To Be or Not to Be, Might That Be Our Question?

From early on in life Gertrude Stein saw a special role for herself, as she stated, “I always wanted to be historical, from almost a baby on.” In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, speaking to her readers through the voice of her partner, Stein uses Alice as the mechanism through which she expounds upon her personal qualities on many occasions and in a great number of references. She proclaims herself to be one of “three first class geniuses” of which Alice claims, “(I)n no one of the three cases have I been mistaken.”

There is no denying our author’s intelligence- Radcliffe and Johns Hopkins- nor her associations with the notables of Modernism’s artists and writers- Picasso and Hemingway. How much of the acclaim she so sought for her own works is a result of her literary achievement and how much is “fame by association” with the greatness of others at her salon and gallery at 27 rue de Fleurus?

I read for two main purposes- information or entertainment. In my first attempts to read Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, I was stymied time and again to fulfill either of these purposes. It demands great patience to read this piece. Her style is so repetitive, like a stuttering of the mind, and often illogical, in fact nonsensical. It is idiosyncratically punctuated and grammatically confusing, as if the reader were not struggling enough already and the author would further hinder rather than aid the comprehension of her text. However, in our reading of the second Stein selection, The Autobiography, the author gives us some clues in understanding her inimitable style. She explains to Alice that “I feel with my eyes and it does not make any difference to me what language I hear, I don’t hear language, I hear tones of voice and rhythms.” Later on she further explains that she does not care much for music “… which may seem strange because it has been so often said that the appeal of her work is to the ear and to the subconscious.” Rather Stein tells us that she “felt a desire to express the rhythm of the visible world…” at which she “looked, listened and described.”

So perhaps that was her very objective- to have the reader not try to make sense of and comprehend the substance, but rather to sense the rhythm and sound of her writing. So with that renewed purpose, I reread select portions and found the pages filled with alliterations as well as some interesting word play. In “Rooms” she writes, “Cadences, real cadences, real cadences and a quiet color. Careful and curved, cake and sober…” Recurring words of color as well as references to landscapes and many objects in her surroundings are perhaps literary parallels to her artistic friends’ paintings. Her writing about a long dress in “Objects” so vividly describes the article of clothing that one can picture it in its “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.” I interpret this to mean that this particular dress is so lively in its color that it changes the feeling in the room from a dark into a vibrant atmosphere.

On her deathbed, after asking, “What is the answer?” and getting no response, Gertrude Stein leaves us with the parting words, “In that case, what is the question?” Perhaps our playing on Hamlet’s soliloquy alludes to it, “To be, or not to be -- that is the question.” Is Gertrude Stein to be or not to be the genius of her self-proclamation? I believe that is the very personal question each of us will have to answer as she sees fit.