Why Do Something If It Can Be Done
Renate Stendhal
Gertrude Stein was my first muse – a muse I had to wrestle with, a muse who challenged me with a riddle.
Among my literary friends, her name was pronounced with high respect –a fact that made me prick up my ears while I was still a school girl. Not many women writers in the fifties were admired by my friends. In her case, there seemed to be no question about it. One line of her writing apparently said everything about her genius: “A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.” My young mind could not solve the rose puzzle, but my ears already loved the sound of it. My intuition rushed toward it while my intellect struggled with the meaning. Was this a Jewish rose, trained and trimmed in abstract, kabbalistic speculation? Was this a “cubist” rose, rendered in words the way Stein´s famous friends – Picasso, Braque, Juan Gris – were painting their revolutionary paintings?
And what about the way the author looked? That look – unmistakable in its bold androgyny – got my attention the minute I saw the first photographs of her. The shocking Caesar hair cut, the paradox of the huge, inviting body of a wet nurse, dressed in flowery blouses... There was something frightening about her appeal. Nobody I knew back then uttered the word lesbian, nor any other word that would have explained her unusual circumstance. The way she looked at the camera, one moment with the challenging gaze of a general, the next with the joyous sensuality of a child, but never with any pleasing “feminine” air, was intriguing. There was nothing about her that fit into my categories of women or men. Her powerful strangeness attracted me.
A muse usually bestows her blessings with a kiss. Before the kiss and the revelation, however, my muse was the fairytale frog that had to be thrown against a wall in a rage. Try as I might, I was unable to decipher Stein´s books. When I opened a page of her experimental, “cubist” writing like Tender Buttons, I did not understand a word. Even her early “naturalistic” texts like the stories of Three Lives eluded me with their repetitiveness and oddly boring slowness of long sentences without commas. Over the years, whenever I heard another friend sing her praises I would gnash my teeth and try again. I remember at least one occasion when I threw a Stein book against the wall.
All this changed when I moved to Paris and found my chosen exile where she had found hers some 60 years earlier, at the beginning of the century. The Women´s Movement started. I fell in love with a woman, started writing poetry in English –the language my lover and I shared, and joined a poetry workshop of English-speaking feminists. Some of the members of the group were experimental writers and prided themselves on not only reading Stein but enjoying the experience. There she was again at my doorstep, beckoning. I listened to my friends´ favorite and frequently recited one-liners: “There is no there there,” “Don´t worry you will,” “Pigeons on the grass alas,” “If nobody asked the question what would the answer be,” “Before the flowers of friendship faded friendship faded,” or “I am I because my little dog knows me.” I began to hear the irony in Stein´s writing, the twist of the expected formula, the poetic beauty, the humorous provocation. “If not why not.” This statement, without a question mark, became my favorite “Steinese” quote.
It occurred to me that perhaps a requisite quality for understanding Stein was the capacity to regard oneself with humor. Self-humor was a major discovery for me at that time, parallel to the experience of empowerment as a woman. I read Paris France, Stein´s portrait of the French, and started laughing from the recognition. “A frenchman always breaks down when his mother dies,” she writes. Her odd use of the word “always” appeared to be a sly understatement pointing to several character traits in French men that I appreciated: a mediterranean tendency toward a more “matriarchal” organisation of society as expressed though the overwhelming importance of the mother, and a permission for French men to be dramatic, even hysterical, and therefore feminine. I saw French men as comparatively androgynous in their cultural refinement, verbal eloquence and elegance of manners. I liked the fact that young Frenchmen were encouraged to love older, more powerful women while women were encouraged to be more self-assertive and sexual, like men. To me, the old saying “Living like God in France” signified a culture of the center, located between north and south, east and west of Europe – a place, in Stein´s words, that is “peaceful and exciting.” A culture of balance between extremes that equally valued verbal brilliance and sex, intellectual abstraction and raffiné food: “Food and books, books and food, both excellent things,” as Gertrude happily commented. There was no doubt that I was beginning to tune in.
