JOURNEY INTO THE SELF: BEING THE LETTERS, PAPERS AND JOURNALS OF LEO STEIN (331 pp.)—Edited by Edmund Fuller—Crown ($4).
Gertrude Stein was merely Leo Stein’s tag-along sister for the first half of their lives: in Pittsburgh, where they were born; in Vienna and California, where they were brought up, and in Paris, where they went to live. Until they were in their 30s, it was Leo who was the clever one. He knew about ideas and he knew about pictures, and he told Gertrude. Then, to Leo’s astonishment, Gertrude began to turn into a genius. People began to take her inspired gobbledygook seriously, and she began to buy Picasso’s new cubist paintings against her brother’s advice.
It turned out that she was on to a winner. After World War I, Hemingway and the crowd who read and wrote for Eugene Jolas’ magazine transition flocked admiringly round Gertrude, the great writer. People who liked pictures came to look at her collection. Leo had turned into Gertrude’s dim brother.
“God What a Liar!” He stayed that way. This collection of letters and excerpts from his journals, printed with fragments of an autobiography and part of an unfinished book (Leo died in 1949), shows mainly how bitterly he resented it. Many of the letters are petulant complaints about Gertrude’s success. “I simply cannot take Gertrude seriously as a literary phenomenon.” The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas riled him especially. “God what a liar she is!” One of the last things he wrote was a memorandum about his dislike of her and all her works. In 1946, when he heard that she was dead of cancer, he wrote: “I can’t say it touches me. I had lost not only all regard, but all respect, for her.”
The unfinished autobiography and the unfinished book will not do much to change Leo’s status. The autobiography shows him to be an arrogant dilettante claiming an exhaustive knowledge of subjects with which he had had the briefest brushes. At 22, he dismissed history as inaccurate rubbish. At 28, he put all the philosophy worth knowing onto two sheets of note paper.
Ten years later he had an inspiration in his bath one night and by morning had evolved a theory of human consciousness that put him, he felt, many years ahead of the psychologists. A year after that he spent a week staring into the open fire in his Paris apartment, occasionally knocking off to munch a crust, take a bath, or catnap on the floor for an hour or so. At the end of it—through “sheer imagination,” since he was no mathematician—he had evolved a “mystical realization” of the theory of relativity, which put him in a class with Einstein.
“Man Is an Animal.” The arrogance of these claims is equaled only by their lack of substance. In fact Leo’s intellectual life was almost wholly given up to a prolonged self-analysis on Freudian lines. He diagnosed a big part of his neurosis as a “pariah complex,” and for the last 25 years of his life he tended his complex as lovingly as a housebound spinster caring for a windowful of potted plants.
When the analysis was over, Leo felt that he really had something to say to the world. He cleared the way for his final statement with a book on esthetics (which showed by implication how wrong Gertrude had always been about prose, poetry and pictures). Then he began the great work. Modestly he said, “It is the first really sane book on what serves as religion that was ever written . . .”
The great discovery the book was to demonstrate was that “man is an animal. It is very questionable whether he is anything more.” Fragments show that it was going to be an account of Leo’s analysis of Leo. What little of it he had achieved before his death is a dingy chronicle of sterile pride and self-love. Leo’s journey into the self took him into a desert.
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