“… If it were possible that a movement were lively enough it would exist so completely that it would not be necessary to see it moving against anything to know that it is moving,” writes Gertrude Stein in “Portraits and Repetition” (1935). “That is what we mean by life and in my way I have tried to make portraits of this thing.”¹ She is discussing here her own verbal portraits of the 1920's. But she could just as well be discussing the internal movement of shifting styles in her Three Lives (1908) or the successive juxtapositions of referential ground in Lucy Church Amiably (1931) or the rapid summaries in Ida (1941)—or, for that matter, her lifelong friend Picasso's Cubist portraits, for example, “Portrait of Vollard” (1910).

Unless we adopt Wylie Sypher's definition of Cubism in Rococo to Cubism in Art and Literature (1960) and find it in any art form studying its own processes without recourse to representational reality (a definition that allows Sypher to claim Joyce, Huxley, Gide, and Pirandello), we may question whether “Cubist” or “cubistic” are viable terms in literature.² Even if we decide that such an epithet may appropriately be applied to the alternating tones of Max Jacob's poems or the associational ellipses of Stein's portraits, we still may have reservations about an integration of Cubist techniques and narrative techniques. Does not narration imply—if it does not require—sustaining the reader's interest through progression or, at least, as is the case with the nouveau roman, exploiting the reader's expectation of progression? Will not Cubist analysis and rearrangement necessarily disappoint any such interest, frustrate any such expectation?

Possibly. At any rate, the answer lies with the reader's taste in fiction. But why not examine “The Good Anna” of Three Lives, Lucy Church Amiably, and Ida to see how in Stein's hands the narrative becomes, as Alain Robbe-Grillet was later to recommend in Pour un nouveau roman (1963),³ a form of research? Then we shall see how an artist of Cubist orientation can force us to analyze the elements of narration by abstraction and rearrangement.

As a first step we are obliged to borrow an initial definition from art history. We need not do this because Stein was dependent upon Picasso for stylistic analogues but because literary history has not developed a vocabulary for such a discussion. Indeed, Stein probably could have approximated Cubism in literature without being an intimate of the Bateau Lavoir coterie. It is true that when she met Picasso in 1905, he was working his way into Cubism. She was a witness to his encounters with African and Iberian art and to Max Jacob's buffooneries. Picasso's paintings of his Cubist period and her thoughtful analyses of them reinforced the abstractionist direction in her writing.⁴ As Earl Fendelman points out in his analysis of the Cubist elements in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), she began sitting for Picasso before she finished writing Three Lives.⁵ But it seems likely that she could have dispensed with his reinforcement. For sources, she had, after all, an academic background in experimental psychology and Flaubert, and one of Picasso's own sources, Cézanne. She wrote “The Good Anna” in 1905–1906, the first year of her friendship with Picasso, just after translating Flaubert's “Un coeur simple” and while sitting beneath Cézanne's “La Femme au chapeau.” Nevertheless, we can best generalize on how she experiments in this novelette and what she investigates in the two later novels if we first describe the process of Picasso and Braque when they were working their way to “analytic” or “high” Cubism in 1910–1911.

Although they were working their way intuitively from their desire to create a pictorial reality related to but independent of naturalisic reality, they used techniques which now seem systematic and scientific, albeit arbitrary, like game theory. The paintings of these years manifest a process of form analysis in which the basic shapes in an object, scene, or person are itemized, simplified, and rearranged. Within or among these geometric rearrangements, there are pictorial hints, e.g., a nose, a hand, a pipe, which prevent an impression of pure abstraction. Nonetheless, a viewer's attention is fully engaged by the rearranged planes and volumes, kept the main concern of the canvas by subdued color and by an overall two-dimensional, contripetal movement. Object X is investigated to its full geometric possibilities, not exploited for shock or decoration. Object X may be in the last stage of reification before abstraction, but it is formalized with integrity of purpose, possibly with affection as well. So although the completed form is distanced, it contains a felt arrangement. Art historian Douglas Cooper, speaking of Picasso and Braque during these years, affirms, “Cubist painting was in fact a very real record of their private lives and experiences.”⁶ The record is a revelation for the viewer willing to have his vision expanded. Sypher speaks for many of us when he asserts, “Before the cubists investigated the world we did not know what an object is capable of” (p. 310).

