puzzles,’’ Gertrude Stein writes inEverybody’s Autobiography, ‘‘but I do like detective stories. I never try to guess who has done the crime and if I did I would be sure to guess wrong but I like somebody being dead and how it moves along.’’ How it moves along might be more than the pleasure of the surface. It might be more significant than what the book pretends to be about or seems to mean. How it moves might be what it means.

‘‘Other people’s words are quite different from one’s own . . .’’ This was one of the discoveries Gertrude Stein made when, as a joke, she began to write the book it seemed Alice would never get around to writing. ‘‘I had done what I saw, what you do in translation or in narrative. I had created the point of view of somebody else. Therefore the words ran with a certain smoothness.’’ What began as a joke became a tour de force. And the way it moved, the way Alice’s voice carried it along, gave the book a shape and control it needed to become more than a tour de force. But there were other reasons for making Alice the speaker. There was the problem of time.

In 1946 Gertrude Stein spoke of the making of the Autobiography in an interview with Robert Haas: ‘‘You have as a person writing, and all the really great narration has it, you have to denude yourself of time so that writing time does not exist. If time exists your writing is ephemeral. You can have a historical time but for you the time does not exist and if you are writing about the present the time element must cease to exist. I did it unconsciously in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. . . . There should not be a sense of time but an existence suspended in time.’’

The problem of the Autobiography was the creation of such an existence suspended in time, the invention of a real historical past which would, nevertheless, subvert the pressures of ‘‘the time element.’’ Otherwise the work would become ephemeral, and pass away, like those paintings that disappeared into the wall so that Gertrude Stein could no longer see them. To write and to remember at the same time was simply impossible, because this could not produce genuine works of art. ‘‘If you remember while you are writing it will seem clear at the time to any one but the clarity will go out of it that is what a master-piece is not.’’ For Gertrude Stein art had to be an expression of ‘‘the complete actual present.’’ Her own past would have to be fashioned into a created present, complete and actual within the demands of her book. ‘‘Because if you remember yourself while you are you you are not for purposes of creating you.’’ Writing while remembering she would have become her own audience, her own connoisseur. But the artist has no identity ‘‘while you are you’’ for the purpose of creating the identity of the work. She might have remembered Keats, who wrote of the poetical Character that ‘‘it is not itself—it has no self—it is every thing and nothing—It has no character . . . no identity . . .’’

‘‘The thing one gradually comes to find out,’’ she wrote in the essay ‘‘What Are Master-pieces and Why Are There So Few of Them,’’ ‘‘is that one has no identity that is when one is in the act of doing anything.’’ Identity and memory become the materials of the composition, and the composition establishes its own time and its own particular shape. As Picasso had said to her: ‘‘I do not care who it is that has or does influence me as long as it is not myself.’’ ‘‘I sell myself nothing,’’ Picasso had said. Gertrude Stein would not and could not sell herself her own past. She could not write her own autobiography. But someone else could write it. This was the solution: the creation of a figure of herself, the voice of a double to narrate her past. Through that narration and through the precise composition of that voice, the past might be redeemed and the life of memory re-created within the ‘‘actual moment’’ of the speaking voice of Alice B. Toklas.

An autobiography was not unlike a mystery story in which the detective was also the victim. Just as the past was dead so the victim also had been murdered before the story had begun. And this ‘‘victim,’’ being also the detective, could hardly preside over the investigation of her own murder. But if Alice spoke the book then Gertrude Stein could, as she would have to, give up her identity in the creation of the identity of the voice of her book. The mystery of the past could be solved. The book could find its way of moving along. ‘‘You see,’’ she said in 1935 in a lecture at the University of Chicago, ‘‘that is why making it the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas made it do something, it made it be a recognition by never before that writing having it be existing. It is a natural thing to do if writing is to be writing, but after all it ought to be done as history as a mystery story. I am certain so certain so more than certain that it ought to be able to be done.’’