Now that I was writing poetry, Stein´s famous rose, the compelling, bewitching, hermetic rose, was opening to me. The riddle suddenly made sense. After the long tradition of rose poems in our Abendland, I realized, everything that could be said had been said a million times. But in Stein´s sentence, nothing is said. The rose is called up in a ritual of evocation through the “caressing” repetition of its name. Its ring of purring “r´s” and soft alliterations of “s” surrounds the “o” of an implied sigh and creates a rhythm of hypnotic urgency. In this evocation we, the readers, listeners, are called upon to recreate the well-worn rose afresh in our imagination. This was indeed the rose of modernism: non-representational, freed from all the sentiment and sentimentality of the 19th century, minimal, abstract, repetitive..., the modern as well as post-modern rose that keeps its original mystery intact.
My understanding of Stein took another leap forward when I encountered American feminist Gloria Orenstein and her advanced analysis of Stein in her essay, “The Amusing Muse.” Gloria lectured in Paris on the European salon tradition, a tradition of women, often powerful Jewish women, who had opened their salon for the admiration and celebration of the male geniuses of their time. Most creative women I knew, myself among them, were dreaming of a salon renaissance. Stein´s Paris salon – one of the last and most famous salons of a bygone era – served as the prime example. In her most successful book, The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas, Stein evokes the beginnings of the salon in the Rue de Fleurus. She tells the story of going out with her brother Leo to collect the scandalous paintings of the of the young “wild men” of her time – the “fauvistes” and cubists, Picasso, Matisse, Cézanne... “We had just hung all the pictures and we asked all the painters. You know how painters are, I wanted to make them happy so I placed each one opposite his own picture, and they were happy so happy that we had to send out twice for more bread, when you know France you will know that that means that they were happy, because they cannot eat and drink without bread and we had to send out twice for bread so they were happy.” One could not possibly express French happiness in a more funny, tender, poetic way.
A few years later, of course, Gertrude had met and fallen in love with Alice B. Toklas, a Jewish pianist from San Francisco. Alice moved into the Rue de Fleurus with its rooms plastered with paintings, and brother Leo moved out. Now the two women held court together. According to the conventional (patriarchal) legend, Gertrude talked to the male geniuses invited to the salon while Alice, in wifely fashion, entertained the far less desirable wives of the geniuses by serving them self-baked cookies and liqueurs. In Gloria Orenstein´s (feminist) reading, this was a shrewd subversion of the venerable tradition: the genius celebrated at the Rue de Fleurus was Gertrude while Alice played the necessary role of salon hostess. I recognized the chuzpa and brilliance in this survival strategy of outsiders. For it occurred to me, for the first time, that women were outsiders in a system of patriarchal values and hierarchies.
I discovered that Gertrude Stein at first had doubts about her writing. She suffered severe depressions, bouts of loneliness and felt unrecognized and unvalued as long as she lived in the company of her dominant brother Leo. She did not participate in the salon discussions. As her biographer Howard Greenfield reports: “...she was silent, speaking only formal phrases to those who approached her. Every once in a while, and seemingly without reason, she would burst into laughter, a hearty, infectious, engaging laugh.” I loved to imagine what absurdity in the salon discourse, where men were holding forth on art and writing, caused these moments of irresistible merriment? “I am really almost despairing,” she wrote in her early book, The Making of Americans. “I have really in me a very very melancholy feeling, a very melancholy being, I am really then despairing.”
But all of this changed, I learned, when she met Alice B. Toklas, the one and only person who was able to read, understand, value and discuss her writing with her. Gertrude Stein became the language revolutionary, who wrote every day, undeterred by the lack of understanding and ridicule her writing provoked. She became (in her own words) the “literary Einstein of the century” whose salon was the hottest address in town. She became the talkative, people-loving, food-loving playful, witty, self-assured and stubborn Mother of Modernism who taught Hemingway and the other young writers of the “Lost Generation” that “remarks are not literature.”
