Word: steins
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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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...
...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...
...Woman. If posterity understands present-day art. it is likely that the future will have a pretty good idea what Gertrude Stein looked like. Picasso has painted her, Picabia has drawn her. Jo Davidson has done a joss-like statue of her. Never a beauty, she is now massive, middleaged, 59, would strongly resemble a fat Jewish hausfrau were it not for her close-cropped head. (When her old friend Mme de Clermont-Tonnerre had her hair bobbed, Gertrude Stein decided to cut her hair short too. Alice Toklas did it for her.) Very democratic, proud of being a plain...
...admission that when she was 17 ''the last few years had been lonesome ones and had been passed in an agony of adolescence." If curious readers wonder why she passes over these matters so lightly, they may answer themselves by reflecting that no doubt Gertrude Stein, like everybody else, has autobiographical passages which she does not choose...