The business of Art . . . is to live in the actual present, that is the complete actual present, and to completely express that complete actual present.

—Gertrude Stein, “Plays”

I

n the early 70s I published a short paper on Gertrude Stein in the Canadian magazine, Tuatara. The paper grew out of a letter I had written to a friend. Recently, another friend made a remark about “If I Told You” which prompted a similar response. The response became this essay. Almost sixty years after her death in 1946, Gertrude Stein remains a controversial, problematical figure whose achievement can neither be denied nor adequately summed up. There are always going to be people who don’t “get” Stein. There are also always going to be people who find her work fascinating and unique.

I told my friend, I’m not asking you to like “If I Told You.” I’m asking you to listen to what I have to say about it—why I think it is a masterful and important piece of writing. I want to open a window in you, but you don’t have to like what you see through that window:

One thing: Despite the appearance of the notorious “Haschich Fudge” recipe in Alice B. Toklas’ cookbook, Stein always insisted that hallucinogens were of no interest to her. She was interested in consciousness—and in fact felt that she had no unconscious. (She was one of William James’ students; she had little use for Freud.) Whatever the reasons for the kind of writing in “If I Told Him,” it wasn’t due to any sort of substance abuse. I have used more marijuana in my life—and you probably have too—than Stein ever did. “I am always one,” Stein says in “Portraits and Repetitions,” “to prefer being sober.” Toklas asked friends for recipes to put in her book. The “Haschich Fudge” recipe came from Brion Gysin, who described it as “the food of Paradise—of Baudelaire’s Artificial Paradises”: “it might provide an entertaining refreshment for a Ladies’ Bridge Club or a chapter meeting of the DAR.” Gysin undoubtedly used hallucinogens, but there is no evidence that Stein and Toklas ever ate the dish. There are a lot of myths about Stein. The idea that she had to have been smashed out of her mind to write like that is one of them—and it is particularly damaging because it may close people to what she actually did accomplish.

I promised my friend a recording of Stein reciting this piece. Stein’s recitation moves along at a fair clip—a fact which is perhaps not obvious from the poem’s appearance on the page. The first time I heard “If I Told Him,” it was being played on radio station KPFA. This was over thirty years ago during KPFA’s “Gertrude Stein Day.” I suddenly felt I understood Stein—or at least understood this piece. It led me to other pieces.

Of course not all of Stein’s writing is “difficult.” There are far more difficult pieces than “If I Told Him,” but there are also pieces which are extremely easy to read. Stein even wrote a children’s book—quite a good one—called The World is Round. A friend of mine asks audiences at readings to identify the author of this passage from the children’s book:

I am Rose my eyes are blue
I am Rose and who are you
I am Rose and when I sing
I am Rose like anything

No one ever guesses that the author is Gertrude Stein.

A child’s voice is an aspect of many of the things Stein wrote. It is not the only aspect of them, but it is often there. You can find it in “If I Told Him.” Towards the end, the piece conjures up a child having to recite her lessons at school. “Miracles play,” Stein says, and of course children “play” as well. And then at the end: “Let me recite what history teaches. History teaches.” Note the different meaning of the phrase “History teaches” when it appears a second time. The phrase is repeated—so there is “repetition”—but it doesn’t mean the same thing the second time around. What history teaches is that history teaches. Does the poem do something different from what history does, which is to teach? Does Picasso in his art? What is the relation between the idea of “history” and the repeated word “Now”? Children, after all, are “miracles”—and so in a certain way is Picasso, who also, like Stein, has child-like qualities. Picasso is a “miracle,” and so are his paintings. And Stein would probably be aware of the etymology of the word “miracle”: “Middle English, from Old French, from Late Latin miraculum, from Latin, a wonder, marvel, from mirari to wonder at. The old Latin root is mir-, to look (at), esp. with astonishment.” A miracle is something to look at, “esp. with astonishment.” Isn’t that a good description of Picasso’s paintings, especially when they were first seen? That is the kind of effect Picasso’s paintings—and, Stein implies, Picasso himself—had on people.

