This may remain the ultimate history of the Lost Generation rive gauche avant garde in Paris around WWI and through the 1920's. I'm tempted to pluck a bouquet of bons mots and tidbits about favorite artists and authors, but surely that's been done elsewhere.
The book could give gossip a good name.
Otherly, this is probably the most accessible extant example of Stein sentences, a matter worth study. It's also a useful though limited revelation of Stein's intentions in her other well known works, The Making of Americans, 3 Lives, Stanzas in Meditation, Tender Buttons, and Geography and Plays. This contains as extensive and accessible set of reflections as any I've seen by Stein on her relationship with publishing and the general difficulties of the public with most of her work.
"[Stein] says that listening to the rhythmn of [Basket the poodle's] water drinking made her recognize the difference beween sentences and paragrpahs, that paragraphs are emotional and that sentences are not" (248).
This is deliberately provocative, impossible in the literal, and worthy of study.
"Gertrude Stein, in her work, has always been possessed by the intellectual passion for exactitude in the description of inner and outer reality. She has produced a simplification by this concentration, and as a result, the destruction of associational emotion in poetry and prose. She knows that beauty, music, decoration, the result of emotion should never be the cause, even events should not be the cause of emotion nor should they be the material of poetry and prose. Nor should emotion itself be the cause of poetry or prose. They should consist of an exact reproduction of either an outer or an inner reality" (211).
One might ask how anything without emotion might render either an inner or an outer reality. But Stein's intentions might (I can only surmise) be approached by pulling apart the distinctions between incidental sentiments that relate to an author's circumstantial relationship to historical events, and the passion involved in a recognition of the ubiquity of such relationships, and the music or dance of their so relating.
In my long experience as a thoroughly failed author and poet, one way that one may thoroughly fail is by mistaking one's emotion for the readers' emotions, one's relation to the text for the readers' relation to the text.
I feel certain that this is what T.S. Eliot, for example, tried to get at with his theory of the objective correlative. Yet I have still nowhere seen this expressed in a way that satisfies me, and it strikes me as perfectly reasonable that one baffles students in trying to express it. The thing is that what's intended by this POV and what's intended by the Romantic and Post-Romantic insistence that the acme of art is the expression of the author's inner emotion are not contradictory, and yet the words in which these things get couched most definitely are.
I think that the refinement needed to resolve this falls along these lines Yes, the writer's relationship to Universe or common concern resembles the readers' almost exactly; however, it differs in matters of the specific case. And the writers' POV of these matters, filtered through the readers' POV does not equal the readers' POV itself.
To avoid the distortion in this, the author cannot simply gush forth emotion. What results inevitably contains the emotion, the objects that provoked the emotion in their temporal array -- the history, in other words. Expunging these may provide relief to the writer; they don't provide this as well to the reader, who has experienced another history. However, that business of relationship is experienced by both parties. That retains public value. And it's not so much that having to hear personal details dilutes that value; we're happy enough to hear personal details properly framed. It's that changing the music or the structure to match the incidentals of one's own experience of Event distorts the experience of relationships otherwise offered.
Otherwise, the more emotion involved the better, and we shall call it passion instead of sentiment. As Louis-Ferdinand Celine quotes the biologist Savy, "Everything is emotion." I should think these poles are equally true.
It was at that time [of travelling in Granada] that Gertrude Stein's style gradually changed. She says hitherto she had been interested only in the insides of people, their chracter and what went on inside them, it was during that summer that she firstfelt a desre to express the rhythm o fthe visible world" (119).
For this kind of writing, see particularly Stanzas in Meditation, from Sun and Moon, as well as Tender Buttons.
Here's a passage I will have to read Picabia to judge:
"Picabia had conceived and is struggling with the problem that a line should have the vibration of a musical sound and that this vibration should be teh result of conceiving the human form and the human fac in so tenuous a fashion that it would induce such vibration in the line forming it. It is his way of achieving the disembodied" (210).
This should be compared to Olson in "Projective Verse."
Ach, no end to Stein. But I will have more opportunities with The Making of Americans shortly.
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