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During the War, Friends Toklas & Stein tried to live in Paris as if nothing was happening ; when that became impossible they went to Mallorca. The attack on Verdun brought them back to Paris, where they decided to equip and drive a Ford truck for the American Fund for French Wounded. Miss Stein did the driving, with fair success. (She never learned how to back very well.) The War over, they settled down again to Art. By this time Gertrude Stein's Three Lives (published in 1909) had given her a reputation among young U. S. writers. "Gertrude Stein and Sherwood Anderson are very funny on the subject of Hemingway. . . . Hemingway lad been formed by the two of them and they were both a little proud and a little ashamed of the work of their minds. . . . They admitted that Hemingway was yellow, he is. Gertrude Stein insisted, just .ike the flatboat men on the Mississippi river as described by Mark Twain ... he looks like a modern and he smells of the museums. But what a story that of the real Hem. and one he should tell himself but alas he never will. After all, as he himself once murmured, there is the career, the career." Gertrude Stein once told him: "Hemingway, after all you are 90% Rotarian. Can't you. he said, make it 80%. No. said she regretfully. I can't.'' Of Ezra Pound her criticism is even more cavalier: "She said he was a village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not. not." Glenway Wescott "at no time interested Gertrude Stein. He has a certain syrup but it does not pour." But she thinks F. Scott Fitzgerald "will be read when many of his well known contemporaries are forgotten."
The Writer. Alice B. Toklas tells who and—to a certain extent—what Gertrude Stein is. but it will leave pedestrian readers still puzzling their heads over why this obviously shrewd and salty old lady, whose sentences may seem rather primer-like but are just as lucid as a primer's, should have gathered such a lurid reputation as murderess of the King's English. Such readers should remember that in Alice B. Toklas Authoress Stein is on her best behavior. If they are sufficiently curious to look up some of her wilder work, this is the kind of thing they may find:
A PATRIOTIC LEADING
Verse I
Indeed indeed Can you see. The stars And regularly the precious treasure. What do we love without measure. We know.
Verse II
We suspect the second man.
Verse III
We are worthy of everything that happens. You mean weddings. Naturally I mean weddings.
Verse IV
And then we are, Hail to the nation. Verse V Do you think we believe it.
Verse VI
It is that or bust.
Verse VII
We cannot bust.
Verse VIII
Thank you.
Verse IX
Thank you so much.
What can the plain reader make of all this? If he is in a good humor he will doubtless laugh, but at what? Sober-sided Critic Edmund Wilson gives as his opinion that: "Miss Stein is trying to superinduce a state of mind in which the idea of the nation will seem silly, in which we shall be conscious of ourselves as creatures who do not lend themselves to that conception." Still puzzled, the plain reader dips into another Stein volume (Tender Buttons), to his astonishment brings up these: