Spotlight on … Gertrude Stein How to Write (1931)

 

‘We can summarize the lesson of How to Write by saying that it forces one to be conscious of language as language, not as a transparent means to a “referent.” The book does more than that, that is, it takes the implications of this way of looking at language to greater lengths than I have indicated. How to Write makes one aware of words as signs by means of heaping together a great many “referentless” sentences and phrases with the result of gradually reducing the importance of the referent, and gradually increasing the importance of the sign. It also forces one into a consciousness of the formal structure of the sentence, by including groups of words which are not sentences among ones that are, and by repeatedly reminding one of sentences by using the word “sentence,” until one feels a conscious relief and sense of solidness when a balanced sentence appears.

‘Although she has achieved “opacity” of sign by destroying the referent, I do not think that a sign’s drawing attention to itself necessarily means that it will do so at the expense of the referent. Actually, I think that the contrary conclusion would more nearly follow, since being aware of the sign only means that one is consciously aware of a correspondence of two things, whereas before he might only have been aware of the one — the referent. And when Stein herself desires to use language as a means to a referent, she very successfully achieves a one-to-one relationship between sign and referent and at the same time draws attention to the sign itself.

Those who are creating the modern composition authentically are naturally only of importance when they are dead because by that time the modern composition having become past is classified and the description of it is classical. That is the reason why the creator of the new composition in the arts is an outlaw until he is a classic, there is hardly a moment in between. . . . (“Composition,” What Are Masterpieces?)

‘The highly specialized, but very clear, use of “classical” and “classified” is a good illustration.

‘However, if one does become in the habit of noticing the sign, and I think that every student of literature arrives at this kind of awareness, it also becomes possible to read only on the level of sign, or at least with very little concern for the referent. Recently a friend of mine delighted herself, and an entire group of word-conscious ones, with the sentence: “There is, then, no unanimity of sundials.” The phrase “unanimity of sundials” not only elicited an immediate joyful response, but also became a phrase that could be mumbled to oneself with pleasure. Most of us have also known the pleasure of repeating lines from, poetry until they become only a chain of words. We do not exactly remove the meaning entirely, nor listen to them only as sounds, we simply enjoy them verbally. I think that the sentence from Stein that I have already quoted is an example of this sort of thing: “They are found and able and edible. And so they are predetermined and trimmed.”

‘This is certainly not the end of a study of literature, but it is a common by-product of a serious and intensive study, and is perhaps a more important by-product than we usually admit. I would even go so far as to take the position that without having had the experience of recognizing language in this way, and of finding delight in the recognition, one is seriously hampered in the study of literature, whether he puts his study to use as a critic, an author, or simply as a reader. For if one of the characteristics of literature is that it tends to draw attention to its signs, and I think that this is undeniable, then being conscious of this is a very important part of the sensibility of reader, critic, and writer. It is not enough simply to be “told” to watch for this characteristic, one must have had the experience of noticing it, and of finding delight in the noticing.’ — Lew Welch

 

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Further

Gertrude Stein: Resources
A Portrait of Gertrude Stein by Virgil Thomson
‘How to Write’ @ goodreads
Words as Objects
Gertrude Stein on Writing and Belonging
Understanding Steinese
Making Sense: Decoding Gertrude Stein
“It might be a portrait but in any case it is for you”
You are never yourself to yourself
With Pleasure: Gertrude Stein and the Sentence Diagram
Gertrude Stein: Collage and Code
How to Have a Conversation with Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein: Letters to a Friend
‘All I Know About Gertrude Stein’, by Jeanette Winterson
CULTIVATED MOTOR AUTOMATISM; A STUDY OF CHARACTER IN ITS RELATION TO ATTENTION.
THERE USED TO be something known to all readers as “Steinese.”
Gertrude Stein’s Radical Grammar
Gertrude Stein: Unlikely Comp Teacher
Writing and Merriment: Gertrude Stein’s Erotics of Language
Gertrude Stein: Nonsense with a Social Conscience
Buy ‘How to Write’
Download ‘How to Write’ for free @ zLibrary

 

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Extras

Gertrude Stein home movie, circa 1927

Gertrude Stein, American writer, speaks and reads from her libretto

Gertrude Stein: The Enigma

Gertrude Stein reads If I Had Told Him a Completed Portrait of Picasso

Gertrude Stein reads from The Making of Americans

 

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Interview

 

Q: How do you do.

