Ida a Novel (33 page)

Dudley Fitts, a teacher at Choate and later a well-known Greek translator, wrote to Stein on January 18 about the transcript: “The stenographer who took down your lecture had difficulties which I have tried to iron out, but I’m not sure I’ve been successful” (
FF
285). On February 5 he sent the page proofs and said, “I had to ‘restore’ a great deal of the lecture from memory. I hope I didn’t spoil anything. Sorry to have missed entirely what you said about the noun; but the text was so corrupt that I couldn’t do anything with it. If you will be so kind as to look it over, making any additions or deletions you want, we shall be most grateful” (YCAL 106.2109). We do not know what, if any, changes Stein made.

“How Writing Is Written” thus occupies a unique place in Stein’s corpus as a social text that carries the marks of its particular occasion. It includes thoughts that arose as she spoke, moments of direct address to her audience (around sixty boys, as well as faculty and some former students), and the restoration handiwork of Fitts. William Rice has noted that during her 1934–1935 lectures she “often improvised at some length,” but such moments were recorded in audience recollections, not in her published texts (
TW
337). “I have been trying in every possible way to get the sense of immediacy,” she said, and this lecture, even if unintentionally, embodies that aim.

A month after Wilder finished an introductory essay for Stein’s
Narration
in May 1935, he set sail for Europe. During his visit with Stein in Bilignin he talked at length with her about the ideas then shaping
The Geographical History Of America
, and he read
Four In America
(1933–1934) in typescript. When Wilder returned to the United States in November, he delivered to Random House the finished typescript of
Geographical
History
and told Stein that he was reading
Four In America
again (
TW
66). He continued to read and reread Stein in the years to come, but it was in 1935 that the groundwork of his impressions was built.

Wilder wrote his second Stein introduction, for
Geographical History
, in 1936 and a third in 1947 for
Four In America
. “Gertrude Stein Makes Sense” was Wilder’s slightly condensed version of that third introduction’s opening ten pages. His essays complement the Stein lecture and together they describe her mind as she moved toward
Ida
. Although Wilder’s essays were written to accompany particular Stein texts, they also work more generally as a formal voicing of his insider’s perspective. It’s clear from Stein’s letters to Wilder that she trusted his insights and believed that her audience would find his essays useful.

How Writing Is Written

(1935)

Gertrude Stein

What I want to talk about to you tonight is just the general subject of how writing is written. It is a large subject, but one can discuss it in a very short space of time. The beginning of it is what everybody has to know: everybody is contemporary with his period. A very bad painter once said to a very great painter, “Do what you like, you cannot get rid of the fact that we are contemporaries.” That is what goes on in writing. The whole crowd of you are contemporary to each other, and the whole business of writing is the question of living in that contemporariness. Each generation has to live in that. The thing that is important is that nobody knows what the contemporariness is. In other words, they don’t know where they are going, but they are on their way.

Each generation has to do with what you would call the daily life: and a writer, painter, or any sort of creative artist, is not at all ahead of his time. He is contemporary. He can’t live in the past, because it is gone. He can’t live in the future because no one knows what it is. He can live only in the present of his daily life. He is expressing the thing that is being expressed by everybody else in their daily lives. The thing you have to remember is that everybody lives a contemporary daily life. The writer lives it, too, and expresses it imperceptibly. The fact remains that in the act of living, everybody has to live contemporarily. But in the things concerning art and literature they don’t have to live contemporarily, because it doesn’t make any difference; and they live about forty years behind their time. And that is the real explanation of why the artist or painter is not recognized by his contemporaries. He is expressing the time-sense of his contemporaries, but nobody is really interested. After the new generation has come, after the grandchildren, so to speak, then the opposition dies out: because after all there is then a new contemporary expression to oppose.

That is really the fact about contemporariness. As I see the whole crowd of you, if there are any of you who are going to express yourselves contemporarily, you will do something which most people won’t want to look at. Most of you will be so busy living the contemporary life that it will be like the tired businessman: in the things of the mind you will want the things you know. And too, if you don’t live contemporarily, you are a nuisance. That is why we live contemporarily. If a man goes along the street with horse and carriage in New York in the snow, that man is a nuisance; and he knows it, so now he doesn’t do it. He would not be living, or acting, contemporarily: he would only be in the way, a drag.

The world can accept me now because there is coming out of
your
generation somebody they don’t like, and therefore they accept me because I am sufficiently past in having been contemporary so they don’t have to dislike me. So thirty years from now I shall be accepted. And the same thing will happen again: that is the reason why every generation has the same thing happen. It will always be the same story, because there is always the same situation presented. The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn’t make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.

Most of you know that in a funny kind of way you are nearer your grandparents than your parents. Since this contemporariness is always there, nobody realizes that you cannot follow it up. That is the reason people discover—those interested in the activities of other people—that they cannot understand their contemporaries. If you kids started in to write, I wouldn’t be a good judge of you, because I am of the third generation. What you are going to do I don’t know any more than anyone else. But I created a movement of which you are the grandchildren. The contemporary thing is the thing you can’t get away from. That is the fundamental thing in all writing.