Stein, the experience of Flaubert's Félicité behind her, the angular torso and askew face of Madame Cézanne in front of her, was prepared to detect basic shapes, recurring facets, and colliding planes in her simple lay hagiography Three Lives. She had also certain convictions about language use and attention span derived from her Johns Hopkins graduate work.⁷ “The Good Anna,” the first of these three saints stories to be written,⁸ is also the most suitable for demonstrating Stein's nascent Cubism. It is of a length allowing for more play of fictional elements than “The Gentle Lena,” and it is not offensive to present-day readers as is “Melanctha,” where the patronizing tone, which mars all three narratives, is contaminated by subtle racism (regardless of what apology may be offered in the name of aesthetic intention⁹).

In overall organization “The Good Anna” is not innovative in the least. It is a 70-page or so biographical vignette of a German-born spinster housekeeper from her late teens to her late forties. Part I, slightly under one-fifth of the whole, shows us Anna, 40, at her preferred post with Miss Mathilda, who by age, temperament, and bulk is Stein herself. We see Miss Anna as fully set in her ways of being good. Part II, roughly three-fourths of the narrative, takes us back to Anna's departure from Germany and subsequent arrival in Bridgeport (Baltimore) and follows her through her service with three employers, Miss Mathilda being the last and best. Part III, a mere fraction, one-fourteenth of the whole, summarizes quickly her death a few years later from overwork willfully undertaken.

It would be a tour de force to make this self-elected martyr sympathetic. (If Stein was still so close to Realism as to suppose she intended to make Anna sympathetic, she probably does not succeed with very many readers.) The simplicity and humility which make Flaubert's Félicité a born saint are missing, for Anna is overbearing, imposing her rigid yet inconsistent standards without reflection or self-awareness. From the description that we have of Anna at twenty-seven, we can tell that she did indeed resemble Madame Cézanne in angularity and stance, although Stein's description offers us no compensations of color and composition: “The sharp bony edges and corners of her head and face were still rounded out with flesh, but already the temper and humor showed sharply in her clean blue eyes, and the thinning was begun about the lower jaw, that was so often strained with the upward pressure of resolve.”¹⁰ To the extent that Anna emerges as a “real” fictional character, it is as a generally pitiable person whose domestic capabilities barely counteract her self-righteous domineering.

What Stein creates in Anna is not a fully delineated lay saint. Instead, the story is an extended verbal portrait with interacting styles. These styles impose differences in tone, mode, and depth. (In painting terms, we could say that we have interacting planes poised against alternating volumes and/or shifts in perspective, with some modeling.)

The first of these styles both in order of Stein's use of it and our expectation of it is straightforward exposition. Since Stein lets her whimsey show from the first lines, her exposition does not immediately reveal itself as a separate style. She informs us, as would a saint's biographer: “The tradesmen of Bridgeport learned to dread the sound of ‘Miss Mathilda’, for with that name the good Anna always conquered” (p. 11). After illustrating how Anna invoked Miss Mathilda's name like that of a patron saint of merchants, Stein continues with an explanatory statement: “Anna managed the whole little house for Miss Mathilda. It was a funny little house, one of a whole row of all the same kind that made a close pile like a row of dominoes that a child knocks over, for they were built along a street which at this point came down a steep hill. They were funny little houses, two stories high, with red brick fronts and long white steps” (p. 11). An expression like “the whole little house” is a hint that the narrator is incorporating expressions from other speakers, if not actually mimicking them. But the rest of the paragraph just quoted is that of an observer sufficiently distanced to see the setting as a toy. Anna might say “the whole little house,” but she is too grimly serious about the site of her life and work to think of it playfully. Stein proceeds now with her second style, slice-of-life naturalistic, still, of course, within the traditional repertory of fiction. She gives us some samples of Anna's grumbling at the other inhabitants of the house:

“Sallie! can't I leave you alone a minute but you must run to the door to see the butcher boy come down the street and there is Miss Mathilda calling for her shoes. Can I do everything while you go around always thinking about nothing at all? If I ain't after you every minute you would be forgetting all the time, and I take all this pains, and when you come to me you was as ragged as a buzzard and as dirty as a dog. Go and find Miss Mathilda her shoes where you put them this morning.”