A: Very well I thank you.

Q: Would you care to make a statement?

A: Gladly. “If we say, Do not share, he will not bestow they can reiterate, I am going to do so, we have organised an irregular commonplace and we have made excess return to rambling.”

Q: You will not mind if 1 ask what an irregular commonplace is?

A: Not at all, since the answer is anything. That is, anything is the answer. Or anything is an answer. But to back to the question. Anything is at once typical and unique. And so anything is what “everybody knows and nobody knows,” an irregular commonplace, and Miss Stein was always writing the portrait of that, and of anything.

Q: Do go on.

A: I always do. It is just as well to ramble on about it after all. Anything, as I was saying, that comes before the normal mind in the normal life can be identified by name, and that aspect of it which has to do with our habitual practical purposes is obviously and clearly seen. But that same anything contains or involves a great many other aspects and qualities that everybody knows are there, even though everybody keeps his mind pretty well fixed on the single practical aspect and is only vaguely aware of the others, and strictly speaking does not know them.

Q: Can you give an illustration?

A: Everything is an illustration, but take any piece of land. Let alone the farmer and the real estate agent or the picnicker, one painter will see it fiat, another painter will see it in depth, another as structure, another as fluffy, another as dark and light, another as spots and lines, another as still, another as changeable, another as full of its detail, another as a general expression or mood, and so on. But it is all the time the same commonplace piece of land. Likewise people and ideas are normally just as commonplace, but they are irregular since they do contain what is from the practical point of view an excess of aspects and qualities. If it were not for this excess nobody probably would go on living, because in it is all possibility and all novelty and all freedom. I think it was Voltaire who made that irregular commonplace, that paradox, that the superfluous is a very necessary thing. Which would remind me of the natural necessity of paradox, but it would be an excess to venture into it lust now.

Q: Thank you very much. But why make excess return to rambling, as you say? Where has it been and what has it been doing?

A: It has been mainly in suggestion, exclaiming. As in, what a woman! What a piece of land! Ah, Paree! But there has been a more sustained and exhaustively organized way of giving simultaneously a fairly large number of aspects, giving the commonplace a particular iridescence and a sonority, a harmonics, and that was the method of symbolism and of the 19th century impressionists, of Proust and Joyce and Pound and T.S. Eliot.

Q: And Dante. And Virgil. And Milton. And so on. Can you really complain of them?

A: No, not unless for a change you like a hard focus, and simplicity, and seeing things all in one plane or singly. Even then one does not so much complain as get interested in something else. Impressionism is fine but after you have had a lot of it you suddenly want something like cubism.

Q: And after cubism something like impressionism.

A: Or like Francis Rose or Eugene MacCown or the neoromantics. No doubt at all. Not after fifty years or so of something like cubism. That pendulum has been swinging and swinging since the caves of Altamira. Shall we return from rambling now and keep to the subject?

Q: Yes, though I am beginning to think any subject naturally rambles around by itself and to keep to it one has to ramble around after it. But we can return to the text. How does “Do not share, he will not bestow they can meditate, I am going to do so” organize an irregular commonplace? I appreciate that we had returned to rambling and excess, but what kind of organization is that?

A: Well, suppose you have a commonplace group of people before you and you wish to describe them, as a painter would wish to describe a piece of land in front of him. The painter can select out of it and isolate certain shapes or accents on which to arrange a composition in shapes or accents, rather than a composition in depths or effects of light and texture or as a setting for figures, and so on. Just so, out of your group of people you can select certain active attitudes to make a composition of them, rather than record the differences in the color of their eyes and hair, or in their political views, or tell a story involving all of them. You can say, Do not share, he will not bestow they can meditate, I am going to do so. Or you can apply the method to the universal and variable drama of grocers, and say:

First grocer. I am sincere.
Second grocer. I believe in service.
Third grocer. I love my mother.
Fourth grocer. I am rich?

Or you can color the drama by giving the characters pleasant names and broaden it by making the objects of their attitudes anything at all, that is, “it,” and say:

Harry. Should it be known.
Ashley. Could it have come
Amelia. Would it be known
Nuna. Or would it have come

And there you are.

