SOURCE: Marranca, Bonnie. “St. Gertrude.” Performing Arts Journal 16, no. 1 (January 1994): 107-112.

[In the following essay, Marranca examines the significance of Stein's sense of geography and space to the structure, themes, and language of Four Saints in Three Acts.]

I

“Through a window with a grate covered by a veil, I spoke with those who came to visit me,” St. Therese of Avila described convent life in her Book of Foundations. The sense of a framed life would appeal to Gertrude Stein who brought together the painterly and the literary, changing nouns to verbs. In her Four Saints in Three Acts, in which St. Therese has more than three-dozen companions, St. Ignatius is always worrying about who is “to be windowed.” Nuns should observe enclosure he had decreed in sixteenth-century Spain. “How many windows and doors and floors are there in it,” asks St. Therese herself in the middle of the opera. She wants to know what kind of space will frame her.

Stein took great pleasure in the transcendent moments of human existence which St. Therese, her literary sister, had called “spiritual delights.” Inspired by her favorite saints—Therese, Ignatius and Francis—Stein, a Jew, participated in the secularization of the spiritual, the long-lasting project of modernism, by aligning spiritual energy and creative power as acts of faith. It is not a concidence that she carried out her plan in Catholic France, her home from 1905.

Numerous books printed in France (and in England) from the turn-of-the-century into the twenties offered studies of sainthood, mysticism, and the religious life, with St. Therese or St. Ignatius accounting for most of them. It was then that Stein's mentor at Radcliffe, William James, published his great work, Varieties of Religious Experience, though in it he criticized St. Therese as a bit of a flirt in her solicitation of God. Before World War I, in painting and the drama, the spiritual dimensions of human thought and feeling had inspired the vision of abstraction which moves toward the same goal as religious feeling: the contemplation of an object of absolute perfection in an instant of pure presence. In French letters Mallarmé had already conceived of The Book as a “spiritual instrument,” and the Belgian Maeterlinck imagined a new conception of dramaturgy in the religiosity of symbolist aesthetics. Moreover, numerous French composers created works on religious themes or liturgical forms, including Debussy, Poulenc, Satie, Massenet, and Messiaen, from the turn-of-the-century to the period between the wars.

Saints, in particular, have long preoccupied artists, particularly St. Francis, St. Joan, St. Anthony, St. Paul, and St. Sebastian. There are many examples of works in the modern period which treat their lives: in painting, poetry, opera, drama, film. Even the avant-garde manifestoes of the era, mainly from the Catholic countries of France and Italy, have a sense of the church litany in them, for repetition is as much a formal quality of avant-garde rhetoric as that of church doctrine. The exemplary writings of Artaud, to be fully understood, should be read alongside of saints' writings. Closer to our own time, Genet made of dramaturgy a liturgy, then Sartre turned him into a saint, and Barthes wrote a long essay on the language of St. Ignatius.

Stein's great friend and astute admirer Thornton Wilder, who himself had written plays with a fair share of angels and saints, understood that on one level her work could be read as a series of “spiritual exercises.” Her Latinate writings were full of exhortations, codes of self-discipline, study of mental states, acts of contemplation, the cataloguing of the senses. Stein offers a manual for the writing life as rigorous as Ignatius's guide to the spiritual life. As with the lives of saints her inner world leaned toward the ascetic, and like saints' writings her own are full of repetition, for going forward always meant going backward, beginning again. If her guide wasn't quite the sort Ignatius had planned in his classic work, Stein's spiritual journey was nevertheless toward the perfect state of mind, her stanzas in meditation more joyful and wondrous in celebrating nature and being and creating. Ecstasy was always her subject.

For Stein, sainthood, like its secular counterpart, genius, celebrates the fullness of presence: aura. “Saints shouldn't do anything. The fact that a saint is there is enough for anybody.” She said. A saint's life is quite like a writer's life, based as it is on the Word, revelation. A saint is like a classic in that it's just there. Perhaps that is why both saints and books enjoy canonization. A writer-saint's life, St. Therese's, is naturally a performance because it is given to self-dramatization. The self-dramatizing quality of writing results in the primacy of the voice in the text. For St. Therese the voice was her link to God: to listen for the Word is at the center of Catholic faith. For Stein her voice was the link to the audience: “listen to me” is a constant refrain in her writings. She called Four Saints “an opera to be sung,” emphasizing its vocal quality. The forms that characterize it vocally are those of the Church: antiphon, litany, polyphony, choral. In its structure of three acts, it alludes, significantly, to the trinity.

Stein extended the condition of sainthood, this state of grace, into her conception of the play as a landscape. In the 1934 essay “Plays,” she explains:

In Four Saints I made the Saints the landscape. All the saints that I made and I made a number of them because after all a great many pieces of things are in a landscape all these saints together made my landscape. … A landscape does not move nothing really moves in a landscape but things are there, and I put into the play the things that were there.