“Peter,”—her voice rose higher,—“Peter,”—Peter was the youngest and the favorite dog,—“Peter, if you don't leave Baby alone,”—Baby was an old, blind terrier that Anna had loved for many years,—“Peter if you don't leave Baby alone, I take a rawhide to you, you bad dog.”

(p. 12)

But in the midst of these two styles, Stein has put up the first sign of her third style, the nascent and abstractionist. When the one-sentence paragraph “Anna led an arduous and troubled life” first appears (p. 11) as the fourth paragraph of the story, we dismiss it as authorial sarcasm. A page and a half later after the demonstration of Anna's ideals of canine chastity begun in the naturalistic dialogue just cited, Stein repeats “You see that Anna led an arduous and troubled life” (p. 13). We suspect at this point that this is a mere motif, reminding us after each example of Anna's problems that she creates them from her own determination to impose her standards on others. And it is a kind of motif. But when we encounter this sentence towards the end of the first section upon Anna's discovery that during her evenings out the under-servant's boyfriend comes to call, its referential ground is both larger and smaller. Larger, because we know that such episodes and the distress which they cause Anna are paradigmatic. For her the petty looms as large as the serious, and her martyrdom, regardless of the triviality of some of its causes, will be real. Smaller, because the language has become autonomous but abstract, true but flat. It seems all the flatter, a surface of meaning, because in the fourth paragraph from the end of the first section, Stein brings in her fourth style, the impressionistic. This occurs when she shifts her inside narrative to Miss Mathilda who “loved to go out on joyous, country tramps when, stretching free and far with cheerful comrades, over rolling hills and cornfields, glorious in the setting sun, and dogwood white and shining underneath the moon and clear stars overhead, and brilliant air and tingling blood, it was hard to have to think of Anna's anger at the late return” (p. 22). Stein has shown how “good” her Anna is: an efficient house manager and a friend to animals—but simultaneously cruel, tyrannical, childish, cantankerous, nagging, and crafty—and has established her literary devices. The presence of all four styles in informal patterning gives us analogues of the plane juxtapositions of Cubism.

As a character sketch, the large middle section “The Life of Good Anna” shows how Anna can be taken advantage of by her friends and misused by her employers and how, conversely, her officiousness nearly justifies her drab life. As a specimen narrative technique, it shows further applications of Stein's approximations of Cubism. Stein's alternation among four styles may be frustrating to the reader who decides that there is good material here for a conventional story, if Stein would just write it, particularly when she occasionally inserts a paragraph of “good,” i.e., vividly realistic, writing. But at this stage of her development she was not ready to be completely abstractionist, and in keeping four styles active she was being faithful, more or less consciously, to the procedures of beginning Cubism. After a two-page synopsis of Anna's life from age 17 to 27 (expository, style #1), we have a scene in which this prerogative maniac feels threatened (naturalistic, style #2). We are forthwith treated to a sample of style #4 (impressionistic). The following description must be considered a style juxtaposition, for it pertains not to Anna, but to the implied narrator:

It was an early spring day in the South. The fields and woods were heavy from the soaking rains. The horses dragged the carriage slowly over the long road, sticky with brown clay and rough with masses of stones thrown here and there to be broken and trodden into place by passing teams. Over and through the soaking earth was the feathery new spring growth of little flowers, of young leaves and of ferns. The tree tops were bright with reds and yellows, with brilliant gleaming whites and gorgeous greens. All the lower air was full of the damp haze rising from heavy soaking water on the earth, mingled with a warm and pleasant smell from the blue smoke of the spring fires in all the open fields. And above all this was the clear, upper air, and the songs of birds and the joy of sunshine and of lengthening days.

