Logan Esdale

On Ulla Dydo’s
«The Language That Rises»
as Stein Criticism Turns 100

Back in 1909, when Gertrude Stein published her first book, Three Lives, the review in the Kansas City Star raised an issue that has long vexed Stein’s readers and critics: “Here is a literary artist of such originality that it is not easy to conjecture what special influences have gone into the making of her” (qtd. in Gallup 79). Indeed, what are her “special influences”? What made Stein the writer she was? Are these even the right questions to ask?

So we now have a century of Stein publications to consider, hers and those of her critics. Arguably, and I subscribe to this view, it wasn’t until after Stein died in 1946, and all of her notebooks, manuscripts, typescripts and letters were archived and available at Yale University, that the real work of understanding her “special influences” began. As we reflect on a century of Stein we also need to (re)consider what may be the essential book of criticism: Ulla E. Dydo’s Gertrude Stein: The Language That Rises, 1923-1934. It was published in hardcover in 2003 and has recently been reprinted in paperback — and it proves the value of the Yale archive.

In her own lifetime, Stein made it clear that her writing “rises” out of daily life, out of lived experience, and indeed it was the people who had met her that seemed to know and like her work best. Hemingway, for instance, became an ardent supporter after visiting her at home, where they looked at the famous paintings and “[s]he showed me the many volumes of manuscript that she had written and that [Alice Toklas] typed each day. Writing every day made her happy” (17). One problem, however, was that except for Toklas no one had a comprehensive understanding of the evolving creative conditions of Stein’s work.

There are biographies of Stein and critical studies of selected Stein texts, but the most ambitious and enlightening books are those that have done both — to borrow the subtitle of Donald Sutherland’s, they offer us a “biography of her work.” In 1950 Thornton Wilder wrote to Toklas about the manuscript of Sutherland’s book, Gertrude Stein (1951):

At once I was very enthusiastic. It’s the right direction and it asks the right questions. Books will come later that will do it deeper and more authoritatively, but this is the first that relates her creation itself with her life-long concern with ‘what is creation?’ [… ] Now I wait for someone’s next book and of course my assurance holds that the great gloire is coming — a gloire which will be light and heat and energy for twentieth century literature and philosophy — for this the second half of the twentieth.

Richard Bridgman’s Gertrude Stein in Pieces (1970) might have been what Wilder had wished for, but I have my doubts. As a catalogue raisonné, Stein in Pieces does offer a comprehensive account of her development and career, and although Bridgman established a chronology of composition, which is crucial, he focuses on the record of her published texts. He makes little use of her letters and almost nothing of her manuscripts. Yet the book did forward the notion that seeing each Stein text in relation to the rest of her work is a necessary goal for the critic who wants to produce the “great gloire.”

Dydo offers us what Wilder thought Stein’s work needed: a reader who can truly walk with Stein through “her life-long concern with ‘what is creation?’” Wilder had seen the manuscripts and must have felt, as Dydo does, that they “give access to her creative process” (3). And although this book focuses on a part of Stein’s career (1923-34), it refers to numerous texts from before and after those dates. The Language That Rises was years in the making and behind it are other projects, including A Stein Reader (1993) and, along with Edward Burns, The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder (1996). Her experience as an editor and an unmatched acquaintance with the compositions at all stages — notebook, manuscript, typescript or print — deeply inform her insights as a critic.

The Language That Rises deliberately studies the least understood period of Stein’s career. Most critics have been drawn to the early period, when her “portraits” of people and things can be read in relation to visual arts, and the later period, when personal narratives such as The Autobiography Of Alice B. Toklas (1933) made her a celebrity. Much of the work from the middle period has been regarded as too difficult, but as Dydo observes about the twenty-one plays Stein wrote in 1930-32, “What does it mean to say that they are difficult when they have hardly been studied?” (441). It should be noted that even after we read Dydo’s explication these plays may seem difficult, in the sense that their meanings remain unsettled; even with her insight she can sometimes offer us only “insistent questions” and “preliminary comments” (441). What we always get, however, are the various reasons why Stein wrote (and it’s this question that needs answers), such as her “rejection of the rigid conventions of language led her gradually to dissociate herself from all inflexible forms, including hierarchical thinking, authoritarian organization, prescriptive grammar, and chronological narrative — aspects of the patriarchy. In a sense, all her work is a demonstration of possibilities of grammar for democracy” (17).

