as a pleasure as out loud. Now think. A paragraph such as silly. That is alright. So there we are just as all the same. No not out loud never accrue as allowed. What does he mean by eating. There you are. There are marks where he went away. What does he do by himself. There you are. Left left left right left he had a good job and he left. Buy a pair and with them do this for them which they like as well. It is very necessary to be held by Fanny. Now all this is still sentences. Paragraphs are still why you were selfish. Shell fish are what they eat. This is neither a paragraph nor a sentence. When it is there it is out there. This is a sentiment not a sentence. Now that is something not to think but to link. A little there. I lost a piece of my cuff button and I found it. This is not a sentence because they remain behind. Now that is it. I have it. They do not leave it because they do send it. Now the minute you do more you make a subject of a severance.

2 4 6

\

T E X T S

A sentence has been heard. Now listen. Have it made for me. That is a request. A sentence is proper if they have more than they could. They could. Without leaving it. A sentence makes not it told but it hold. A hold is where they put things. Now what is a sentence. A sentence hopes that you are very well and happy. It is very selfish. They like to be taken away. A sentence can be taken care of. The minute you disperse a crowd you have a sentence. They were witnesses to it even if you did not stop. There there is no paragraph. If it had a different father it would have. I heard how they liked everybody and I said so too. That is not a sentence and you see just why it is not why it should be. Once when they were nearly ready they had ordered it to close. This is a perfect example and it is not because it is a finish it is not ended nor is it continued it is not fastened and they will not neglect. There you are they will not neglect and yet once again they have mustaches. Think well do they grow any taller after they have a beard. They do although all experience is to the contrary. Once when they were nearly ready they had ordered it to close. This is one of the series of saving the sentence. Remarks are made. The courtiers make witty remarks. They payed where they went. Habits of which they are the owners are those they have without it being to them of any aid. It is February. They add it up. He does not sound like me. Nor do I sound like him.

S E N T E N C E S

A N D

P A R A G R A P H S

/

2 4 7

Think that a sentence has been made. I am very miserable about sentences. I can cry about sentences but not about hair cloth. Now this is one way of relenting. Think of a sentence. A whole sentence. Who is kind. We have known one who is kind. That is a very good sentence. A separate cushion is not as comfortable. This is a sentence that comes in the midst not in the midst of other things but in the midst of the same thing. They have that as flourishes. That is a sentence that comes by obedience to intermittence. That is the cruelest thing I ever heard is the favorite phrase of Gilbert. Saving the sentence volume one. Or three The difference between a short story and a paragraph. There is none. They come and go. It is the cruelest thing I ever heard is the favorite phrase of Gilbert. And he is right. He has heard many cruel things and it is the cruelest thing that he has heard. It is very hard to save the sentence. Part of it is explained. I like evidence of it. He is to get away as usual. Music is nondescript. This is a sentence. They have taken exception to this statement because there will be exceptions when words are harbingers of means, by which they made names. He accompanied words by musical tunes. How are houses crowded. A crowd contemplate moving. This is a commonplace sentence facing they will object.

2 4 8

\

T E X T S

It is a pleasure to play with a dog. Bower is a secluded place where they had names. Find their names. All this meets the objection. A little bit of way and she comes to say that he is the best taken care of anyway. This is a light sentence with positive joy and so they have it. Do understand and to understand. This is so light it is an emotion and so a paragraph. Yes so a paragraph. A man. One man. Of interest to one man. They say they will find it interesting. How are ours received. That is a question which they make. Now think of a sentence. All these are parts. One man makes four children. He is not taught without care. This sentence comes to the same place as all they said. Now what is the difference between a sentence and I mean. The difference is a sentence is that they will wish women. Do you all see. Now here is a sentence. Are they coming back. That is not a sentence. A sentence is from this time I will make up my mind. Then they have hurried. A sentence can be three things they can use. A sentence can be three things made with hurry. Come and see me. Come Thursday and you will see them. Wait for what you are waiting for. By the time that it is here they have had it and it is what they selected. I like what they give me. Now all these sentences have been made with their assistance. Now make a sentence all alone.

S E N T E N C E S

A N D

P A R A G R A P H S

/

2 4 9

They remember a walk. They remember a part of it. Which they took with them. Now who eases a pleasure. I ought to be a very happy woman. Premeditated meditation concerns analysis. Now this is a sentence but it might not be. Premeditated. That is meditated before meditation. Meditation. Means reserved the right to meditate. Concerns. This cannot be a word in a sentence. Because it is not of use in itself. Analysis is a womanly word. It means that they discover there are laws. It means that she cannot work as long as this. It is hard not to while away the time. It is hard not to remember what it is. With them they accord in the circumstances. Sentences make one sigh. There were three kinds of sentences are there. Do sentences follow the three. There are three kinds of sentences. Are there three kinds of sentences that follow the three. If his ear is back is it drying. One says there are three kinds of sentences and every other one is just alike. Butter spreads thinly. They made it be away as they went or were sent. This is a mixture of a memory and a reproduction. This is never noisy. Nothing is noisy. How are a sentence is the same. If it is very well done they make it with butter. I prefer it not with butter. What is a sentence with tears. Is she using red in her tapestry red

2 5 0

\

T E X T S

in her tapestry. All these sentences are so full of with glass, glass is held it can make coffee so too. Now then what is it. A sentence is Humbert with him. There are so few kings. He was so funny. He was so funny. That is a sentence. She resembled him. Now that you see is because of it it is not so, she was exactly like her. Exactly alike her. If you forget a paragraph. Hop in hope for. Neglecting. I will write to Christian Berard. It is alright. Once or twice it does not make any difference. Does not make any difference. Let us meditate. Does not make any difference. They fasten that they are not by noticing. He would not hurt even if it does bother his teeth by it. Now think carefully whether they say it. I would use a sentence if I could. Why does it not please me to be sitting here. Who likes to hear her hear of them. See how bad that is. A sentence is saved not any sentence no not any sentence at all not yet. It is not very easy to save a sentence. The sentence that is the one they are saving if they are lucky which has been predicted to them. Never ask any one what a sentence is or what it has been. It is of no interest if you know what it has to do with it. Come back to complacency. What is a sentence.

S E N T E N C E S

A N D

P A R A G R A P H S

/

2 5 1

If he has wished. Wild and while. A sentence says that the end of it is that they send in order to better themselves in order to sentence. A sentence is that they will have will they be well as well. What is a sentence. A sentence is tardily with them at a glance as an advance. Listen to this. It does make any difference if his voice is welling they will be well if they receive their welcome with as without as well with it. It is all a relief. Everything is worth while with a pudding an angel made of pudding. Do you see why I am happy. Happy is to find what it does. What is it it does. What is the difference between a question and answer. There is no question and no answer. There is an announcement. There is at the outset. Have never had the outset. We feel that if we say we we will go. This a simple meaning. A sentence that is simple in a cross with a meaning. A sentence says you know what I mean. Dear do I well I guess I do. Keep away from that door and go back there, that has not a meaning that has an association does he do so he does but not by guess work or difference there is no difference. I think there which I wish here. For no movement. It does make any difference if a sentence is not in two. We change from Saturday to to-day. She thinks that she can wish that she can have it be there. What is a sentence. A sentence is not a fair. A fair is followed by partake. This does make a sentence.

2 5 2

\

T E X T S

Think how everybody follows me. A sentence makes them all not an avoidance of difficulty. A sentence is this. They never think before hand if they do they lay carpets. Lay carpets is never a command. You can see that a sentence has no mystery. A mystery would be a reception. They receive nothing. In this way if it finishes. This is so obviously what they will do. Obviously what they will do is no mistake because we did not know it. We did not know it is not a mistake either. Leave it alone is not theirs as a mistake. Artificially is what they call when they call out. Who knows how many have been careful. Sentences are made wonderfully one at a time. Who makes them. Nobody can make them because nobody can what ever they do see. All this makes sentences so clear I know how I like them. What is a sentence mostly what is a sentence. With them a sentence is with us about us all about us we will be willing with what a sentence is. A sentence is that they cannot be carefully there is a doubt about it. The great question is can you think a sentence. What is a sentence. He thought a sentence. Who calls him to come which he did. The Earles parlor was a parlor in a house in Lynn. Does it make any difference if a sentence is balanced it does and it does not. The balancing of a sentence is mound and round. They will thank you anywhere. What is a sentence. A sentence is a duplicate. An exact duplicate is depreciated. Why is a duplicated sentence not depreciated. Because it is a witness. No witnesses are without value. Even which it may be they do not know that their right hand is their right hand nor their left hand which is their left hand. A sentence then can easily make a mistake. A sentence must be used. Who has had a sentence read for him. He will be pleased with what he has and has heard. This is an exceedingly pretty sentence which has been changed.

S E N T E N C E S

A N D

P A R A G R A P H S

/

2 5 3

I did not expect to be interested but I am. Now the whole question of questions and not answer is very interesting. The whole thing about all day is not at all when they were owned. What is a question. To thank for a question is no mistake. We change from Saturday to to-day. ■

HISTORY

OR

1930

■

MESSAGES

FROM

HISTORY

I have it to do. They have it to do. Lynn has to do it. She is awake to bake cake. Apart from a pie what can she do she cannot make a pie because she cooks a part of it separately and this should not be done for a pie. The fruit in a pie should be cooked in a pie. The pleasure of coming here is why they speak as they do. In this time they will manage not any longer to stay long to buy sugar as they have surpassed them as to their roses. This is how hours point. We are no longer young in weather. It is very remarkable that we are very nearly perfect when we had been mostly troublesome. Now why. We do not know except that we were tired of meals in butter. Butter comes first. The scene opens with a storm followed by rain but no hail. There

2 5 4

\

T E X T S

was expected to be a wind storm. But even so there would be a little coldish air but not at present wind. They were quietly expectant but a little irritable. In a night it made no difference to it that it did not leave it which is it. Do you feel well does he feel well. He is a little pale. Perhaps he needs more food. Perhaps he does. Then he will have it if it is what is when he has need of it. She is very willing to prepare meals for him as well as for them unless it is raining in which case she is busy sewing. There is no interest in regretting that they are equally regretting that it is a not as happy as for an occasion. This is why they are not here hardly why they mean this by threes. He has not come back. He is there and he has not come back. Do they feel that this is their donation to lending, alas no, they are caught because they have won the right to be in meaning. I mean I mean was not said of women. When made a link with then linked with men linked with a pencil or a pen linked with a pen wherein chickens are kept. What is it. A scene out of the window with the nightingales singing. Beginning their singing which is intermittent at first. Nightingales means nothing to those who have not heard them which many in America have not. She wants to read it. Lavender begonias heliotrope pinks roses and add pansies although they are not there but near give a great deal of pleasure in many ways.

H I S T O R Y

O R

M E S S A G E S

F R O M

H I S T O R Y

/

2 5 5

Will it be that they will think with me. They will think it with me. They will readily be with me. They need to have it be here with me. Five make forty-four we hope they will give us the house. The house. This house. Not their house not his house it is her house but since she does not count it it is a house. She does not need it it is not needed in place of usage. Usage is when they made it do very well for the use of it. It is very well that a little while they will have been happy to go. It is indeed very desirable that in a little while they will have been prepared to have left when they did go. It is not useful if they wait. A little chicken does not prepare to step up. A little chicken is not little. It is without eight pears. They move about any men have pears to sell. Peaches are reasonable. Grapes are to be plentiful. Chickens are scarce. You never can tell by their mistaking who lives in the house. A house is attached to others. By the time some have come. Beans are peas. Placed so that they change with the weather. Nobody seeds which are washed away. They can be in and out of sight. The dog looks young. The colonel has directed the soldiers to grow nasturtiums. In argument. A spinning of a tulip in a villa of lilacs in not magenta. Attendance a necessity. It is very easy to grow peas and be proud of a grandson and be fearful of the way he never passes. Oh how can you bother with me.

2 5 6

\

T E X T S

They curtsied as they fished that is their father fished but not then. Bob has a wife called May. She has lost her bloom. Frank has a wife Diana who has a mother. She has a father who lives with the mother. She goes every day as they are not too far away. Others have a friend who is not any longer able to care for them. They do still own them. Nuns are made in their image. A dog sleeps easily. There is very little variety he sleeps with variety. It is useless both to remember names. He comes running of which no one complains. A dragging is made in bicycles. They will never forget women and bicycles, chickens and drawers and ebony and extensive burdens. It happens that they will leave it with her and she will be happy to make more of it with theirs. See how many changes make nobody lessen more days. Now he there more for theirs. This is never near by. Again with their season. It is why after me. Letters are answered before us. A little cup and saucer is of no use with dishes. Think of a reason for that. How do you do if you make a mess. It is regrettable to be sorry for them all. Think why.

an interlude. begonias.

H I S T O R Y

O R

M E S S A G E S

F R O M

H I S T O R Y

/

2 5 7

Think with a minute, a minute is too baby who. An owl is a bird. And wisely is furred. Because it is true I love but you. She is winsome as a wicked nightingale. A nightingale means everything so does after music. Less is less than lest, lest we hear the nightingale. The meadow in which they throw rosebush roots is below. To refuse to be cajoled by in which. Oh thank you. A name is normal they will be within reach of the sound that a name sakes for them they are awaked by the sound of their name which is spoken for reaching named it to them. They will be alike if they cannot get in. Houses are multiplied with a hail storm. Cadence cup and ball. To matter in taming Bertha. Climb into a coat. With them they are busy. She is always right. And beautiful. Rested. They will name arches by her. Leaves honey and lavender. Leave money for her finding it sunny. Money is a flower.

symbolism. She means yes by yes and little by little and went there to have them along. Symbolism means yes by yes with part of it which they take. Taken made easily it is too bad. I feel I know it now. Without disguise although I am busy I have not to be assured where it is. All who call call with all their strength this not really so because they would be farther blamed as exhausted. Let us think of symbolism in wading in a country where the water dries easily. It is a pleasure to find begonias although one does not care

2 5 8

\

T E X T S

really to regard them because they will look well in the place in Versailles do you remember. The characters are to be she and they. He is not dissatisfied. They are very well. It is very kindly. They are there where she is and that is because they will not be saddened by her living and leaving in three places. One once with wedding made a glance with credit at once they made a present to the ones they were with. It was known as attending to helping in accidentally never have to make it to them in their mistaken in what is the difference if it is or is not made on purpose when then it will do. The better wider that they mind after the firm of which they might be seated as if they had loaned it until they were through. Nobody needs paper to make dolls with what they have for her. It is mine to idle and to chew which he would mean if he ran they were welcome as the difficulty of it all. As breath of better instead of named when he heard her come not nearly as well as it was one and one. One and one does he like to have to do it if not why. There are so few that they will do. Who has been here. Once when I went I added three to we are here. They went away and fastened it for me when this you see you are all to me. In union there is strength they are after all to look for me. When added as very likely. They came and went and were heaven sent. Heaven is a place from which they are sent. Well meant is when they come when they are invited. These are the characters which emerge. A dog has a heart which beats quickly when he is told.

