Where We Are

...The people sitting on the stools and eating in the drug store all looked and acted as if they lived in a small country town...

...Besides, it was not a simple prejudice but faced essential "complication...

...Perhaps her firmest ground of communication, after the verbal manner, is the romance she felt in the commonplace, her passionate apprehension and acute interpretation of ordinary phenomena which we mostly take for granted and ignore...

...With a single exception, an epigraph distinct from the book, all the passages are in her most lucid manners, not in the abstruse experimental styles for which she is better known...

...This too will bear meditation, our case of being rubes and cosmopolitans at once...

...This, and the whole difficult question of expatriation or long residence abroad, is dealt with summarily but sharply in one of the short sections of this book, under the perfect rubric We And They...

...Man is man was man will be gregarious and solitary"—which is true and fair enough, but she much preferred the conversant American soldier of World War II to the monologuist and raconteur of World War I. Conceivably, the individual who is conversant, sociable, even mercantile, not a simple absolute nor a simple yes or no, would be a creature of the Republican party, as against the aspiration to a unison chorus which occurs in Democratic feeling...

...The passages are shrewdly selected, as bearing on issues which are even more evident now than when she wrote...

...There is a great deal of touring and studying abroad, but how much living abroad is there and how much of it is for the purpose of creation...

...I was back in Paris from fighting and trying to police Germany, and we wandered about the streets together, nominally in search of strawberries and cakes, but intensively worrying about America's affair with Germany...

...Likewise, "The wooden houses of America excited me as nothing else in America excited me" and on she goes about them...

...And, as she would say, there we are...

...In 1945, when the gregariousness of the American Army became strangely concentrated on Germany, and fraternization was passing into infatuation, she was naturally appalled...

...If you do not represent anything you get a very dark look and the form has to be satisfied by the entry "self"—which makes me at least feel both archaic and immoral...

...Except in the case of 17th- or 18th-century houses, and perhaps now the ""shingle style" that has entered art history, we think a wooden house is a failure to be of brick or stone or concrete and steel—no doubt because our sculptural sense is now on the rampage—but Gertrude Stein, who did not care for sculpture and preferred a flat painted surface, loved any of our wooden buildings, even any shed in any state of disrepair...

...One thing that used to bother her Leftish friends in the '30s and '40s was her politics, a passionate allegiance to the Republican party and the middle class...

...She was rarely an isolationist in any field: "You don't like the Latins, or the Arabs or the Wops, or the British, well don't you forget a country can't live without friends " So her patriotism, emphatic and complete as it is, includes an essential gregariousness toward other nations...

...Chicago aside, our sense of any American city is now distracted by questions of housing, of transportation, of water supply and air pollution, and it is a great pleasure to be reminded that even endlessly under construction and entangled in themselves, our cities can be and usually are very beautiful indeed, with little or no dependence on the picturesque...

...Windows in a building are the most interesting thing in America," she says, and goes on about it...

...We worried about everything, about how American soldiers made love—which she could infer with incredible accuracy merely from the way they looked at women or spoke to them or followed them in the street—about the "peaceful penetration" of the Orient into the West, about the apparent decline of American delicacy, about what we could hope for from the Greek Orthodox Church underlying Russia, but mainly about America and Germany, how their sentimentalities and cruelties are not the same and their senses of reality are not the same, even in mechanics, and still there was this scandalous affair going on...

...You could not imagine them ever being out in the streets of New York, nor the drug store itself being in New York...

...Like the most basic Americans, the red Indians, we can be both violent and endlessly ruminant...

...She did have one reservation, Germany...

...I, not remarkably, cannot find it that beautiful, in spite of many handsome buildings and the lake shore right in town, being more oppressed by its heavy power, but it is restoring to read that Chicago does have that much beauty for those who see it...

...She makes much of an issue that is awfully with us now, the danger of subjugation to a job, of settling into an employe mentality as a permanent thing rather than—as she saw the alternative—feeling oneself a potential employer...

...Many of her passing remarks can seem captious but they do lead into large and intricate questions, of interest to anybody as well as to artists and writers, so this book is not only worth reading—and it reads rapidly—but well worth rereading and meditating upon, like a sort of American breviary...

