writing in the wake of his classes (as the Surrealists and other moderns, notably the wife of W. B. Yeats, did also) to demonstrate to herself the creative and alert potential of cognition and its language even when removed from intention — like Sigmund Freud, whose Interpretation of Dreams (1900) showed the intense poetic activity of the sleeping mind. As a result, her first encounter with postimpressionist painting in France did not discomfit her as it did the many Europeans who felt disoriented by the abandonment of a focalized perspective and by the fragmentation of the viewer's position that would become even further radicalized by Cubism during the next decade.
The abstraction of formal elements that she found in Cezanne's still lifes, the attention to the geometries of shapes that made his canvases a composition of spheres and cones, Stein adapted in a prose that foregrounded the geometries of language, the nouns and verbs and adjectives, the pauses and punctuations that she would love all of her life. In the careful construction and repetitions of her sentences in Three Lives — 'It was a very happy family there all together in the kitchen, the good Anna and Sally and old Baby and young Peter and jolly little Rags' — Stein created a stylistic primer of the symmetry and formality of the common sentence while simultaneously rendering its fatuous logic ironic. In later years she would write this sentence -313- again, only this time about the sentence itself: 'It makes everybody happy to have words together. It makes everybody happy to have words apart.'
These experiments culminated in the collection of prose pieces she called Tender Buttons (1914), where Stein moved from the postimpressionism of Three Lives to the extreme abstraction of a verbal Cubism with only vestigial references to represented things. In Tender Buttons Stein abandons even the already abstracted mimesis of the still life hinted at in her subtitle — 'objects food rooms' — to concentrate on the concrete qualities and compositional possibilities of words themselves. It is not objects, food, and rooms that she represents but the playful disposition, in juxtapositions we now recognize as collage, of the sounds and look of words associated with objects, food, and rooms. 'A sight a whole sight and a little groan grinding makes a trimming such a sweet singing trimming and a red thing not a round thing but a white thing, a red thing and a white thing.' With this writing, the reader becomes a viewer who must forgo communication with a work of art that does not ask to be 'understood' but obtrudes its medium — words as concrete as though they were laid on with a knife, like the thick paint Stein reports the outraged public tried to scratch off Matisse's La Femmeau Chapeau at the autumn salon — and as full of harmonic gradations as a musical composition by Stein's friend Erik Satie, who himself playfully invoked painting in such titles as 'Three Pieces in the Shape of a Pear.'
But Stein's grand opus, a thousand-page American genealogy called The Making of Americans, represents an astonishingly early text of modernistic maturity: well underway while T. S. Eliot was still a Harvard undergraduate, the work was completed in 1911 (but not published until 1925), several years before Ezra Pound published his Imagist manifesto in the March 1913 issue of Poetry magazine or Ernest Hemingway saw his first Red Cross ambulance in 1917. Written far ahead of its time, this big book should have established itself as Stein's revolutionary masterwork, her Finnegans Wake, as it were: the most avant-garde of the modern family epics that include John Galsworthy's post-Victorian Forsyte Saga, Thomas Mann's neobaroque Buddenbrooks, and D. H. Lawrence's scandalous The Rainbow. From its startling opening narration — 'Once an angry man -314- dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. 'Stop!' cried the groaning old man at last, 'Stop!' I did not drag my father beyond this tree' — Stein makes her own writing a violent remembering of violent rememberings, an allegory of the verbal and stylistic manhandling of one's literary forebears and traditions. Her remarkable grammatical effects in this text reflect her progress in elaborating the metaphysical implications for the collapse of traditional notions of space and time that were inaugurated with Albert Einstein's publication of his work on the special theory of relativity in 1905, and that Stein, like many other American writers including William Faulkner, attended more closely in the works of the French philosopher Henri Bergson's notion of a durée, a subjective quality of time as a present duration observable in memory. Stein, who was also friendly with Alfred North Whitehead and therefore familiar with his work on the relations of time, space, and matter, made the syntactical handling of tense in her writing a performance of the way the times of life in individuals and families felt during their present duration:
Repeating is always in every one, it settles in them in the beginning of their middle living to be a steady repetition with very little changing. There may be in them then much beginning and much ending, but it is steady repeating in them and the children with them have in them the pounding of steady march of repeating the parents of them have in them.
Stein's prose too has in it the steady pounding of the repeating, thereby rendering its own voice or speech, its own speaking ego or narrating subject, itself as intuitively atremble as the living being of the Herslands, whose story it tells. Before 'stream of consciousness' was even properly implemented by Virginia Woolf and James Joyce as a salient technique of novelistic modernism, Gertrude Stein was already problematizing it and dismantling it in her texts.
Stein insisted throughout her life that she had invented modern writing, yet both in her own time, and during the decades after World War II when critical opinion was shaping the literary history of the modern period, her significance as an innovator was eclipsed by that of the 'lost generation' novelists (to borrow her own term), Ernest Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, whom she befriended, encouraged, and instructed. Until a recent critical tend-315- ency began to elevate and foreground avant-garde texts over more traditional modernist productions, Stein's reputation survived mainly on the basis of her salon, her art collection, her patronage of Picasso, Matisse, and Gris, and her dominant personality that evoked both subtle and crude ambivalences in people made uncomfortable by the unconventional way she deployed her own gender identity. Her intellectual and artistic ambitions and her social power tended to be construed as egotistical and patriarchal in this gifted woman, who had been writing and experimenting for nearly twenty years before the Nineteenth Amendment gave women the vote in the United States in August 1920. The feminist impulses that led her to make her first sustained text a coded lesbian novel (Q.E.D.; or, Things as They Are [1903]), and to treat in Three Lives the conditions of lower-class ethnic women who are, in fiction, the most invisible Americans, flowered in her most popular and famous book, the 1933 Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Turning conventional perspectives upside down, like a Cubist painting, this revisionary history restores to the success of the modern art movement the labors and contributions of the wives, mistresses, sisters, and servants who invisibly cooked, kept house, posed, inspired, typed, managed, published, and loved the artists and made their work possible. Matisse may have been master to his disciples (Stein playfully called him the C. M. or cher maître), but it was Madame Matisse who posed until she was exhausted, took care of his diphtheritic daughter, accepted his abuse, and taught him how to haggle with buyers. She more than deserved to season her soup with the laurel wreath her husband eventually had bestowed on him. With the cunning inversion that lets Alice's voice and interest tell the story of modern art, Stein offers her own companion a silver anniversary gift in the form of a textual embrace, a text that problematizes the notion of authorship with a principle of female collectivity that makes it ambiguous and undecidable whether it was Gertrude or Alice who 'created' the books, having become two in one mind and one life as well as in one flesh.
The issue of gender was just one of many complex factors informing the extremely heterogeneous and complex ideology of modernism. Much of the conservatism of 'high modernism,' the classical poetics of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, was produced by the fusion of an antiromantic intellectual bias, formally articulated by the young - 316- English critic T. E. Hulme (who fell in World War I), and wedded to an elitist reaction against what was perceived, in the tradition of Matthew Arnold, as the greedy materialism, cultural philistinism, and spiritual bankruptcy of modern society. In his Culture and Anarchy (1869), Arnold wrote, 'Our society distributes itself into Barbarians, Philistines, and Populace; and America is just ourselves, with the Barbarians quite left out, and the Populace nearly. This leaves the Philistines for the bulk of the nation.' Art, by imposing a geometry, discipline, and order on itself, served the modernists as a formal bulwark against what Eliot in his essay on Joyce's Ulysses was to call 'the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.' Pound, in his essay 'Why Books?' was to write of 'the damned and despised litterati' — 'when their very medium, the very essence of their work, the application of
