Word: stein
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Some readers laugh, some are annoyed; some snort with disgust or indignation. Gertrude Stein, writer for posterity ("I write for myself and strangers'") does not mind. Says she slyly: "My sentence: do get under their skin...
...Writer. Alice B. Toklas tells who and-to a certain extent-what Gertrude Stein is. but it will leave pedestrian readers still puzzling their heads over why this obviously shrewd and salty old lady, whose sentences may seem rather primer-like but are just as lucid as a primer's, should have gathered such a lurid reputation as murderess of the King's English. Such readers should remember that in Alice B. Toklas Authoress Stein is on her best behavior. If they are sufficiently curious to look up some of her wilder work, this is the kind...
What can the plain reader make of all this? If he is in a good humor he will doubtless laugh, but at what? Sober-sided Critic Edmund Wilson gives as his opinion that: "Miss Stein is trying to superinduce a state of mind in which the idea of the nation will seem silly, in which we shall be conscious of ourselves as creatures who do not lend themselves to that conception." Still puzzled, the plain reader dips into another Stein volume (Tender Buttons), to his astonishment brings up these...
...Sentences not only words but sentences and always sentences have been Gertrude Stein's life long passion." The only teacher she acknowledges is her poodle, Basket. "The rhythm of his water drinking made her recognize the difference between sentences and paragraphs, that para- graphs are emotional and that sentences...
Critical consensus, while it writes off Gertrude Stein's less comprehensible utterings as a public loss, grants that she has been a private gain to more intelligible writers, and that her influence on contemporary literature has been vicariously potent. Serious critics take her seriously, even when they cannot understand what she is doing. Says Critic Wilson: "Most of us balk at her soporific rigmaroles, her echolaliac incantations, her half-witted-sounding catalogs of numbers; most of us read her less & less. Yet, remembering especially her early work, we are still aware of her presence in the background of contemporary...