H I S T O R Y

O R

M E S S A G E S

F R O M

H I S T O R Y

/

2 5 9

They meant that old and gold and told are two words which resemble. She made a discovery she asked who has been left to get it all. If she married a general she was a widow. If she married an admiral she was a young girl. In this way all the characters have come to be wealthy. Wealthy and wise. We think that they are happy. Happy is as happy does. They are very well when they have had a sister and a daughter. It is of assistance. Now listen it is of assistance to them. A moth in the moonlight is a moth indoors. Joining is an amusement and a presence. A lieutenant is not a captain in which way he finishes. I never like to think of anybody. How many people have come home to attend to the little calves. One. She is to be with and with diminishes. When she came today she said she would stay away. No elephants are irritable as a sign. One two three all out but she. A turk has held her by the hand, he has filled her heart and her hand and she is not displeased with money. He is obedient in that way. She meant to like Thérèse. Thérèse is a sister she has a brother. An african is not a turk he is an indian. A hen is not a chicken she is an appointment which has been kept. Who hurts him. He hurts him. Who will be welcome. It will be welcome. There will be an emigration. They will have satisfaction.

2 6 0

\

T E X T S

Hours of their opportunities and they do not like to think about them. In this way they are selfish. A happy hour. Prefacing a happy hour. It is untangible which means that the tangles have been taken out and there is a reason for their not gradually getting stout. Maria Sera was her name there we do not know her name here. Oh yes we will bless her we will be grateful and we may be left to be careless of how she does it. A simple way of being here when she is obliging. Now then. Now and then François says he is all right Sunday and Monday. He says his father knows. He says he likes it all alike. Anybody living here is in the fields and fearful not of thunder or of rain or of cold or of cows they are afraid of whether they will cut the hay.

part ii. Play horses with oxen and copy carrots with seed. She is just as well as that. A mystery or Thérèse. Why does not Thérèse have to go. There is no mystery with the young man. He may not in fact it is said so he is not her son. If they stand are they annoyed not if they are sitting they are annoyed not very.

H I S T O R Y

O R

M E S S A G E S

F R O M

H I S T O R Y

/

2 6 1

It is easy not have her crackle paper but not so agreeable. A dog sleeps he is not nervous when he sleeps. A little noise is not attractive when it is made by her. She moves slowly and works hard not to reach up but her boy is necessary to fail not her but his teacher who expect nothing better. She that is she in her letter said it better. Better have sepoys than lovely ladies sepoys are hindoo soldiers in revolt. There are two things that are interesting history and grammar. History is historical. It is very well to like to have grammar. Grammar is acquainted with a way to feed them. Think of history. She made her have no hope of being married. That can never be history. It was too bad that he was never hurried. That came [to] be historical. Now she she being there and now always remembering the key to take the key there is no history in that. It is difficult to remember her. There is no history in that nor is there candy nor is there farming. Abandoning grammar for history eating and farming and never being happy. She is very happy. He is very happy. He married the daughter of a dressmaker and she left to have a child by a cousin of whom she had been fond. He was a doctor and had been married to her. They will not be restless not her father and mother who have little dogs. They are not any stranger. She likes a brown suit and a golden beard in a notary. Anybody here is here for history. An answer to where have you known of her is this I did not see her I bought it for her. This is not history. Lands which are placed where they are forward and back and nec-

2 6 2

\

T E X T S

essary and a little as late as ever is the history of whether they will be hurt by an accident. They can easily have their arm hurt but it does not hinder them neither their eyes. In history one does not mention dahlias mushrooms or hortensias. They may mention tulips grasses roses and ducks and geese. They may mention dogs and geraniums and verbena also acacia lavender and apricots. Apples and pears and now birds and flowers and clouds and distance. History is placed where it is and hope is full of wishes. I wish to be with them. They are agreeable and fortunately able to like merry circuses. They appeal to the desire for weeding and patience. They make dresses prettily and wait. There is a difference between history and description. They will preface that. They have nieces for their vines. Vines which grow. They must be taken care of even if they fail to bear. This is not description it is not authority it is not history. The history of any opposition to happiness. There is no history in gentleness. She gently found mushrooms. She questioned the authority. It might have been many more there were quite enough. No history is proof against everything. Moonlight in the valley is before and after history. History of a lady whose grandchildren told her they were a king and she did not believe that he had come. History of his making it be there were for them taken. Little pay for places where they were rented to stay. Knives cleaner knife cleaner. Bed roses beds of roses bed of roses beds for roses roses are declared to have been chosen. They chose or were chosen they chose roses or roses were chosen. Beds for baking. It is sideways to love having heard with them. Tomorrow. Manage changes.

H I S T O R Y

O R

M E S S A G E S

F R O M

H I S T O R Y

/

2 6 3

Leave it for babies. Read it for changes. An annoyance. Leave made maid for minding changes. They name by our changes. It is destroyed by happening to be with them. With them with him. Now think how is a history of think with them think with him think for him think for them think they were with him they thank and they thank him with them for him. Aloud is organized for louder. How are ours meant for them in clouded. Rain is not accompanied by a sigh from dogs. Can they walk that way from tire. They are careful to be in the way by saving. Save. Like nine like welcome women. They must be chosen with them then they were worn with addition in meaning. It is so easy to confound her with the mother of little more than any more with them. They were outstanding in coining words without women. Leave it to me. How could he be how little they like how many are there may be more names which they have by next to their home. It is a passage where they were waiting. Who has a fancy for whom. An entirely new way to say entirely. I like horses to be with my father because he walks more easily with oxen. That is it. A pleasure to them all but why will they wait for me in regularly. Leave it to be as much with intended women. Names when they had named that. Percy a prize. Thank you for the surprise. Lead ways are lost. We will ask them to see to the light because it is of importance that we are obliging. Finally with women.

2 6 4

\

T E X T S

part ii. messages from history Better than the mother she heard it be no bother. Unless you look. This is why he was not nervous but a little happy in their attention. It is when they look that they look like that. They expected thunder and they had rain and the thunder came after. 2 Love of a person makes better soften. She made him like them. It was not unwelcome to him. They were repaid by them. It is true that they give an account of it which is received with acclamation. In the meanwhile do they have words with music. Selfishly. They account for it like this. In union there is strength. They were expecting it to be emphasized which whenever it was they know that they sided with intention with their impression nevertheless they were without choice which is where they were in repetition which they resettle alike in union there is strength and a hymn to have him be approached with makes it restless as after every little while they wait for it. An allowance for a cloud. It is bursting with rain the cloud is and it comes.

H I S T O R Y

O R

M E S S A G E S

F R O M

H I S T O R Y

/

2 6 5

3 Shut up whatever you like with his being liked it is of no use that puppies and birds have little ones they have to respect it themselves. A pressure is that they have fought and told it about how they were wishing to be disappointing they make it be very much which they knew they had out right. Leave winter to summer. That is what they do when they are within and without you. 3 How are errors avoided. They are fresh as ever. He made it be that they are willing to mistake him for me. This is what is seen when they pass from one to one as they stand with their instruments in between not of farming not of fighting but of standing. And no one hears what they say. Why not if it is a word. Because they must not have known to more than those who like it. Everybody can be away for a minute. This makes all day easy. 4 Birdie is alike. Remain is alike and they nearly saw fog surround a cross. When they do this they in a little while buy something Swedish then all of a sudden there is thunder and this happens every once every hundred years. 5 Mainly being fine with willing to rain she is the one who has been right and right it is that it is never left to the judgment of one incapable to spell truly with the words behind which they make their treasure. She makes my happiness in every measure.

2 6 6

\

T E X T S

6 Birds make religion this is known every hour and why because it does not belie what she cherishes. She cherishes me so tenderly. They will be thought best and most and she is all. 7 The lesson of history so she says is that he will do it again but will he we hope not. 8 A famous wife is married to a famous poet both beloved. This is what history teaches. 9 What is history. They make history. 10 History is this. Human nature is the same that is not history. A dog is dissatisfied and restless that is not a history. He is unpleasant in all his little ways and we do not care about him although we forgive him that also is not history. The son of Mrs. Roux has failed in his examinations that is to say he has been discouraged from attempting them that is not history. What is history they make history. In times of attention they are not certain that they will obtain what they wish this might be history but it is not history. Intention is not history nor finality finality is not history. Think what is history. Mildred made and knew history.

H I S T O R Y

O R

M E S S A G E S

F R O M

H I S T O R Y

/

2 6 7

Pierre does not make but fears history. Bernard leaves and leans on history. Once upon a time a couple had a dog who aroused universal admiration. They were by nature interested in antithesis. They followed when they came they were much in use and equally they were amused. They were not behindhand with arguments in their arrangement there were birds who had built a nest who unable to be in that place might have come in and out, and puzzled the dog. They were imaginative they hoped for the best and they had seen that chickens can die and be complained of. It was very often inconsiderate to not be found noisily precious to their employees. Leave well enough alone was never said by them. They amounted to that. There is a difference between noisily and visibly so they thought and they were attacked by those who found them wanting in delicacy of expression. It was not often that they were disappointed, they were alike in being often weather beaten. Who makes it be incompatible with fame. It is terrible when weather is not propitious. In time they were accustomed to sunshine they had been accustomed to sunshine and they were tired of it sunshine accompanied or unaccompanied by wind, they were a little at a time desirous of mountains in the distance and one at a time they were recognized. They were very often coming to be an outstanding responsibility to those who were not careful. When any little arrangement was made they were not very careful and yet without abundance they were quite careful. They were astounded in accordance with the establishment of an adventure. In various times they were subject to prophecy. In all it was part of a reason. Very often any date could be in amount without counting. In hopes and in all their objection to invitation they were obliging they were sweet they were attractive and attracting and an allowance being

2 6 8

\

T E X T S

made for what they considered wholesome and injurious they were very often wilful a subject is varied by their achievement. In every little while all pieces of renewing and there they might be doubtful of a choice and their habit would be not seized but reluctantly and therefore consciously to remind leaving, it was as of no occurrence lending for them was a pleasure and yet it could be refused not the pleasure but the organization. It is not often that two people agree about having had it all. In this way it is a little changed. Abruptly thinking is not a surprise they may be blamed because in a pleasure there is always a rejoinder. How do you like your favorite scent. If you say you prefer pansies that may be because of delicacy. Pansies are pretty. They went away and they had in common that the present and at present they are careful made it be by means of altercation that shouting is heard at a distance this may be conversation. What is history. History is the learning of spectacular consistency privately and learning it alone and when more comes they receive. 5 Do be asked to bag grapes. Do be asked to make grapes into raisins. Do be asked to bag grapes so that they will not come to be raisins. 6 History pleases when will for their sake they repay their adage. Bay is a bay with a lake. 7 History is this they may I say add leave that.

H I S T O R Y

O R

M E S S A G E S

F R O M

H I S T O R Y

/

2 6 9

8 Jacob pays Marcel who saw Francis leave wood for wages. His heart is like a lion by reason of the muscle in his arms down to his hands. 9 The mother of Bernard and Florence had a little boy which they left is this what is bad for history no because it is funny. It is not history by a viaduct. She need leave she leaves with a relish for resting which she had. A viaduct brings water not milk water in abundance is bad for wheat, wheat is not wholesome. Butter is and so is food. She eats food. History rests by this they mean they make history all day a dog will come when he is called and go away, this is history because a dog does not fare as well there as here. A dog is in hope of learning a mountain and a mountain is helpful in being called for them. They will manage it better. 9 What is history. Leave leaves and summer. Lettuce leaves and spring and summer. Leaf when an officer marries a daughter and they will have a home together. A leaf of embroidery. She makes leaves and a leaf very perfectly making it with a better than hopefully. Hope was in praise of hoping. This is the history of a name. 10 Beware of a lake the sun may shine and the reflection burn you or it may be cold either way is as it were a frontier. A frontier is a division between countries. A history of a country is not a history of the changing of frontiers although many think so particularly those near the frontier the history of a country is why they like things which they

2 7 0

\

T E X T S

have and which they do not exchange for other things for which they do not care. They have a particle at a time of any more and they are never eager. No country is ever eager. This account is one which makes no account of waterfalls or trees or any ground which is used for giving them this. They are not acquainted with any one who has butter for sale. There are many ways of drowning bees in honey those used in a country are the same anywhere. Hours of clouds. They like to gather what they plant. 11 Bakers bake in February. Thank you. 12 April is fully a holy day too. A holiday for a shoe. 12 Pink blessing is helping heard them make it do. She is established with having it for you. Little as well as do. 14 What is history he felt that it was not a foolish thing to do.

Flowers 7

H I S T O R Y

15 historical And lovely flowers mostly roses pansies and dahlias.

O R

M E S S A G E S

F R O M

H I S T O R Y

/

2 7 1

Herbs Francis Hat

7.15 7.30 8

And very delicate and spicy herbs. He was quite welcome was he not. A hat very well suited to the usage for which it was and is intended. Beans 9.30 A great many beans. Basket 10.30 He is sometimes a trial of patience. Bathe 11.30 A pleasure and a refreshment. This is historical in the best sense. 16 History teaches us that whether clouds have in the part of them a spiral movement made by the action of the wind or not as long as the barometer shows no change the rain will continue, at intervals, with pleasant weather interspersed. 17 History is this. He is not happy because he is worried by his refusing to be able to have his hopes succeed rapidly one after the other not that he has hopes to fulfill but he has hopes which follow all the while there is great bitterness because he goes when he does and he comes as he does and he does nothing without refusing such as has been asked of him. This you can see sounds historical and in a way it is historical. It is not his history it is historical thank you very much. 18 Leaves of history. If they smile at a photograph taken of them in the sun.