...Endearingly enough she shares the average enthusiasm for skyscrapers, and then sees more in them than we do— noticing the "beautiful dark gray light" thrown on Chicago by the lighting of its buildings...

...It all seemed strangely out of date, but in our present mixed state of politics and unimaginable economics, her combination of capitalist conservatism with absolute egalitarianism and even with agrarianism seems entirely real and contemporary, however confused it may appear as theory...

...It seems so trusting to have all these letter boxes standing there by themselves perilously supported on a stick and that makes the fascination of the American character, it has so much suspicion in it of anything and everything and it is so trusting, which is really very exciting of it to be...

...One tried to explain it by remembering that the Republican party she knew best was that of the late 19th century and the early 20th, when its power and doctrines were so broad that members of it could swear by Eugene Debs, or that the source of almost all revolutionary doctrine was indeed the middle class, but the bother remained...

...So, after the nearly 20 years since she died, the book communicates its thoughts and feelings with a startling actuality, even when her subject is World War I or the Civil War...

...I never had enough of going into them...

...Something very interesting about us is going on, and Gertrude Stein could certainly have figured it out, but not I. Still, she said one reassuring thing for those of us who work in America and cannot get down to working more than a little abroad: "Later on there will be place enough to get away from home in the United States, it is beginning, then there will be creators who live at home...

...At the same time she adored the skyscrapers, especially when they were not a necessity, as in New York, but an arbitrary splendor as in Chicago or Oklahoma City...

...This last, by the way, is hardly said against us, for somebody once told Gertrude Stein that, like George Washington, she was impulsive and slow minded, and this was all right with her...

...On we walked and worried, but we worried always with great confidence and we laughed a great deal...

...She found Chicago, as she did most American cities, very beautiful...

...Another section of the book is a sampling of her vast amount of writing on our native language and the composition of American literature...

...This book reminds me very closely of that, a lot of celebration, a lot of pertinent worry, but underneath it a solid and happy confidence in our native land...

...Indeed she does and indeed it may well need restoring...

...It is certainly the most extravagantly entertaining country in the world, whatever it does, but also the most difficult to belong to both with devotion and in one's approximately right mind...

...And so why did she live most of her adult life in Paris...

...DONALD SUTHERLAND Author, "Gertrude Stein: A Biography of Her Work" Janet flanner says on its jacket that in this book Gertrude Stein "restores your American soul...

...In spite of our conformities and standardized nonconformities, a very great many people seem to be leading lives of their own within or across our systems, whether or not they should, and her prejudice now sounds like mere observation...

...But Gertrude Stein would probably be delighted...

...She duly appreciated their rising out of the ground instead of sitting on it like European buildings, and the gradual omission of cornices and topping of any sort...

...If the premature finality of our planned and processed education worried her in 1934, what would she make now of the listing of professors as "employes" of education industries which turn out "products...

...That was certainly the way she felt about it, but more generally she believed that many an artist, American or not, brought up in a country has that country thoroughly inside him and is more free to express his native qualities if that country is not also immediately outside him, confusing him with incidental demands and episodes, while with an alien but romantic and congenial culture around him he can express his own national quality more freely and clearly...

...Normally we resign the problem of fenestration to architects and think no more about it, but once your attention is drawn to it, the endless variety and distinction of ways in which windows are cut or set into small and large buildings all over America can be quite occupying...

...Well, is it true now...

...Or of hotel registers which now have to know what organization the guest is "representing...

...This condition she saw as a result of our industrialism, which for a number of reasons alarmed her so much she went agrarian, even supposing the agrarian South might save us, or at least slow us down...

...She believed strongly in ownership, especially in owning the ground under one's feet, though she herself owned no land...

...And why in the world should it be done in Italy or Greece or Tangier...

...Gertrude Stein had a more ravenous esthetic appetite than most of us...

...Is there any inner necessity for living abroad...

...Although many things about America struck her more vividly and freshly because she saw them from the distance of half her life spent in Paris, she never speaks as an outsider, and when she scolds us for our mistakes and weaknesses she scolds as we scold each other, putting on a pretty violent family row...

