Word: stein
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With her scrambling of familiar word groupings to break down associated ideas in the reader's mind, making a complete denial of the usual meaning, Gertrude Stein contributes intangibly in her "play" on Daniel Webster. Saroyan's "The Pool Game" proves that he can create an objective tableau which has artistic form. "Letters to Christopher," by Mcrle Hoyleman, are strangely captivating. Perhaps the best writing is found in Delmore Schwartz's two stories, of which "The Commencement Day Address" is admirable for its moral as well as verbal edge...
When The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas became a best seller (1933), Gertrude Stein discovered that it was ''very nice being a celebrity a real celebrity who can decide who they want to meet and say so and they come or do not come as you want them." She also discovered that she liked to make money ("Just at present my passion is avarice"), that she loved the U. S., loved to lecture, liked photographers, reporters, liked to see her name in electric lights on Times Square. When she sailed for the U. S., after a 30-year...
Last week she described just how different it was. Her 318-page volume was crowded with characteristic Gertrude Stein incoherencies, lucid passages about herself and Miss Toklas. malicious portraits of other celebrities, scrambled philosophical observations, comments on history, drunks, dogs,, revolutions, writing, painting, genius, the Stein family, the U. S. landscape-and, above all, "about is money money or isn't money money...
...earlier work (Tender Buttons, The Making of Americans) Miss Stein apparently put down whatever irrelevancies popped into her head as she began to write, without explaining their connection and without suggesting why they occurred to her. But in Everybody's Autobiography, as in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, she is more considerate of her readers, explains as she leaps from subject to subject why she does so. As a result, the book strongly suggests a fireside monologue delivered by a strong-minded, original lady who is unfortunately unable to keep on the subject, who nods and dozes, forgets...
First part of Everybody's Autobiography gives a picture of the Stein-Toklas household in Paris; the second describes Miss Stein's inability to recapture contentment in the French village of Bilignin after she had become a success; the third tells of the U. S. journey. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas brought old literary-artistic quarrels to a head. Miss Stein began reading the manuscript to Artist Pablo Picasso and his wife: "I was reading he was listening and his eyes were wide open and then suddenly his wife Olga Picasso got up and said she would...