2 7 2

\

T E X T S

19 What is history. They make history. Just why do they like birds seen in the way he saw them it was very pretty and made it be very welcome in the telling. 20 If they send it to him as well as to her both will have had it. If they do this for both of them either of them will be the one to tell the other. The way to taste is to be welcomed as eating. Any acquaintance with their having had it is nullified. And in indemnifying them for awaiting the disadvantage of their reason. The history of satisfaction. She ate late because she had had to wait. He is ready to leave but he must wait until they are after all not to wait. It is better that they should all wait. They wait. It is now time that they had come to go having waited. They are able to wait but they would as leaf not wait. Having waited they would rather after all not wait. They will go together that is they will leave none of them behind. 21 What is history it does not leave dogs for cows. It does not will not please not, an opportunity not to call when they are after the interval known that they may be perfectly left for them in a place.

H I S T O R Y

O R

M E S S A G E S

F R O M

H I S T O R Y

/

2 7 3

22 History, it is said so kindly she ate the pear not the whole but the top of a pear which being a favorite morsel had been delicately offered and the offering is not in vain as it has been as much known. Do think things. 23 Behavior pleases many. His behavior leaves nothing to be desired by any one coming into any contact with him he is pleasant and ferocious he can see with what he likes when they call officious a farewell to society and also he never has been referred to as being with them there in the meanwhile it is as when they must must she come she came and left with it as attached to attach left where they went he was on the place with what they asked of pleasing. It is mine to ask plenty of them to go away. ■

WE

CAME.

A

1930

■

HISTORY

A HISTORY

We came and were pleased with what we saw. It was very much as pleasant as it could be. It was nearly with which we were to be as much as possible contented. In no time we were made where we were. This is an introduction to residing. A nephew of an old woman could be shot having been mistaken for

2 7 4

\

T E X T S

a wild boar not by those who had the right to destroy the animal by themselves but by those who were doing it illegally. So then they made it be as if he had been killed. The result of which is that we have no wild hare. One day we had two visitors they stayed not with us but in the neighborhood two days and during that time they were with us and we found it agreeable to show them things that were known. What is known homes and places and lakes and churches. An attitude of being made agreeable to those who do not care to address him. What is history. Believe them it is not for their pleasure that they do it. History is this anything that they say and that they do and anything that is made for them by them such as not speaking to them in case that he is turned away from them. This is historical. What did they do. They were willing to like them and to tell it of them in telling everything. What is historical. Sentences are historical. They will not encourage children. This is not historical. They will be made very dependent on men and women. This might be historical. He was very much pleased with the hope of release. This is historical. What happened. He resigned himself to remaining where he was and in this way he neither endeared himself nor made them relieve him when he was willing. This is history because it is accompanied by reluctance. Reluctance is not necessarily history nor is decision. I like white because dahlias are beautiful in color. Tube roses come from onions, in every sense of the word and the way of saying it is attractive to her. How do you like what you have heard.=History must be distinguished=From mistakes.=History must not be what is=Happening.=History must not be about=Dogs and balls in all=The meaning of those=Words history must be=Something unusual and=Neverthe-

W E

C A M E .

A

H I S T O R Y

/

2 7 5

less famous and=Successful. History must=Be the occasion of having=In every way established a=Precedent history must=Be all there is of importance=In their way successively=History must be an open=Reason for needing them=There which it is as they=Are perfectly without a=Doubt that it is interested.=History cannot be an accident.=They make history they=Are in the place of it.=II=History leaves no place=For which they ask will=They be made more of=In case of the disaster=Which has not overtaken=Any one. Historically there=Is no disaster because=Those who make history=Cannot be overtaken=As they will make=History which they do=Because it is necessary=That every one will=Begin to know that=They must know that=History is what it is=Which it is as they do=Know that history is not=Just what every one=Does who comes and=Prefers days to more=Than ever which they have=History must again be=Caught and taught and=Not be that it is tiring=To play with balls.=It is not tiring to go on=And make the needle=Which goes in and out=Be careful not at all=History is made by a very=Few who are important=And history is what that=One says. History is=This it is the necklace= Which makes pansies=Be made well of stones=Which they are likely=To be. This is not=History history is made=By them they make history.=III=One who was remarkable=Addressed them as follows.=Come when you like and=Leave when you like=And send what you like=And play what you like=But and in this there=Can be no mistake=Do not care more for=Nasturtiums than for=Tube roses. It was a=Moment the moment=When there was certainty=That it was that and by=Itself they were told=That it was not different.=There are three things=That are historical.=Tube roses heliotrope and lavender.=There may be fragrant lilies=And other delights but=History is made and=Preserved by heliotrope=Lavender and tube-roses.=His-

2 7 6

\

T E X T S

tory is made and remains=A delight by reason=Of certainty and certainty=Depends upon a result=Achieved directly by a=Surprise not a surprise=In fact nor in thought=Nor in result but a=Surprise in the delight=And the delight is not=A surprise the surprise=Is in confirmation and so=It is undoubtedly real=That history is made=By accomplishment=And accomplishment is=A surprise which it is=So that there is not=A possibility of coming=And going historically.=This will be understood=Readily not by them.=Nor by me for them=Nor is it without doubt=That they are as for them=In elegance. In order=Not to end and finish=They will say it has=Not happened but it has.=With them in time.=The time for tasting is=Also as you may say=They have forgotten that=It is not worth while=This has to do with grapes=And barley and wheat=And also meat and rice=And also ducks and birds=And also hens and cats=And eggs. All this has=Been a history of pleasantness=In arrangement which=They made when they=Were pleased.=IV=But in duration they might=With which they please days=More just as willing pass=In neglect receive on loan=It is call of=They will be willingly here=Not as if alright lain=Made it a forgotten thing=That she could thank layers=Not without use of it=Partly as when known mind=They mind whether they do=A well which it is=Counting from this of it=In much of it owned.=Likeness makes places be where=They must have what now=Come to smoulder with our=Nearly formed alike with moist=Allowed which is in his=To make those carry here=She sleeps but is annoyed=And so she mentions them=That is arranged like it=A part of which cut=You know how like it=Known how you like it.=V=But as will which is of it=Nearly come back to help exploit it=They might in the meantime see which=In a way it is a choice=By the time that it is finished=They must have whatever they will like=It is very dangerous to help it=As

W E

C A M E .

A

H I S T O R Y

/

2 7 7

they mean to hold all there=As they very well happen with it=To hope to have it like it.=VI=Please save them=For little things=In a million=They make which=It is vastly=Nor more than=As left nearly=In a tree=Which came like=A better parasol=Made into two=The like of which=Is not felt=By those who=In the meanwhile=Are better inclined=Than they were=As much as=In silently waking.=As she named.=All of it=Is made there=In quietly=Second to none=In recollection barely=Hours at a time=They will share=What they have=With those known=By their name=They will hear=What they do=In woods alike=And rhododendrons hortensias=And peppers alike=They will have=More of it=Chain of vines=Made of morningglories=Which are renowned=And blushing pails=Which made treasure=Be happily theirs=Oh leave it=With them here=Because as a matter of fact=They will be better off.=VII=Touch butter but not flower=Whether either or for another=Make hopes leave it all=Never bother them with it=As very likely they will=She knows how to refuse=Leave it for them there=They will have a use=For it as an almanac=In splendid weather=Which they expect=VIII=Bother me with that=But it is part of it=In that case do not leave it=But it is of no use to me=Why do they not like it.=Do not say they when you mean them=They like it very well=They will use it for themselves=Once in a while they will not know what to do with it.=It is the only reason for it not being made better.=The change from all of it is well enough.=They have it=As they like=Which they regulate.=IX= Acrobacy fools them.=X=Just when they went=They knew as well=As if it was=Their wish to go=In which in case=They were as often=Left alone with it=As it might be=Too much coming there=Without its being said=Jackets are necessary here=In a little while=Very often a veil=Is what they know=When they hear it=In the meanwhile too=It

2 7 8

\

T E X T S

is actually read=By the time only=In case of separation=Two have to order=All that they need=May be she will=But in and about=It is not likely=Which she means.=XI=Autobiography ought to=Have made doors=They will scare them=XII=By their help=It is usual=To succeed nicely=Without their help=Which they give=As it is=Ought to go=They must and=Will have whatever=They want here=By the time=They are willing=To allow banking=Which have helped them.=XIII=It is easy to see that they move differently=XIV=I called it audience and then frame or form but the question is not that it is not composition it is not that it is beginning and middle and ending without that anybody can end and begin and the middle is easier than anything.=XV=I am not busy=When he is neglected=This is not often= Because she is there=XVI=Ours are made for them=They will ask for it=They need two rests for it=Because it is helped more than they like by it=Because in searching for doves=Doves are named pigeons by butter.=Do not be blamed for failure=Ask them are they ready=But is it wise to=Because it may annoy them=Press them to remain here=They will like it if they stay=Little by little it will help=Not to be restless like that=He wants his dinner=After it is over he will be=Just as restless=This is why they never pay any attention to what he does.=They must call him anyway.=XVII=I do not think it would do=To bathe him on a Sunday=This is the reason=It is easy to be quiet=And to give it as a reason=For coming to-day=Florence is made to George=Now listen to that.=It does surprise you=Florence is not yet married to George but they have had the dinner of betrothal which was later than noon and a good deal of bother.=The first of September Florence is to be married to George.=XVIII=Any one believes that things equal to the same thing are equal to each other. Any little way that is like a pleasure.=Just why they came=Is the same

W E

C A M E .

A

H I S T O R Y

/

2 7 9

way=In which they waited=In liking having bought it=Which made them go=They went away at once.=XIX=It is easy to keep count.=One two three all out but she.=It is easy to keep count and make a mistake.=Slenderness keeps them busy.=Ought they to be busy=With it=Anything artificial is an annoyance example artificial silk.=All history is cautious. ■

STANZAS

IN

1930

■

MEDITATION

(

STANZA I

I caught a bird which made a ball And they thought better of it. But it is all of which they taught That they were in a hurry yet In a kind of a way they meant it best That they should change in and on account But they must not stare when they manage Whatever they are occasionally liable to do It is often easy to pursue them once in a while And in a way there is no repose They like it as well as they ever did But it is very often just by the time That they are able to separate In which case in effect they could

2 8 0

\

T E X T S

EXCERPT)

Not only be very often present perfectly In each way whichever they chose. All of this never matters in authority But this which they need as they are alike Or in an especial case they will fulfill Not only what they have at their instigation Made for it as a decision in its entirety Made that they minded as well as blinded Lengthened for them welcome in repose But which they open as a chance But made it be perfectly their allowance All which they antagonise as once for all Kindly have it joined as they mind

STANZA II

It is not with them that they come Or rather gather for it as not known They could have pleasure as they change Or leave it all for it as they can be Not only left to them as restless For which it is not only left and left alone They will stop it as they like Because they call it further mutinously Coming as it did at one time only For which they made it rather now Coming as well as when they come and can For which they like it always Or rather best so when they can be alert Not only needed in nodding

S T A N Z A S

I N

M E D I T A T I O N

/

2 8 1

But not only not very nervous As they will willingly pass when they are restless Just as they like it called for them All who have been left in their sense All should boisterous make it an attachment For which they will not like what there is More than enough and they can be thought Always alike and mind do they come Or should they care which it would be strange Just as they thought away. It is well known that they eat again As much as any way which it can come Liking it as they will It is not only not an easy explanation Once at a time they will Nearly often after there is a pleasure In liking it now Who can be thought perilous in their account. They have not known that they will be in thought Just as rich now or not known Coming through with this as their plan Always in arises. Liking it faintly and fairly well Which meant they do Mine often comes amiss. Or liking strife awhile Often as evening is as light As once for all Think of how many open And they like it here.

2 8 2

\

T E X T S

STANZA III

It is not now that they could answer Yes and come how often As often as it is the custom To which they are accustom Or whether accustomed like it In their bought just as they all Please then What must they make as any difference Not that it matters That they have it to do Not only for themselves but then as well Coming for this. He came early in the morning. He thought that they needed comfort Which they did And they gave them an assurance That it would be all as well As indeed were it Not to have it needed at any time Just as alike and like It did make it a way Of not only having more come She refused to go Not refused but really said And do I have to go Or do I go Not any more than so She is here when she is not better

S T A N Z A S

I N

M E D I T A T I O N

/

2 8 3

When she is not better she is here In their and on their account All may remember three months longer Or not at all or not in with it Four leaf clovers make a Sunday And that is gone

STANZA IV

Just when they ask their questions they will always go away Or by this time with carefulness they must be meant to stay For which they mind what they will need Which is where none is left They may do right for them in time but never with it lost It is at most what they can mean by not at all for them Or likeness in excellent ways of feeling that it is Not only better than they miss for which they ask it more Nearly what they can like at the best time For which they need their devotion to be obtained In liking what they can establish as their influence All may be sold for which they have more seeds than theirs All may be as completely added not only by themselves. For which they do attack not only what they need They must be always very ready to know. That they have heard not only all but little. In their account on their account may they Why need they be so adequately known as much For them to think it is in much accord In no way do they cover that it can matter

2 8 4

\

T E X T S

That they will clear for them in their plight Should they sustain outwardly no more that for their own All like what all have told. For him and to him to him for me. It is as much for me that I met which They can call it a regular following met before. It will be never their own useless that they call It is made that they change in once in a while. While they can think did they all win or ever Should it be made a pleasant arrangement yet For them once in a while one two or gather well For which they could like evening of it all. Not at all tall not any one is tall No not any one is tall and very likely If it is that little less than medium sized is all Like it or not they win they won they win It is not only not a misdemeanor But it is I that put a cloak on him A cloak is a little coat made grey with black and white And she likes capes oh very well she does. She said she knew we were the two who could Did we who did and were and not a sound We learned we must we saw we conquered most After all who makes any other small or tall They will wish that they must be seen to come After at most she needs be kind to some Just to like that. Once every day there is a coming where cows are

S T A N Z A S

I N

M E D I T A T I O N

/

2 8 5

STANZA V

Why can pansies be their aid or paths. He said paths she had said paths All like to do their best with half of the time A sweeter sweetener came and came in time Tell him what happened then only to go He nervous as you add only not only as they angry were Be kind to half the time that they shall say It is undoubtedly of them for them for every one any one They thought quietly that Sunday any day she might not come In half a way of coining that they wish it Let it be only known as please which they can underrate They try once to destroy once to destroy as often Better have it changed to pigeons now if the room smokes Not only if it does but happens to happens to have the room smoke all the time. In their way not in their way it can be all arranged Not now we are waiting. I have read that they wish if land is there Land is there if they wish land is there Yes hardly if they wish land is there It is no thought of enterprise there trying Might they claim as well as reclaim. Did she mean that she had nothing. We say he and I that we do not cry Because we have just seen him and called him back He meant to go away Once now I will tell all which they tell lightly. How were we when we met.