Reading and understanding Gertrude Stein had an impact on understanding myself. I was struck by Stein´s beginnings because of the parallels I detected in my own experience as a young writer. I, too, had felt utterly silenced in the company of men and been despairing about my writing. In my teen years, even though writing had been my passion from the start, I did not believe that a woman could be a serious writer or artist. The culture I grew up in did not believe it either. I did not think that writing in a diary day after day could be taken seriously in spite of the fact that my notebooks were turning into serious stylistic workbooks. But then I, too, had fallen in love with a woman and discovered that I had a voice, after all. The encouragement of love and the warm wave of support from my feminist sisters had started to rekindle my passion for writing. After a writing block of almost a decade, I had gone back to writing poems. Now I translated a number of important feminist books into German and made a living by writing cultural reports from Paris for the German radio and press. At the end of the seventies, I took the leap of unifying my activism with my writing: I wrote the texts for the feminist theater and multimedia shows I was creating with a new lover. My forebear Gertrude Stein seemed to be shining the way for me. The intriguing, frightful “frog” whom I had finally kissed had turned into the “Amusing Muse.” And my Muse was now going to kiss me in turn.
In the early eighties, one of the best literary publishing houses, the Zurich-based Arche Verlag, was taken over by two women. The moment I heard the news, saw their picture and guessed that they were a couple, I used the contact of an old editor friend to look them up. I offered them my services as a translator because I had already tackled a number of demanding authors of poetry and prose and felt sure of my craft. But I had found translating a back-breaking job with little reward. A good translator tends to go unnoticed; book reviews hardly ever mention the merits of the translation even though the success of a foreign book has a lot to do with it. Literary translation used to be paid by the page, and a perfectionist like me would end up making about $ 1 per hour. Nevertheless, I was determined to do the “slave work” again if I got a book, an author, a challenge I could not resist. Arche Verlag had been the German-language publisher of Gertrude Stein and when the new owners asked me what I had in mind, I said, “Gertrude Stein!”
I picked “Blood on the Dining-Room Floor” because it is a short, autobiographical story. Stein has played with every literary genre, from nursery rhymes and portraits to opera libretti. And as she loved reading detective stories she also – just once – tried her hand at one. I liked the idea of a detective story by Gertrude Stein because at first it seemed so incongruous. What would the demanding, hermetic “high priestess of modernism” do with the rather low-brow genre of mystery writing? Needless to say, her detective story had only the slightest resemblance to what you would expect from the genre. Gertrude and Alice had been spending the summer in their French country house (“A house in the country is not a country house,” as Stein points out in the book.) All sorts of strange things had been happening in the neighborhood – an adultery, a suspicious death and a suicide. But the criminal events are never clarified or solved in the book. They seem to serve as a mere reminder that there are mysterious reasons behind apparent facts.
The fact is that Stein was faced with a true mystery that needed solving: she was suffering the first serious writing block of her entire life. While everything was happening around her, Stein sadly reports that writing was “not happening.” Recording the events of that summer of 1933 was Stein´s way to try and break the spell of her writing block. Many times in the story we hear that a woman “tries and cries,” “cries and tries.” In my own sleuthing, I found evidence that the writing block was a consequence of Gertrude Stein´s first literary success. The 59-year-old author who had been scorned and ridiculed, who had hardly been able to publish any of her innumerable books, had finally succeeded. In 1933 she had published a bestseller, The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas. In Alice´s wry, sarcastic voice, Gertrude talks about life with Gertrude Stein and her scandalous artist friends who created the revolution of “modernism.” After all the years of struggling for recognition, Stein was suddenly a celebrity, “a lion,” famous for having taken on the identity of her lover. She was for the first time making money with her writing. In the past, she had said: “I am writing for myself and strangers...,” but now there was an eager, applauding, demanding audience weighing in on her imagination and crowding her creative inner space. She was not the same person any longer, but who was she? “I am I because my little dog knows me.” The mystery she had to solve was the mystery of identity.