What Gertrude Stein was attempting—the creation of ‘‘existence suspended in time,’’ the creation of masterpiece—was happening at the beginning of the twentieth century in the first Cubist experiments. Of these paintings she wrote: ‘‘Picasso in his early cubist pictures used printed letters as did Juan Gris to force the painted surface to measure up to something rigid, and the rigid thing was the printed letter.’’ The Autobiography itself uses this tactic. Because of the impossibility of being the narrator of her own past, another element had to be added. That addition—the double, the invented voice of Gertrude- as-Alice—would function as ‘‘something rigid’’ and would force the past to assume shape and coherence and value. That addition would serve as a controlling force of stability, giving the composition of the book a defense against the ephemeral, allowing it to become a shape in space. This ‘‘printed letter’’ would be the presence and voice of Alice B. Toklas. The painted surface would be the presence and life of Gertrude Stein.

She would write the story ‘‘as simply as Defoe did the autobiography of Robinson Crusoe,’’ and in doing this she would not only blur autobiography into biography, she would allow both categories to dissolve into a narrative that would carry some of the demands and privileges of fiction. Forty-five years after the publication of the Autobiography we are familiar with works that call themselves ‘‘A Fictional Memoir’’ or ‘‘The Novel As History’’ or ‘‘The Nonfiction Novel’’: Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes, Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. We have become accustomed to hearing, over and over, about the breaking up and confusion of formal structures, categories and definitions. We have also become more accustomed to, though generally no less comfortable with, the thought that a work of art may finally be a medium leading us to a discovery of itself as itself, as a shape in space that may not be primarily reflective of (and indeed may not be at all reflective of) those aspects of the ‘‘real world’’ it may seem to contain. Art may move away from a pointing out at what lies around it. Art may not really be about what it seems to be about, but concerned instead with the way it uses the material of the world around it: what it does as itself, the shape it makes of itself, the medium that it is by itself, the way it moves along. In this effort the apparent function of language—to show, to gesture, to point out: Look at that, Remember that—is called into question, as if the reality of literature did not lie in how closely it could approximate the world from which it had drawn its signs and symbols. A world inhabited by the painting of the door that seemed so real you were almost tempted to try to open it. And the painting of the fruit, so clearly glistening with dew, so freshly picked it made you hungry: it made you want what it could only pretend to be.

And so it began with paintings. Gertrude Stein learned from Cezanne, at first, what could be done with words. Each part of the painting was essential, each gesture, each mark: ‘‘It was not solely the realism of the characters but the realism of the composition which was the important thing, the realism of the composition of my thoughts.’’ It would not even be necessary to make the people seem real, or to make the fruit appear ripe and delicious. The fruit was no more essential to the composition than the leg of the table, or the curve of the cloth, or that dark vertical line that does not seem to be a part of any window or chair or table.

‘‘In writing about painting,’’ she says in ‘‘What Are Masterpieces,’’ ‘‘I said that a picture exists for and in itself and the painter has to use objects, landscapes and people as a way the only way that he is able to get the picture to exist.’’ Similarly, literature uses objects, landscapes and people to talk itself into existence. The still life by Cezanne is not really about a bowl of fruit. That bowl, and that fruit, and the table and the cloth and the wall behind them all provide something rigid that might contain the painted surface. Then the composition of that surface might make its own demands. It could call upon itself. Language also might become a calling upon itself.

Bees in a garden make a specialty of honey and so does honey. Honey and prayer. Honey and there. There where the grass can grow nearly four times yearly.

(from ‘‘Cezanne’’)

And how it moves along might become what it has to say. The name could be the sign of itself. The sentence could be like the stroke of the brush—selfexisting but continuous. From the second of her four Chicago lectures:

Poetry and prose. I came to the conclusion that poetry was a calling an intensive calling upon the name of anything and that prose was not the using the name of anything as a thing in itself but the creating of sentences that were self-existing and following one after the other made of anything a continuous thing which is paragraphing and so a narrative that is a narrative of anything. That is what a narrative is of course one thing following any other thing.

The narrative could be the story of its own sentences, words that would run ‘‘with a certain smoothness,’’ one thing—any thing—following another. The eye would move over words as over paint. The picture by Cezanne will appear now as a bowl of apples, now as a woman, now as a distant blue mountain. Moving closer, woman, fruit and mountain all disappear, and the strokes of the brush reveal themselves. The paint itself reveals itself. Perhaps that is what we were looking at all the time. And looking from a distance long and often and hard enough the same thing happens. The picture, perhaps reluctantly at first, comes into its own separate life.

