A History of American Literature

(Marvins-Underground-K-12) #1
400 Making It New: 1900–1945

completely caressed and addressed the noun” here, she later explained, so as to take
the reader away from the common word and toward the rare reality. It was her way
of pursuing a strategy common in American writing: to reassert the presence of the
miraculous in the commonplace and so replace habit with wonder.
Altogether, Stein produced over five hundred titles: novels, poems, plays, articles,
memoirs, and portraits of the famous. These included The Geographical History
of America (1935), Ida: A Novel (1940), a relatively straightforward account of a
contemporary American woman, and The Mother of Us All (1945–1946), a portrait
of the nineteenth-century American leader Susan B. Anthony. One of her best-known
works from her later period is The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), a
fictionalized account of her own life from the point of view of her companion
and partner. In The Autobiography Stein, through the persona of Toklas, tells of their
travels and their life “in the heart of an art movement”: their acquaintance with a
wide variety of artists and intellectuals from Picasso to Pound, from T. S. Eliot to
Djuna Barnes. Stein had a high opinion of her own work that has not always been
shared. She claimed that only three writers of her time were being true to the writerly
imperatives she outlined: Proust, Joyce, and herself. And in The Geographical History
of America she makes it clear that, in her opinion, she is doing the major literary
thinking of her period. There is a curiously airless quality about some of her
pronouncements, such as her repeated contention, in the Geographical History, that
“human nature has nothing to do with it,” “nothing to do with master-pieces.”
Perhaps this is because she tended to confuse two separate issues: she wished to look
at reality as though for the first time – she then thought it necessary to write about
this reality without using words that contained compelling evidence of previous
realities witnessed, previous attempts at a direct encounter with the world. No
matter the debate over her achievement, though, there is no doubt that she was a
major innovator, one of the leading figures in American literary modernism.
Ernest Hemingway confessed that he was grateful to Stein “for everything I learned
from her about the abstract relationship of words.” Many other writers said, or could
have said, the same. There may, perhaps, be doubts about the literary solutions,
the aesthetic answers she came up with, but there can be no doubt that she always
asked the right questions.
Three modernist writers who asked questions, in particular, about the condition
of being a woman were Katherine Anne Porter (1890–1980), Elizabeth Madox
Roberts (1881–1941), and Djuna Barnes (1892–1982). Porter, born in Texas, worked
on a newspaper in Colorado before spending many years in Mexico and Europe. It
was the experience of foreign cultures that supplied the catalyst for her first collection
of stories, Flowering Judas and Other Stories (1930). Several of these stories are set in
Mexico and, whatever the setting, they explore the theme that was to dominate her
writing: a woman’s search for independence, the conflict between this and, on the
one hand, the pressures of custom and tradition, and, on the other, her own desire
for love and the conventional security of home and family. That theme is dramatized
with particular subtlety and passion in Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939), a volume
consisting of three short novels, and also in the stories collected under the title

GGray_c04.indd 400ray_c 04 .indd 400 8 8/1/2011 7:53:55 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 55 AM

Free download pdf