Stein insisted that she wished to write “in the excitingness of pure being.”(1) Picasso and his work gave her that sensation: the sensation of not merely hearing about things, not merely “teaching,” but of experiencing “the excitingness of pure being.” It is being—being alive—that is the real subject of this “portrait.” Note that Stein never names Picasso in the poem: she is not trying to “describe” him; she is trying to find words which are in some sense his equivalent. For Stein a “resemblance” is not so much what the man looks like as it is what it feels like when he is present.(2) Note as well her constant puns. The phrase “Miracles play” suggests the medieval “miracle plays,” but there are many others: “A well / As well”; “Play fairly. / Play fairly well.” A pun is the sudden bringing together of two or more contexts in a single word. Don’t we live in a plethora of contexts? Isn’t our existence—our “being”—like that? Isn’t much neurosis a getting stuck in one context with no capacity to get out of it? In any case, Stein’s poem “playfully” puns. She feels Picasso not as an “individual” who can be described but as a momentary center of various meanings—various “contexts.”

A few preliminary things: Gertrude Stein and Pablo Picasso were close friends for a time, encouraging each other, talking about art. He painted her portrait—a rather remarkable painting. His famous remark about the painting was: “People say it doesn’t look like her. But it will.” She loved the portrait. She also felt that her writing was a kind of equivalent to what Picasso was doing in his art. She wrote another, earlier “portrait” of him—

One whom some were certainly following was one who was completely charming. One whom some were certainly following was one who was charming. One whom some were following was one who was completely charming. One whom some were following was one who was certainly completely charming . . .

He was working, he was not ever completely working. He did have some following. They were always following him. Some were certainly following him. He was one who was working. He was one having something coming out of him something having meaning. He was not ever completely working—

and also produced a. short book, Picasso:

Painting in the nineteenth century was only done in France and by Frenchmen, apart from that, painting did not exist, in the twentieth century it was done in France but by Spaniards.

In the nineteenth century painters discovered the need of always having a model in front of them, in the twentieth century they discovered that they must never look at a model. I remember very well, it was between 1904-1908, when people were forced by us or by themelves to look at Picasso’s drawings that the first and most astonishing thing that all of them and that we had to say was that he had done it all so marvellously as if he had had a model but that he had done it without ever having had one. And now the young painters scarcely know that there are models. Everything changes . . .

I mentioned that Stein’s writing often involves a child-like consciousness. You can see some of that here. Doesn’t this sound like a children’s rhyme—something one might bounce a ball to?

One.
I land.
Two.
I land.
Three.
The land.
Three.
The land.
Two.
I land.
Two.
I land.
One.
I land.

Picasso’s work was challenging on the level of form. The opening line of Stein’s poem is also a kind of formal challenge: “If I told him would he like it. Would he like it if I told him.” The line is Stein’s version of a palindrome: “Greek palindromos running back again, from palin back, again + dramein to run; akin to Greek polos axis: a word, verse, or sentence (as ‘Able was I ere I saw Elba’) or a number (as 1881) that reads the same backward or forward.”

Stein’s line is not a strict palindrome, but it is a palindrome nonetheless. “If I told him”—first phrase. “Would he like it”—second phrase. Then the pattern is reversed. “Would he like it”—first phrase. “If I told him”— second. Another of Stein’s lines, “Like and like likely and likely likely and likely like and like” is a more complex example. That line, from her portrait of the sculptor Lipshitz, breaks at the first of the two likely’s—“likely likely”—and then reverses itself. Why that form? I think Stein thinks of the palindrome as a kind of mirror: the line runs out and then runs back. The first half is identical to the second half—except that the second half is backwards. She has a phrase in still another portrait, “A Valentine to Sherwood Anderson”: “Idem the Same.” The word “Idem” is Latin and means “the same,” so the two halves of the phrase are saying the same thing—but they are saying them in two different languages. Stein’s relationship to the people she makes portraits of is like that. She and Picasso are “Idem the Same”—the same but different; they are like words which mean the same thing but exist in two different languages. Together, they constitute a kind of palindrome; they are full of the same elements, but one of them is running one way and the other is reversing that movement.

