Abstract
Many biographers and scholars have commented on Stein’s struggle, in the early years of her career, to secure a publisher for her difficult literary experiments. Critics have expanded these discussions by showing the various ways in which Stein’s hopes and anxieties surface in the often-opaque texts she was writing at the time. Yet, no one has attempted to systematically examine how Stein’s attitudes or her aesthetic strategies changed after the publication of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), a time when she began to reflect, in ways that she never had before, on the nature of her writing and its relationship to a larger public.
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Notes
Stein’s biographers have traced her earliest works to the winter of 1902. For example, see John Malcolm Brinnin, The Third Rose: Gertrude Stein and Her World (New York: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1987), 41, 44–45
James R. Mellow, Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company (New York: Praeger, 1974), 115
Linda Wagner-Martin, “Favored Strangers”: Gertrude Stein and Her Family (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 57.
For an account of Stein’s early publishing history, see Bryce Conrad, “Gertrude Stein in the American Marketplace,” Journal of Modern Literature XIX (1995).
Laurel Bollinger, “‘One as One Not Mistaken but Interrupted’: Gertrude Stein’s Exploration of Identity in the 1930s,” Centennial Review 43, no. 2 (1999): 255 fn. 1.
Ulla E. Dydo, Gertrude Stein: The Language That Rises, 1923–1934(Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003), 551–53.
Gertrude Stein, “And Now,” in Vanity Fair: Selections from America’s Most Memorable Magazine, a Cavalcade of the 1920s and 1930s, ed. Cleveland Amory and Frederic Bradlee (New York: Viking Press, 1934), 280.
Dydo discusses the publication of Stein’s manuscript in some detail. See Dydo, Rises, 543–50. For relevant correspondence, see Donald Gallup, ed., The Flowers of Friendship: Letters Written to Gertrude Stein (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953), 259–63.
Gertrude Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography (Cambridge: Exact Change, 1993), 86.
Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 115.
Loren Glass, Authors Inc.: Literary Celebrity in the Modern United States, 1880–1980 (New York: New York University Press, 2004), 1.
G. F. Mitrano, Gertrude Stein: Woman without Qualities (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2005), 58.
For a useful discussion of Stein parodies, see Kirk Curnutt, “Parody and Pedagogy: Teaching Style, Voice, and Authorial Intent in the Works of Gertrude Stein,” College Literature 23, no. 2 (1996).
For a more general discussion of Stein’s reception, see Karen Leick, Gertrude Stein and the Making of an American Celebrity (New York: Routledge, 2009).
T. S. Eliot, “Charleston, Hey! Hey!” The Nation & Athenaeum xl, no. 17 (1927): 595; “The Ten Dullest Authors: A Symposium,” in Vanity Fair, Amory and Bradlee, 76.
Bennett Cerf, At Random: The Reminiscences of Bennett Cerf (New York: Random House, 1977), 102.
Gertrude Stein, Lectures in America (New York: Vintage Books, 1975), 312.
Gertrude Stein, What Are Masterpieces (New York: Pitman Publishing Corporation, 1970), 29.
Neil Schmitz, “Gertrude Stein as Post-Modernist: The Rhetoric of ‘Tender Buttons,’” Journal of Modern Literature 3, no. 5 (1974): 1217.
Charles Caramello, “Reading Gertrude Stein Reading Henry James, or Eros Is Eros Is Eros Is Eros,” Henry James Review 6 (1985): 188.
Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans (New York: Something Else, 1966), 212.
Juliana Spahr, Everybody’s Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2001), 6.
Barbara Will, Gertrude Stein, Modernism, and the Problem of “Genius” (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 9.
Stein, Masterpieces, 86. Stein did make another reference to “myself and strangers” in her short article for Cosmopolitan, “I Came and Here I Am,” which was published in February 1935. This is the latest reference I have found that employs the phrase as a useful descriptor. This particular instance, however, does not entirely fit with the others because she is referring to broadcasting and not her own writing. She says, “In writing in The Making of Americans I said I write for myself and strangers and this is what broadcasting is. I write for myself and strangers.” Gertrude Stein, How Writing Is Written: Volume 2 of the Previously Uncollected Writings of Gertrude Stein, ed. Robert Bartlett Haas (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1974), 71. Gertrude Stein, How Writing Is Written: Volume 2 of the Previously Uncollected Writings of Gertrude Stein, ed. Robert Bartlett Haas (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1974), 71.
Gertrude Stein, Four in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1947), xxi–xxii.
Harcourt, Brace & Company, who had published The Autobiography and an abridged version of The Making of Americans, rejected Four in America in May of 1934. Even though no other publisher would put it out in time for the American tour, as Stein wanted, she remained committed to the work. For example, see her comments to Carl Van Vechten in Edward Burns, ed., The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Carl Van Vechten, 1913–1946, 2 vols., vol. I (1913–1935) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 329.
Quoted in Donald Gallup, “Gertrude Stein and the Atlantic,” Yale University Library Gazette XXVIII (1954): 124.
Bob Perelman, The Trouble with Genius: Reading Pound, Joyce, Stein, and Zukofsky (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), 150.
It is possible to read Stein’s position in Four in America as an elaboration of her famous quip from The Autobiography: “No artist needs criticism, he only needs appreciation. If he needs criticism, he is no artist.” Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 235.
Harriet Scott Chessman, The Public Is Invited to Dance: Representation, the Body, and Dialogue in Gertrude Stein (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 2, 8.
Michael Szalay, “Inviolate Modernism: Hemingway, Stein, Tzara,” Modern Language Quarterly 56, no. 4 (1995): 470.
Gertrude Stein, Narration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1935), 53.
Marjorie Perloff, 21st-Century Modernism: The ‘New’ Poetics (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2002), 26.
The following discussion owes a debt to the work of Jennifer Ashton, even though, as will become apparent, I disagree with Ashton on several points. See Jennifer Ashton, From Modernism to Postmodernism: American Poetry and Theory in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); “Gertrude Stein for Anyone,” ELH 64, no. 1 (1997); “Modernism’s ‘New’ Literalism,” Modernism/modernity 10, no. 2 (2003); “‘Rose Is a Rose’: Gertrude Stein and the Critique of Indeterminacy,” Modernism/modernity 9, no. 4 (2002).
Perloff is more concerned with tracing the “indeterminate” tradition in her earlier book and spends more time detailing the specific modes and methods involved. In particular, see Marjorie Perloff, The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), esp. 4–44.
Lisa Siraganian, “Out of Air: Theorizing the Art Object in Gertrude Stein and Wyndham Lewis,” Modernism/modernity 10, no. 4 (2003): 665.
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© 2011 Timothy W. Galow
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Galow, T.W. (2011). The Celebrity Speaks: Gertrude Stein’s Aesthetic Theories after The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas . In: Writing Celebrity. American Literature Readings in the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119499_3
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