Life Sentences (8 page)

A small boat crowded to the gunwales with journalists met the docking of Gertrude Stein’s steamship in New York. Her name ran like an illuminated rabbit around Times Square. Her picture appeared above columns of newspaper copy that made a place for both quotes and those feeble but funny imitations of her style.
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
had been a big hit, and pieces of it had come out in
The Atlantic Monthly
. Now her caricature was flaunted in
Vogue
. There was money in nearly every mail.
Three Lives
had been reborn in the Modern Library. Strangers smiled when they met her figure on the street, moving like a stately teepee, and nodded to Miss Toklas too. College students were charming; lecture halls were full; attentions were paid. She was called Gertrude because Americans were chummy, then Gertie because GIs were chummier. And Gertrude flew, for the first time, over mountains, deserts, lakes, plains, seeing American history through the scope of its geography. Reaching, like Balboa, the Pacific, Stein went west, as she said, in her head, as we each did, obedient to our destiny, though San Francisco, where her father had investments in a cable car company, felt as strange as foreign money. She liked to sample regional food and be fed by the rich, although in Iowa she asked for Vichy water and got tap.

Let me quote: “Then we arrived in Saint Louis. We ate very well there. I was interested in Saint Louis, and it was enormous the houses and the gardens and every way everything looked, everything looked enormous in Saint Louis. They asked us what we would like to do and I said I would like to see all the places Winston Churchill had mentioned in The Crisis.” (This Winston Churchill’s ten novels sold about five hundred thousand copies each. The British press reviewed him as if their Winston, not ours, had written them. The two Churchills met once but did not get on.) To continue: “They were very nice about it only it was difficult to do because naturally they should have but they really did not know a lot about what Winston Churchill mentioned in The Crisis.… we found the Mississippi River … and some of the homes and then we gave it up and went on to see something that they could find … the house of Ulysses Grant.”

Gertrude Stein had begun—she liked to begin things in February—as a pampered baby girl whom her father described as “a little schnatterer … She talks all day long and so plainly. She’s such a round little pudding, toddles around the whole day and repeats everything that is said or done.” At least she hadn’t been a boy. “What is the point,” she said, “of being born a boy when you’re only going to grow up to be a man.” She grew herself into a homely girl, a homely Jewish girl, a queer homely Jewish girl, in time a queer homely Jewish woman, and finally into a bizarre avant-garde gay Jewish woman writer known in Paris, her hometown abroad, as the Mother Goose of Montparnasse.

She was homely, but also disinclined, so she got out from under men. “Menace” was made of men with an ace up their sleeve. Her father finally died and she was freed of her family. “Then our life without a father began,” she said, “a very pleasant one.” Her overbearing brother Leo took her under his smotherly wing until Alice Toklas, who could cook, came along, whereupon her bossy brother left for Florence with Cézanne’s apples and a lot of lovely drawings.

So when, nearly sixty, she shook the hand of her fame in New
York, she knew she had arrived. The identity she had worked on for so long was complete: she was Gertrude Stein; she had a wife; she drove a motorcar; she had a fortune invested in Picasso and company; she had her own course of life and could tell Ernest Hemingway where to get off. Yet all the applause, the circulating lights, those nervous hosts and earnest meals, made her uneasy. “I write for myself and strangers,” she had once said, but now there were too many strangers who cried hi! who knew what she wore and the waddle of her walk, but didn’t know what Vichy water was. “I am I,” she wrote with some disgust, “because my little dog knows me.” Well, the nose was enough for the mastiff of Ulysses. Yet the self she had struggled so long and hard to define could be pictured on an ID: her passport and her driver’s license proved she was she, the way our credit card does now, the dog tag our corpse, as our social security number certifies us, or our mother’s maiden name. She had become—for she knew her philosophy—the sum of her adjectives, like an apple being peeled by Bishop Berkeley, and she could be duplicated by anyone who claimed to have the same set of properties the way a spy assumes another’s identity.

Suddenly she was no longer certain who had written her books, for the Gertrude Stein on their spine was but a bit of history, a tabloid tidbit; her snows of yesteryear would be carted away in dump trucks; dust would close her eyes as well as it had Helen’s; and brightness would fall from the air to run down drains. Had this overweight gay girl written
The Making of Americans
? Was
Tender Buttons
Jewish?
Three Lives
a stop on a Baltimore bus? How could such a local lady fall under the spell of Henry James or Sophocles—genders, nations, ages, worlds away? In an essay she called “What Are Masterpieces and Why Are There So Few of Them?” she addressed the problem. Why would her work, which had circulated only when friends gave away their copies, manage to endure, when the novels of St. Louis’s Winston Churchill, whose sales were in millions, would scarcely survive two decades?

Because they had been written, not by Human Nature and all the
causes and conditions of our Identities, but by the Human Mind. “I am not I any longer when I see” was a better way to put it. To understand is to step into eternity. All flesh is grass, Isaiah wrote, where pigeons light occasionally, but the spirit is immensely and immeasurably present in every word of a masterpiece, which is why we—when we read—are spirits too, and recognize our kin. Human nature was incapable of objectivity, she decided. It is viciously anthropocentric, whereas the human mind leaves all personal interest behind. It sees things as entities, not as identities.… The human mind makes lifetimes out of moments, particulars into generalities, quirks into characters. The human mind can entice human nature into Elysium; though it can do nothing with the quaint, for, as Stein said, quaint ain’t … yet we are all witness to that transformation, when the human mind sips the tea and tastes the biscuit, to turn the simple offer: have some? into a summation; for we’ve seen how a paltry pun, a phrase, those perceptions personal to style, how the right writing can drag daily life in its drudgery and exhilaration, with its restless elevators, its solemn ceremonies, from one present tense to another and another and another—for today my little dog did deign to know me, and though I was not a warrior returning in rags, I
was
a warrior returning in rags; a saucer enabled my cup to warm my fingers, and I felt an old friend on the lip of a story, for Gertrude Stein, as so often, was right: every rhyme in Mother Goose is still well with us, and so, for that matter, is the Mother Goose of Montparnasse.

