398 Making It New: 1900–1945committed to experiment and inquiry, and in particular to asking fundamental
questions about the relationship between language and reality. “Beginning again
and again is a natural thing,” she wrote in Composition as Explanation (1926). As she
saw it, innovation was necessary because it was the “business of art” to live in “the
complete and actual present.” The enemies were traditional narrative, with its
reliance on habit and continuity rather than instantaneousness and memory. “It
is very curious,” she declared in What Are Masterpieces? (1940), “you begin to write
something and suddenly you remember something and if you continue to remem-
ber your writing gets very confused.” To see the thing as it is, the thing-in-itself
rather than the thing in history, was her aim, and that meant clearing away the grime
of old emotions and associations. “After all,” she suggested in Picasso (1938), “the
natural way to count is not that one and one make two but go on counting one and
one and one ... One and one and one and one and one.” Applied to prose, this would
mean no “assembling,” no comparison, no increasing density of significance; it
would mean a style that, literally, was not additive. Language could and should
become a recreation of each perception (“now and now and now”), “composition”
rather than “description.” It should involve, fundamentally, repetition, with small
additions and modifications catching the differences as well as the similarities
between each separate moment. For Stein, this project, not only to live in the actual
present but “to completely express that actual present” (as she put it in her Lectures
in America (1935)) was an aesthetic imperative but also, critically, an American one.
This was because Americans were, supremely, of the present. “It has always seemed
to me a rare privilege, this, of being an American, a real American, one whose
tradition it has taken scarcely sixty years to create,” she confessed in The Making of
Americans (1906–1908, published in 1925). “We need only realize our parents,
remember our grandparents and know ourselves and our history is complete.”
“If you are an American,” she added in Narration (1935), “gradually you find that
really it is not necessary not really necessary that anything that everything has a
beginning a middle and an ending.” You return to “the simplicity of something
always happening,” the purity of what is existing now and for itself and, as Whitman
did, Stein suggests, to a language that evokes the sheer quality of the here and now,
existing things.
Whitman was singled out as exemplary here: “he wanted really wanted to express
the thing,” Stein insisted in Lectures in America. So too were the modernist visual
experiments of Picasso and the contemporary cinema. Picasso, Stein suggested, was
trying to look at things as if for the first time: like a child who sees only vivid
fragments – one side of its mother’s face, for example – and has not yet learned to
infer the whole. “He was right,” she insisted, “one sees what one sees, the rest is a
reconstruction from memory and painters have nothing to do with reconstruction.”
Nor do any artists, including writers like herself, she felt; what she found in Picasso,
was what she wanted in her own work, “things seen without association but simply
as things seen.” And she also found it in the cinema. “The cinema has offered a
solution of this thing,” she explains in Lectures in America: the thing, that is, of
simulating people, objects, emotions, “as they are existing” and without havingGGray_c04.indd 398ray_c 04 .indd 398 8 8/1/2011 7:53:54 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 54 AM