‘‘When a form is realized,’’ Picasso said, ‘‘it is there to live its own life.’’ But words, for Gertrude Stein, had not yet come into their own life. ‘‘I felt that the thing I got from Cezanne was not the last composition,’’ she told Robert Haas. ‘‘You had to recognize words had lost their value in the nineteenth century particularly towards the end, they had lost much of their variety and I felt that I could not go on, that I had to capture the value of the individual word, find out what it meant and act within it. . .’’ This endeavor would lead her to create her most difficult work, work which, toward the end of the Autobiography, is described as ‘‘the destruction of associational emotion in poetry and prose.’’ In 1914 she published a small book entitled Tender Buttons. It begins with three sentences entitled ‘‘A Carafe, That Is A Blind Glass’’:

A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading.

The pieces in this book form ‘‘an arrangement in a system to pointing,’’ but the words do not gesture away from themselves. They point at themselves and at each other: words as things, as objects on the page, as individual presences. From ‘‘Rooms,’’ the last section of the book:

The care with which the rain is wrong and the green is wrong and the white is wrong, the care with which there is a chair and plenty of breathing. The care with which there is incredible justice and likeness, all this makes a magnificent asparagus, and also a fountain.

Anything could be asparagus, or fountain. Artichoke or salad dressing, apple, cup, table, elephant, a shawl which is hat, which is hurt or a red balloon, which is a wedding or a shawl. Anything could appear in the system of the sentence: ‘‘Cocoa and clear soup and oranges and oat-meal.’’ Words would slide into each other, yielding up parts of themselves to each other, becoming each other, spreading into difference, into sameness, and back again into what that individual word might do or be when it could live as itself by itself.

Sugar any sugar, anger every anger, lover sermon lover, centre no distractor, all order is in a measure.

Any word repeated often enough will certainly lose its meaning, if only for a moment. But could that be ‘‘the value of the individual word,’’ or only a musical drone in a mind that had begun to lose hold of the word altogether? Could words be stripped of their associational emotions by urging them toward the condition of song? By fragmenting and twisting grammar? By ordering a sentence so that even articles and prepositions would seem to take on the color and value of nouns and verbs? Finally it was impossible: the meaning, the associational emotion, could not be destroyed. It could be baffled but not annihilated. Unlike the paint that became apple and mountain, or within both simply shapes on the flat inflexible surface of the canvas, words clung to their meanings. And the mind of the listener also clung to meaning. She told Haas:

I took individual words and thought about them until I got their weight and volume complete and put them next to another word and at the same time I found out very soon that there is no such thing as putting them together without sense. It is impossible to put them together without sense. I made innumerable efforts to make words write without sense and found it impossible. Any human being putting down words had to make sense out of them.

Gertrude Stein’s most difficult work is sometimes thought to be a magnificent failure: an adventure on the furthest edge of language that was bound to fail. No one could destroy ‘‘associational emotion in poetry and prose.’’ But Gertrude Stein is not always well-served by the explanations, justifications and extraordinary claims she makes, again and again, for her own work. Perhaps it is unfortunate that most readers will come to her writing with some sense, however murky, of what she had to say about what she had done. So the work too easily becomes an illustration of the theory, something to be placed in context, made sense of, figured out, explained, justified. ‘‘I was creating in my writing by simply looking,’’ she says in her lecture ‘‘Portraits and Repetition.’’ But because of all those writings and lectures it has been difficult simply to look at what she has written: the weight, volume and painterly value of those words and sentences—to look simply, and to listen, and to be ready only to hear. One sentence from A Long Gay Book:

Please the spoons, the ones that are silver and have sugar and do not make mischief later, do not ever say more than listening can explain.

Listening can explain: this is a more helpful key to her work, and to that particular sentence, than the cloudy, hovering notion of the destruction of associational emotion. In fact she does not destroy emotion, or sense, and indeed the sentences themselves do not really attempt such a destruction. Instead, sense and emotion, and images and meanings, are fragmented and displaced. A sentence will slide in and then out of what ‘‘seems’’ to make sense. An image will appear and then disappear, will assert itself and then suddenly dismantle itself, as the eye moves along the play of the surface which, like a pane of water, breaks now into circles and now into its original calm. But more than listening can explain can become less than what listening might mean.