(pp. 27–28)

From our after-the-fact analysis of Stein's purpose, she misguidedly and lamely links this effective descriptive passage to Anna by commenting that the excitation of Spring merely exasperates her. There follows a brief scene of domestic conflict in naturalistic style, #2. With a statement indicating abstractionist style, #3 (“The widow Mrs. Lehntman was the romance in Anna's life,” p. 30), Stein presents Mrs. Lehntman as the unstable object but the stable point in Anna's passion. By referring to the friendship consistently as a “romance,” Stein makes clear her superior awareness and her characters' lack of awareness. Anna asserts the role of male dominance and male support, but she is the vulnerable member of the couple, for Mrs. Lehntman, as Stein puts it, is “more ready to risk Anna's loss” (p. 54). The flat motif sentence “The widow Mrs. Lehntman was the romance in Anna's life” like the others of style #3 always imposes one-dimensionality upon the narrative. It is last used towards the close of this section, nearly coinciding with Miss Mathilda's permanent departure for Europe. After a narrow escape from the law for collaborating with an abortionist, Mrs. Lehntman drifts back into Anna's life, but she “could never be again the romance in good Anna's life” (pp. 70–71).

Part III, “The Death of Good Anna,” is simply a matter of dispatching Anna to the next world. Yet in six or so pages Stein still can make use of three of her styles. Most of the account is expository synopsis (style #1); the expression that “these days were not all unhappy” is the abstractionist return to flatness (style #3), and the passage ends with a letter telling of Anna's last moments (style #2).

The shifts have been made. Modeled bits of this born martyr come sharply before us and then recede, obliterated or dominated by another style, like planes in a painting. Anna has not come into the world of our consciousness like Flaubert's Félicité, a simple creature living in Western literature. She has been imposed upon our verbal consciousness in fragmented and rearranged sets of “meaning.” Although as cited earlier she does resemble Madame Cézanne, except in style #4 (impressionistic) Anna has not been imposed visually at all. Rather, Stein has been approximating Cubism in narrative techniques. It is “Les Demoiselles d'Avignon” of her corpus.

Her technique here manipulates established rhetorical models which speak to a unified referential ground. That is, we know what “The Good Anna” is about. With Lucy Church Amiably Stein forestalls any such assurance. She is using English words throughout (although she does presuppose a good knowledge of French culture and Mid-Atlantic seaboard customs for her puns to be spotted). She uses sentences which can be diagrammed subject, predicate, modifier, etc. These are arranged in paragraphs of a felt cohesiveness. But the result is not exposition, for the words so ordered do not in themselves bespeak an ordered, i.e., logically progressing, “meaningful” referential ground.

Stein's “explanation” of her rationale for this novel sounds like a description of a “high” Cubist painting: “… quite definitely as a conception of what is seen was contained by itself inside it, although there it was a conceiving of what I was looking at as a landscape was to be itself inside in it, it was I said to be like an engraving.”¹¹ Reading the novel, in fact, can be done only by transferring to language analysis some of the techniques useful in analyzing abstractionist painting. I should term the steps identification, quantification, and disposition. First, we must see what recognizable objects there are: here they are in the form of characters, events, dialogue, authorial commentary, motifs. Second, we must note how often such objects occur and, third, whether they have been disposed in a pattern. Lucy Church Amiably can never be decoded because only in the most rudimentary sense was it ever encoded. But by patient itemizing and quantifying we do find in normal sequence a family novel in which Lucy Church and her amiable disposition figure as an archetypal female in a Mid-Atlantic seaboard setting and country gentlemen milieu. Stein's narrative non-persona, tediously cute and pretentiously simple, gives us only this much help: “How can novels be as close as close closing not being not being bent but to open openly shown that they have been have been in in invariable and plain explain the variety of plentiful interpellation of theirs two and two.”¹² A four-chapter introduction, roughly one-sixth of the whole, gives a French context to the composition. The first three chapters of the novel establish the family, the procreation principle, and the pleasant rural routine. By now, roughly one-third of the novel is accounted for. The next six chapters continue the daily rounds of pleasure and pain and bring the reader to the half-way mark. There is no chapter 10. Chapters 11 through 20 introduce aging and bring the reader to the two-thirds mark. The remaining 19 chapters, the final third in the book, accelerate aging and change, so by Chapter 36, three chapters before the end, we have a new cast of characters. The emphasis has not been on the death of the older generations but on the regeneration of a family in a setting where spring is long and beautiful. (Of course, only dutiful aficionados read to the end, and the senile Southern belle garrulousness of the narrator has us shrieking.)