The book opens with three concise chapters on Stein’s work in general. We get the thoughts of someone who has read Stein for over three decades with concentration and love. Remember that it “is not the mind that puts the words in order but the words that open the mind to possibilities of order” or “Stein composes coherence rather than composing in a world whose coherence is given” (67, 197). There are aspects that seem particular to Dydo herself — her amazing ear for Stein’s puns, for instance, or her encyclopedic knowledge of early twentieth-century arts culture in Europe and America — but the voice is welcoming, not intimidating. Stein truly thought her writing was for everybody, and Dydo likewise demonstrates that a critical engagement requires no special abilities. Above all, she helps us appreciate Stein’s “comic spirit” (22).

These introductory chapters also address the complex relationship that Stein’s life has to her writing. Dydo notes that because Stein wrote out of daily life, “everything she wrote included the writer who shaped it. Experience yielded the vocabulary for writing” (19). This comment, seen out of context, suggests that to understand Stein’s writing we do need to understand her life. To what extent is Stein’s writing autobiographical? There are unavoidable contradictions on this issue. The book details Stein’s life experiences, and knowing the context does open up a text. Indeed, with the whole of Stein’s textual life empirically sifted, Dydo goes so much further than the Star reviewer in 1909 who was unable to offer “conjecture” on Stein’s “special influences.” But she distinguishes between Stein’s own private life and the private life of the work, and it is the latter that Dydo examines. The poet Peter Gizzi has coined a term that I think applies perfectly to Stein in this regard: her writing is not autobiographical but autographical (108). Stein did not write about herself. She wrote words, and Dydo has historicized them — where they came from and where they go (“one Stein piece engenders the next” [78]).

When Emily Dickinson’s writing was published in the 1890s — and Stein was in Boston attending Radcliffe College — readers were given the story of how she had made numerous booklets of her poems. Dickinson’s editor Mabel Todd called them fascicles, and the name has stuck. Dydo has done something similar for Stein. Because of her work at the Yale archive, we know that her writing process had three stages: Stein often started a piece in what Dydo calls a carnet, a small notebook; she then worked it up, again by hand, in a cahier, a larger notebook; and then the cahier pages were typed out by Toklas and any final revisions (not many, usually) were made to the typescript. “Hundreds of carnets must have been filled,” she says, and the “scribbled notes tell what she did, what she saw, what she thought, where she went, and how she worked, all interlocked in the service of composition. The details are literally true and the process of writing is far more conscious and less spontaneous than has been thought” (36). The cahiers reveal that Stein often used them as a painter would a canvas: “Many manuscript notebooks are filled to the last line of the last page of the last cahier of any one work. [… ] Stein let space determine composition” (41).

Throughout her book Dydo turns to the carnets and cahiers to read the “referential details [that] make it possible to follow, in a raw state, what was happening to Stein, what she did and what she thought” (83). And with her background as an editor of Stein, she has added footnote after footnote to thicken our sense of Stein’s living context. All of this presents a radically different Stein from the voice we hear and see in print, that abstract voice committed to the essence rather than the informational quality of words. Stein in print decontextuates words, and she liked the idea that her texts were complete as is: that, in other words, they needed no further explanation. (Stein herself used the term “decontextuate.”) This public stance has always made the task of being a Stein critic a tricky one. Dydo has, more than any other critic, balanced a respect for the “essential privacy of [Stein’s] writing and living,” and for the words in their essential state, with what can be learned when we (as I can put it) recontextuate (115). “Never introspective or confessional,” notes Dydo, “she intended us to read her text, not where it came from. My study, however, is about both her texts and their sources” (69). In this way, Dydo puts both the compositional and referential impulses — Stein’s textual and social worlds — into “constant, creative opposition” (19).