Another puzzle I encountered in translating Stein was the realization that she was a master at dissimulating her gender. Throughout her entire oeuvre, I discovered, Stein uses general pronouns when she speaks of herself: instead of “I” or “ she,” she writes, one, someone, everyone, everybody, anybody, nobody, and occasionally even he. She called her autobiography “Everybody´s Autobiography” (1936). This could not be rendered in German. German pronouns are gendered without exception ( “everyone,” for example, translates as “every man”) and only the plural hides gender – so to speak – in the crowd. I sometimes got away with using the plural, replacing “everybody” with “all of them.” But the singular pronouns had to be faced – there was no way around them. So I decided to be faithful to Stein´s hide-and-seek game. I created a brand-new composite of bi-gendered pronouns: jede jeder, keine keener, always to be used in tandem so that the gender remained undefined. The effect was similar to the feminist usage of he/she or s/he, and the publishers liked the idea enough to use it for the book title, keine keiner.
Creating something new and avantgarde for my Muse brought me closer to her and rewarded me with insights. It occurred to me that Stein had perhaps consciously camouflaged her identity as a disadvantaged outsider. Perhaps writing of herself as “everybody” assumed and proclaimed the universality of her female person. It seemed to me that being an exile was another brilliant strategy: all the problematic identities of Gertrude Stein – woman, lesbian and Jew – could be hidden under the acceptable umbrella of being “an American in Paris.” The label of being an American in Paris gave you some prestige and granted you a certain fool´s freedom. These strategies worked, I think, to some degree. Paris is famous for its tolerance and indifference toward its exiles. But Gertrude Stein did not leave anybody indifferent. Everything about her was in fact a provocation to her contemporaries. She came from a well-to-do Jewish family and was a woman of independent means. She had grown up at the “wild” edge of America, California, as a tomboy, the spoiled youngest of 5 children. She had studied psychology and medicine before settling in Paris. She did not accept the authority and domination of men but loved the company of beautiful gay men and women. She challenged her literary rivals by proclaiming herself a genius ( “In my generation I am the only one”). How could she do this at a time when women had barely begun to demand the vote? And how could she maintain such a powerful position throughout her life when she was continually under attack?
Every time I looked at her pictures, these questions continued to intrigue me. There was something in her appearance, something in her nature, her character, that I saw reflected in the photographs, both of her childhood and her later years: a stock-solid, sensuous embodiment. Whether she giggles with her nephew or wrestles with her dog, sports one of her eccentric hats or sits like Humpty-Dumpty on a wall, singing, she appears good-natured, spontaneous and playful. It struck me that there was nothing posed, coquettish or stereotypically “feminine” about her; she never showed any flirtatious eagerness to please. And yet, she clearly liked to be seen. She posed for all the well-known and unknown photographers of her time. After her first portrait, painted by Picasso in 1906, she sat for numerous painters and sculptors. It occurred to me that there was not a single other writer I knew whose image – painted, sculpted and photographed – was as ever-present as that of Stein. Her powerful emperor´s head and big body seemed to belong to the art and culture of the beginning 20th century like an icon –a modern, compellingly androgynous Mona Lisa.
The more I thought about it the more I got the impression that Stein liked to be seen as much as she liked to be read, that she took the same freedom with her appearance that she took with her writing. A few years before her famous hair cut, she had removed her stays, literally stepping out of the corset of convention. There had to be a connection between her revolutionary writing style and her liberated style of presenting herself to the world. This hunch led to my idea of creating a photo biography of Gertrude Stein. My publishers agreed: no biography of Stein was available in German. There were a number of American biographies, each one using a selection of mostly famous photographs. But given the wealth of pictures, we were surprised that nobody had yet come up with the idea of creating a visual biography of Gertrude Stein.
