Gertrude Stein, dailiness, and "the proper music"

It has taken a couple of days for me to take stock of my involvement in reading and writing about Gertrude Stein's writing as I move also into the writings of others who have felt her influence and as I consider the limits of her influence on my own practice.

There's a candid and telling moment I thought I recalled in Ann Lauterbach's conversation with Charles Bernstein on the Penn Sound site (link provided in a previous post) about her feeling of being so intensely alive when writing and in a separate frame or world from the usual -- though strangely I couldn't find it when listening again, so perhaps it was something after all from The Night Sky, though I could swear I heard Lauterbach's voice . . . .Yet it's a feeling I strongly identify with. After hours spent absorbed in writing, the wrench of suddenly experiencing not only the change of the light as the day fades but also the unaccountable vanishing of time that alters my sense of mortality, then realizing that now the descent must begin into another world, into the necessities of those daily duties in support of being mortal, the descent into the world of household, of kitchen, of a disorder that can not be transformed by words.

In my absorption in the writing of GS (which will remain a consistent thread in my reading and thinking about writing generally)I had purposely avoided thinking about the details of her daily life. A burst of pique came from realizing that this woman whose writing is so revolutionary in fact lived a life of upper middle class privilege, of independent means, fully supported by the intellectual sympathies and domestic devotion of Alice Toklas, whom she describes as her "wife." It was Alice who tended to maintaining the household in all aspects in order to leave Gertrude free to be a "genius."

When Gertrude writes of domestic objects, as in Tender Buttons, they are very much present as the impetus for language but not in their capacity of involving time and labour in the process of living and not in their presence in the framework of her own lived time.

Ann Lauterbach talked with Bernstein about the "backdrop or thing that unleashes its power into the poem" and that you "take what you need from many different sources" though she tries to avoid the domestic because that's what women have for so long been expected to write about.

How can these pieces or aspects of being alive -- these persistent repeated incidents of "hauling wood, drawing water", the routine of living, be capable of being integrated into a creative life? Or do they continue as background against which writing is resistance? Or is it only a matter of ongoing gender politics that a female who is writing even considers domestic tasks as a form of anguished interruption? What is the "real work?" I doubt that Edmund Wilson or Vladimir Nabokov or a host of other male writers considered it an issue at all that meals must be cooked, laundry laundered, floors swept, and the myriad chores done that constitute the round of daily life. Even Virginia Woolf had "servant problems."

Years ago I recall reading an essay by feminist (Judy Syfers, premier issue of Ms. Magazine in 1971) who claimed that what she needed was "a wife" to take care of domestic matters thus freeing time for her career. As a humorous piece satirizing traditional gender roles in heterosexual marriage, it echoes what Villiers de l'Isle Adam wrote in his play Axel (1890) with reference to the dream of living in a carefree fantasized future: "Vivre? Les serviteurs feront cela pour nous."

Is it a matter of gender or of class or the heady drug of writing that casts such shadows on domestic work?

Paris appealed to Gertrude for the "calm and peace necessary to her mode of life and work" (Brinnin 47) and "[h]er appreciation of Parisian virtues is made largely on a basis of ease -- physical ease, to a great degree, but more importantly, intellectual and spiritual ease." (Brinnin 48)

I especially note: But more importantly, intellectual and spiritual ease and the relation to physical ease. The primary concerns of Gertrude and Leo moving into the flat on Rue de Fleurus were where to hang paintings.

Part of my project will be to find evidence (perhaps in the "gray proletarian stories she wanted to tell"? Brinnin 57) of G's experience of domestic duties. But the stories (in for example Three Lives) concerned not people of her status as Brinnin goes on to elaborate:

Inarticulate humanity had always fascinated her; she now saw ways to record the whole sound and sense of the unlettered yet massively human type of servant she knew. No further observation was necessary; for years, in many households, including her own, she had studied such women with a natural human curiosity as well as with her scientifically informed eye. But to record the matter was one thing; to make the proper music was another. Gertrude's problem was twofold, yet one answer would serve.

The emphasis is mine. Gertrude was in a class apart from those who served her, they were her material for study, her intellectual stimulus, and the issue was to make "proper music" of such matters.

My partner has commented slyly that my grumbling about Gertrude's freedom from household tasks might smack of a tendency towards social realism, yet I doubt that my aim is to compare the writing of GS to Jack London's Martin Eden (now largely unread). There remains the question always for me of relating life to art.

Brinnin is astute in noting her naive approach towards her "subjects": "By a ceaseless flow of half-articulated thoughts, worn phrases of speech and homely inflections from domestic life, she would match Cezanne's iteration of the qualities of light." (62)

So indeed she was marginally aware of the daily drudgery of life as experienced by others; they were to be the raw material of her fiction, to be transformed into art, her literary form of impressionism.