This is because we have been bombarded with words, so truly purified of the language of the tribe that we cannot put together meanings. To risk a conceit, we have had words nearly excavated from their referential ground. “Nearly” because some allusion, some uncleansable residue clings to them—confusing us to Stein's satisfaction. They still do signify something, but in their disposition they just elude sense. Chapter I, for example, “informs” us, “No detaining Lucy Church today as she and they are satisfied to be under obligation and very well I thank you so they needed as much as before by that time” (p. 50). Or, a few lines later after comments on the odor of drying boxwood, Lucy's delayed conception, the need for planning, her amiability, “There were these things were an argument in favour of being very much which makes it not unlikely to give directly to them when it is more than told and she said very likely they were winning” (p. 51). A conversational voicing of the phrases shows that they have the lilt of female small talk, shows further that one voice, in usually just one side of a conversation, speaks it all.

In this gossipy, folksy, maiden-aunt Border-South monologue,¹³ each word is stripped to its merest autonomy by serving as the skewed context for every other word. It has been preserved in its merest autonomy by positioning in a speech pattern mimicking monologue rhythm. Consider this paragraph on p. 122:

Lucy Church and her sister Frances Church and her mother and her brother she did not have a brother it is Helen who had a brother and three sisters and a father Lucy Church had two sisters and a father and a mother and of her it was said not Lucy.

In conventional punctuation this would be:

Lucy Church and her sister Frances Church and her mother and her brother—she did not have a brother; it is Helen who had a brother and three sisters and a father. Lucy Church had two sisters [one besides Frances?] and a father and a mother and of her [of the mother?] it was said, not Lucy [there is no antecedent for “it”].

It is rambling discourse with easily imagined intonation. Let's take the next sentence: “And of her it was said not Lucy it was said of her not Lucy.” The positioning here does not positively violate syntax, but the elements of the elliptical sentence are being rearranged like blocks. The next sentence: “Lucy did [what, for example?] and it was of no interest to any one as it was so much worse and had often been remarked upon by any one even he he knew it not John but one of whom nobody said anything that is to say of whom everyone said not only but also as it is at once.” The punctuation is not too problematical, when the sentence is voiced, but the sentence, to the extent it conveys information, speaks to information by inference already conveyed but, in fact, never given anywhere in the novel. The final three sentences of the paragraph: “Very well I thank you. It is as good. Very well I thank you.” These, when voiced, sound like one side of a telephone conversation. Of course, at this half-way point of the novel, we know the other side of the conversation would be no more informative. In fact, “Very well I thank you,” “Thank you very much” and similar ready-made expressions of nominal gratitude are not to be construed chiefly as speech characteristics of the narrator but as rhetorical cues which bring our language response to minimal content translation. These are the furthest abstractions of “You see that Anna led an arduous and troubled life.” In “The Good Anna” such flat announcements were interspersed among styles of relatively greater referential depth. Here such cues are like a flat line on the outermost texture of tunneling arabesques of “high” Cubist painting.

