4 - ‘If it can be done why do it’: Gertrude Stein

Summary

If you can come to think of a philosophy, apart from the intrication of your reason, leaving on your memory an abstract impress of its particularity as a perfume or a voice might do, you can begin to sort out the vital elements in Gertrude Stein's achievement.

Mina Loy, ‘Gertrude Stein’ (2005: 436)

To be democratic, local (in the sense of being attached with integrity to actual experience) Stein, or any other artist, must for subtlety ascend to a place of almost abstract design to stay alive. To writing then, as an act in itself.

William Carlos Williams, ‘The Work of Gertrude Stein’ (2005: 547)

If Gertrude Stein found abstract writing impossible, it is.

Stephen Kern, The Modernist Novel: A Critical Introduction (2011: 171)

Peers as well as critics have consistently recognised Gertrude Stein as an abstract writer. For fellow modernist Mina Loy, who, Stein noted, had ‘always been able to understand’, an ‘abstract impress’ lay at the heart of Stein's work (Stein 2001: 145; Loy 2005: 436). Loy's wonderful 1924 essay on Stein, however, approaches this idea tentatively – ‘If you can come to think, … you can begin to sort out …’ – registering the struggle to enrol the senses into a philosophy lying beyond the ‘intrication’ of reason. Perhaps the abstract impress was better encapsulated as a ‘radium of the word’, extracted by Loy's Stein as the ‘Curie/of the laboratory/of vocabulary’, in the short poem, ‘Gertrude Stein’, that prefaced her essay (Loy 1997: 94). For William Carlos Williams, in 1930, Stein's writing as ‘an act in itself’ was the place of ‘almost abstract design’, and the sign of a certain democratisation, that Stein, paradoxically, needed to ‘ascend to’ in order to stay alive. Yet with ‘almost abstract’, Williams, like Loy, hesitates, as if unwilling to commit Stein to the full consequences of what abstraction might portend.

Michael J. Hoffmann's 1965 study of abstractionism in Stein held that ‘The one area of common agreement about Gertrude Stein's writings is that they are “abstract”,’ and that this relation to abstraction concerns ‘the emulation of the techniques of painting’ (Hoffmann 1965: 15, 176).