2 8 6

\

T E X T S

All of which nobody not we know But it is so. They cannot be allied They can be close and chosen. Once in a while they wait. He likes it that there is no chance to misunderstand pansies. ■

LECTURE

I

(

1932

■

FROM NARRATION)

It is a rather curious thing that it should take a hundred years to change anything that is to change something, it is the human habit to think in centuries and centuries are more or less a hundred years and that makes a grandfather a grandmother to a grandson or a granddaughter if it happens right and it often does about happen right. Is it the human habit to think in centuries from a grandparent to a grandchild because it just does take about a hundred years for things to cease to have the same meaning that they had before, it is a curious thing a very curious thing that everything is a natural thing but it is it is a natural thing and it being a natural thing makes it a curious thing a very curious thing to almost anybody’s feeling. One is always having to talk to one’s self about it that a natural thing is not really a strange and a peculiar and a curious thing. So then there we are a hundred years does more or less make a century and this is determined by the fact that it includes a grandparent to a grandchild and that that is what makes it definitely different one time from another time and usually there is a war or a

L E C T U R E

I

/

2 8 7

catastrophe to emphasize it so that any one can know it. It is a very strange thing that such a natural thing is inevitably to all of us such a strange thing such a striking thing such a disconcerting thing. The eighteenth century finished with the French revolution and the Napoleonic wars the nineteenth century with the world war, but in each case the thing of course had been done the change had been made but the wars made everybody know it and liberated them from not knowing it not knowing that everything was not just exactly what it had been. I am quite sure that the world’s history the world made up of human beings is made up in this way of about always a century and it is determined that is made by the natural filling up of time from a grandparent to a grandchild. Twenty-five years roll around very quickly but four times twenty-five years which makes a century does not really roll around at all it makes a complete change but it does not roll around at all at least not to anybody’s feeling. That is what narrative is that twenty-five years roll around so quickly but that one hundred years do not roll around at all but that they end, the century ends in being an entirely different thing and so any century comes to begin and comes to end. That makes one of the great difficulties of narrative to begin and to end and I think it has to do with the fact that a century begins and ends but that no part of it begins and no part of it ends and this serious problem in narrative I will take up very much later but now first to know what English literature is in connection with English life and what American literature is in connection with their life and their lives because of course most literature is narrative that is in one way or in another way the telling of how anybody how everybody does anything and everything. To begin then with English literature and what it is and American literature and what it is. But before going on to this matter I have just been thinking that

2 8 8

\

T E X T S

the civil war in America was another case of about a century, seventeen sixty to eighteen sixty again made a grandfather to a granddaughter a grandmother to a grandson and so as usual everything changed as it always has done very likely it will do so again, very likely a century every so often will do what a century always has done. But to commence again with what English literature has done in telling everything and what American literature has done in telling everything and how although they completely differ one from the other and they use the same language to tell everything that can be happening it is naturally very naturally not at all the same thing. I have already written a lot about what the English people are and what their literature is and how it changed in every century not how the English people changed the English people did not change. That is something that again we must remember as a contradiction that makes everything the same. Once a nation has lived long enough anywhere to be that nation and that commences very soon after they have come to live where they are to live the character of that nation can naturally never be changing. When they asked me when I came back to America do you find America changed I said no neither America nor Americans after all when you say changed how could they change what after all could they change to, and when you ask that of course there is no answer. How could there be any answer. After all how could they change what could they change to. Different things happen and at the end of more or less of a century the different things that have happened makes everybody do all the different things that have happened very differently, but they as a nation although they do do things differently do do those different things differently in the way they as that nation always has done them always will do them. And therefore any nation’s literature is a homogeneous thing although in every century everything is different.

L E C T U R E

I

/

2 8 9

I do know about English literature that it has been determined by the fact that England is an island and that the daily life on that island was a completely daily life, that they could do nothing but lead a daily life on that island and that the more they owned everything outside of that island the more inevitably and completely were they forced to live the daily life in a more daily way, because if they owned everything outside they could not possibly allow themselves to confuse the inside with the outside. Every hundred years or so everything changed, that they were English people living on an island did not change but things in relation one thing to another changed and that is what makes a century and in every century the relations of anything to anything changed and this change is what makes history, and really this is a thing for all of us to remember and to realize because it is going to make very clear the interesting thing that mostly history is not literature that literature is not history. Literature we may say is what goes on all the time history is what goes on from time to time and this is what is terribly important to think about in connection with narrative. But to come back again to English literature. As I say the English people did different things the nations near them or around them did different things and about once every hundred years everybody became conscious of this thing that everybody had come to do different things that is to say had come to do the same things in a different way in a way so different that every one could come to know this thing know that it was a really different way and so of course a different way that had come to stay. That is inevitably what every one once every hundred or so years really comes to say. And this had happened in England in the same way as it happens anywhere where there is a grandfather or a grandmother to a grandson or a granddaughter. But all the time the English people were living their

2 9 0

\

T E X T S

life every day, that had to be because that is what their island life had made them be that they lived their daily life every minute of the day. And the whole of English literature was a description of this daily life that they lived every day. And now there is another thing to say. If you live a daily life every minute of the day the description of that daily life every day must be moving, it must fill you with complete emotion and it must at the same time be soothing. It must be completing as emotion and it must be soothing. If you live your daily life every minute of the whole day there must really be very little excitement in the narrative with which you while the time away that is natural enough if you think about it and a great deal of the written narrative in English literature has to do with this thing, they want narrative they need narrative because as they live their daily life every minute of the day narrative has so much to say it has to say that that daily life is being lived every second of that day. And that is what literature does it emphasizes what every one has as the life of the nation which the life of every one in that nation makes it be. That is what literature is as anybody can see if they read the writing as a nation makes it be. It makes it be absolutely clear that the daily life in England is a daily life lived every minute of the day. That is to say. The minutes succeeding each other each one has in it in the daily living that minutes succeed each other give them and every one knowing that daily living is going on in each one of them can know this in them in each minute of them and each minute can give any one this thing, that daily living is existing. Americans and English use the same language but the Americans have not a daily living as any Englishman does and can have. In America life goes on but not from minute to minute and each minute being filled full with it. Therefore Americans do not need a narrative of every day of any day, they have nothing to tell of the living of every moment in a daily

L E C T U R E

I

/

2 9 1

living, they have nothing to say of living every day that makes it be a really soothing thing to say. Think of any American narrative and what it has to say. Not at all. One may say that in America there is no daily life at all. The English live their island life every day every minute of the day and if there could be one moment in the day in which their daily life was not lived in the daily island way their narrative would be at an end there would be nothing to say. Now the English write their narrative in English because that is the language they have made and it is made to tell of a daily life lived every minute of the day. Also as it is a daily life lived every minute of the day it is a soothing thing to say and mostly what the English have had to say has been that it has been a soothing thing to say that they live every minute of the day even when the day has been a difficult day. Now the Americans also tell their story in English, but as they have no daily life every minute of every day and as the language is written down so much any and every day they can not change that language and still they have nothing to say no narrative to tell about living every day no narrative to soothe any one who is living every minute of every day. So what can they do. At any other time at a time when everybody and everything is not being written all the time it would have been an easy thing to make the language the Americans are using another language but now it is almost impossible to do this. Little by little it does not change the words they use continue to be all the same and yet the narrative they have to tell has nothing whatever to do with the narrative the English have and had to tell. The American not living every minute of every day in a daily way does not make what he has to say to be soothing he wants what he has

2 9 2

\

T E X T S

to say to be exciting, and to move as everything moves, not to move as emotion is moving but to move as anything that really moves is moving. It is going to be very interesting and it is very interesting and it has been very interesting to see how two nations having the same words all the same grammatical construction have come to be telling things that have nothing whatever in common. It is something that any one interested in narrative has to very much think about, because it has never happened before. Always before the language of each nation who had a narrative to make a story to tell a life to express a thing to say did it with a language that had gradually become a language that was made gradually by them to say what they had to say. But here in America because the language was made so late in the day that is at a time when everybody began to read and to write all the time and to read what was written all the time it was impossible that the language would be made as languages used to be made to say what the nation which was coming to be was going to say. All this has never happened before. History repeats itself anything repeats itself but all this had never happened before. So what has there been and what is there and what is there going to be to do about it. That narrative is going to be made that the story they have to tell is going to be told that the nation which lives in a land that has made it that nation will have to tell its story in its own way about that there can be no doubt, the story must be told will be told can be told but they will tell this story they tell this story using the exactly same words that were made to tell an entirely different story and the way it is being done the pressure being put upon the same words to make them move in an entirely different way is most exciting, it excites the words it excites us who use them. These words that were made by those who finally made them to tell the story of the soothing of liv-

L E C T U R E

I

/

2 9 3

ing every minute of the day a daily living these words by the pressure of being used by those who never any day live a daily living have not come to have a different meaning not at all but they have come to have a different movement in them and this is all so very very exciting and interesting and unexpectedly a real thing. As always it has taken a century for anybody to really completely know this thing about the language we use we Americans use to tell that there is in us for us by us and with us no daily daily living. So then we must really realize that the language the English language was made by the English people to tell this thing that the daily living the daily island living is every moment existing and that any and every Englishman is always conscious of the necessary existing every minute of his living of the daily living which makes him an Englishman with a daily island living, this is true of Englishmen Englishwomen and English children. There is never a moment in the day when the English people do not live their daily living every day their daily island living every day, and this as the language formed itself to tell what the people who made it had to tell of how they lived every day they lived in their daily way every moment of the day it changed from the language as it began in Chaucer’s day to the nineteenth century when it completely told in every way that they lived their daily life every moment of every day. Think well of English literature and you will see what I mean. As I said in the nineteenth century as the sun never set upon the English flag and that island owned everything outside they had more and more to tell every minute of every day that they were leading their daily living every moment of every day because otherwise the outside might come to be inside and the inside might come to be outside and then their way of telling about the way they lived their daily living every day would have gone away.

2 9 4

\

T E X T S

And so by the time the English language had its final form made by the English who had made a language it was a language that could completely soothingly movingly say that they lived their daily life every day. So there they were and the Americans were not at all that way they did not live their life at all no not at all in that way and they had it to say that they lived their own life in their own way and they had it to say it with the words that had been made to tell a nation’s story in an entirely different way as the nation who had made the language had the entirely different story to tell of living their daily life every moment of every day. You do understand if you think about it that the American people do not live their daily life in every minute of every day. Think about it and you will see that you do realize that. Think about how the American lives his life and you must realize that although he is alive any day unless he is dead never the less he does not in any way feel himself as living his daily life every moment of any day. And so we have this situation, a settled language because a language is settled after it does not change any more that is as to words and grammar, and it being written so completely written all the time it inevitably cannot change much and yet the pressure upon these words to make them do something that they did not do for those who made that language come to exist is a very interesting thing to watch. If you watch as I have watched all through the history of American literature you will see how the pressure of the non daily life living of the American nation has forced the words to have a different feeling of moving. I like to look at it in its last expression in the road signs which are a further concentration of the thing they did to the words in advertising. They got the words to express moving and in England the words even when they were most active were words that expressed arrested motion or a very slow succession. In the American writing the

L E C T U R E

I

/

2 9 5

words began to have inside themselves those same words that in the English were completely quiet or very slowly moving began to have within themselves the consciousness of completely moving, they began to detach themselves from the solidity of anything, they began to excitedly feel themselves as if they were anywhere or anything, think about American writing from Emerson, Hawthorne Walt Whitman Mark Twain Henry James myself Sherwood Anderson Thornton Wilder and Dashiell Hammitt and you will see what I mean, as well as in advertising and in road signs, you will see what I mean, words left alone more and more feel that they are moving and all of it is detached and is detaching anything from anything and in this detaching and in this moving it is being in its way creating its existing. This is then the real difference between English and American writing and this then can then lead to anything. I can say it enough but can I say it more than enough that the daily life is a daily life if at any moment of the daily life that daily life is all there is of life. Can I say it more than often enough. Can I say more than often enough that the daily life if it is not a daily life consists in at no moment of that daily living of there being any conscious feeling or unconscious feeling that at every moment of that daily living daily living is all there is of any living. In America they may have daily occupations they do not have to they may but they do not have to they often do not they often do but whether they do or whether they do not do so do not have the daily occupation in any case that daily occupation does not force upon them any necessity of having every and any moment of their daily life that they are living their daily living. Think of the American life as it is lived, they all move so much even when they stay still and they do very often stay still they all move so