For Stein, the life of a convent is the life of a landscape, nuns busily moving about but the scene remaining placid as a landscape, simply there. Still life. The walledin cloister is a natural frame. It follows that the play/landscape evolves essentially as static composition, tableau, in which frontality is the defining visual attitude. Elements in the landscape—people, objects, or nature—only become meaningful to one when they are looked at. They already exist for themselves. They don't look at others, they are looked at. In deriving from nature, Stein's conception of a play as landscape joins the natural and the artificial in a topographical view of dramaturgy.

Though much less radically, and with altogether different intentions, Maeterlinck carried a personal vision of the natural world into drama, already breaking down the conventional action/conflict-based scenic structure into smaller units of non-action, at times with repetitive, fragmentary sentences. Narration often substitutes for dramatic action, intuition for speech, the sign for the thing. The notion of the figure in a landscape is central to his static, abstract plays, as it would be for Stein. In Maeterlinck's quiet drama the most cherished element was sense perception: looking, listening. Chekhov, who brought a new sense of light into the drama, had already hinted at the idea of a performance space with The Seagull which he called “four acts and a landscape.” He made dramatic time seem like real time. Stein's remark that “conversation is only interesting when no one hears,” might well apply to Chekhov's plays. The most tempting feature in tracing this development is that all three writers took great interest in the natural world which influenced the philosophical underpining of the works, Maeterlinck and Chekhov as horticulturalists, and Stein—she left the gardening to Alice—in her special view of geography and the human mind. She introduced the concept of a dramatic field into the drama. For her space became a scene of revelation.

At the same time painting was moving toward abstraction and flatness, there was a parallel movement in theatre. The fussy detail of setting was giving way to space, the text to the voice, closure to process. This theatrical shift was perceived by dramatists who were evolving new attitudes toward space, object, and preception, in effect a philosophic shift in the relation of figure to ground. It is not coincidental that Kandinsky, whose paintings are among the earliest abstract compositions, in his work for the stage elaborated the scenic units as “pictures.” The idea of the stage picture described a theatre of tableaux and tableau objects, emphasizing frontality and the frame, the painterly and the contemplative. Kandinsky harmonized the abstract and the spiritual in a new spatial consciousness. Under the influence of cubism, which opened up other possibilities for abstract art in its simultaneity of form and fragmentation of surface, Stein brought the techniques of abstraction and collage to drama, shifting it from the anecdotal to the pictorial, from psychology to the mind.

II

Stein was more interested in soulfulness than the soul, in natural processes than nature. She invited the natural world into her work to express itself in a formal way, opening her pages to birdsong and climate and plant life as compositional elements of the plays. They create the language of the plays, not merely functioning as description of setting or atmosphere. Birdsong alternated with conversation, the moon with a lamp. John Cage, who early in his career set Stein's words to music, would decades later create music from the same impulse to have it imitate, not nature itself, but the processes of nature. Stein and Cage shared a passion for the sights and sounds of the world, and from this passion flows their spiritual energy: everything is experienced as mind, enlightenment. That Stein liked to sit in the front seat of her car “Godiva” and write to the rhythm of street sounds and traffic is the kind of joyful creativity Cage celebrated in his mus/ecology. Stein treated her own life and the lives of friends as “ready-mades.” In the countryside she would at times write in the open air to the rhythm of life around her—a circling cow, a stream, the wind, a conversation. The sky was a sheet of paper. Her writing was repetitious and cyclical in shape because she wrote in nature, not of it. As early as The Making of Americans she understood that repetition was a kind of wisdom. “Loving repeating is in a way earth feeling.” For Stein writing was always organic process.

In the glorious St. Remy period beginning in 1922, five years before she wrote Four Saints back in Paris, when Stein composed such plays as Saints and Singing, A Saint in Seven and Lend a Hand or Four Religions, in addition to other works that alluded to Catholic literary form, “Talks to Saints or Stories of Saint Remy,” Practice of Oratory,” “A Hymn,” “Precepts,” she infused her saintly preoccupations with the worship of the natural world. When she first began to write plays, in 1913, she was in Mallorca, far away from the battlefields of World War I. Here she first called a play a landscape, and the plays she wrote are gathered with other works in a volume called Geography and Plays. Already, the compositional sense of writing as geography (mapping) was in her work. Mapping and perception would be inseparable, and for a time Spain and play and landscape.

By 1922 Stein was infusing more of the landscape in the emotion of her writing. She described her activity in this way: “I concentrated the internal melody of existence that I had learned in relation to things seen into the feelings I then had … of light and air and air moving and being still.” Her writing was rooted to daily existence in the French countryside around St. Remy where she lived. In the Mallorcan plays she was in the landscape, but in the south of France, at St. Remy and later at Bilignin, she was of it, and that made all the difference. Here the lives of Stein and her friends was indistinguishable from the lives of saints, nor talk from prayer. She prayed to saints for rain in St. Remy. She went to Lucy Church Amiably. She saw mountains of saints singing and religious faces on black currants. She read flowers. There was beatitude in gratitude. The land was like an illuminated manuscript. What joined together the writer's life and the saintly life is that in her child-like wonder Stein was able to experience the world as miraculous. For a time she became St. Gertrude in ecstasy. “How a little nature makes religion, and how a little religion makes creation.” Stein was never so musical as in the saint plays, her miracle plays. These were her years of the sublime.

