Making It New: 1900–1945 399recourse to “remembering.” “By a continuously moving picture of any one there
is no memory of any other thing and there is that thing existing,” she goes on. Just
as life never repeats itself, so the cinema does not quite repeat itself and prose should
not really repeat itself: there are minute differences in each successive moment,
frame, or phrase making up a sequence that presents itself as a flowing continuity,
a continually developing present complete and actual at any given moment. Now
and now and now – one and one and one: what Stein pursues in her work is an
experience of wonder at the constant newness of things. By the use of partly repetitive
statements, each making a limited advance, she presents us with an uninterrupted
series of instantaneous visions, so that we can grasp living moments in precise,
ordered forms. Reading her prose is sometimes like holding a strip of movie film
and looking at each frame separately. There is stillness, newness, difference in each
frame or phrase, but there is also the impulse toward process, motion – registered, in
Stein’s work in particular, in her preference for verbs and participles over nouns
and adjectives, and her minimal use of punctuation. The present and process: that
is a very American coupling, as well as a modernist one, as Stein knew well. “It is
something strictly American to conceive a space that is filled with moving,” she
observed in Lectures in America, “a space of time that is filled always with moving.”
Stein herself left America in 1903. Having spent her early years in Vienna and
Paris as well as the United States, she moved back to Paris where she lived until her
death, except for the years of Nazi occupation, when she moved to the south.
A lesbian, she lived with another expatriate American, Alice B. Toklas, from 1907.
A friend of such painters as Picasso, Matisse, and Braque, she established a salon
in the 1920s that became a gathering place for both European artists and American
expatriates like Hemingway, Anderson, and Fitzgerald. Her first published work,
Three Lives: Stories of the Good Anna, Melanctha, and the Gentle Lena (1904–1905,
published 1909), shows some of the influence of Naturalism. But already the hall-
marks of Stein’s mature style are there, especially in the second section concerning
the black woman Melanctha. Melanctha is defined by her excited involvement in
the present moment. One of her lovers tells her “you never can remember”; her
explanation is “it’s because I am always knowing what it is I am wanting, when I get
it.” And to capture her character’s strange combination of “ignorance and power
and desire,” Stein uses a style marked by repetition, that moves ever forward in a
rhythmic pattern with an emphasis placed on the verb. Nouns being names, Stein
observed in Lectures in America, “things once they are named the name does not go
on doing anything to them and so why write in nouns.” With poetry, however, she
held a different theory of language. Although nouns did not carry prose forward,
Stein argued, “you can love a name and if you love a name then saying that name
any number of times only makes you love it more.” And poetry is “really loving the
name of anything,” she said. So in Tender Buttons (1914), her prose and poetry
meditation on “Objects: food: rooms,” she sometimes dwells upon nouns: repeating
one as if, each time it is repeated, a bit of inertia and impercipience is shaken loose
off it and the reality is freshly brought to our minds. That strategy is at work in what
is perhaps her most famous phrase: “a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.” “I caressedGGray_c04.indd 399ray_c 04 .indd 399 8 8/1/2011 7:53:54 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 54 AM