Interpreting Cézanne: Immanence in Gertrude Stein's First Landscape Play, Lend A Hand or Four Religions

Gertrude Stein was a woman perennially bothered by the relation of inside and outside. Conventional theater makes a person feel "nervous" she explained in her 1934 lecture "Plays," because of the lack of congruence between the viewer's emotion and the unfolding of the play: "your emotion concerning [the] play is always either behind or ahead of the play at which you are looking and to which you are listening."¹ Stein arrived at a solution to the "problem with plays" through a series of experiments in "landscape plays" she began in 1922 on a visit to the South of France. On a motor trip through the Provence region late in August, Stein and Alice Toklas extended their stay in St.-Rémy through the winter and returned to Paris in March of the following year. In landscape Stein saw a homology for the composition of the play newly imagined as a spatial "formation" much as landscape is a structure of relations: "the landscape not moving but being always in relation, the trees to the hills the hills to the fields the trees to each other any piece of it to any sky. . . ."² Spatial relations would replace dramatic development, and the viewer's emotion would coincide with the play much as a viewer appears to be co-present with landscape that is simply there.

We might dismiss Stein's account of her "landscape plays" as yet another instance of the modernist tendency to explain formal innovation as a novel "way of seeing," except that even a cursory survey of the work of the early twenties reveals that her compositional methods changed dramatically at the time of her encounter with the landscape of Provence. There she wrote her first "landscape play," Lend A Hand or Four Religions (1922), a highly successful example of her experiments in playwriting during this period. Eclipsed by the production and notoriety of Four Saints in Three Acts, her 1927 opera libretto also modeled on landscape, Lend A Hand has received little critical attention and there is no record of a public production.³ Long after its composition, Stein recognized her achievement and considered the play important in her body of work and an influential example for other writers.⁴ This is not merely special pleading on her part. The homology to landscape proved enormously generative in the early twenties, so much so that in an excited burst of composition Stein reprised not only playwriting, but portraiture, elucidation, and the novel with her new method and epistemology.

In what follows, I argue that Stein's first landscape play can be critically read as an investigation of the methods Cézanne developed for creating a quality of immanence in the late landscape paintings, those he painted in the last decade of his life, from 1895 to 1906. There are many reasons to liken Stein's practice to Cézanne's during her "St.-Remy period," not least that she was living in the Provence region, the site of his motifs. Her stay there prompted Stein to open her writing to renewed looking at the world, and the homology to landscape, insofar as it is painterly, gave her the basis for "including looking" without resorting to verisimilitude.⁵ Stein herself linked Lend A Hand to the artist by closing the portrait of Cézanne she wrote the following year with a line much elaborated in the play, "There where the grass can grow nearly four times yearly."⁶ Analyzing Stein's methods for evoking presentational force in her first landscape play allows us to follow the experiment of the text as it unfolds in composition, to grasp the stakes of her experiments in landscape plays, and to evaluate her success.

Without diminishing the strangeness of the homology Stein proposes, it seems evident that landscape is discursive when it is landscape painting and, indeed, in her claims for landscape Stein appears to treat the physical landscape as pictorial representation. Viewers "read" landscape painting as a particular "kind of language" according to Mark Roskill whose comprehensive study...