Word: williams
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...William James called her his "most brilliant woman student." And Gertrude Stein herself, in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, remembers "enjoying her life" and "liking it all." The apparent contradiction may arise from the complexity of her mind, from the habit she had of speaking just any old thought. Robert M. Hutchins, former president of the University of Chicago, recently told an anecdote which bears this out. Apparently Miss Stein and friend Alice B. Toklas went to a dinner party where the conversation turned into a Gertrude monlogue. As the guests were leaving. Miss Toklas said, "Gertrude has said...
Nevertheless, she delighted her professors. William James taught her philosophy and psychology. He was then, as Elisabeth Sprigge writes in her book, Gertrude Stein, Life and Work, "a bright-bearded exuberant man in his early fifties with neither the appearance nor the manner of a University professor.... James liked unusual people and appreciated this rollicking girl, this clever unusual pupil...
...quality of their relationship: "It was a very lovely spring day, Gertrude Stein had been going to the opera every night and going to the opera in the afternoon and had been otherwise engrossed and it was the period of final examinations and there was an examination in William James' course. She sad down with the examination paper before her and she just could not begin to work. "Dear Professor James,' she wrote at the top of her paper, 'I am sorry but really I don't feel a bit like an examination paper in philosophy today,' and left...
...next day she had a postal card from William James saying, "Dear Miss Stein, I understand perfectly how you feel. I often feel exactly that way myself." And underneath it he gave her the highest mark in his course...
Miss Stein's earliest known writings were written in 1894-5 when she was taking English 22 under William Vaughn Moody. Rosalind S. Miller, in Gertrude Stein: Form and Intelligibility, described those early themes as "introspective," as more significant than the hackneyed conventional themes which ruin the eye and enfeeble the mind of the college English teachers." Mrs. Miller mentions Gertrude's sense of humor as being "Not sophomoric witticism, but rather the subtle understatement of which she was later to become master." It is interesting to note professional comments on the sides of the pages; such praise an "interesting...