The eleven chapters that follow the introduction read through Stein’s work chronologically, from early spring 1923, when Stein was in southern France, to summer 1934, when she was in Bilignin preparing for the six-month lecture tour in America. Some of texts from that time include the 1926 Hogarth Press edition of the lecture “Composition As Explanation,” the opera Four Saints In Three Acts (written in 1927 though not performed until 1934), How To Write (1931), one of the five Plain Edition titles she self-published from 1930 to 1933, and the Autobiography. But in looking beyond all of the commentary on the texts, and Dydo’s utilization of Yale’s archive, two of the most revelatory aspects involve Stein’s self-consciousness about her audience, and the importance of country living. Dydo undermines the notion that Stein experienced a definitive shift in 1932 when she wrote the Autobiography. In the years after Stein delivered “Composition As Explanation” at Cambridge and Oxford, there emerged a “striving for success and publicity” (419). Seeing the Autobiography as an extension of earlier developments also leads to a reconsideration of the later work, which can seem too oriented for public recognition. In the end, then, although the standard description of Stein having three periods (early, middle and late) may well persist, Dydo’s work makes a powerful argument for continuity.

We are so used to thinking of Stein in Paris that Dydo’s narrative is startling: a lot of what Stein accomplished in these years took inspiration from her life in rural France. In 1923 she stayed in St.-Rémy and Nice, then from 1924 to 1928 she spent long summers on Belley, staying at the Hotel Pernollet, and then from 1929 on she leased a house nearby in Bilignin. Dydo argues that 1923 was a significant turning point: in late 1922 Stein’s first book in eight years was published, Geography And Plays, and “as she became known both as writer and as collector, American tourists, including relatives, increasingly invaded her privacy in Paris and her time for work in the summer, making a retreat a necessity” (136). In 1923 she was reflecting on her twenty-year career — in 1903 she had written Q.E.D. and started The Making Of Americans—and absorbing the “new forms of social life and local history” she encountered in the countryside (440). And when she secured a long-term lease on the Bilignin house, and got their dog Basket, she experienced for the first time some of the pride of ownership and place: “Family living in the country house with the dog changed the ways in which the daily life at home entered work. In writing done in Paris, the private life [… ] is never prominent, and the impulse in the studio is compositional” (335). In other words, just as Stein’s manuscripts open up the referential elements, so too does an understanding of Stein in her rural context.

Because Dydo (and her writing companion, the late visual artist William Rice) looks at Stein from the perspective of contemporary poetry and art practice, The Language That Rises was written not just for the sake of literary history but for everyone interested in the medium of language and grammatical possibilities. Stein’s conception of geography and landscape, for instance, puts poetry into dialogue with other art media. She tested and modified so many genres to determine which could support spatial narrative: that is, where (in Dydo’s words) the words are “in relation in the space of the composition” and everything is “visible at once rather than one by one in time” (70-71). She discovered that “[p]ortraits, poetry, and plays are more likely than linear narrative to hold and concentrate the steady internal movement of composition” (159). It is to poetry’s benefit if artists in other fields embrace Stein’s writing and Dydo’s book will help them do exactly that.

Anyone looking at such writing perceives abstract forms moving into patterns in a space but also tries to read the words for meaning. From the repetitions and permutations the eye gains a sense of design while the mind reading a phrase over and over loses the sense of meaning. Constructions rearrange themselves constantly. Looking collides with reading, eye with mind, to create the textual instability that is also the magnificence of Stein pages. The eye ends up asking what it is seeing, how it is seeing, what reading is, what knowing is. (109-110)

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Works Cited

Gallup, Donald. “A Book Is a Book.” New Colophon 1.1 (January 1948): 67-80.

Gizzi, Peter. “Extract from a Letter to Steve Farmer.” American Poets in the 21st Century: The New Poetics. Ed. Claudia Rankine and Lisa Sewell. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 2007. 107-108.

Hemingway, Ernest. A Moveable Feast. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1964.

Wilder, Thornton. “Letter to Alice Toklas on 16 October 1950.” Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, MSS 76. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Box 138, folder 3239.

Logan Esdale lives in Long Beach, California, with the artist Lara Odell. He has a chapbook out from Phylum Press, and an article is forthcoming in Textual Cultures on Marianne Moore’s correspondence with George Saintsbury in the late 1920s. He is an Assistant Professor of English at Chapman University.