...It is singularly a sense for combination within a conception of the existence of a given space of time that makes the American thing the American thing, and the sense of this space of time must be within the whole thing as well as in the completed whole thing...

...Gertrude, thou shouldst be living at this hour...

...Moreover the wording, very nearly monosyllabic, has a constant pungency, an energy completing itself at every instant, always arriving, as it were—in short it is the 20th-century American language which she surely did more than any other single person to create...

...I don't know a place in the world more beautiful...

...I do think Americans are slow minded, it seems quick but they are slow minded yes they are...

...But this is only a sampling of what she had to say or of what there is to say about the curious combination of high speed and virtual immobility in American life, inner or outer, as in the sensation of riding in a jet, or in American dancing or music or headline-writing or warfare...

...She could be eloquent beyond the dreams of a travel agency on the subject of our landscapes, seen from the ground or from the air, but she is at her best in finding beauties and portents where you would least suspect them—as in our rural mailboxes left open to anyone, or in the slow movement of the machinery at oil wells, or in the strangely village life at urban drugstore counters...

...Some passages, from early works like Things As They Are and The Making of Americans, do still retain some of the oratorical or cultured tones of her Radcliffe education at the end of the 19th century, but most of the book is from later work in which she reached a perfect plainness...

...This too seems contemporary, as we are now generally gregarious, more that than imperialist, in spite of much opinion to the contrary...

...I used to think that her feeling about the essentially independent individual leading his own life was a prejudice left over from the 19th century, but individualism still does persist as a fact...

...This book helps enormously It is a collection of brief and longer passages from many books, essays, fugitive articles, and conversations by Gertrude Stein, fondly and gracefully composed by her friend Gil Harrison, who also provides intervals of useful biographical information and discreet commentary...

...We may be more conscious of this since the crisis of the picture window and the agony of confusion about whether the picture was of the outside or of the inside or of both, but I suspect even that has been forgotten and we do not much look at "windowing" even when it tries to be outrageous...

...A French friend of mine had said it was not an affair but a marriage, but Gertrude Stein and I gradually told ourselves it was a wild oat, even if we could not be sure...

...For her in her time the French, as only amateurs of the 20th century, provided a firmly traditional but hospitable background for the integral creators of 20th-century art and writing, Picasso and herself, or Spaniards and Americans...

...The following, though concerned mainly with the verbal and syntactical movement in her own writing and much, other American writing, goes for much of what we are doing or trying not to do in painting, sculpture, manufacture, architecture, drama, missiles, warfare, political figures, radio TV, and what not: "The assembling of a thing to make a whole thing and each one of these whole things is one of a series, but beside this there is the important thing and the very American thing that everybody knows who is an American just how many seconds, minutes or hours it is going to take to do a whole thing...

...Think of anything, of cowboys, of movies, or detective stories, of anybody who goes anywhere or stays at home who is an American and you will realize that it is something strictly American to conceive a space that is filled with moving, a space of time that is filled always filled with moving...

...Just before she died she exhorted us: " you have to get courage enough to know what you feel and not just all be yes or no men, but you have to really learn to express complication, go easy and if you can't go easy go as easy as you can.' Even if one is homesick for the pure and militant affirmations and negations of the '30s and '40s, one cannot very well evade this challenge, and certainly not "complication...

...Perhaps our restless dispersions and returns are a further formation of an America containing within itself plenty of firmly exotic but accommodating civilizations to which one can go away and in which one can live pleasantly as an American at large and work...

...We have corrected blast off to lift off...

...She adored money, blatantly, though she was not at all rich and once told me she could not really imagine more than $500 at a time...

...that slow movement is the country and it makes it prehistoric and large shapes and moving slowly very very slowly so slowly that they do almost stand still...

...Even if one happens to have a brute patriotism stronger than any enlightened universalist convictions, one can still go apathetic from the exhaustion of trying to follow in feeling and reasoning alike what America is from one season to the next, through its good and bad behavior, its triumphs, disasters, ineptitudes, Macchiavellianisms, and so on...