Response

A grammar is in need of little words.

—Gertrude Stein

If I’m not mistaken, Professor Lezra’s narrative of the contradiction inherent in Stein’s construction of herself alternately as a “public persona” (117) and as a contingent self, posed “incidentally” (124) in the immediacy of the act of writing, together with his analysis of the implications for subjective agency of the Steinian sentence, “Narrative is it for one,” lead him to conclude that we cannot read How to Write after all. I want to refute this conclusion by offering two methods to circumvent the critical binds Lezra proposes: the first is to situate the texts of How to Write historically in the chronology of Stein’s work, and the second is to provide a compositional context for the sentence Lezra isolates. I’ll offer a reading of “Arthur A Grammar,” the text Lezra finds “baffling” (127), in order to demonstrate a compositional approach to reading How to Write. Here I take issue with Lezra’s method since, read compositionally, the line “Narrative is it for one” does not occur as an interruption to the discourse on grammar as he insists (127), but as an integral part of an interrogative series in which Stein compares the functions of grammar to those of vocabulary, explanation, description, and narrative. In order to answer whether grammar or the subject pre-poses the other, and before we can speculate about the allegorical readings of formal equations that might be implicated—grammar as the structure of identity, of resemblance, of marriage, of publication—we’ll need to know first what the working practice of grammar is in the Steinian text. For this kind of inquiry, we have to understand the importance of Stein’s compositional writing method. ¹

Written after Stein’s Cambridge and Oxford addresses in 1926 and before her 1934–35 lecture tour in America, the compositions collected in How to Write do not exemplify the crisis of writerly anxiety that awareness of an audience was to cause Stein. Prompted by writing the lecture “Composition as Explanation,” Stein continued to write exercises on the properties and operations of language structure itself. How to Write collects some of these compositions written between 1927 and 1931 including “Sentences and Paragraphs,” in which Stein questions whether the sentence can be made to carry the emotional valence ordinarily distributed in the paragraph, and “Arthur a Grammar,” which circulates the question “What is grammar.” ² In my view, the texts of How to Write are best considered members of a series of experiments with language structure that begins with the composition “An Elucidation” written in 1923, followed by her lecture, “Composition as Explanation,” and then the individual compositions of How to Write. In this series of investigations of both discursive operations and explanation, the texts before and after the lecture are the least constrained by the complications of self-presentation, and best exemplify Stein at work on open-ended explorations in the fundamental operations of writing.

Concern for identity based on recognition, with its thematics of historical time—memory and continuity—disrupted Stein’s writing in the mid-1920s when she was invited to lecture at Cambridge and Oxford, and, again, famously, in the crisis after the success of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1932), when the fact that she had an audience made it difficult for Stein to write. Questions about the relation of identity and creativity recur and are critical to Stein’s texts in the 1930s in particular—Four in America (1932–33), The Geographical History of America or The Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind (1935), and Ida a Novel (1937–40). ³ The anxiety Stein felt at having agreed to explain her work, or at least to put herself in a position where such an account could be expected, erupts in the texts she was writing at the time she accepted the invitation to lecture in England. According to Ulla Dydo, a “shrill sound” interrupts the meditation of A Novel of Thank You when the speaker recalls that she has been asked to give

  An address.

  I am taking it for granted...