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FOUR IN AMERICA (221 pp.]-Gertrude Stein-Yale...
...Gertrude Stein had leisure, intelligence, curiosity and quite a bit of gall. She never got tired of playing games with language. She preferred to live in Europe, but America and Americans always fascinated her. Four in America is an inquiry about the American soul as exemplified in four great men: Ulysses S. Grant, Wilbur Wright, Henry James and George Washington. A year ago last July, a few weeks before her death, Miss Stein sent the manuscript to Yale, which has now published it in its entirety for the first time...
...book is written in Stein style at its Steiniest, and reading it takes more than most readers want to give. Even admirers of Gertrude Stein will be grateful to Thornton Wilder for his luminous introduction. Wilder's advice to the reader: be intelligent enough to put aside the vanity of intelligence; relax and listen. The reward: a pleasurable sense of listening to nonsense that is unique...
...seem a modest achievement. Miss Stein starts the fun & games by supposing that Grant had become a religious leader, Wright a painter, James a general and Washington a novelist. In defense of her little game, she apparently fetches some reasons from afar: Grant's first name was Hiram (an Old Testament name) but he dropped it in favor of his middle name, Ulysses (a soldier's); Wright, like Miss Stein's favorite modern painter, Picasso, invented contraptions that gave people a new sense of being alive; James planned his novels as a good general plans an operation...
Stops and Starts. Far-fetched and solemn jokester though she was, Gertrude Stein as a writer was about as gabby as they come. Maddeningly persistent and maddeningly placid, in Four in America she seems to take all day to say-with many stops and starts, reveries, irrelevancies and fond repetitions-what a good sharp professor could put in a few paragraphs...