Another thing you have to remember is that each period of time not only has its contemporary quality, but it has a time-sense. Things move more quickly, slowly, or differently, from one generation to another. Take the Nineteenth Century. The Nineteenth Century was roughly the Englishman’s Century. And their method, as they themselves, in their worst moments, speak of it, is that of “muddling through.” They begin at one end and hope to come out at the other: their grammar, parts of speech, methods of talk, go with this fashion. The United States began a different phase when, after the Civil War, they discovered and created out of their inner need a different way of life. They created the Twentieth Century. The United States, instead of having the feeling of beginning at one end and ending at another, had the conception of assembling the whole thing out of its parts, the whole thing which made the Twentieth Century productive. The Twentieth Century conceived an automobile as a whole, so to speak, and then created it, built it up out of its parts. It was an entirely different point of view from the Nineteenth Century’s. The Nineteenth Century would have seen the parts, and worked towards the automobile through them.

Now in a funny sort of way this expresses, in different terms, the difference between the literature of the Nineteenth Century and the literature of the Twentieth. Think of your reading. If you look at it from the days of Chaucer, you will see that what you might call the “internal history” of a country always affects its use of writing. It makes a difference in the expression, in the vocabulary, even in the handling of grammar. In [Robert T.] Vanderbilt’s amusing story in your
Literary Magazine
, when he speaks of the fact that he is tired of using quotation marks and isn’t going to use them any more, with him that is a joke; but when I began writing, the whole question of punctuation was a vital question.
¹
You see, I had this new conception: I had this conception of the whole paragraph, and in
The Making Of Americans
I had this idea of a whole thing. But if you think of contemporary English writers, it doesn’t work like that at all. They conceive of it as pieces put together to make a whole, and I conceived it as a whole made up of its parts. I didn’t know what I was doing any more than you know, but in response to the need of my period I was doing this thing. That is why I came in contact with people who were unconsciously doing the same thing. They had the Twentieth Century conception of a whole. So the element of punctuation was very vital. The comma was just a nuisance. If you got the thing as a whole, the comma kept irritating you all along the line. If you think of a thing as a whole, and the comma keeps sticking out, it gets on your nerves; because, after all, it destroys the reality of the whole. So I got rid more and more of commas. Not because I had any prejudice against commas; but the comma was a stumbling-block. When you were conceiving a sentence, the comma stopped you. That is the illustration of the question of grammar and parts of speech, as part of the daily life as we live it.

The other thing which I accomplished was the getting rid of nouns. In the Twentieth Century you feel like movement. The Nineteenth Century didn’t feel that way. The element of movement was not the predominating thing that they felt. You know that in your lives movement is the thing that occupies you most—you feel movement all the time. And the United States had the first instance of what I call Twentieth Century writing. You see it first in Walt Whitman. He was the beginning of the movement. He didn’t see it very clearly, but there was a sense of movement that the European was much influenced by, because the Twentieth Century has become the American Century. That is what I mean when I say that each generation has its own literature.

There is a third element. You see, everybody in his generation has his sense of time which belongs to his crowd. But then, you always have the memory of what you were brought up with. In most people that makes a double time, which makes confusion. When one is beginning to write he is always under the shadow of the thing that is just past. And that is the reason why the creative person always has the appearance of ugliness. There is this persistent drag of the habits that belong to you. And in struggling away from this thing there is always an ugliness. That is the other reason why the contemporary writer is always refused. It is the effort of escaping from the thing which is a drag upon you that is so strong that the result is an apparent ugliness: and the world always says of the new writer, “It is so ugly!” And they are right, because it
is
ugly. If you disagree with your parents, there is an ugliness in the relation. There is a double resistance that makes the essence of this thing ugly.

You always have in your writing the resistance outside of you and inside of you, a shadow upon you, and the thing which you must express. In the beginning of your writing, this struggle is so tremendous that the result is ugly; and that is the reason why the followers are always accepted before the person who made the revolution. The person who has made the fight probably makes it seem ugly, although the struggle has the much greater beauty. But the followers die out; and the man who made the struggle and the quality of beauty remains in the intensity of the fight. Eventually it comes out all right, and so you have this very queer situation which always happens with the followers: the original person has to have in him a certain element of ugliness. You know that is what happens over and over again: the statement made that it is ugly—the statement made against me for the last twenty years. And they are quite right, because it
is
ugly. But the essence of that ugliness is the thing which will always make it beautiful. I myself think it is much more interesting when it seems ugly, because in it you see the element of the fight. The literature of one hundred years ago is perfectly easy to see, because the sediment of ugliness has settled down and you get the solemnity of its beauty. But to a person of my temperament, it is much more amusing when it has the vitality of the struggle.

In my own case, the Twentieth Century, which America created after the Civil War, and which had certain elements, had a definite influence on me. And in
The Making Of Americans
, which is a book I would like to talk about, I gradually and slowly found out that there were two things I had to think about; the fact that knowledge is acquired, so to speak, by memory; but that when you know anything, memory doesn’t come in. At any moment that you are conscious of knowing anything, memory plays no part. When any of you feels anybody else, memory doesn’t come into it. You have the sense of the immediate. Remember that my immediate forebears were people like [George] Meredith, Thomas Hardy, and so forth, and you will see what a struggle it was to do this thing. This was one of my first efforts to give the appearance of one time-knowledge, and not to make it a narrative story. This is what I mean by immediacy of description: you will find it in
The Making Of Americans
, on page 284: “It happens very often that a man has it in him, that a man does something, that he does it very often that he does many things, when he is a young man when he is an old man, when he is an older man.” Do you see what I mean? And here is a description of a thing that is very interesting: