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5. Repetition and Juxtaposition: From Stein to Hemingway
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5 Repetition and Juxtaposition From Stein to Hemingway Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different . The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest. —T. S. Eliot, “Philip Massinger” Something else I learned to consider—judiciously—for myself, from Hemingway , was the use of repetition: we need to coin another term to honor him, conveying repetition transformed in his hand as a special term for emphasis ; used well, repetition becomes the Beethoven note, a knell laden with resonant meaning. —Nadine Gordimer, “Hemingway’s Expatriates” Acknowledging Gertrude Stein’s influence on Hemingway has become obligatory when discussing his use of repetition, but the extent of her influence has been exaggerated and misunderstood. It was Hemingway’s nature to learn quickly from mentors and, once he got what he needed, to drop them just as quickly. This process was partly the result of temperament— he was too competitive and independent to remain in thrall to anyone— and partly it was because, however much others influenced him, he always transmuted that influence into his own craft. One rarely sees Hemingway imitating anybody else, and when he does, it’s unexceptional. Stein influenced Hemingway as a maternal figure, a teacher, and a writer. During their brief relationship, she served as a surrogate mother who physically and emotionally had much in common with Grace Hall Hemingway but, unlike her, took his literary ambitions seriously and encouraged him at a time when he desperately needed such support. In a letter to her biographer written after her death, Hemingway also admitted having had a strong sexual attraction to Stein (SL 650); as Jeffrey Meyers observes, Hemingway “tried to work out” with her some of “the strong 113 114 Art Matters Oedipal feelings” he had for Grace (77). Second, just as Pound guided his reading of literature, so Stein extended the art education Grace had provided by introducing Hemingway to the Impressionists and Cubists. The walls of her Paris apartment were covered with paintings by Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, Juan Gris, and Pablo Picasso, including Picasso ’s famous portrait of Stein (which resembled Picasso). Stein told Hemingway she had written Three Lives sitting in front of Cézanne ’s Portrait de Madame Cézanne, and the prose of that book, as James Mellow notes, imitates “Cézanne’s method, with its infinitely patient repetition of one stroke laid next to another.” Mellow summarizes what Stein discovered in Cézanne and passed on to Hemingway: “the sense of overall composition in which each part, each sentence, was as significant as any other part, a composition in which nothing seemed to happen, but one which, through reiterative phrases and shifting emphases, moved forward to the culminating paragraph” (150). Hemingway took her instruction to heart, began regularly visiting the Musée du Luxembourg and the Louvre, developed into an art aficionado, and translated Cézanne’s methods into his own literary techniques of landscape depiction (Reynolds, Paris 40). Stein also introduced him to another of his passions, the bullfights, talking to him about the great matador Joselito and encouraging him to travel to Spain (DIA 1–2). The influence of Stein’s own writing, however, is a complicated matter, for she was more a philosopher of language and narrative than a teller of stories; her methods of narration in such works as Three Lives and the highly opaque The Making of Americans are so utterly different from even the most avant-garde types of modernist fiction that any disciple would, of necessity, have to adapt rather than adopt them. At the time Stein influenced Hemingway, she was trying to do in fiction what her friend Picasso was doing in painting. As she explained, before Picasso “no one had ever tried to express things seen not as one knows them but as they are when one sees them without remembering having looked at them.” Picasso tried “to express not things felt, not things remembered, not established in relations but things which are there, really everything a human being can know at each moment of his existence and not an assembling of all his experiences.” When we view...