Books: The Abominable Snowoman

THE THIRD ROSE (427 pp.)—John Malcolm Brinnin— Atlantic-Little, Brown ($6).

Renouncing Babbitry for Babel, Gertrude Stein was a kind of saint to some and a stunt to others. She belongs not to the ages, but an age—the '20s. Fresh from his last safari (Dylan Thomas in America), Poet-Critic John Malcolm Brinnin goes in search of this Abominable Snowoman of modern letters. What he brings back is not startling, but it is a biographically complete if critically indulgent account of the concentric odyssey of Gertrude Stein, of whom it might be said: in her...