Stein was not leading us astray when she said Lucy Church Amiably was to be “like an engraving.” Although her narrative voice lists colors and colorful objects (flowers, trees, skies, animals), she lists them too rapidly and with too little accretive context for them to be visualized. The whole analogizes as lines centripetally arranged in one and two-dimensional effects. But despite our analogy with painting, it should be emphasized that Stein prevents our visualizing anything. The nouns, as will be noted in the cited passages, are either class nouns, e.g., mother, father, or proper nouns, e.g., Lucy Church, Frances Church. The pronouns as often as not have unclear antecedents. The verbs denote minimal action, e.g., to be, to have, to say; or, if more emphatic, e.g., to do, to confuse, refer to prior action that has never been expressed. The adverbs are called upon to modify unexpressed prior actions. As for adjectives, there are hardly any.

As for Lucy Church Amiably as a form of research, we could do worse than quote the last line of the novel and say it was all “Very well I thank you” (p. 240).

Ida, like its title character, is nervous but not frenetic, intoxicating but not vertigo-inducing. Lucy Church Amiably might have been Stein's equivalent of Picasso's “Man Smoking a Pipe” (1911) or perhaps Braque's “Rooftops at Céret” (1911). Ida is more comparable to the former's “Three Masked Musicians” (1921). That is, it will never do for the reader who is not forewarned, but there are characters of anthropoid outlines. They lead a life of color and charm. They have past, a present, perhaps even a future. The reissue of the book in 1972 was well timed. Intriguingly inspired by Wallis Simpson Duchess of Windsor,¹⁴Ida is not only a book about and by a woman; it is a biographical fictionalizing which exploits an upper middle-class girl's traumas: identity in the family unit, the beauty queen syndrome, three or so marriages, a Washington, D.C. household, childlessness and precious pets, and, finally, Mr. Right. Puzzled by her beauty and sex appeal (which she does not feel), Ida is happiest when at rest. But she is not a non-sectarian Marjorie Morningstar. Stein treats her with affection but not with seriousness, since she is merely the means of ordering the narrative. The first 83 pages (pp. 7–90) are entitled “First Half”; the remaining 61 pages are entitled “Second Half.” The former is “Before Andrew,” whom she “almost married” in Part Two of the “Second Half,” making the “Second Half” “With Andrew.” (“Besides he was Andrew the first. All the others had been others.”¹⁵)

The narrator is narrating to be read, enclosing dialogue and indirect discourse within the sparsely punctuated exposition. Consider this sequence, circa World War I. First, exposition: “If an officer met Ida he said, how do you do and she answered very well I thank you” (p. 28). Note that the dialogue is presented as part of repeated and continuous action in the past. Three sentences later:

The officer would then go on conversing.

What is it that you like better than anything else, he asked and she said. I like being where I am. O said he excitedly, and where are you. I am not here, she said, I am very careful about that. No I am not here, she said, it is very pleasant, she added and she turned slightly away, very pleasant indeed not to be here.

The officer smiled. I know he said I know what you mean. Winnie [as she is called for winning so many beauty contests] is your name and that is what you mean by your not being here.

(p. 29)

Now comes a new paragraph of indirect discourse: “She suddenly felt very faint. Her name was not Winnie it was Ida, there was no Winnie.” Within the paragraph the narrator shifts to recording the officer's thoughts: “Nobody could know in looking at him that he was an officer because he did not wear a uniform and he did not know whether she knew it or not” (p. 29). Then as narrator Stein in a new paragraph answers the officer: “Perhaps she did and perhaps she did not” (p. 29).

Ida may be an American Emma Bovary, beating the law of averages. But her inner life and the outward events of her life are narrated with equal emphasis; Stein's whimsically ironic summary and avoidance of affective detail ensure our distance. The act of narration alone holds our interest. We are almost never shown anything, always told. Relatively neutral words must get by without affective context. The narrator pontificates on the first page of Part Five of the “Second Half”: “Cuckoos magpies crows and swallows are signs. / Nightingales larks robins and orioles are not.” Since literary tradition can refute the second assertion easily, we can assume that we are being conditioned for a digression on the arbitrary and the autonomous in language. Four pages later, Andrew meets a man who quotes a spider: “Listen to me I, I am a spider, you must not mistake me for the sky, the sky red at night is a sailor's delight, the sky red in the morning is a sailor's warning, you must not mistake me for the sky, I am I, I am a spider …” (pp. 122–123). We are regaled by a cuckoo, a goldfish, and two dwarfs who enter into this epistemological dispute, settled by the dwarfs who believe in the language of flowers, lucky stones, peacock's feathers, stars, tea leaves, a white horse and a red-headed girl, the moon, red in the sky, the barking of a dog, “everything that is mortal and immortal” (p. 128).

