Gertrude Stein: the Original Texter

In Paris this semester, my students are reading, among others, Gertrude Stein. Or, as Stein would put it, In Paris this semester my students are reading among others Gertrude Stein. Stein is famous, of course, for her eclectic use of commas, repetition, inverted syntax, absence of question marks, and other tricks of her Modernist trade. In an essay on The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, one student focused on what she deemed Stein’s “poor grammar.” My student wasn’t the first to label Stein’s style this way. One interested New York publisher (Stein had a notoriously difficult time getting her work published commercially) wondered if English was her second language, so rudimentary did he deem her skills.

Reading Stein today feels like reading the basic, most original form of texting. Like any good texter, she dispenses with punctuation except where it’s absolutely necessary. She uses a lot of pronouns. True, she didn’t have emojis and didn’t seem attracted to acronyms, but she privileged verbs and adverbs over nouns; she’d have been comfortable with common text exchanges like this:

Going out

Cant join you

I mean are you are you going out

Oh no not like out out

WTF

Down the street to the store maybe the store where they sell bananas

But not like driving right

Driving no walking how bout you

Staying totally in. Need tylenol lol

As John McWhorter and others have been arguing, the notion of “poor grammar” doesn’t apply to this form of communication. Stein’s manifesto on language, Poetry and Grammar, makes a similar argument but with a different conceit — not that her form of writing is like speech, but that words themselves come alive in a way she doesn’t like to constrain. Take, for instance, her preference for verbs over nouns:

Besides being able to be mistaken and to make mistakes verbs can change to look like themselves or to look like something else, they are, so to speak on the move and adverbs move with them and each of them find themselves not at all annoying but very often very much mistaken. That is the reason any one can like what verbs can do.

I’m not sure why, but my favorite thing about this passage is that missing comma following “so to speak.” So to speak, in Stein’s context, is an adverbial expression, and as soon as she gets it down on the page she is on the move (so to speak) and can’t be bothered to hold up for that comma.

Yes, Stein can get precious. She may be precious in the passage I just cited; she certainly is in much of her other work. But she is also, frequently, howlingly funny, and specifically funny about language:

Pronouns are not as bad as nouns because in the first place practically they cannot have adjectives go with them. That already makes them better than nouns. … They represent some one but they are not its or his name. In not being his or its or her name they already have a greater possibility of being something than if they were as a noun is the name of anything. Now actual given names of people are more lively than nouns which are the name of anything and I suppose this is because after all the name is only given to that person when they are born, there is at least the element of choice even the element of change and anybody can be pretty well able to do what they like, they may be born Walter and become Hub, in such a way they are not like a noun. A noun has been the name of something for such a very long time.

Here, my favorite part is not so much the Humpty-Dumptyesque idea of the changeability of a name, but again, a choice in syntax and punctuation. I’m talking about the very confusing phrase if they were as a noun is the name of anything. What my student would call “proper grammar” would insert commas after were and is. Stein’s omissions create a gestalt shift much as Picasso’s portraits did when they allowed the viewer to see the head either face-forward or in profile. That is, we read both if they were as a noun is, a way of saying “if they were like a noun,” but with a shadow of personification; and we read as a noun is the name of anything, which somehow comes across to me as “as if a noun is the name of anything.” Like Picasso, Stein is stretching and warping her materials. Also like Picasso, she is having fun.

As I lead my students through an exploration of 1920s Paris, one thing I worry about is that they — that we — have lost this sense of fun in language. Grammar, to our students, is deadly serious. We mark their sometimes wildly applied punctuation — the chief basis of my student’s concern over Stein’s “improper grammar” — not because someone died and made us the god of commas, but because we suspect that the slapdash nature of their collaged sentences suggests some slapdash thinking. Students don’t always see it this way; they tend to believe that if they can just master the “rules,” our quibbles will cease. It could be risky, certainly, for them to read Stein on, say, commas:

Commas are servile, they have no life of their own and their use is not a use, it is a way of replacing one’s own interest, and I do decidedly like to like my own interest my own interest in what I am doing. A comma by helping you along holding your coat for you and putting on your shoes keeps you from living your life as actively as you should lead it and to me for many years and I still do feel that way about it only now I do not pay as much attention to them, the use of them was positively degrading.

But say what you will about Stein’s mannerisms, she knew as much about writing with “proper grammar” as Picasso knew about painting realistically — which is to say, a lot. I’m not at the point of asking my students, as Stein might, “Wherefore should one use the question mark” — but after reading her, I’m more inclined to regard that bit of punctuation as optional. What about you.