simonfeatherstone
Lifting belly together.
Doyou like that there.^4A conversation about emotional and physical satisfaction is interrupted by the
Battle of Verdun, mentioned tentatively by one voice as a potential source of
anxiety, but quickly dismissed as such by the other. The verse paragraph returns
to mutual pleasure and sexual experiment as war is subsumed within personal and
island life. Yet Verdun’s intrusion into, and rapid expulsion from, this intimate text
is a marker not of a neglect of war, but of a radically different way of dealing with it.
The exaggerated casualness of the dismissal of a battle in which there were
700,000 casualties^5 (the voice does not just reply ‘No’, but ‘Oh dear no’) demands
attention in a text that is otherwise negligent of much beyond local events. In one
sense, it seems to emphasize the distance between the brutal realities of European
war and a personal aesthetic of delight pursued out of reach of the guns. Yet this
apparent frivolity, the refusal to talkaboutthe war (‘Oh dear no’), also poses a
question to assumptions about what constitutes war writing in the first place. There
is actually quite a lot of war in ‘Lifting Belly’—Verdun’s appearance in the text is
later complemented by the intrusions of disruptive male characters called Caesar
(who have a hard time coping with the talkative lesbian lovers) and by references
to that war-ridden national anthem ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’. The treatment of
these representatives of male warfare is disconcerting and (knowingly, punningly)
disarming. War does not know its place in a text that refuses to engage with it in the
terms of a ‘national experience’ of change. ‘Lifting Belly’ cannot be reclaimed for the
canon on those grounds, because it is a poetry exiled from both nation and battle,
though conscious of both. But the terms of its refusal, far from being frivolous, can
be seen instead as revealing and insisting upon alternative discourses of engagement.
Lifting belly, with all its curves, intimacies, ambiguities, and potential, is an act and
a state embodying everything that the relentless destructiveness of Verdun and the
monophonic power of Caesar are not.
Stein’s war writing is not concerned with articulating a response to war, but
with playing out alternative possibilities to the obsessions that the war itself has
established. It is a different kind of war poetry, in which personal lives, sensibilities,
and pleasures are preserved in tacit opposition to a totalizing force. For a critic
of war poetry, it serves as a reminder of the variousness and possibilities of the
genre if he or she can think outside the ideological constraints embedded within
it. Stein was no ordinary polemicist, but ‘Lifting Belly’ stresses that the canon of
war poetry doesn’t just need to be expanded to ‘include’ women’s experience, but
needs to be reconfiguredas a result ofwomen’s experience. The main body of this
essay is about the work of two writers different from Stein and different from each
(^4) Gertrude Stein, ‘Lifting Belly’, inBee Time Vine and Other Pieces, 1913–1927,ed.CarlVan
Vechten (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953), 71. 5
See Malcolm Brown,Verdun 1916(Stroud: Tempus, 2003), 159–60.