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Reviewed by:
  • They Named Me Gertrude Stein
  • Susan E. Bittker (bio)
They Named Me Gertrude Stein Ellen Wilson . With 16 photographs. Ages 12 and up. (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, $5.50).

Through reading biographies at an early age, I soon learned that being was not, in itself, enough: you had to make something of yourself in order to leave your mark. A biography of Gertrude Stein, geared to readers six or eight years too young to read Stein straight, is not quite the anomaly it sounds: it presents a fascinating personality for its own sake, without the usual emphasis on tangible success. The book's format is enticingly "adult"; well-printed on quality paper, with a number of photographs. But there are disappointments.

"There may have been times in her life that Gertrude Stein wished that she weren't so large." It gets off to an auspiciously Steinian start, distinctly along the order of "Rose Herbert made it very hard to bring her baby to its birth"; unfortunately, the effect is not sustained. The writing is, in fact, rather erratic, and not without occasional jarring misjudgments and omissions.

What twelve year-old would not feel daunted on being told that The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas". . . proved to be written in a way that was not cryptic, esoteric, repetitious, or tangential?" (p. 105). Several clarifications which would have been useful to young readers are not forthcoming: Ms. Wilson gives no inkling of what "automatic writing" might be, nor does she explain why proper Parisians found "The Rites of Spring" and the 1905 Salon d'Automne so shocking, although she stresses that they did. And although one thread of the narrative deals with the intricacies of Stein's stylistic innovations, it is only in the last ten pages that the reader makes any sort of contact with the writing itself, when Ms. Wilson offers Stein's own explication of "a rose is a rose is a rose."

But Ms. Wilson's most annoying habit is the old primer trick of ending her chapters with a falsely "climactic" exclamation or rhetorical question, presumably designed to maintain the reader's attention from chapter to chapter. The final sentence I find particularly condescending: "Yes, no matter what the answer or what the question, life had always been interesting to Gertrude Stein."

Still, in all, it's not a bad book; not by a long shot. There is much that should be stimulating to sensitive readers; for example, an excellent exploration of the analogous elements in painting and writing, and a concisely subtle passage on death:

It wasn't so much that she was afraid of dying as that she was [End Page 242] frightened by the idea of dissolving into nothingness, of not existing after death.

(p. 19)

And a moment of supreme delicacy:

And so throughout the year, with a growing affection between these two, Gertrude was drawn into the realm of emotional involvement with one of her own sex . . . Her first doubt was an old one, since she had always assumed that the only acceptable kind of deep attachment was that between a woman and a man. But here was a woman who was offering her more love and devotion than any man had ever shown her.

(p. 53)

The spirit of homoemotionality has seldom been expressed more simply and movingly.

And this is the book's true value: Ms. Wilson has a gift for expressing abstract emotional and aesthetic matters in a manner both simple and thought-provoking. It's an unusual gift which, to my mind, transcends the book's stylistic flaws. [End Page 243]

Susan E. Bittker

Susan E. Bittker is an Honors Student at the University of Connecticut. One of her special interests is Gertrude Stein and her circle.

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