"sitting at the Table" With Stein and Ashbery: "an Occasion" for Thin[g] King

7 3 R ‘ ‘ S I T T I N G A T T H E T A B L E ’ ’ W I T H S T E I N A N D A S H B E R Y ‘ ‘ A N O C C A S I O N ’ ’ F O R T H I N [ G ] K I N G K A R I N R O F F M A N John Ashbery’s 1971 ArtNews review of Four Americans in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition of Stein family collections , is the closest he ever came to spending an afternoon in Gertrude Stein’s company at 27 rue de Fleurus. He had arrived in Paris too late, nine years after Stein’s death in 1946, and this immersive show was a chance to experience a small part of what he had missed. His assessment of the riveting occasion led him not only to reflect anew on Stein’s achievement as a poet and a collector – something that he had been attempting in published and unpublished works for thirty years – but also to utter some of his most profound statements on what poetry is and why it matters. He opens the review by asserting that ‘‘Poets when they write about other artists always tend to write about themselves,’’ and concludes that Stein’s ‘‘achievement’’ as both poet and collector is ‘‘excitedly in doubt and thus alive.’’ In other words, focusing on Stein’s oeuvre enables Ashbery to explain how he thinks about poetry and things, and, in turn, his analysis o√ers a spirited defense of Stein’s domestic and literary projects as equally crucial to poetry. Ashbery’s enthusiasm for Stein’s collecting instincts seemed ini- 7 4 R O F F M A N Y tially to eclipse his appreciation for her poetry. Even Tender Buttons (1914), in fact, the work that incited his passion for Stein at sixteen after a friend pointed it out to him at the Deerfield Academy library, receives some neutral or negative comments. He mentions the ‘‘sureness of Gertrude’s taste as a collector’’ against the ‘‘unfathomable solidity of works like Tender Buttons.’’ He writes that in the book, ‘‘Stein’s method of composition is to make statements which cannot be disproved even when they may be ignored .’’ These claims suggest a not entirely pleasant experience with Stein, but Ashbery argues for a di√erent approach to reading and thinking about her work through connecting her domestic and literary projects. He explains that Stein’s genius lies in her ability to create spaces for collections of things (paintings or sentences ) to exist in new relations to each other: ‘‘She is building. Her structures may be demolished; what remains is a sense of someone ’s having built.’’ Ashbery sees a direct connection between her collecting and poetic processes; she creates room for thinking about people and things. Stein’s things have the e√ect on Ashbery that she had intended they should. In the early chapters of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), she suggests this reading of her life and work by o√ering examples of how being among her collections provokes a kind of thinking that she later calls, simply, ‘‘pleasure.’’ In an iconic passage about her home, she speaks to Matisse in the atelier with its floor-to-ceiling paintings when Alice arrives at the place for the first time. Stein then explains the room’s importance through a story about something that took place there a year earlier: We were talking, she said, of a lunch party we had in here last year. We had just hung all the pictures and we asked all the painters. You know how painters are, I wanted to make them happy so I placed each one opposite his own picture, and they were happy so happy that we had to send out twice for more bread, when you know France you will know that that means that they were happy, because they cannot eat and drink without bread and we had to send out twice for bread so they were happy. Nobody noticed my little arrangement except...