Books: Stem's Way

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"Red Roses. A cool red rose and a pink cut pink, a collapse and a sold hole, a little less hot.

"A Sound. Elephant beaten with candy and little pops and chews all bolts and reckless rats, this is this.

"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 seeing.

"Chicken. Alas a dirty word, alas a dirty third, alas a dirty bird."

Some readers laugh, some are annoyed; some snort with disgust or indignation. Gertrude Stein, writer for posterity ("I write for myself and strangers'") does not mind. Says she slyly: "My sentence: do get under their skin. . . ."

"Sentences not only words but sentences and always sentences have been Gertrude Stein's life long passion." The only teacher she acknowledges is her poodle, Basket. "The rhythm of his water drinking made her recognize the difference between sentences and paragraphs, that para- graphs are emotional and that sentences are not."

Critical consensus, while it writes off Gertrude Stein's less comprehensible utterings as a public loss, grants that she has been a private gain to more intelligible writers, and that her influence on contemporary literature has been vicariously potent. Serious critics take her seriously, even when they cannot understand what she is doing. Says Critic Wilson: "Most of us balk at her soporific rigmaroles, her echolaliac incantations, her half-witted-sounding catalogs of numbers; most of us read her less & less. Yet, remembering especially her early work, we are still aware of her presence in the background of contemporary literature—and we picture her as the great pyramidal Buddha of Jo Davidson's statue of her, eternally and placidly ruminating the gradual developments of the processes of being, regis- tering the vibrations of a psychological country like some august human seismograph whose charts we haven't the training to read." Such esoteric experiments as Have They Attacked Mary He Giggled—A Political Satire, Lucy Church Amiably, Tender Buttons and her monumental The Making of Americans may have to wait for a doubtful posterity to be properly appreciated; but her first and best-known book, Three Lives, will be reprinted this month by the Modern Library, whose editors' ears are close to the ground.

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