When I started my research for Gertrude Stein: In Words and Pictures (Gertrude Stein in Bildern und Texten, Arche Verlag 1989; resp. Algonquin Books, 1994) diving into public and private archives, I found a treasure trove of tens of hundreds of photographs. Of course I had to have the “classics,” the masterful portraits by Man Ray, Cecil Beaton and the like, that had struck me as a school girl when I first encountered my Muse. But I also wanted the lesser known snapshots and portraits that had rarely or never been published. And most of all I wanted to create a dialogue between Stein´s words and pictures that let words and images play off each other in surprising ways. I wanted an amusing, shocking and illuminating dialogue between Stein´s words and body language that would make her accessible to everybody, even readers who had never dared to approach her. In short, my “picture reader” was to be “peaceful and exciting.” To complete my hommage, I also needed a few significant observations from the “outside,” from people who had known her – Alice, Picasso, Hemingway, and other friends and enemies.
Now, for the first time, I turned into a serious reader of Gertrude Stein. I read her work and every biography, looking for references, excerpts, and snippets, hunting for her funniest stories, her most absurd anecdotes and wittiest one-liners. I had to translate texts that I wanted in the book, especially her lyrical and erotic writing that was fairly unknown and that nobody had dared to take on in German. I realized that to enter her play with words, her double and triple entendres, one had to know all the languages that Stein spoke herself: German, Yiddish, French, and English. It was one of the most thrilling adventures of my life to enter Stein´s most experimental writing, equipped with these languages (I had taken the first Yiddish classes offered by any German university after the War, in Hamburg). In my efforts to decode the words and find the meaning, I followed Stein´s own lead, assuming that her writing made sense. She had said it herself, repeatedly, talking about her “lifelong passion for sentences,” evoking “...the intense feeling that they made sense, then the doubt and then each time over again the intense feeling that they did make sense.” She even maintained that her obscure writing was, in fact, very simple and that any child could understand it.
I would not go quite this far. After sifting through mountains of contradictory evidence, my instants of happy decoding sometimes felt as if I had just solved a tricky Sherlock Holmes case. There were moments of intense struggle – moments of temptation to throw the frog back against the wall. What tended to soothe me was her own touching anxiety: “then the doubt.…” Her doubt proved to me the earnestness of her revolutionary undertaking. If you set out to create something radically new, if you enter the unknown, uncharted territory of language, you walk a tight-rope. The danger is that nobody can follow you, perhaps not even yourself, to reassure you that you are not falling into the abyss of incoherence, of empty irrelevance, of insanity. The importance of making sense: I wonder if Stein kept defying those ghosts of the abyss by going to the other extreme when she made the claim that all her writing is of childlike simplicity. To me, this assertion has the ring of a child´s magical, wishful thinking.
One thing is for sure: Stein never lost the serious playfulness of a child, this most creative way of being, which she called “aggressive liveliness.” Today, when I turn to her, I am no less surprised and charmed than I was at first by this aggressive liveliness, by the fun-and-pun of her words, by the humor in her way of looking at the absurdities of life and language. “Why do something if it can be done.” And I am still in awe of her daring, her capacity to be radically, unswervingly true to herself and her calling. Stein was not a self-declared early feminist, but she was nevertheless a pioneer who dared to break the rules of gender inhibition. She defied the restrictions imposed on women by listening to, and being faithful to, her own knowing. Her refusal to follow any exterior demand, her determination to follow her own command, are a lasting inspiration to me.
about the author
Renate Stendhal, Ph.D. (www.renatestendhal.com) is a German-born, Paris-educated writer, writing coach and spiritual counselor with a private practice in San Francisco and Pt. Reyes Station. Among her publications are True Secrets of Lesbian Desire: Keeping Sex Alive in Long-Term Relationships and the Lambda Award-winning photobiography Gertrude Stein: In Words and Pictures. Her latest essay, “Thieves, Pimps, and Holy Prostitutes – My World” has just appeared in Identity Envy -- Wanting to Be Who We’re Not, ed. Jim Tushinsky and Jim Van Buskirk (Haworth Press). She is working on an erotic novel set in Paris.