Of course Picasso made “portraits” too. His work in a sense revolutionized the way in which we “see” people—at least as we see them in a painting. Instead of presenting a single “view” of a person, Picasso’s Cubist sensibility presented various views, various overlapping planes. A person’s nose might be seen from the side but his mouth from the front. The subject of a portrait “is” not because he can be seen in a single, special perspective—as perhaps the eye of God might look at him—but because he exists in many planes, many contexts, not all of which are necessarily quite in sync with one another. Look at this passage from Stein’s portrait:

He he he he and he and he and and he and he and he and and as and as he and as he and he. He is and as he is, and as he is and he is, he is and as he and he and as he is and he and he and and he and he.

Can curls rob can curls quote, quotable.

Picasso had a high-pitched laugh, and that is referred to here: “He he he he.” But the other “he’s” suggest something else. They suggest various people—all male. Each of those separate “he’s” is a separate person with a separate personality and point of view. They are like Picasso in certain respects, but they are also different from him. Stein herself is identifying strongly with Picasso, but she realizes, after all those “he’s,” that gender is an issue: “Can curls rob, can curls quote, quotable.” Stein has (as Cole Porter says) “feminine curls,” and she is writing something that she hopes will be “quoted.” But will it be? She feels the power of Being in Picasso—“he is and as he is, and as he is and he is”—and she feels such power in herself. But she is a woman. Can women accomplish great acts: “Can curls rob can curls quote, quotable.”

She is, after all, not only a woman but a child in the midst of a somewhat dream-like, fractured history lesson:

Now to date now to date. Now and now and date and the date.

Who came first Napoleon at first. Who came first Napoleon the first. Who came first, Napoleon first

The child Gertrude is learning about great historical figures—MALE ones. Picasso is like those figures. He is a sort of potent father figure (cf. “Father and farther”). Stein suggests that Picasso is like a “king,” but he is even more like Napoleon (“Would he like it would Napoleon would Napoleon would would he like it”). Picasso is the General (even the Emperor) of painters. He is at the head of the “avant-garde” (a phrase which has a militaristic etymology). He is a kind of embodiment of the power of being alive—a great historical figure. But Stein is uncertain whether the world-famous Picasso will like this portrait which looks at him from different perspectives, just as his own work looks at the world from different perspectives. Gertrude is a woman, a “judge,” a child, a friend, an artist: look at the palindrome she makes. She worries whether Picasso will like her “gift.” (Her brother Leo did not care for her “gifts,” and that was a primary cause of their separation.) As Picasso is a complex figure, so is the author of the “portrait.”

Another important aspect of this poem is the fact of time. Time is obviously a theme of the piece (“Now,” “Now to date now to date. Now and now and date and the date,” “Let me recite what history teaches”) but Stein insists that time is also more than that: it is not only a subject but a condition of the piece:

Now.
Not now.
And now.
Now.

As our eyes move from one “Now” to another, we are moving in time. Stein’s poem insists that we be aware of that. The movement of time is a series of “nows”—a movement resembling a railroad train’s movement as each of its cars (its “nows”) moves along: “As trains. / Has trains. / Has trains. / As trains.” When she writes,

Exact resemblance to exact resemblance the exact resemblance as exact as a resemblance, exactly as resembling, exactly resembling, exactly in resemblance exactly a resemblance, exactly and resemblance, she is making a comment on what she is doing—attempting an “exact resemblance”—but she is also forcing us to notice the minute changes in the words “exact” and “resemblance” as she moves them through her construction (it is not quite a sentence). The words she repeats are themselves “Idem the Same” as moment by moment they change. Of course anything we read exists in time—to read is a temporal act—but Stein is insisting that we be aware of that fact. Why?

I think the answer is that her “portrait” is attempting to be a “miracle”: not to transcend time but to experience it so intensely that we have a deep sense of being alive at this moment, “now”:

Now.
Not now.
And now.
Now.

Stein is attempting to bring us, through a temporal art—an art in which everything is constantly moving—into a sense of presence. The artist—here, Picasso—embodies that sense of presence. She writes in another piece, “Look at me now and here I am.” It is immediacy that is her subject. History merely “teaches”—talks about a subject. But art brings us into the “excitingness of pure being.” Time is real and cannot be transcended. But a person exists as a conflux of contexts: a vibrant, momentary center of various pieces of information. By bringing us into contact with such a vision of personality, the artist allows us to forget the temporality which is the very condition in which the vision can occur. “In a change that is remarkable,” Stein writes in “A Waist”—one of the Tender Buttons—“there is no reason to say that there was a time.”