Was it in the summer? It probably was … when you thought you had enough time on your hands to fill them with a book, when an unappointed space had appeared in your life … the summer when you decided to read Proust. Perhaps the impossible purpose appeared to you in late afternoon, at an hour customarily assigned to tea and to fingering volumes by Henry James. You would have had to have been—hear the toll of those terrible tenses?—you would have had to have been young. Or recently retired. Ambitious. Or convalescent. Feeling the need, sensing the opportunity, to improve yourself.

When André Gide first looked into
Swann’s Way
(1913), it must have seemed a stack of sheets like any other, so his mind would not have been filled with the kind of foreboding that faces the climber of a mountain while still in the foothills looking up at his goal, a blanched peak whose slopes are already dotted with many a failed ambition. Gide’s encounter with the name “Proust” would not be like any of ours. He would remember the frivolous social snob, while we would be ready to regard that same person as bearing a title, perhaps like others so often in the literary news—Joyce and Kafka and Mann—so that if we didn’t positively love what of Proust we finally read we would never let on, for some small sins are more shameful to the soul than many a public crime.

Yet that’s the way we should have got into it—unaware—when it first came out—into
Swann’s Way
—because during every decade after, in addition to the rambling work itself, books of commentary and criticism would begin to surround it like a barricade, adding to one’s trepidations. Not to mention idle conversations about the great work’s length, its difficulties, and laughable place in summertime’s hammock—attitudes that built its popular reputation. Am I ready? Am I worthy? Couldn’t I settle for Colette or even Sagan, each equally French?

This hunt, this search, this reclamation of the past, is not like one for mislaid keys, or tickets, or even a lost weekend, since such searches end willy-nilly when Sunday comes, the curtain falls, or the locksmith is called. It aims at the recovery of a life, an entire society even—not in ruins like an ancient city hitherto hidden by sand—but one realized in its interiors as well as its trappings—fully fledged, freshly painted—something impossible in every sense of
can’t—
especially since it is only a fictive aim: to bring everything that life has touched from the shady side where it snoozes—and depending upon the tree’s endurance and solidity—to realize the beauty and the bounty of its leaves.

If it were keys, we should be in a hurry, with an office to reach, a plane to catch. Then we had better read Dumas and get a move on. But no hurry here. The book wakes up as eagerly as a teen on Sunday. What has happened to the narrative drive? It is in reverse. The significant modern novel—those of Joyce, Mann, Musil, Malcolm Lowry—drills for oil, seeks treasure in its depths
—in
is the operable preposition, not
on. Around
is another, for the circle has replaced the arrowed line as fiction’s favorite figure. And when Proust describes the Hôtel de Guermantes as a castle medievally located in the center of Paris, he surrounds it with small shops—a shoemaker’s, a tailor’s—and imagines a porter who keeps hens and grows flowers, then an elderly self-appointed “comtesse” who, when she drives out
in her rickety carriage, flaunts on her hat a few nasturtiums stolen from the porter’s garden plot, and greets the children of the metaphor with a wave and a flounce.

What is the reader to do? She might open her own store next to the tailor’s, and take care, when the comtesse bears her vague smile by, to be briskly brooming the steps.

Unlike Balzac’s less mediated and exterior world, Proust’s society lives like snow in a paperweight, inside the novel’s structural imagery. As the narrator says: “To strip our pleasures of imagination is to reduce them to their own dimensions, that is to say to nothing.” (601) To Balzac, matter has a weight all its own; to Proust, matter has weight only when metaphored by mind. Musil, another great meditator, is too positivistically inclined to mix the ore with its assessor.

When we begin Henry Fielding’s
Tom Jones
, how much of the story does the author expect us to keep in mind as we read along? He expects us, I think, to remember about as much of Tom Jones’s history as Tom Jones does; for instance, to remember that Tom broke his leg, but not to remember all that was said by the visitors who appeared at his bedside. The text is meant to dwindle away as past times do, and if some element is supposed to be retained for future use, we can be confident that Fielding will prompt us.

How otherwise it is with Joyce, to name the guiltiest. He would have us recollect Bloom’s orangeflower water hundreds of pages after its first appearance, while recognizing that the soap with which it is associated is even more important. The text is not a boat’s wake, meant to subside behind us; instead it rises up like a tidal wave and pursues us as we read, ready to flood each and every succeeding page with previous meanings, and altering all that has gone before the way Henry James’s predicates surprise and abash their subjects with an ultimate turn of phrase.

How can past time be found if the text in which its discovery is meant to be made is itself as forgetful as Smollett or Fielding or Scott or Trollope? Nor must a text that is the result of dauntless revisions be read as the skater skates, at the sharp edge of blade and the
blunt of ice. Proust’s novel remembers more fully than any memory might; moreover it remembers in words redolent with sensation and rich with reflection. What has taken place in this novel, what has been rendered into such a verbal vision, it now remains for us to seek and realize and serve. That
M
, the hidden Marcel, whose world I read of there, also stands for me. So much less was once required.

The ultimate narcissist loves to be called “king” and see his stools saved in silver boxes.