III

Stein was always interested in creation, not representation. Things in themselves, the qualities, not the names of things. Four Saints works as a composition in both the literary and horticultural sense, elaborating as complex an idea of dramatic writing as one can find in twentieth-century theatre. If Henry James had his figure in the carpet, Stein would have hers in the garden. Both writers wrote around a subject not about it.

Hidden in Four Saints is the outline of a hortus conclusus. St. Therese is both the protected virgin and Stein's literary heroine in a garden. As much a plan of research as it is a play, Four Saints reveals a formal garden conceived as a plan of knowledge. With the constant interruption of her own voice in the narrative, Stein incorporates her ideas for the play, the choices for weather, objects, birds, flowers. Stage directions and remarks on design are also made a part of the text. “St. Therese could be photographed. “More scenes, more saints. “A great many saints can sit around with one standing.” Documentary sections of daily life and thoughts flow into the writing process, making real time interchangeable with dramatic time. “What happened to-day, a narrative.” A bit of sexual innuendo. Two of them, longitudinally. More and more saints are added, even a St. Plan. Half-way through, St. Therese asks, “How many saints are there in it.” Stein needs more time for research on Ignatius. “Continue reading.” More wordplay, children's tunes, rhyming. My country tis of thee. Scenes run out of sequence, repeat in different order, go backwards. One scene is an adverb—“usefully.” Sentences sing across the page. “Could Four Acts be three.” A procession. “One at a time in rhyme.” An exasperated chorus of saints wonders at last, How much of it is finished.

Curiously, St. Therese's own writings are full of digressions, repetition, movements from singular to plural, first person to third, missing punctuation. “But what disorder in the way I write,” she interjects in The Way of Perfection. More self-recrimination. “So many days have gone by since I wrote the above.” Stein is just as anxious in Four Saints. “A narrative to plan an opera.” Then, “Come panic come.”

Stein's grand design is a fabulous subversion of plot. The English word “plot,” which in the medieval period first defined a patch of land set off from its surroundings, by the sixteenth century describes a plan for writing. Like Stein's window, it can be both noun and verb. This topographical sense of the work suits her notion of geography: the play as landscape as dramatic field.

What Stein does in Four Saints is transform the idea of theological space into a spatial conception of drama: here time turns into space. Read as an allegory, the “four saints” of the title are the four pathways of the garden, echoing the biblical four rivers of Eden. In her autobiography St. Therese describes the four kinds of prayer as four ways to water a garden. The garden is Stein's perfect universe, a paradise, a frame. The Persian word pairidaeza (paradise) means enclosure, and from this form the cloister garden plan of Catholic monasteries took shape as a place of learning and meditation and cosmological principle. In Four Saints the garden space is now a performance space, the plot of a garden the plot of a play.

If in the earlier Lend a Hand or Four Religions the four religions act as four roads in the play (sign/posts), now the imagery outlines a garden that is walled in, enclosed. The garden is filled with flowers: hyacinths, pansies, violets, fragrant roses. Herbs, too. And hedges. It has fruit trees—pear, cherry, apple. An arbor. To piece together the images of the play one has to discover the words dispersed throughout it because they don't appear together as a description of an event but in an all-over effect, as field. Reading Stein, being an observant Stein reader, is looking for her words on a page the way one seeks out wildflowers in a meadow. She likes words in the open air, words with space around them. It's as if the words have been windblown through the text. A robin here, a magpie there, snow, rain, soil, a bench, a plateau. “Exercise in mastering pieces of it,” she advises in the rapturous Saints and Singing.

In Four Saints there is a “garden inside and outside of the wall.” The frame inside of a frame inside of a frame—the walled-in garden in the walled-in cloister inside of the walled-in city of Avila. Here is the perfect principle of containment for Stein to pursue inner and outer reality. Even her stage directions follow the pattern of the wall. “Who mentioned that one followed another laterally.” Avila for Therese, Barcelona for Ignatius. Walls, water. Pigeons on his grass, alas. It's only the Holy Ghost. Stein called Four Saints “a perfectly simple description of the Spanish landscape.”

A play is a landscape. In Stein's plan the preferred landscape does not imitate the natural, flowing line of the English school, but the more formal, stylized continental design. The same can be said of her writing. With the elegance of Poe, Stein's own philosophy of composition equals her structural plan for the work itself. Her “landscape” collapses the time/space frame of sixteenth-century Spain and Paris of the twenties, the baroque and modernism—cultures of sight.

Here in her garden as text Stein reconciles nature and society, her private and public lives. Work and play. The blank sheet of paper on which she plots her play opens up as a land of wonder. To write is to worship.