Q: Where? Let us ramble back to the first example. It could have been done in the way you say, and I see that we have a set of statements abstracted from a reality, but all I see in it is a loose set of abstractions. Oh I do see that the postures, the dispositions and relations of the characters of four people in one moment have been “tenuously” conceived, and registered in an irreducible outline, as if Picabia were drawing. That much I can see and I think I like it. But I don’t recognize, in that much, an organization.

A: But any sentence is in itself an organization of experience, and in that little passage there is also the pictorial organization of simple juxtaposition, the verbal situation changes from the imperative to the third person singular to the third person plural to the first person singular. We have rhythm and rhyme, we have a style that is compact, simple, decisive. It is all, both in the manner and the literal sense, full of a vital tension. This tension is stabilized by the fact that Do not share, he will not bestow, they can meditate, I am going to do so, all, as sentences, express a relation between the present and the future, a relation that is modulated from sentence to sentence through several degrees of immediacy and closes in its highest degree of immediacy, its major or tonal center, so to say: I am going to do so. It is, to be bright about it, a tension of tenses. Also, the vocabulary is harmonized to the tenses: the laxer “bestow” and “meditate” to the negative and potential futures, the sharper and monosyllabic “share” and “do so” to the more present futures. All the aspects of the passage are informed with a single intention, or, if you like, sustain a contihuing vibration. As a verbal plastic one might almost say it is overorganized.

Q: Yes, but it is not very organized toward telling me anything about the group of people. As a vehicular organization I question it.

A: How much do you want conveyed? Actually the passage conveys enough, like an outline drawing or silhouette or X-ray or snapshot. Yet from the point of view of its intrinsic organization, its internal coherence and entity, the very small percentage of information it carries is mere courtesy, like the eggs and apples in arithmetic or the rubber balls in topology.

Q: Then it is not really about people, that is, some four actual people once?

A: Not quite. Four people once did, by being together, bring into being, for Gertrude Stein, that thing.

Q: So, as a matter of fact, it is about people?

A: It was once, in a way. But it is now complete in itself. Its “about” relationship, which was never essential, is now cut off or atrophied. Even the original relationship of these abstractions and the quality of their organization to the actual people was more a matter of ahere” and “out of” than “about.” If it were “about” anything still and essentially, if its meaning depended on that relationship, it would not be complete. The completeness of “two plus two equals four” does not now depend on being about apples or dinosaurs or whatever originally led to it as an observation.

Q: But “two plus two” can be applied in many cases of quantity, even if its completeness is in itself.

A: Of course. Literature is not quite arithmetic but it comes close to it in proverbs and some poetry, particularly quotable poetry. One counts apples by referring them to numbers, and one can count the quality of a situation or of what not by referring it to proverbs or a quotation or for that matter a word. But these have a reality of their own which does not depend on their occasional use of being referred to or on the experience that first occasioned them. Nursery rhymes, advertising slogans, the declensions and conjugations in grammar books, all have to some degree this disconnected reality. The four sentences quoted can- not be universally applied, but often enough to make them a commonplace a group of people will demonstrate them. A group will present variously the peremptory, the reserved, the competent, and the determined together, and just barely outside the central focus of what they consider they are there for. The four sentences moreover reproduce exactly the tension and animation produced by several different personal intentions together. It is what everybody knows, since the way one sits, the tone of one’s voice, all of one’s behavior in such a group is qualified by one’s apprehension of it. But nobody knows it articulately or in isolation because it has not been put directly into words that are more than a historical account of a particular occasion or a contribution to the academic study of group dynamics. This little passage does put it in durable words.

Q: Does it really imply all that? Is art that long? I mean, am I, in reading some four short sentences, to read all that and more into them?

A: No, not unless you care to. All that or something like it goes into making the sentences solid and complete and possessed of themselves, into sustaining their quality to the utmost. Just as a great deal of climatology and aeronautics goes into the simplest flight. But that is nothing, or need be nothing, to you as a passenger.

 

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Book

Gertrude Stein How to Write
Lume Books

‘Dispensing with traditional form and structure, some of the most challenging works of English literature emerged from this era, and its authors Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and Ezra Pound.

