Hence the impulse, so patiently and passionately followed by her, to root herself in a profession, in the city of Paris, in a society of her choosing. The consequences for her personality were, again, astonishing. In her maturity, she gave the impression, not merely of doing what she liked but of being almost anything she wanted to be. She seemed, as the many surviving likenesses of her suggest, at once female and male, Jew and non-Jew, American pur sang and European peasant, artist and public figure, and so on. She did not, however, create this intricate unity and sustain it without showing evidences of great strain. Her magnetic, almost magical, self-mastery was buttressed by frank self-indulgence and advertised to the world by a good deal of unashamed self-congratulation. A regular system of compensations characterized her life. Inclusions entailed exclusions in a virtually mechanical perfection of balance. For almost every idea she embraced, almost every person she befriended, there was some idea that remained pointedly alien to her, some person who was an outsider. Henry James had played something like this drama too, though with more compunction, it seems, and with himself often cast as the outsider. Gertrude Stein, never the outsider, seems not to have risen—or sunk—to the level of James’s flexibility. Thus her combined residence, salon, and art gallery in the rue de Fleurus, where she presided with the aid of the devoted Miss Toklas, presented the aspects, now of an infinitely charming refuge, now of a bristling fortress. The former aspect predominated; the wariest visitor was apt to be struck by things about Gertrude Stein which were more literally magical than her self-mastery—things that were not to be fully accounted for by will, intelligence, or the principle of genius by association: her magnificent head and features, her appealing voice, her elementally refreshing laugh.

But Gertrude Stein’s family background was not the only source, or even the principal one, of her prodigious and largely good-humored will to power. The same background failed to supply her brother Leo with any such determination to make himself at home in the world. Brilliant, erratic, eternally unfulfilled, Leo Stein became an early advocate and perennial patient of psychoanalysis, finding a sort of fatherland only in Freud. In Gertrude Stein’s case, obviously, it was her involvement in the profession of literature, and the exacting mysteries attending it, that made the difference. The profession was the more engrossing because of the variety of influences she brought to bear on it. If her conception of literature included elements of Naturalism, it also anticipated the literary Modernism that was to culminate in the chief works of Joyce, Eliot, Yeats, and others. To her as to them (up to a point), literature in the twentieth century presented itself as a problem in the reconstruction of form and language. But where the solution of this problem was a means to an end for these writers, it became, for her, on the whole, a pursuit worthy in itself of her best efforts. She had no quarrel, as they did, with culture, with history, with the self. Culture in her terminology becomes “composition,” an aggregate of institutions, technologies, and human relations which the artist, as artist, accepts as it is, eliciting its meanings primarily through eye and ear rather than through mind, memory, or imagination. And words, like the other materials of the literary medium, become useful to the artist, assume a character purely aesthetic, in proportion as they can be converted from bearers of established meaning and unconscious association into plastic entities.

Such was the theoretical basis of her work, a basis to which she added many refinements as she sought to find literary equivalents for the various experiments conducted by the Cubists. Her theories have been admirably expounded and criticized in a number of recent books. The usual conclusion is the common-sense one. Literature is a temporal art rather than, like painting, a spatial one; and in using words as plastic entities, as things in themselves, words become not more but less alive, indeed peculiarly inert. Mr. Kenneth Burke has called Gertrude Stein’s practice “art by subtraction,” a phrase that expresses well the literal and merely negative aspect of her work at its least effective. Mr. B L.