2 9 6

\

T E X T S

much. They move so much because in moving they know for certain they can know it any way but in moving they really know it really know it as certain that they are not daily living in their daily living. The English just in the other way even when they are travelling are not moving, they do not move no one can move who is really living in any moment of their living their daily living. And this is the thing that is a necessary thing to have in exchange of anything of words or what any one is doing. In the early English writing words did move around they moved by themselves we get that with the period that ended with the end of the Elizabethans, words moved then, they made their own existing they were there and they enjoyed that thing they enjoyed being there the words did and any one having anything to do with them anything to do with the words being there knew that of them knew that the words were enjoying that thing were enjoying being there. That made the period that we call Elizabethan, that was really the end of words living by being existing. Then slowly as I say words began to have another meaning, they were used to accept everything as being there in the daily living they accepted their being there to tell something or to make everything have emotion have sentimental feeling or to be soothing. That is what makes daily life when it is lived at any moment of the day or night, that anything should be there and it should be there and should be there to be soothing and it should be there to give existence the emotion of sentimental feeling, the emotion of anything and of everything being there as anything and everything is. Now it has often been said that the Americans in their feeling about the English language they are using have some connection with the Elizabethan way of using the English they are using. This is not really true. The early English through the Elizabethans used words in every way they like the lively way the words had the

L E C T U R E

I

/

2 9 7

words that would later be there to stay but now had come there and coming there had all the excitement of arriving in any way they could arrive and they were arriving in every kind of a way. That made them use the language the English language in their way and it is and was a wonderful way but it is not at all the way we are using the language that has really come to stay. Because there is no doubt about it that English language that we all use has come to stay, we are changing grammar and punctuation and shoving it around and putting pressure upon it but there it is and it has certainly as any American is bound to say it has come as it is it has come to stay. Now wherein is our use of it so different and it is completely different from the way the English used it in the early day when it was first coming if not coming to stay and then later when the nineteenth century had it as a language that had completely and entirely come to do nothing really do nothing but stay. It has been said that our use of the English language has some connection with the Elizabethans and that has been said because at that time the English language moved around, words were themselves and having been discovered and having been exciting by being next to each other were gaily and happily alive and every one who had anything to do with them felt that way about them. The words themselves at that time did not decide what they were to do in the way that the meaning should come out of them but every one who did anything with them was excited by the way any one could use any one of them and how wonderful it was to do what any one was doing with them. That made the liveliness of the period ending with the Elizabethans that every one liked everything that any word was and liked anything that any one could do with any one of them any word or all the words that were there then, but and that is where it was very different from the American way of using those words they did not want the words the settled

2 9 8

\

T E X T S

words the known words to act in a particularly that is to move in a particular way and also in any kind of a direction. The English from Chaucer to the Elizabethans played with words they endlessly played with words because it was such an exciting thing to have them there words that had come to be the words they had just come to use then. But the American has a different feeling, these words the words that the Englishman had settled into having as a steady and unchangeable something, they the Americans did not care for the particular use these later Englishmen had come to have for them and the American had then decided that any word which was a word which was there if you put enough pressure upon them if you arranged and concentrated and took away all excrescences from them you could make these same words do what you needed to do with them. And they did this thing and they are doing this thing and punctuation and arranging them and destroying any connection between them between the words that would that did when the English used them make of them having a beginning and a middle and an ending to them has made of these English words words that move as the Americans move with them move always move and in every and in any direction. It is a very interesting thing that this this has been done a very interesting thing that this has been done by the pressure brought to bear upon them brought to bear upon these words which came to us as they were and as they still are but now they have an entirely different movement in them. Anybody can tell this the minute they pick up any ordinary book any ordinary newspaper any ordinary advertisement or read any ordinary road sign or slang or conversation. The words used are the same words but they have such a different pressure put upon them that in the case of the English the words have the feeling of containing that

L E C T U R E

I

/

2 9 9

in which they are staying and with the American they have the feeling that they are and indicate and feel moving existing inside in them. And so there is all this and twenty-five years move around so quickly and a century does not move around at all and at any time that is to say at some time a century will have its ending and its beginning and after all why not after all since after all after all nothing so any American can know nothing does need to have a middle and ending and a beginning and certainly at the end of every century or so at the end of a grandfather to a granddaughter at the end of a grandmother to a grandson, there will be that every one has something that is no longer anything and still if you have had always had had a daily life in every moment of your living that is not changing and your language will have the words feeling that thing feeling that they are there and staying and if you have not any day your daily living as an American never can have and never does have any day in his living then the words which are their words will have in them the feeling of moving even if by spelling and lettering they are the same words that the English have who have in them the feeling of staying. And so this is what I have to say about our language which is our language today and in our way as any words are are our words to-day. I like the feeling of words doing as they want to do and as they have to do when they live where they have to live that is where they have come to live which of course they do do. ■

3 0 0

1934

\

■

T E X T S

IDENTITY

A

POEM

Play 1 I am I because my little dog knows me. The figure wanders on alone. The little dog does not appear because if it did then there would be nothing to fear. It is not known that anybody who is anybody is not alone and if alone then how can the dog be there and if the little dog is not there is it alone. The little dog is not alone because no little dog could be alone. If it were alone it would not be there. So then the play has to be like this. The person and the dog are there and the dog is there and the person is there and where oh where is their identity, is the identity there anywhere. I say two dogs but say a dog and a dog. The human mind. The human mind does play. The human mind. Plays because it plays. Human nature. Does not play because it does not play again. It might desire something but it does not play again. And so to make excitement and not nervousness into a play. And then to make a play with just the human mind. Let us try. To make a play with human nature and not anything of the human mind. Pivoines smell like magnolias Dogs smell like dogs Men smell like men And gardens smell differently at different seasons of the year.

I D E N T I T Y

A

P O E M

/

3 0 1

Play 2 Try a play again. Every little play helps. Another play. There is any difference between resting and waiting. Does a little dog rest. Does a little dog wait. What does the human mind do. What does human nature do. A Play There is no in between in a play. A play could just as well only mean two. Then it could do It could really have to do. The dog. The human mind. Human nature.

What could it do. The human mind too Human nature does not have it to do.

What can a dog do and with waiting too. Yes there is when you have been told not to cry. Nobody knows what the human mind is when they are drunk. Everybody who has a grandfather has had a great grandfather and that great grandfather has had a father. This actually is true of a grandmother who was a granddaughter and grandfather had a father. Any dog too. Any time any one who knows how to write can write to any brother. Not a dog too. A dog does not write too.

3 0 2

\

T E X T S

Another Play But. But is a place where they can cease to distress her. Another Play It does not make any difference what happens to anybody if it does not make a difference what happens to them. This no dog can say. Not any dog can say not ever when he is at play. And so dogs and human nature have no identity. It is extraordinary that when you are acquainted with a whole family you can forget about them. Another Play A man coming. Yes there is a great deal of use in a man coming but will he come at all if he does come will he come here. How do you like it if he comes and looks like that. Not at all later. Well any way he does come and if he likes it he will come again. Later when another man comes He does not come. Girls coming. There is no use in girls coming. Well any way he does come and if he likes it he will come again.

PART IV THE QUESTION OF IDENTITY.

A Play I am I because my little dog knows me. Which is he. No which is he.

I D E N T I T Y

A

P O E M

/

3 0 3

Say it with tears, no which is he. I am I why. So there. I am I where. Act I Scene III I am I because my little dog knows me. Act I Scene Now this is the way I had played that play. But not at all not as one is one. Act I Scene I Which one is there I am I or another one. Who is one and one or one is one. I like a play of acting so and so and a dog my dog is any one of not one. But we we in America are not displaced by a dog oh no no not at all not at all at all displaced by a dog. Scene I A dog chokes over a ball because it is a ball that choked any one. Part I Scene I He has forgotten that he has been choked by a ball no not forgotten because this one the same one is not the one that can choke any one. Scene I Act I I am I because my little dog knows me, but perhaps he does not and if he did I would not be I. Oh no oh no.

3 0 4

\

T E X T S

Act I Scene When a dog is young he seems to be a very intelligent one. But later well later the dog is older. And so the dog roams around he knows the one he knows but does that make any difference. A play is exactly like that. Chorus There is no left or right without remembering. And remembering. They say there is no left and right without remembering. Chorus But there is no remembering in the human mind. Tears There is no chorus in the human mind. The land is flat from on high and when they wander. Chorus Nobody who has a dog forgets him. They may leave him behind. Oh yes they may leave him behind. Chorus There is no memory in the human mind. And the result May be and the result If I am I then my little dog knows me. The dog listens while they prepare food. Food might be connected with the human mind but it is not. Scene II And how do you like what you are And how are you what you are And has this to do with the human mind. Chorus And has this to do with the human mind. Chorus And is human nature not at all interesting. It is not.

I D E N T I T Y

A

P O E M

/

3 0 5

Scene II I am I because my little dog knows me. Chorus That does not prove anything about you it only proves something about the dog. Chorus Of course nobody can be interested in human nature. Chorus Nobody is. Chorus Nobody is interested in human nature. Chorus Not even a dog Chorus It has nothing to do human nature has nothing to do with anything. Chorus No not with a dog Tears No not with a dog. Chorus I am I because my little dog knows Chorus Yes there I told you human nature is not at all interesting. Scene III And the human mind. Chorus And the human mind Tears And the human mind Chorus Yes and the human mind. Of course the human mind Has that anything to do with I am I because my little dog knows me. What is the chorus. Chorus What is the chorus. Anyway there is the question of identity. What is the use of being a little boy if you are to grow up to be a man. Chorus No the dog is not the chorus.

3 0 6

\

T E X T S

Scene II Any scene may be scene II Chorus And act II No any act can be act one and two. Scene II I am I because my little dog knows me even if the little dog is a big one and yet a little dog knowing me does not really make me be I no not really because after all being I I am I has really nothing to do with the little dog knowing me, he is my audience, but an audience never does prove to you that you are you. And does a little dog making a noise make the same noise. He can almost say the b in bow wow. I have not been mistaken. Chorus Some kinds of things not and some kinds of things. Scene I I am I yes sir I am I. I am I yes madame am I I. When I am I am I I. And my little dog is not the same thing as I am I. Chorus Oh is it. With tears in my eyes oh is it. Yes madame or am I I. And there we have the whole thing Am I I. And if I am I because my little dog knows me am I I. Yes sir am I I. The dog answers without asking because the dog is the answer to anything that is that dog.

I D E N T I T Y

A

P O E M

/

3 0 7

But not I. Without tears but not I. Act I Scene I The necessity of ending is not the necessity of beginning. Chorus How finely that is said. Scene II An end of a play is not the end of a day. Scene IV After giving. ■

WHAT WHY

ARE

ARE

1935

■

MASTER-PIECES

THERE

SO

FEW

AND

OF

THEM

I was almost going to talk this lecture and not write and read it because all the lectures that I have written and read in America have been printed and although possibly for you they might even being read be as if they had not been printed still there is something about what has been written having been printed which makes it no longer the property of the one who wrote it and therefore there is no more reason why the writer should say it out loud than anybody else and therefore one does not.

3 0 8

\

T E X T S

Therefore I was going to talk to you but actually it is impossible to talk about master-pieces and what they are because talking essentially has nothing to do with creation. I talk a lot I like to talk and I talk even more than that I may say I talk most of the time and I listen a fair amount too and as I have said the essence of being a genius is to be able to talk and listen to listen while talking and talk while listening but and this is very important very important indeed talking has nothing to do with creation. What are master-pieces and why after all are there so few of them. You may say after all there are a good many of them but in any kind of proportion with everything that anybody who does anything is doing there are really very few of them. All this summer I meditated and wrote about this subject and it finally came to be a discussion of the relation of human nature and the human mind and identity. The thing one gradually comes to find out is that one has no identity that is when one is in the act of doing anything. Identity is recognition, you know who you are because you and others remember anything about yourself but essentially you are not that when you are doing anything. I am I because my little dog knows me but, creatively speaking the little dog knowing that you are you and your recognising that he knows, that is what destroys creation. That is what makes school. Picasso once remarked I do not care who it is that has or does influence me as long as it is not myself. It is very difficult so difficult that it always has been difficult but even more difficult now to know what is the relation of human nature to the human mind because one has to know what is the relation of the act of creation to the subject the creator uses to create that thing. There is a great deal of nonsense talked about the subject of anything. After all there is always the same subject there are the things you see and there are human beings and animal beings and everybody you might say since the beginning of time knows practically commencing at the

W H A T

A R E

M A S T E R - P I E C E S

/

3 0 9

beginning and going to the end everything about these things. After all any woman in any village or men either if you like or even children know as much of human psychology as any writer that ever lived. After all there are things you do know each one in his or her way knows all of them and it is not this knowledge that makes master-pieces. Not at all not at all at all. Those who recognise master-pieces say that is the reason but it is not. It is not the way Hamlet reacts to his father’s ghost that makes the master-piece, he might have reacted according to Shakespeare in a dozen other ways and everybody would have been as much impressed by the psychology of it. But there is no psychology in it, that is not probably the way any young man would react to the ghost of his father and there is no particular reason why they should. If it were the way a young man could react to the ghost of his father then that would be something anybody in any village would know they could talk about it talk about it endlessly but that would not make a master-piece and that brings us once more back to the subject of identity. At any moment when you are you you are you without the memory of yourself because if you remember yourself while you are you you are not for purposes of creating you. This is so important because it has so much to do with the question of a writer to his audience. One of the things that I discovered in lecturing was that gradually one ceased to hear what one said one heard what the audience hears one say, that is the reason that oratory is practically never a master-piece very rarely and very rarely history, because history deals with people who are orators who hear not what they are not what they say but what their audience hears them say. It is very interesting that letter writing has the same difficulty, the letter writes what the other person is to hear and so entity does not exist there are two present instead of one and so once again creation breaks down. I once wrote in writing The Making of Americans I write for myself and strangers but that was merely a liter-