‘Gertrude Stein was herself a modernist writer and playwright who spearheaded the movement, developing her ‘continuous present’ style of narration. Among her many dense works is How to Write, a work that still challenges and provokes today’s readers.

‘In the book, Stein uses the English language in ways that seem unorthodox. Her syntax and grammatical control is loose, and there is no real message in what ‘proper writing’ should be. It remains a sort of text for her way of writing, with a repetitious style that delights in the abstract nature of words and of language.

‘The book is split into eight sections, including ‘sentences’, ‘forensics’ and ‘a grammarian’, but the 120,000 words blend into one absorbing whole.’ — Lume Books

Excerpt

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Lovely paean to the maestro. ** David, Hi. In the research I did on Kinkel when I was working on ‘My Loose Thread’ it seemed pretty certain that he wasn’t into Marilyn Manson and that kind of transgressive clickbait stuff, or he barely was, and that was one of big the reasons why I was drawn to him as an inspiration. So I hope he wasn’t. I don’t think your accusation against my work would hold up in court, ha ha. I like your Kinkel pic. It more than captures him. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Yes, and I still haven’t gone to The Real McCoy. I was going with Zac, and he hurt his back, so we’re supposed to go today, but don’t count on it given my American junk food-related inadvertent flakiness. I’m guessing you’re the one who turned your love onto that TV series, and I’m assuming it was good since you wouldn’t lead your love astray. Love getting so bored he spends three hours looking for interesting artist-made chandeliers for one of my future blog posts, and the happy ending is that he succeeds, G. ** Tosh Berman, Yeah, that interview was sad indeed. Oh, wow, I think I remember that your dad did a Heliczer cover. That’s wild. I’ll go see if I can hunt it (or at least the cover image) down. Hope you’re doing really well, Tosh. ** Misanthrope, Hi. I remember David being very sympathetic when we all hung out that time, and it’s good to know he still can be ‘cos your reports on him here have painted a more damning portrait. I think you should see your GP, yes. Mm, I’m a pretty trusting person. I feel like I have good instincts about people, and usually they’re proven right, and I’m not one to get angry very often, but when someone betrays my trust, watch out. Anyway, granted I’m in France, but I find most people pretty trustworthy. Bad eggs seem pretty rare. ** Maria, Isabella, Camila, Malaria, Gabriela, I’m happy to have caused you betterment. Stress is the fucking worst. Mine is usually about money, which I assume is pretty normal. Sleep tight. ** Verity Pawloski, Yikes! ** Shane, I do have a guilty pleasure kind of thing about that song ‘Oh L’Amour’. ** -l@rst, HI, bud. Happy to be of service. Oh, wow, awesome about the spoken word album! I’ll imbibe in a short bit. Everyone, d.l. -l@rst is better known IRL as a fine writer and purveyor of other fine stuff named Laurence Lillvik, and he has two poems on a new spoken word collection that you can hear and even buy on bandcamp, and I certainly recommend that you click this and find him and listen. Sweet! ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. Sirks are pretty easy to find, I think. A surprising number are freebies on youtube. Ever so much love and strength to you and your dad, maestro and dear comrade. ** Bill, Hi. Ooh, ‘We’re All Going to the World’s Fair’ looks very fun! Huh. I’ll figure out where it’s hiding. Thank you! ** Brendan, Me too. I saw tons of Fassbinder films long before I ever saw a Sirk film. I’m glad you loved it. Love fucking rules! ** Brian, Hey, Brian. Yep, there he is, all blog throne-ensconced. You know,I’ve only seen two or three Sirks for no good reason. I think ‘Written on the Wind’ was my favorite. So far. Ha ha, well, I looked into ‘Moonfall’, and as I probably have mentioned before, I’m a disaster movie addict, so I am, for better or worse, very excited to see ‘Moonfall’, but I seriously like every single disaster movie no matter how terrible. So I think Zac, a fellow addict, and I will be rushing to a theater here to see it in the next day or so. Ridiculous, I know, but addiction is addiction. And, hey, you got some laughs out of it, so all is not lost? We can compare notes, ha ha. What did Monday do to you, sir? ** Okay. Do you want to learn the secrets of writing from the one, the only Gertrude Stein? Then check out this post, and maybe even get the book it circles around. See you tomorrow.