Literary Pilgrims
Friedman, Melvin
Literary Pilgrims by Melvin Friedman GERTRUDE STEIN, who arrived in Paris in 1903, was among the first of the literary pilgrims. She began a transatlantic movement which was to achieve...
...Her large collection attracted almost all the young writers who either lived in or passed through Paris in the Twenties and Thirties...
...He offers few biographical insights not already revealed by Stein's other commentators, Donald Sutherland, Elizabeth Sprigge, and Rosalind S. Miller...
...It can be recommended as a companion piece to The Third Rose, which handles some of the same material in a more exacting critical vein...
...Writers, painters, and musicians were herded together to worship at Gertrude's feet and, incidentally, to discuss the arts...
...She called upon the same Dijon printers which Gertrude Stein was to use for The Making of Americans...
...Sylvia Beach, its proprietress, has finally set down her memoirs using the suggestive name of her shop for its title, Shakespeare and Company (Harcourt, Brace...
...Brinnin's contribution is in the direction of literary criticism...
...She began a transatlantic movement which was to achieve legendary proportions in the years following World War I and to be immortalized in such works as Malcolm Cowley's Exile's Return...
...He redefines Gertrude Stein's aesthetic by linking it with painting and insisting on the analogy with the plastic arts...
...These were her only three publishing ventures and were all devoted to the Irish writer who was indebted to her for a large share of his increasing eminence in the Twenties...
...Brinnin has made it possible for us, then, to trace Gertrude Stein's work from Nineteenth Century Naturalism and Impressionism through Cubism and various of its literary offspring...
...The light, casual, often gossipy tone of Shakespeare and Company admirably suits Sylvia Beach's intentions...
...John Malcolm Brinnin in The Third Rose: Gertrude Stein and Her World (Atlantic-Little, Brown) gives a much needed revaluation of an author who has been regarded by Sherwood Anderson and others as "a writer's writer...
...Brinnin derives her early manner from the happy fusion of Flaubert's naturalistic method in Trois Contes (which Gertrude Stein early translated into English) with the late Impressionist style of Cezanne...
...Miss Beach devotes the larger part of her book to describing her literary mission...
...Brinnin reviews the details of Gertrude Stein's life: reacquainting us with the Harvard years under William James, the depressing period at Johns Hopkins Medical School, the first impressions of Paris, the inordinate publishing difficulties of the early volumes, and the gradual emergence to literary eminence...
...She brought with her the blessings and financial backing of her mother and father (who was pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Princeton, New Jersey...
...She transformed Shakespeare and Company briefly into a publishing and distributing house for Ulysses...
...He has helped rid us of the notion that she is merely a writer to be studied in creative writing workshops as a literary oddity...
...Brinnin speaks at length of Gertrude Stein's "portrait writing...
...He has also filled in an oblique image of an age—recently christened the "banquet years...
...She later published Pomes Penyeach, "a baker's dozen to be sold for one shilling," and a volume of essays about Joyce's "Work in Progress...
...She devotes brief chapters in Shakespeare and Company to many of these frequenters...
...He connects her work with Cubism as convincingly as Edmund Wilson (in Axel's Castle) placed her in the final, exaggerated stages of Symbolism...
...As her work becomes increasingly abstract, she seems to depart from these Nineteenth Century French models towards the initiators of Cubism— Picasso and Braque...
...She took over from Harriet Weaver and Margaret Anderson— after both of their attempts seem to have met with failure—the task of wresting Joyce from an undeserved anonymity...
...The Saturday evenings at Gertrude's apartment at 27 Rue de Fleurus assumed much the same proportions as Mallarme's "mardis" and T. E. Hulme's "1909 club...
...A favorite gathering spot for a slightly later generation of Parisians and expatriates was a unique bookshop...
...Literary Pilgrims by Melvin Friedman GERTRUDE STEIN, who arrived in Paris in 1903, was among the first of the literary pilgrims...
...Her "pilgrimage" took her to Paris in 1917...
...He perhaps missed a significant cue when he failed to link this unusual literary genre with Joyce's "epiphanies...
...D. H. Lawrence, Frank Harris, Henry Miller, and others—perhaps confusing Sylvia Beach's interest in Joyce with pornography—all approached her unsuccessfully when they were unable to market their manuscripts elsewhere...
...The "portraits" of Mabel Dodge, T. S. Eliot, Picasso, and Matisse, like Joyce's "most delicate and evanescent of moments" (see Stephen Hero), are diary substitutes penned as prose poems...
...At first she was intent on setting up a lending library for those interested in recent literature...
...Gertrude Stein would doubtless resent the connection as she failed consistently to appreciate the work of the Irish writer...
...Her devotion to Joyce and her sympathetic connection with so many other talented writers of the Twenties reinforce her role as literary benefactor...
...each has the informality and spiciness of a diary jotting...
...Her personal life reinforces her literary tendencies at this point, especially the friendship with Picasso which offered the unique opportunity to watch the development of an original painter towards a new plastic idiom...
Vol. 24 • January 1960 • No. 1