3 1 0

\

T E X T S

ary formalism for if I did write for myself and strangers if I did I would not really be writing because already then identity would take the place of entity. It is awfully difficult, action is direct and effective but after all action is necessary and anything that is necessary has to do with human nature and not with the human mind. Therefore a master-piece has essentially not to be necessary, it has to be that is it has to exist but it does not have to be necessary it is not in response to necessity as action is because the minute it is necessary it has in it no possibility of going on. To come back to what a master-piece has as its subject. In writing about painting I said that a picture exists for and in itself and the painter has to use objects landscapes and people as a way the only way that he is able to get the picture to exist. That is every one’s trouble and particularly the trouble just now when every one who writes or paints has gotten to to be abnormally conscious of the things he uses that is the events the people the objects and the landscapes and fundamentally the minute one is conscious deeply conscious of these things as a subject the interest in them does not exist. You can tell that so well in the difficulty of writing novels or poetry these days. The tradition has always been that you may more or less describe the things that happen you imagine them of course but you more or less describe the things that happen but nowadays everybody all day long knows what is happening and so what is happening is not really interesting, one knows it by radios cinemas newspapers biographies autobiographies until what is happening does not really thrill any one, it excites them a little but it does not really thrill them. The painter can no longer say that what he does is as the world looks to him because he cannot look at the world any more, it has been photographed too much and he has to say that he does something else. In former times a painter said he painted what he saw of course he didn’t but anyway he could say it, now he does not want to say it because seeing it is not

W H A T

A R E

M A S T E R - P I E C E S

/

3 1 1

interesting. This has something to do with master-pieces and why there are so few of them but not everything. So you see why talking has nothing to do with creation, talking is really human nature as it is and human nature has nothing to do with master-pieces. It is very curious but the detective story which is you might say the only really modern novel form that has come into existence gets rid of human nature by having the man dead to begin with the hero is dead to begin with and so you have so to speak got rid of the event before the book begins. There is another very curious thing about detective stories. In real life people are interested in the crime more than they are in detection, it is the crime that is the thing the shock the thrill the horror but in the story it is the detection that holds the interest and that is natural enough because the necessity as far as action is concerned is the dead man, it is another function that has very little to do with human nature that makes the detection interesting. And so always it is true that the master-piece has nothing to do with human nature or with identity, it has to do with the human mind and the entity that is with a thing in itself and not in relation. The moment it is in relation it is common knowledge and anybody can feel and know it and it is not a master-piece. At the same time every one in a curious way sooner or later does feel the reality of a master-piece. The thing in itself of which the human nature is only its clothing does hold the attention. I have meditated a great deal about that. Another curious thing about master-pieces is, nobody when it is created there is in the thing that we call the human mind something that makes it hold itself just the same. The manner and habits of Bible times or Greek or Chinese have nothing to do with ours today but the master-pieces exist just the same and they do not exist because of their identity, that is what any one remembering then remembered then, they do not exist by human nature because everybody always knows everything there is to

3 1 2

\

T E X T S

know about human nature, they exist because they came to be as something that is an end in itself and in that respect it is opposed to the business of living which is relation and necessity. That is what a masterpiece is not although it may easily be what a master-piece talks about. It is another one of the curious difficulties a master-piece has that is to begin and end, because actually a master-piece does not do that it does not begin and end if it did it would be of necessity and in relation and that is just what a master-piece is not. Everybody worries about that just now everybody that is what makes them talk about abstract and worry about punctuation and capitals and small letters and what a history is. Everybody worries about that not because everybody knows what a master-piece is but because a certain number have found out what a master-piece is not. Even the very master-pieces have always been very bothered about beginning and ending because essentially that is what a master-piece is not. And yet after all like the subject of human nature master-pieces have to use beginning and ending to become existing. Well anyway anybody who is trying to do anything today is desperately not having a beginning and an ending but nevertheless in some way one does have to stop. I stop. I do not know whether I have made any of this very clear, it is clear, but unfortunately I have written it all down all summer and in spite of everything I am now remembering and when you remember it is never clear. This is what makes secondary writing, it is remembering, it is very curious you begin to write something and suddenly you remember something and if you continue to remember your writing gets very confused. If you do not remember while you are writing, it may seem confused to others but actually it is clear and eventually that clarity will be clear, that is what a master-piece is, but if you remember while you are writing it will seem clear at the time to any one but the clarity will go out of it that is what a master-piece is not.

W H A T

A R E

M A S T E R - P I E C E S

/

3 1 3

All this sounds awfully complicated but it is not complicated at all, it is just what happens. Any of you when you write you try to remember what you are about to write and you will see immediately how lifeless the writing becomes that is why expository writing is so dull because it is all remembered, that is why illustration is so dull because you remember what somebody looked like and you make your illustration look like it. The minute your memory functions while you are doing anything it may be very popular but actually it is dull. And that is what a master-piece is not, it may be unwelcome but it is never dull. And so then why are there so few of them. There are so few of them because mostly people live in identity and memory that is when they think. They know they are they because their little dog knows them, and so they are not an entity but an identity. And being so memory is necessary to make them exist and so they cannot create master-pieces. It has been said of geniuses that they are eternally young. I once said what is the use of being a boy if you are going to grow up to be a man, the boy and the man have nothing to do with each other, except in respect to memory and identity, and if they have anything to do with each other in respect to memory and identity then they will never produce a master-piece. Do you do you understand well it really does not make much difference because after all master-pieces are what they are and the reason why is that there are very few of them. The reason why is any of you try it just not to be you are you because your little dog knows you. The second you are you because your little dog knows you you cannot make a master-piece and that is all of that. It is not extremely difficult not to have identity but it is extremely difficult the knowing not having identity. One might say it is impossible but that it is not impossible is proved by the existence of masterpieces which are just that. They are knowing that there is no identity and producing while identity is not.

3 1 4

\

T E X T S

That is what a master-piece is. And so we do know what a master-piece is and we also know why there are so few of them. Everything is against them. Everything that makes life go on makes identity and everything that makes identity is of necessity a necessity. And the pleasures of life as well as the necessities help the necessity of identity. The pleasures that are soothing all have to do with identity and the pleasures that are exciting all have to do with identity and moreover there is all the pride and vanity which play about master-pieces as well as about every one and these too all have to do with identity, and so naturally it is natural that there is more identity that one knows about than anything else one knows about and the worst of all is that the only thing that any one thinks about is identity and thinking is something that does so nearly need to be memory and if it is then of course it has nothing to do with a master-piece. But what can a master-piece be about mostly it is about identity and all it does and in being so it must not have any. I was just thinking about anything and in thinking about anything I saw something. In seeing that thing shall we see it without it turning into identity, the moment is not a moment and the sight is not the thing seen and yet it is. Moments are not important because of course master-pieces have no more time than they have identity although time like identity is what they concern themselves about of course that is what they do concern themselves about. Once when one has said what one says it is not true or too true. That is what is the trouble with time. That is what makes what women say truer than what men say. That is undoubtedly what is the trouble with time and always in its relation to master-pieces. I once said that nothing could bother me more than the way a thing goes dead once it has been said. And if it does it it is because of there being this trouble about time.

W H A T

A R E

M A S T E R - P I E C E S

/

3 1 5

Time is very important in connection with master-pieces, of course it makes identity time does make identity and identity does stop the creation of master-pieces. But time does something by itself to interfere with the creation of master-pieces as well as being part of what makes identity. If you do not keep remembering yourself you have no identity and if you have no time you do not keep remembering yourself and as you remember yourself you do not create anybody can and does know that. Think about how you create if you do create you do not remember yourself as you do create. And yet time and identity is what you tell about as you create only while you create they do not exist. That is really what it is. And do you create yes if you exist but time and identity do not exist. We live in time and identity but as we are we do not know time and identity everybody knows that quite simply. It is so simple that anybody does know that. But to know what one knows is frightening to live what one lives is soothing and though everybody likes to be frightened what they really have to have is soothing and so the master-pieces are so few not that the master-pieces themselves are frightening no of course not because if the creator of the master-piece is frightened then he does not exist without the memory of time and identity, and insofar as he is that then he is frightened and insofar as he is frightened the master-piece does not exist, it looks like it and it feels like it, but the memory of the fright destroys it as a master-piece. Robinson Crusoe and the footstep of the man Friday is one of the most perfect examples of the non-existence of time and identity which makes a master-piece. I hope you do see what I mean but any way everybody who knows about Robinson Crusoe and the footstep of Friday knows that that is true. There is no time and identity in the way it happened and that is why there is no fright.

3 1 6

\

T E X T S

And so there are very few master-pieces of course there are very few master-pieces because to be able to know that is not to have identity and time but not to mind talking as if there was because it does not interfere with anything and to go on being not as if there were no time and identity but as if there were and at the same time existing without time and identity is so very simple that it is difficult to have many who are that. And of course that is what a master-piece is and that is why there are so few of them and anybody really anybody can know that. What is the use of being a boy if you are going to grow up to be a man. And what is the use there is no use from the standpoint of master-pieces there is no use. Anybody can really know that. There is really no use in being a boy if you are going to grow up to be a man because then man and boy you can be certain that that is continuing and a master-piece does not continue it is as it is but it does not continue. It is very interesting that no one is content with being a man and boy but he must also be a son and a father and the fact that they all die has something to do with time but it has nothing to do with a master-piece. The word timely as used in our speech is very interesting but you can any one can see that it has nothing to do with masterpieces we all readily know that. The word timely tells that masterpieces have nothing to do with time. It is very interesting to have it be inside one that never as you know yourself you know yourself without looking and feeling and looking and feeling make it be that you are some one you have seen. If you have seen any one you know them as you see them whether it is yourself or any other one and so the identity consists in recognition and in recognising you lose identity because after all nobody looks as they look like, they do not look like that we all know that of ourselves and of any one. And therefore in every way it is a trouble and so you write

W H A T

A R E

M A S T E R - P I E C E S

/

3 1 7

anybody does write to confirm what any one is and the more one does the more one looks like what one was and in being so identity is made more so and that identity is not what any one can have as a thing to be but as a thing to see. And it being a thing to see no master-piece can see what it can see if it does then it is timely and as it is timely it is not a master-piece. There are so many things to say. If there was no identity no one could be governed, but everybody is governed by everybody and that is why they make no master-pieces, and also why governing has nothing to do with master-pieces it has completely to do with identity but it has nothing to do with master-pieces. And that is why governing is occupying but not interesting, governments are occupying but not interesting because master-pieces are exactly what they are not. There is another thing to say. When you are writing before there is an audience anything written is as important as any other thing and you cherish anything and everything that you have written. After the audience begins, naturally they create something that is they create you, and so not everything is so important, something is more important than another thing, which was not true when you were you that is when you were not you as your little dog knows you. And so there we are and there is so much to say but anyway I do not say that there is no doubt that master-pieces are master-pieces in that way and there are very few of them. ■

3 1 8

1936

\

■

T E X T S

D O C U M E N T S

This page intentionally left blank

“With Apologies to Gertrude Stein,” newspaper advertisement (n.d.). Courtesy Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Two love notes from Stein to Toklas (n.d.): “Dear dainty delicious darling” and “Ir/Re/Sis/Ti/Belle.” Courtesy Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Reproduced by permission of the Estate of Gertrude Stein, through its Literary Executor, Mr. Stanford Gann, Jr., of Levin & Gann, P.A.

LETTER

TO

GERTRUDE

STEIN

virgil thomson Paris May 30 [1933] Dear Gertrude Mr. Bradley* has communicated to me a passage from one of your letters to him in which you express some reserves about the opera mounting as I described it, and he has suggested that I might correspond directly with you on that subject, which is after all a part of our artistic collaboration and outside his domain. I am eager that the production should represent your text as closely as possible and so is Miss Stettheimer. Hence my eager acceptance of Mr. Bradley’s suggestion to establish, if that is agreeable to you, a direct correspondence on the subject. Before I go on about the mounting, however, I am taking the liberty of mentioning a business matter which I have already spoken of to Mr. Bradley and which I have his permission to write to you about, he being slightly embarrassed, as both your personal agent and our joint agent, about reopening the question. At the beginning of my conversations with him I mentioned that

* William Aspenwall Bradley (1878–1939), a Paris literary agent.

3 2 4

although the usual practice was otherwise, I preferred, in view of the closeness of our collaboration and of the importance given to the text in my score, to offer you a 50–50 division of all profits. It has since been called to my attention by the Société des Droits d’Auteurs that such an arrangement defeats its own end and that the contract commonly made in France allowing two-thirds to the composer and one to the author is designed to establish that very equality: 1) because the manual labor involved in musical composition is so much greater than that of writing words that half the proceeds is an insufficient return for the composer, considering him as a joint worker. 2) because a literary work is perfectly salable separate from the music and thus brings further profit to its author, whereas the music is rarely salable in any way separated from the text it was designed to accompany. The 2–1 division of profits is already, it would seem, to the advantage of the author in that an inferior text is assured of paying profits as long as the music lives, and a poem of merit is in no way injured in its independent literary career by the performance of an inferior musical setting. In cases where the musical setting is noteworthy, the sale of the book has often surpassed the normal sale of that author’s work, thus bringing a very considerable independent profit to the author in which of course the composer has no share at all. I am told that this has been true recently of [Paul] Claudel’s Christophe Colombe (music by Milhaud) and of Edna Millay’s The King’s Henchman, which was written for Deems Taylor. Four Saints has already, if I mistake not, been published twice, and I hope Mr. Bradley will arrange to have it printed in America (with perhaps a few minor changes to permit American copyright) so that it can be sold as a libretto at performances. In view of these considerations would you consider it just on my part to ask that our projected contracts (and any eventual publication

V I R G I L

T H O M P S O N

/

3 2 5

of the score) be based on the 2–1 rather than the 1–1 division of profits, a proportion which, as I said above, is the one used in France? The same proportion would naturally apply in sharing the expense of copyright. About the mounting, we are all in accord that the idea of a parochial entertainment must remain. Miss Stettheimer suggested, however, that since any interior is less joyful than an outdoor scene, and since Sunday-school rooms and chapels have been done in so many religious plays (black and white), perhaps the same entertainment might take place on the steps of a church, in this case the cathedral of Avila itself, though represented in a far from literal imitation. Spring at Avila could thus be expressed doubly. Also the general atmosphere somewhat lightened. The colors and materials she suggests are merely an amplification of the fairy-tale effect ordinarily aimed at in the construction of religious images out of tin and tinsel and painted plaster and gilding and artificial flowers. Her idea seems to me more efficacious than our original one in expressing the same thing, especially in view of the enormous lightening of every effect that is necessary in order to get a dramatic idea across the barrier of footlights and music. I must admit I am rather taken by the whole proposal, having seen the extraordinary elegance which Miss Stettheimer has produced in her own rooms with exactly those colors and materials. We are all, however, open to persuasion and to suggestions, and no maquettes have been made. The idea for the Maypole dance in Act II is even less definite than the other. That also is Miss Stettheimer’s. The Negro bodies, if seen at all, would only be divined vaguely through long dresses. The movements would be sedate and prim, and the transparence is aimed primarily not at titillating the audience with the sight of a leg but at keeping the texture of the stage as light as possible. This end is important to keep in view when there are as many things and people on a stage as this opera requires and all frequently in movement. Naturally, if the

