Broadcasting Modernism

6. Gertrude Stein and the Radio

c h a p t e r 6 Gertrude Stein and the Radio Sarah Wilson Gertrude Stein returned to the United States in 1934, a year of fierce debate over the Federal Communications Act and the regulation of American radio . As she traveled the country, she could not have missed the fact that radio broadcasting had captured the imaginations of Americans. Stein had long been an avid reader and critic of popular culture and the media—her relationship with American newspapers predated her late romance with the radio. However, the radio in particular acted as a powerful formal model for Stein’s late writing.1 Radio’s influence can be traced in Stein’s political and aesthetic strategies during her American tour, and it emerges as a dominant note in her World War II texts. Broadcasting provides a suggestive means of connecting Stein’s early aural experimentalism (as in the multiple, echoing voices of “Bon Marche Weather”) with her later, more popular, idiom. Resolutely oral, dialogic, and changeable, Stein’s artistic project finally finds its formal corollary in mid-century radio. Tracing the influence of the radio in Stein’s late writing also makes it possible to extend our analysis of Stein’s use of indeterminacy in language to her more audience-focused texts, with the effect of complicating our readings of her investment in communication and communal meaning-making. Through the 1930s and 1940s, Stein wrestles with the idea of radio as a kind of public sphere—a forum in which self, other, and community can be constituted through talk. Her aurality must thus be understood as being as profoundly public in its orientations as it is private.2 Finally, hearing the radio in Stein’s late writing advances our understanding of the cross-fertilizations of “high” and “low” Modernist cultures 107 while beginning to acknowledge radio’s own distinct thematic and stylistic contributions to mid-century Modernism. In “I Came and Here I Am,” published in Cosmopolitan in February 1936, Stein describes the exhilaration of making a radio broadcast: it was, it really was, as if you were saying what you were saying and you knew, you really knew, not by what you knew but by what you felt, that everybody was listening. It is a very wonderful thing to do, I almost stopped and said it, I was so filled with it (“I Came” 72). Broadcasting fills Stein with the feeling of everybody—of everybody listening . Just as Stein hoped to do in Everybody’s Autobiography (1937), the radio creates “everybody” by creating the audience, a kind of community that understands itself as existing in (varying) relation to a mass medium.3 This audience is not passive, and the broadcast is not unidirectional; as Stein’s voice fills the airwaves, she in turn is filled by listening. The radio broadcast conveys a sense of an immediate and concentrated present; it begins again and again, as Stein’s characteristically insistent phrasings indicate to us. It applies itself to representational questions that Stein’s writing had been addressing for the three preceding decades. As she proclaimed to the readership of Cosmopolitan, Stein was smitten with the distinct form of connection that the radio seemed capable of performing. The Cosmopolitan article represents the enjoyment of broadcasting as constituted by a distinct kind of knowledge, knowing “by what you felt.” That is, the appeal of the radio is not exclusively informational but extends intellectually, just as it does physically, into more intimate and emotional territory . Stein’s experience of the America of radio evangelist Father Coughlin would have made this extension clear. The emotional appeals of the radio form would achieve dominance in the United States by the late 1930s and early 1940s, when the threat of war made strongly felt connection and communication across the geographic and cultural divides of the United States seem even more imperative. As the American war machine engaged, pundits assigned the radio a central role in the creation and maintenance of “national morale.” Radio assumed this central role by dint of its distinctive form of address, according to James Rowland Angell of NBC; he attributed the medium’s influence to (1) the immediacy of its conveyance of news; (2) the vast mass of persons thus reached, many of them having only delayed access, if any, to the newspapers, 108 Sarah Wilson and not a few being unused to reading, or incapable of it...