Books, Arts & Manners: Legend of the Rue de Fleurus

Gertrude Stein in Pieces By Richard Bridgman Oxford, 411 pp., $12.50 You keep discovering that people you’ve known for years once met Gertrude Stein and were charmed by the experience: tea, and the Picassos to look at, and conversation and advice, and pronouncements like “America is the oldest country in the world because it has been in the twentieth century longer than any other.” This does prompt reflection, like the still more Delphic “History takes time,” which we’d scrutinize like a crystal ball if we’d received it from Herakleitos (and the first reflection that prompts is that the concept of “history” wasn’t available to Herakleitos).

But I’ve never met a visitor to Gertrude Stein’s who was turned by the experience into a reader of hers. Has she readers? Can she be read? Ernest Hemingway typed several dozen pages of The Making of Americans, which is the most plausible way to have been influenced by her; the mind rejects any fantasy of Hem, whisky glass in hand, communing with Tender Buttons. She has certainly had devotees; just twenty years ago Donald Sutherland published Gertrude Stein: a Biography of Her Work, which begins “This will be to explain as much as I understand of what Gertrude Stein did in writing.” He caught the virus, it’s clear, and his book is charming, much as she could be. You needn’t buy Stein to find it illuminating on normally torpid topics like “The Novel Today.”

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Hugh Kenner

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William F. Buckley Jr.

Gertrude Stein in Pieces By Richard Bridgman Oxford, 411 pp., $12.50 You keep discovering that people you’ve known for years once met Gertrude Stein and were charmed by the experience: tea, and the Picassos to look at, and conversation and advice, and pronouncements like “America is the oldest country in the world because it has been in the twentieth century longer than any other.” This does prompt reflection, like the still more Delphic “History takes time,” which we’d scrutinize like a crystal ball if we’d received it from Herakleitos (and the first reflection that prompts is that the concept of “history” wasn’t available to Herakleitos).

But I’ve never met a visitor to Gertrude Stein’s who was turned by the experience into a reader of hers. Has she readers? Can she be read? Ernest Hemingway typed several dozen pages of The Making of Americans, which is the most plausible way to have been influenced by her; the mind rejects any fantasy of Hem, whisky glass in hand, communing with Tender Buttons. She has certainly had devotees; just twenty years ago Donald Sutherland published Gertrude Stein: a Biography of Her Work, which begins “This will be to explain as much as I understand of what Gertrude Stein did in writing.” He caught the virus, it’s clear, and his book is charming, much as she could be. You needn’t buy Stein to find it illuminating on normally torpid topics like “The Novel Today.”