We are returned, in fact, to common sense faith. Part Five ends “Everybody in the room was quiet and Andrew was really excited and he looked at Ida and that was that” (p. 128). The novel itself ends 34 pages later. The lines of this mural have been pulled in towards the center around Ida at rest: “She dresses in another hat and she dresses in another dress and Andrew is in, and they go in and that is where they are. They are there. Thank them. Yes” (p. 154). Western clothing, a woman and a man, in position.¹⁶

It is not Realism, Naturalism, Symbolism. So starkly non-visual, it is not Surrealism. Complete within itself, it is not Futurism. But it moves its own elements around its center. Cubism? Yes.

Perhaps we do not like to consider thoughts, characters, events, actions as objects even in their verbal translations. Perhaps the word, too, has suffered so much demeaning in real life that we like it to mean as much as possible in art. Nonetheless, without pretentious metaphysical encumbrances Stein has shown what, to echo Sypher, a verbalized object is capable of. And why not call this record of fictional research Cubist narrative?

Notes

1. In Lectures in America (New York: Random House, 1935), p. 170. All quotations from this edition.

2. (New York: Random House Vintage Books, 1960), pp. 269ff.

3. (Paris: Gallimard, 1963), p. 144.

4. See Gertrude Stein on Picasso, ed. by Edward Burns (New York: Liveright, 1970).

5. “Gertrude Stein Among the Cubists,” Journal of Modern Literature, II (November, 1972), 481–490.

6. The Cubist Epoch (New York: Phaidon Press, 1970), p. 64.

7. See Michael J. Hoffman, The Development of Abstractionism in the Work of Gertrude Stein (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1965), pp. 199ff.

8. Richard Bridges, Gertrude Stein in Pieces (New York: Oxford Press, 1970), p. 50.

9. Norman Weinstein, Gertrude Stein and the Literature of Modern Consciousness (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1970), p. 24, while calling the dialogue “an authentic aesthetic construct, an accomplished experiment in cubistic prose art,” maintains that it is faithful to Black speech. Stein's long-time friend Richard Wright considered “Melanctha” authentic also. See Constance Webb, Richard Wright (New York: Putnam's, 1968).

10. (New York: Random House Vintage Books, 1936), p. 28. All quotations from this edition.

11. Lectures in America, p. 202. The original cover read “Gertrude Stein a Novel of Romantic beauty and nature which Looks like an Engraving Lucy Church Amiably.” See James R. Mellow, Charmed Circle (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1974), p. 349.

12. (1930) (Millerton, N.Y: Something Else Press, 1972), p. 19. All quotations from this edition.

13. Much as I respect Bridges as a foremost Stein scholar, I cannot tie this book so closely to her home in Bilignin, France as he does (pp. 190–191). The puns on that region, which indeed has a hamlet Lucey with a bulbous-steepled church, simply provide an in-group joke. Double-entendres with French culture are largely limited to the introduction.

14. Reported by Bridges, p. 306.

15. (1941) (New York: Random House Vintage Books, 1972), p. 111. All quotations from this edition.

16. The events are not narrated so as to be incontrovertible. Bridges believes that Ida invents both her twin and her beauty contest victories (p. 308). No reader can be certain what happens. Although he most usefully points out the provenance of certain episodes, I think he misses the interesting linguistic features of the work when he concludes, “If it is accepted that Ida is a peg on which Gertrude Stein can hang her obsessions, particularly those involving men, then these disconnected stories fall into place” (p. 309).