3 2 6

\

D O C U M E N T S

transparent clothes turned out in rehearsal to be a stronger effect than we intended, petticoats would be ordered immediately for everybody. I think the idea is worth trying, however. If it can be realized inoffensively, the bodies would merely add to our spectacle the same magnificence they give to classic religious paintings and sculpture. One could not easily use this effect with white bodies, but I think one might with brown. My Negro singers, after all, are a purely musical desideratum because of their rhythm, their style, and especially their diction. Any further use of their racial qualities must be incidental and not of a nature to distract attention from the subject matter. . . . Hence, the idea of painting their faces white. Nobody wants to put on just a nigger show. The project remains doubtful, anyway, till I find the proper soloists. Very faithfully yours, Virgil Thomson

V I R G I L

T H O M P S O N

/

3 2 7

STEIN SUNG

BY

OPERA

ALL-NEGRO

CAST

SPECIAL TO THE NEW YORK TIMES

February 9, 1934

Hartford, Conn.—The fabulous rumors of an all-Negro cast singing in tan-face and costumed in cellophane; of a libretto whose words were unintelligible and an opera whose stage directions were set to music— all this crammed the new Avery Memorial Theatre with a highly sophisticated and curious audience tonight. The audience, literary and musical, came in part from New York and New England for an event sponsored by “The Friends and Enemies of Modern Music,” a New England organization, and occasioned by the opening of the Avery Memorial wing of the Wadsworth Athenaeum under Everett Austin Jr., curator. The opera, given a public dress rehearsal Wednesday night and scheduled to run here to houses already sold out the rest of this week, will open at the Forty-fourth Street Theatre in New York on Feb. 20. The cast has been rehearsing under Mr. Smallens, assistant conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra, for many weeks. Frederick Ashton from England assisted John Houseman in the choreography and staging. Florine Stettheimer designed sets and costumes and A. Feder

3 2 8

the lighting. Despite these impressive preparations, the advance tidings somewhat exhaled the bizarre preciosity of post-war Paris under Cocteau, and some skeptics audibly wondered whether these manifold mountains would bring forth more than a rococo mouse. Mr. Thomson, native of Kansas City, Mo., graduate of Harvard and pupil of Nadia Boulanger, composed the opera in Paris in 1928 to a text Miss Stein wrote at his request. They previously collaborated on a cantata, “Capitals Capitals,” performed some years ago in New York. The composer has written numerous choral and instrumental works.

WORDS THAT ESCHEW MEANINGS

Miss Stein’s writing roused violent controversy in Paris—fifteen years ago. Save in “Three Lives” and her recent autobiography, she apparently uses words for sound instead of meaning. Only quotations can do justice to the result. These are taken at random from the libretto: To know to know to lover [sic] her so. Four saints prepare for saints. It makes it well fish. Four saints it makes it well fish. Saint Blar [sic]. In the middle of their pleasurable resolutions resolving in their adequate announcing left to it by this by this means. And out. Scene IV Usefully Saint Therese. Having happily married. Saint Therese. Having happily beside. Saint Therese. Having happily had it with a spoon.

N E W

Y O R K

T I M E S

/

3 2 9

Act I Saint Therese in a storm at Avila there can be rain and warm snow and warm that is the water is warm the river is not warm the sun is not warm and if to stay to cry. Saint Therese half in and half out of doors. Scene III There is a difference between Barcelona and Avila. What difference.

OBJECTIVES OF THE AUTHORS

Mr. Thomson, recently interviewed, informed the writer that he and Miss Stein worked out a narrative; a “baroque fantasy” about seventeenth-century Spanish saints to be told not by the text but by pantomime, choreography and music. Miss Stein then clothed this story in a sound-pattern of words vaguely suggesting its atmosphere at times. Mr. Thomson found this pattern brilliantly singable; a prosody uncontaminated by emotional or expressive content. Most plots and even texts of operas as sung were largely unintelligible, he suggested. A good verbal pattern was more important. The composer has set this “pattern” to music as candidly melodious as “Pinafore” and as rhythmically flexible as Gregorian chant. There are not ten measures of “dissonance” in the entire score. It abounds in tunes. The orchestra is subordinate. The result is an effective marriage of pseudo-simple harmony with a highly decorative vocal line. Mr. Thomson chose a Negro cast, he said, because he felt they had better diction and a more direct and unself-conscious approach to religious fantasy. This choice seemed amply to have justified itself last night. In spite of the relatively simple idiom in which Mr. Thomson has written the

3 3 0

\

D O C U M E N T S

free rhythms and the task of committing to memory a text without meaning in its usual sense, made unusual demands upon the singers. They acquitted themselves admirably. The work is scored for double mixed chorus, numerous minor roles and five principle [sic] roles— the two Saints Therese, St. Ignatius and the Commerce and Compere. It is doubtful if white singers could have given the score, with its strange alternations of comedy and exaltation, the flavor it requires, or have projected the vocal lines with the startling clarity and beauty of phrasing that they achieved. To be sure, the spirit of inspired madness animates the whole piece. Kneeling and solemn deacons suddenly break into a fandango, as an angel, presents it. Ignatius with a lute, ballets of angels, sailors and senoritas abruptly animate a scene filled with solemn saints in prayer. Miss Stettheimer has provided fantastically absurd and effective sets and costumes; also a bower of cellophane in which St. Therese, clad in crimson velvet, appears. The tan-faced (not white, as rumored) chorus in silver haloes and silver-studded gloves and long, blue robes, carried out the originality, glitter and imaginative quality given the whole production. Mr. Smallens and the cast deserve high praise for their achievement. Edward Matthews as St. Ignatius and Beatrice Robinson Wayne as St. Therese, gave outstanding fine readings, among many good performances. There were occasional rough spots in the orchestra and in the singing, which further performance may clear up. “But does it make sense?” the serious minded will ask. It does not— to the too serious minded. But neither do “Alice in Wonderland” and other creations of fantasy. Nor was “The Green Pastures” to be taken literally.

N E W

Y O R K

T I M E S

/

3 3 1

INTRODUCTION

TO

NARRATION

(1935)

thornton wilder

In November of 1934 Miss Gertrude Stein delivered before an audience of five hundred students at the University of Chicago the lecture on “Poetry and Grammar” which is now printed in the volume entitled Lectures in America. At the invitation of the University she returned in March, 1935, to read before approximately the same audience the four lectures contained in this volume. In addition ten conferences were arranged during which Miss Stein amplified the ideas contained in these lectures by means of general discussion with some thirty selected students. There are a number of ways in which these lectures may be approached. In the first place they are in themselves models of artistic form. The highly individual idiom in which they are written reposes upon an unerring ear for musical cadence and upon a conviction that repetition is a form of insistence and emphasis that is characteristic of all life, of history, and of nature itself. “If a thing is really existing there can be no repetition. . . . Then we have insistence insistence that in its emphasis can never be repeating, because insistence is always alive and if it is alive it is never saying anything in the same way because emphasis can never be the same not even when it is most the same that is when

3 3 2

it has been taught.” In the printed version of the lectures the individuality of the idiom has been enhanced by the economy of the punctuation, which has been explained by Miss Stein as being a form of challenge to a livelier collaboration on the part of the reader. “A comma by helping you along holding your coat for you and putting on your shoes keeps you from living your life as actively as you should lead it. . . . The longer, the more complicated the sentence the greater the number of the same kinds of words I had following one another, the more the very many more I had of them I felt the passionate need of their taking care of themselves by themselves and not helping them, and thereby enfeebling them by putting in a comma. . . . A long complicated sentence should force itself upon you, make yourself know yourself knowing it.” Another approach to these lectures lies in seeing them as objectlessons of the teaching method. Nothing is learned save in answer to a deeply lodged and distinctly stated question. Beginning with a calculated simplicity, these lectures first prepare and provoke the correct questions in the listeners’ minds. One is irresistibly reminded of the request that Dante put to his guide, and which might serve as a motto for all education: . . . io pregai che mi largisse il pasto Di cui largito m’aveva il disio. . . . I prayed him to bestow on me the food, for which he had already bestowed on me the appetite.

These are real rewards, but the great reward of these lectures lies in the richness and vitality of the ideas contained in them. We soon discover that we are not to hear about narration from the point of view that the rhetorics usually discuss the subject. We hear nothing of the proportion of exposition to narrative, of where to place a climax, of how to heighten vividness through the use of illustrative detail. Here we

T H O R N T O N

W I L D E R

/

3 3 3

return to first principles, indeed: “Narration is what anybody has to say in any way about anything that can happen, that has happened or will happen in any way.” There is an almost terrifying exactness in Miss Stein’s use of the very words that the rest of the world employs so loosely: everybody, everything, and every way. Consequently the discussion leads at once into the realms of psychology, philosophy, and metaphysics, to a theory of knowledge and a theory of time. These matters are treated, however, not in the Latinizing jargon of the manuals, but in the homely language of colloquial usage. The great and exhilarating passage in the third lecture, describing the difference between “existing” and “happening,” that begins: “The inside and the outside, the outside which is outside and the inside which is inside are not when they are inside and outside are not inside in short they are not existing, that is inside. . . .”—such a passage might have been rendered in terms of “subjective and objective phenomena”; it might have been more academically impressive; it could not have been clearer; and it would have lost that quality of rising from the “daily life” and from our “common knowledge” which is the vitalizing character of Miss Stein’s ideas. These ideas are presented to us in a highly abstract form. Miss Stein pays her listeners the high compliment of dispensing for the most part with that apparatus of illustrative simile and anecdote that is so often employed to recommend ideas. She assumes that the attentive listener will bring, from a store of observation and reflection, the concrete illustration of her generalization. This is what renders doubly stimulating, for example, the treatment of the differences between English and American literature, and the distinction between prose and poetry— a critical principle which from the earlier lecture has already made so marked an impression and which in the present lectures receives a further development. In the present series, however, the outstanding pas-

3 3 4

\

D O C U M E N T S

sages will undoubtedly be those dealing with the psychology of the creative act as the moment of “recognition” and the discussion of the relations between the artist and the audience—a subject now the center of critical speculation in many quarters and which here receives distinguished and profound treatment. Miss Stein has said that the artist is the most sensitive exponent of his contemporaneousness, expressing it while it still lies in the unconscious of society at large. In the first lecture in this book and in the lectures she has previously given she has described the character of the new points of view of this age, the twentieth century which was made by America, as the nineteenth was made by England, and with the result that “the United States is now the oldest country in the world.” These lectures in their method and in their content are brilliant examples of the breadth and movement and energy that the perspective of time will reveal to have been our characteristic.

T H O R N T O N

W I L D E R

/

3 3 5

This page intentionally left blank

S E L E C T E D

B I B L I O G R A P H Y

For the most complete publications history of Stein’s works through the early 1990s, see Robert Wilson’s Gertrude Stein: A Bibliography (Rockville, MD: Quill and Brush, 1994). Ulla Dydo provides a comprehensive bibliographical selection of Stein’s “principal works” and a detailed chronological listing of her works written from 1923 to February 1935 in Gertrude Stein: The Language That Rises 1923–1934 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003). Catharine Stimpson and Harriet Chessman’s two-volume Gertrude Stein: Writings (New York: Library of America, 1998) has an indispensible chronology that places Stein’s writing projects in the context of other events in her life. There are also several useful Stein bibliographies online. Stein’s books are constantly going in and out of print; many interesting editions are available in university libraries. WORKS BY GERTRUDE STEIN

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. New York: Vintage Books, 1990. “Before the Flowers of Friendship Faded Friendship Faded.” With Georges Hugnet’s poems “Enfances” on facing pages. Introduction by Juliana Spahr. In Exact Change Yearbook No. 1. Edited by Peter Gizzi. Cambridge, MA: Exact Change, 1995. Blood on the Dining Room Floor. Berkeley, CA: Creative Arts Books, 1982; Reprint, London: Virago Press, 1985. Brewsie and Willie. New York: Random House, 1946. Everybody’s Autobiography. London: Virago Press, 1985; Cambridge, MA: Exact Change, 1993. Fernhurst, Q.E.D., and Other Early Writings. Introduction by Leon Katz and

3 3 7

essays by Donald Gallup. New York: Liveright, 1971. Reprint, London: Virago Press, 1995. Four in America. Introduction by Thornton Wilder. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1947. Four Saints in Three Acts. In Last Operas and Plays. Edited by Carl Van Vechten. Introduction by Bonnie Marranca. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. The Geographical History of America or The Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind. Introduction by William Gass. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973. Geography and Plays. Introduction and notes by Cyrena N. Pondrom. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993. “Gertrude Stein: A Radio Interview.” Introduction by Steven Meyer. Paris Review, no. 116 (Fall 1990), 85–97. Gertrude Stein: Writings. Edited by Catharine R. Stimpson and Harriet Chessman. 2 vols.: 1903–1932 and 1932–1946. New York: Library of America, 1998. The Gertrude Stein Reader. Edited and with an Introduction by Richard Kostelanetz. New York: Cooper Square Press, 2002. History or Messages from History. Los Angeles: Green Integer, 1997. How to Write. Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1995. Ida, a Novel. New York: Vintage Books, 1971. Last Operas and Plays. Edited by Carl Van Vechten. Introduction by Bonnie Marranca. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. Lectures in America. Introduction by Wendy Steiner. Boston: Beacon Press, 1985; London: Virago Press, 1988. Lucy Church Amiably. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2000. The Making of Americans. Foreword by William Gass. Introduction by Steven Meyer. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2006. Mexico, a Play. Los Angeles: Green Integer, 1999. Mrs. Reynolds. Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1980. Narration: Four Lectures by Gertrude Stein. Edited and with an introduction by Thornton Wilder. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1935. Reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969; New York: Greenwood Press, 1969; Folcroft, PA: Folcroft Library Editions, 1977.