Stein’s work tends always towards performance. She wrote poetry, plays, memoirs, novels, operas—Four Saints in Three Acts became quite famous—but that sense of immediacy which is at the center of her work always propels her towards the here and now, which is to say towards theater. A classroom after all is a kind of theater in which both teachers and students “perform.” Painting Picasso’s portrait, Stein is watching him as she might watch a play—a “miracle play” with a great actor in it. What is the role Picasso is playing? Clearly, he is playing Napoleon, and because he is doing it well, he is bringing Napoleon vividly to life. Stein hopes that her own work—her own performance—will do the same for her. Her portrait is a portrait of Picasso, but it is also a portrait of Gertrude Stein, who is “Idem the Same” as Picasso and who, like Picasso, is a performer. (Her famous “at homes” were a mode of theater; her recorded reading of “If I Told Him” is one of her best.)

“If I Told Him” is not Gertrude Stein at her most difficult, but it is by no means a simple piece, and it expresses with extraordinary clarity issues which go to the center of her life as an artist. “Gertrude Stein knocked,” Stein wrote in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas—another performance—“and Picasso opened the door and we went in”:

He was dressed in what the french call the singe or monkey costume, overalls made of blue jean or brown, I think his was blue and it is called a singe or monkey because being all of one piece with a belt, if the belt is not fastened, and it very often is not, it hangs down behind and so makes a monkey. His eyes were more wonderful than even I remembered, so full and so brown, and his hands so dark and delicate and alert . . .

Picasso and Fernande came to dinner, Picasso in those days was, what a dear friend and schoolmate of mine, Nellie Jacot, called, a good-looking bootblack. He was thin dark, alive with big pools of eyes and a violent but not rough way. He was sitting next to Gertrude Stein at dinner and she took up a piece of bread. This, said Picasso, snatching it back with violence, this piece of bread is mine. She laughed and he looked sheepish. That was the beginning of their intimacy.

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NOTES

1.

The entire passage is quoted in Patricia Meyerowitz’s excellent Gertrude Stein: Writing and Lectures 1909-1945. It is worth quoting here as well. Stein’s remarks were recorded by her friend Thornton Wilder, who published them in the introduction to Four in America. Stein, lecturing at the University of Chicago, was asked the meaning of her line, “rose is a rose is a rose.” She answered,

Now listen. Can’t you see that when the language was new—as it was with Chaucer and Homer—the poet could use the name of a thing and the thing was really there. He could say ‘O moon,’ ‘O sea,’ ‘O love,’ and the moon and the sea and love were really there. And can’t you see that after hundreds of years had gone by and thousands of poems had been written, he could call on those words and find that they were just wornout literary words. The excitingness of pure being had withdrawn from them; they were just rather stale literary words. Now the poet has to work in the excitingness of pure being; he has to get back that intensity into the language. We all know that it’s hard to write poetry in a late age; and we know that you have to put some strangeness, as something unexpected, into the structure of the sentence in order to bring back vitality to the noun. Now it’s not enough to be bizarre; the strangeness in the sentence structure has to come from the poetic gift, too. That’s why it’s doubly hard to be a poet in a late age. Now you all have seen hundreds of poems about roses and you know in your bones that the rose is not there. All those songs that sopranos sing as encores about ‘I have a garden! oh, what a garden!’ Now I don’t want to put too much emphasis on that line, because it’s just one line in a longer poem. But I notice that you all know it; you make fun of it, but you know it. Now listen! I’m no fool. I know that in daily life we don’t go around saying ‘ . . . is a . . . is a . . . is a . . . ’. Yes, I’m no fool; but I think that in that line the rose is red for the first time in English poetry for a hundred years.

2.

Cameras of course make portraits as well: “Shutters shut and open . . . .” Stein suggests that Picasso’s paintings—like her own verbal portraits—give a sense of “being” that the camera does not.