Looking for ‘‘sense’’ we are baffled, because we are looking for what we have been accustomed to find. We expect to hear what we have always heard in a series of sentences. We are not listening. And we are not listening to what listening can explain. Perhaps, we think, we do not have the words—the right ‘‘critical vocabulary’’—to make this encounter ‘‘meaningful,’’ to put it in its place, to explain it and so feel comfortable and so, finally, not feel threatened. Gertrude Stein’s work does threaten us, and it means to. But the threat is a tactic and the tactic, properly attended to, listened to and heard, becomes a pleasure, a joy, language at play, delighting in itself.

A reason is that a curly house an ordinary curly house is exactly that, it is exactly more than that, it is so exactly no more than more than that.

(from Geography and Plays)

Everything means what it means, sometimes less and sometimes more. Everything is exactly that, and sometimes more, and sometimes no more. Literature, finally, tells us how to read itself. If we listen carefully enough it tells us exactly how to read, how quickly, how slowly, how carefully. It makes its demands, particular and special. It teaches us about itself as it goes about the work and the pleasure of becoming itself.

So the eye is drawn into a painting and if we are not in a hurry and do not feel anxious to deliver the painting into the explanation of the painting, weight and volume and value, shape and line will guide the eye, and the picture begins to reveal itself. In Picasso’s Architect’s Table of 1912, a picture once owned by Gertrude Stein, we see the letters that become MA JOLIE, the curves that could represent a cup in a saucer, the curl that might be part of a violin, the tilted words in the lower corner that say ‘‘Gertrude Stein.’’ But this is not a table that stands in a room inside a frame. Not a table covered by a cloth set against a wall beneath a window. The picture is the table. And for all the hints of actual things, no object including that table is allowed to emerge in its entirety. A momentarily recognizable shape merges into another shape that presents no ‘‘meaning’’ other than the shape that it is. We do not confront a table with objects. We confront, immediately and directly, the surface of a painting. No illusion. As soon as our gaze touches it the painting insists upon revealing itself as a painting. No more than that, no more than more than that.

The best way to read Gertrude Stein is to read her, no more than that. But this is not always possible: we know too much; we think we know too much, or too little; we are anxious, afraid of being bored or confused; we are accustomed to reading as if the surface of language should be seen through rather than simply seen. We are used to experiencing books as pleasant deceptions, in which that plane of words pretends to give way and vanish into what it is ‘‘about,’’ as if style were no more than a frail and dispensable container, and the true magical substance lay inside. Gertrude Stein’s work is diffi- cult because it denies this assumption. It asks us to read in a way that we may never have read before. And as it makes this demand it reveals a way of reading that otherwise might not have been available to us. By instructing us in itself it teaches us about language and composition: about any book. The Architect’s Table is, initially, a more ‘‘diffi- cult’’ painting to see than Cezanne’s Still-life with Apples and Oranges. But if we can see the Picasso perhaps we can see the Cezanne more clearly.

We may find that it is more profitable to avoid, for a while, Gertrude Stein’s explanations of her work and approach her through a picture like The Architect’s Table, as Stein herself made her discoveries through Cezanne. The references in Cubist paintings—the letters, lines, edges and circles that stand for but do not become newspaper headlines, violins, eyes and bottles are points of reference, mementoes and memories of shapes that seem immediately recognizable, and are, but lead us finally to a way of looking at and not through that surface. Our inevitable initial struggle to make ‘‘sense’’ of a curly house or a blind glass might encourage us to consider the significance of that struggle. Then we might conclude: let the house be curly and the glass blind. In the painting the brown shape next to the saucer will not turn into anything recognizable, and yet it remains part of the painting and it functions in terms of the whole: it does something, and both shape and saucer, finally, work in the same way. So do the house and the glass, curly and blind, when we hear them as they are. The sense remains. In fact our apprehension of what those words mean is not lost but heightened, because of the strangeness of the composition. A blind man with curly hair? A glass on a table in a house? Now the words retreat into the ordinary, like: blue sky, white snow, red apple. ‘‘How often,’’ Picasso said, ‘‘haven’t I found that, wanting to use a blue, I didn’t have it. So I used a red instead.’’ Red sky, blue snow, white apple.