3 3 8

\

B I B L I O G R A P H Y

A Novel of Thank You. Introduction by Steven Meyer. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1994. Operas and Plays. Foreword by James Mellow. Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1987. Paris France. New York: Liveright, 1970. Picasso. New York: Dover Publications, 1984. Portraits and Prayers. New York: Random House, 1934. Previously Uncollected Writings of Gertrude Stein. Edited and with a preface by Robert Bartlett Haas. 2 vols.: Reflections on the Atomic Bomb and How Writing Is Written. Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1973–74. A Primer for the Gradual Understanding of Gertrude Stein. Edited and with a preface by Robert Bartlett Haas. Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1973. Really Reading Gertrude Stein: A Selected Anthology with Essays by Judy Grahn. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1989. Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein. Edited and with an introduction and notes by Carl Van Vechten. New York: Random House, 1946. Reprint, with an introduction by F. W. Dupee, New York: Modern Library, 1962. Stanzas in Meditation. Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1994. (Selections with manuscript accuracy restored by Ulla Dydo in A Stein Reader [see “Volumes of Selected Work by Gertrude Stein”].) A Stein Reader. Edited by Ulla E. Dydo. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993. Tender Buttons. Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1990. (Also in Gertrude Stein: Writings, 1932–1946 [see “Volumes of Selected Work by Gertrude Stein”].) Three Lives. New York: Dover Publications, 1994. (There are many editions in print.) Unpublished Writings of Gertrude Stein, Vol. 5: Painted Lace and Other Pieces [1914–1937]. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1955. Useful Knowledge. Foreword by Edward Burns. Introduction by Keith Waldrop. Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1988. A Village Are You Ready Yet Not Yet, A Play in Four Acts. Lithographs by Elie Lascaux. Paris: Galerie Simon, 1928. Wars I Have Seen. Introduction by Jacqueline Morreau. London: Brilliance Books, 1984.

B I B L I O G R A P H Y

/

3 3 9

The World Is Round. In Gertrude Stein: Writings, 1932–1946. Edited by Catharine R. Stimpson and Harriet Chessman. New York: Library of America, 1998.

BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES AND LETTERS

Brinnin, John Malcolm. The Third Rose: Gertrude Stein and Her World. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1987. Burns, Edward, ed. The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Carl Van Vechten. 2 vols.: 1913–1935 and 1935–1946. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. Burns, Edward, and Ulla E. Dydo, eds. The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996. Everett, Patricia R. A History of Having a Great Many Times Not Continued to Be Friends: The Correspondence between Mabel Dodge and Gertrude Stein, 1911– 1934. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996. Gallup, Donald, ed. The Flowers of Friendship: Letters Written to Gertrude Stein. New York: Octagon, 1979. Greenfeld, Howard. Gertrude Stein: A Biography. New York: Crown, 1973. Hobhouse, Janet. Everybody Who Was Anybody: A Biography of Gertrude Stein. New York: Putnam, 1975. Malcolm, Janet. “Gertrude Stein’s War: The Years in Occupied France.” New Yorker, June 2, 2003, 58–81. ———. Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. Mellow, James R. Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company. New York: Henry Holt, 1974. Page, Tim and Vanessa Weeks Page. Selected Letters of Virgil Thompson. New York: Summit Books, 1988. Rewald, John. Cézanne, the Steins, and Their Circle. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1987. Rogers, William Garland. When This You See, Remember Me. New York: Rinehart, 1948. Simon, Linda. Gertrude Stein: A Composite Portrait. New York: Avon, 1974. ———, ed. Gertrude Stein Remembered. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994.

3 4 0

\

B I B L I O G R A P H Y

Souhami, Diana. Gertrude and Alice. San Franciso: Pandora, 1992. Steward, Samuel M. Dear Sammy: Letters from Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toldas. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1977. Toklas, Alice B. Staying on Alone: Letters of Alice B. Toklas. Edited by Edward Burns. Introduction by Gilbert Harrison. New York: Liveright, 1973. Turner, Kay, ed. Baby Precious Always Shines: Selected Love Notes between Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. Wagner-Martin, Linda. “Favored Strangers”: Gertrude Stein and Her Family. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995. Wineapple, Brenda. Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein. London: Bloomsbury; New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1996. CRITICAL STUDIES, INCLUDING VOLUMES WITH SUBSTANTIAL DISCUSSIONS OF GERTRUDE STEIN’S WORK

Berry, Ellen E. Curved Thought and Textual Writing: Gertrude Stein’s Postmodernism. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992. Bowers, Jane Palatini. Gertrude Stein. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993. ———. “They Watch Me as They Watch This”: Gertrude Stein’s Metadrama. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991. Bridgman, Richard. Gertrude Stein in Pieces. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970. Bush, Clive. Halfway to Revolution: Investigation and Crisis in the Work of Henry Adams, William James and Gertrude Stein. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991. Caramello, Charles. Henry James, Gertrude Stein, and the Biographical Act. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. Chessman, Harriet Scott. The Public Is Invited to Dance: Representation, the Body, and Dialogue in Gertrude Stein. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989. Damon, Maria. The Dark End of the Street: Margins in American Vanguard Poetry. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. DeKoven, Marianne. A Different Language: Gertrude Stein’s Experimental Writing. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983. ———. Rich and Strange: Gender, History, Modernism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991.

B I B L I O G R A P H Y

/

3 4 1

Dydo, Ulla. Gertrude Stein: The Language That Rises 1923–1934. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003. Meyer, Steven. Irresistible Dictation: Gertrude Stein and the Correlations of Writing and Science. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001. Miller, Rosalind. Gertrude Stein: Form and Intelligibility. New York: Exposition Press, 1949. Nielsen, Aldon Lynn. Reading Race: White American Poets and the Racial Discourse of the Twentieth Century. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988. North, Michael. The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Perelman, Bob. The Trouble with Genius: Reading Pound, Joyce, Stein and Zukofsky. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Perloff, Marjorie. The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981. Quartermain, Peter. Disjunctive Poetics: From Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky to Susan Howe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Richardson, Joan. A Natural History of Pragmatism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Ruddick, Lisa. Gertrude Stein: Body, Text, Gnosis. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990. Spahr, Juliana. Everybody’s Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2001. Steiner, Wendy. Exact Resemblance to Exact Resemblance: The Literary Portraiture of Gertrude Stein. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978. Steward, Allegra. Gertrude Stein and the Present. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967. Sutherland, Donald. Gertrude Stein: A Biography of Her Work. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1951. Walker, Jayne L. The Making of a Modernist: Gertrude Stein from “Three Lives” to “Tender Buttons.” Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984. Weinstein, Norman. Gertrude Stein and the Literature of Modern Consciousness. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1970. Will, Barbara. Gertrude Stein, Modernism, and the Problem of “Genius.” Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000.

3 4 2

\

B I B L I O G R A P H Y

CRITICAL ESSAYS

Cohen, Milton A. “Black Brutes and Mulatto Saints: The Racial Hierarchy of Stein’s ‘Melanctha.’” Black American Literature Forum 18 (1984), 119–21. Damon, Maria. “Gertrude Stein’s Jewishness, Jewish Social Scientists, and the ‘Jewish Question.’” Modern Fiction Studies 42, no. 3 (1996), 489–506. DeKoven, Marianne. “Breaking the Rigid Form of the Noun: Stein, Pound, Whitman, and Modernist Poetry.” In Critical Essays on American Modernism. Ed. Michael J. Hoffman and Patrick D. Murphy. New York: G. K. Hall, 1992. ———. “Gertrude Stein (1874–1946).” In The Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology. Ed. Bonnie Kime Scott. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. ———. “‘Why James Joyce Was Accepted and I Was Not’: Modernist Fiction and Gertrude Stein’s Narrative.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 25 no. 2 (1992), 23–30. Haselstein, Ulla. “Gertrude Stein’s Portraits of Matisse and Picasso.” New Literary History 34, no. 4 (2003), 723–43. Hejinian, Lyn. “Two Stein Talks,” “Three Lives,” and “A Common Sense.” In The Language of Inquiry. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Hoffman, Michael J., ed. Critical Essays on Gertrude Stein. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986. Hovey, Jaime. “Sapphic Primitivism in Gertrude Stein’s Q.E.D.” Modern Fiction Studies 42, no. 3 (1996), 547–68. Karem, Jeff. “‘I Could Never Really Leave the South’: Regionalism and the Transformation of Richard Wright’s American Hunger.” American Literary History 13, no. 4 (2001), 694–715. Katz, Leon. “Weininger and The Making of Americans.” Twentieth Century Literature 24 (1978), 8–26. North, Michael. “Modernism’s African Mask: The Stein-Picasso Collaboration.” In Prehistories of the Future: The Primitivist Project and the Culture of Modernism. Ed. Elazar Barkan and Ronald Bush. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995. Peppis, Paul. “Thinking Race in the Avant Guerre: Typological Negotiations in Ford and Stein.” Yale Journal of Criticism 10, no. 2 (1997), 371–95. Pondrom, Cyrena N. “Gertrude Stein: From Outlaw to Classic.” Contemporary Literature 27, no. 1 (1986), 98–114.

B I B L I O G R A P H Y

/

3 4 3

———. “Influence? or Intertextuality? The Complicated Connection of Edith Sitwell with Gertrude Stein.” In Intertextuality in Literary History. Ed. Jay Clayton and Eric Rothstein. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. Retallack, Joan. “Accident . . . Aeroplane . . . Artichoke.” New American Writing, no. 10 (fall 1992), 120–35. ———. “The Difficulties of Gertrude Stein, I and II,” In The Poethical Wager. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. ———. “High Adventures of Indeterminacy.” Parnassus: Twenty Years of Poetry in Review. ed. Herbert Leibowitz. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994, 75–107. Schoenberg, Bruce S. “Gertrude Stein’s Neuroanatomic Investigations: Roses or Thorns?” Southern Medical Journal 81, no. 2 (1988), 250–58. Stimpson, Catharine R. “Gertrude Stein and the Lesbian Lie.” In American Women’s Autobiography: Fea(s)ts of Memory. Ed. Margo Culley. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992. ———. “Gertrude Stein and the Transposition of Gender.” In The Poetics of Gender. Ed. Nancy K. Miller. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. ———. “Gertrude Stein: Humanism and Its Freaks.” Boundary 2, no. 13 (1984), 301–19. ———. “The Mind, the Body, and Gertrude Stein.” Critical Inquiry 3, no. 3 (1977), 489–506. Tischler, Alyson. “A Rose Is a Pose: Steinian Modernism and Mass Culture.” Journal of Modern Literature 26, no. 3–4 (2003), 12–27. Watten, Barrett. “The Bride in the Assembly Line: Radical Poetics in Construction.” The Constructivist Moment. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003. Webb, Barbara. “The Centrality of Race to the Modernist Aesthetics of Gertrude Stein’s Four Saints in Three Acts.” Modernism/Modernity 7, no. 3 (2000), 447–69. Whittier-Ferguson, John. “The Liberation of Gertrude Stein.” Modernism/ Modernity 8, no. 3 (2001), 405–28.

RELATED SOURCES

Burns, Edward. Picasso: The Complete Writings. Foreword by Leon Katz and Edward Burns. Boston: Beacon Press, 1970.

3 4 4

\

B I B L I O G R A P H Y

Stein, Leo. Appreciation: Painting, Poetry and Prose. New York: Crown, 1947. Stern, David G., and Béla Szabados, eds. Wittgenstein Reads Weininger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Toklas, Alice B. The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book. New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1960. ———. What Is Remembered. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963. Vetsch, Florian. Desultory Correspondence: An Interview with Paul Bowles on Gertrude Stein. Zurich: Memory/Cage Editions, 1997. Wilson, Robert. Gertrude Stein: A Bibliography. Rockville, MD: Quill and Brush, 1994.

OTHER SOURCES CITED

Adorno, Theodor. Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life. Trans. E.F.N. Jephcott. London: Verso, 1985. Barthes, Roland. A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1978. Breton, André. André Breton: Selections. Ed. Mark Polizzotti. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Fröller, Dita. “Stein Stein Stein Stein Stein.” In New Old World Marvels. Washington, DC and Paris: Pre-Post-Eros Editions, frothcoming. Gay, Peter. Freud, Jews and Other Germans: Masters and Victims in Modernist Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. Theater 32, no. 2 (2002).

AUDIO RESOURCES

“Gertrude Stein,” PENNsound: Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania, http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Stein .html. Sound recordings of Stein reading from “The Making of Americans,” “Matisse,” “A Valentine to Sherwood Anderson,” “If I Told Him, A Complete Portrait of Picasso,” “The Fifteenth of November . . . T. S. Eliot,” “Portrait of Christian Bérard,” “Madame Recamier: An Opera,” and “How She Bowed to Her Brother,” and a 1934 interview with Stein; working notes by Ulla E. Dydo.

B I B L I O G R A P H Y

/

3 4 5

Gertrude Stein Reads. New York: Caedmon, 1996. Audiocassette. Stein reading selections from The Making of Americans, “Matisse,” “If I Told Him, A Completed Portrait of Picasso,” “Idem the Same: A Valentine to Sherwood Anderson,” “Matisse,” and “Madame Recamier: An Opera.”

3 4 6

\

B I B L I O G R A P H Y

A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

O F

P E R M I S S I O N S

All Stein texts and the letter from Virgil Thomson to Stein, dated May 30, 1933, are used by kind permission of the Estate of Gertrude Stein, through its Literary Executor, Mr. Stanford Gann, Jr., of Levin & Gann, P. A. Thornton Wilder’s introduction to Gertrude Stein’s Narration: Copyright © 1935, 1963. Reprinted by permission of the Wilder Family, LLC.

3 4 7

text: display: compositor: printer and binder:

10.75/15 granjon akzidenz grotesk integrated composition systems thomson-shore, inc.