It is not particularly helpful to label Gertrude Stein a ‘‘Cubist writer,’’ just as it doesn’t help The Architect’s Table to look at it and think, ‘‘A Cubist painting.’’ Fortunately there are no ‘‘Manifestoes of Cubism.’’ The painting appears relatively free of critical interference, at least on the part of its creator. However, a sense of what happens in the great works of Cubism is invaluable to hearing the sentences of Gertrude Stein. ‘‘The metaphorical model of Cubism is the diagram,’’ John Berger writes in his fine essay ‘‘The Moment of Cubism,’’ ‘‘the diagram being a visible, symbolic representation of invisible processes, forces, structures. A diagram need not eschew certain aspects of appearances: but these too will be treated symbolically as signs, not as imitations or re-creations.’’ Berger concludes:

The Cubists created the possibility of art revealing processes instead of static entities. The content of their art consists of various modes of interaction: the interaction between different aspects of the same event, between empty space and filled space, between structure and movement, between the seer and the thing seen.

Rather than ask of a Cubist picture: Is it true? or: Is it sincere? one should ask: Does it continue?

The content of Gertrude Stein’s art also consists of various ‘‘modes of interaction’’: between different aspects of the same word, between apparent sense and obscurity, between silence and repetition, stillness and movement, between the listener and the thing heard. Rather than ask: What does it mean? or: Does it make sense? we should ask: How does it move?

Early in the Autobiography Gertrude-as-Alice says: ‘‘Sentences not only words but sentences and always sentences have been Gertrude Stein’s life long passion.’’ The sentence is like the brush stroke. So many sentences form a narrative, so many brush strokes reveal an image. Our gaze resettles on the surface of the painting, and similarly on the shape of the sentence, whether we are baffled by curly houses and blind glass or charmed by a deceptively simple speaking voice:

I myself have had no liking for violence and have always enjoyed the pleasures of needlework and gardening. I am fond of paintings, furniture, tapestry, houses and flowers and even vegetables and fruittrees. I like a view but I like to sit with my back to it.

So Alice B. Toklas begins the Autobiography, in a tone not unlike a response to some tedious questionnaire: Tell a little about yourself—for example your likes and dislikes. Objects, landscapes and people—these, at first, are what can be most easily seen. They are, like the apples in the painting by Cezanne, an invitation to move further into the surface. The surface of the Autobiography is clear but complicated, and the clarity is in the complication. Just as any object or landscape could be the subject of a painting, any remark could also be the material for the sentence that could become literature. It is only necessary to read a biography of Gertrude Stein in which one encounters the same stories and gossip to see that her book is concerned with more than the recitation of amusing anecdotes. While the stories entertain, the sounds of her sentences sink into our minds.

We can approach the difficult writing of Gertrude Stein through the Cubist paintings of Picasso or Juan Gris. We can also move closer to a book like Tender Buttons by an attention to what is really happening within those smooth precise sentences of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas: the shape they make of themselves, the way they move. ‘‘I once said that nothing could bother me more than the way a thing goes dead once it has been said.’’ The memories, anecdotes and remarks that make up the most visible surface of the Autobiography do not go dead once they have been said. What she called ‘‘the realism of the composition’’ is revealed through ‘‘the realism of the characters.’’ The individual life of ‘‘the word’’ exists both in and beside its attachment to the object it is called upon to embody.

‘‘It is very hard to save the sentence,’’ she writes in How to Write. All of her books take up this challenge—nothing less than ‘‘words doing as they want to do and as they have to do when they live where they have to live.’’ The book of sentences called The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is clearly part of that attempt.

The last page of the first edition contains a photograph of the first page of the manuscript. Begin again. And the cover bears her emblematic sentence: ‘‘A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose,’’ endlessly repeating itself in a circle. ‘‘One writes for oneself and strangers,’’ she said. Beginning over and ending with its own conception and beginning over again the book hands itself back to those strangers, back to us. ‘‘And she has and this is it.’’ The life of language is its delight in itself. Each word says: This is it. Pigeons on the grass, sugar in the silver spoons. And for the first time in a hundred years the rose is red. Exactly that. No more than more than that.

Source: Lawrence Raab, ‘‘Remarks as Literature: The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein,’’ in Michigan Quarterly Review, Vol. XVII, No. 4, Fall 1978, pp. 480–93.