Gertrude Stein: Writings, 1932-1946.

844 pp. New York: Library of America. $40 each.

Bruce Hainley

1. Gertrude Stein swallowed the world whole. After sucking it like a blue lozenge, it became her Adam's apple.

She doted on verbs and adverbs, questioned the necessity of "the most the completely most uninteresting" question mark.

She wrote: "So many words to use. / Oh do not say that words have a use."

She balanced elucidation nixed with a willingness to bare her heart in the middle of almost anything, say, in the midst of an essay on narration: "I love my love with a b because she is peculiar."

She wore Balmain vests and never drove in reverse.

She was called by glamorous Natalie Barney "a magnet to which so many adhered," but even with Mice near she was alone. John Ashbery wrote almost thirty years ago: "Gertrude Stein was peculiarly alone. . . . Thus she was both free to go her own way, inspired by the example of Picasso with whom she was in constant contact, and also alone, which accounts for the anguish one feels behind the screen of verbiage . . . and which ultimately lifts it into greatness." Alone and then internationally famous - for Alice's Autobiography - and then rather alone again with fame's flowers fading.

Now she is left alone, perhaps due to her being both the easiest and the most difficult of writers. Easiest because she razes literature so that the shoots and stubs of its most basic elements can be seen - nothing mythic but rather the alphabet and the words made up by it, the use and abandon of punctuation, syntax, grammar, the liberating refusal to explain except by letting language do as it does, repeatedly letting language do as it is doing. She considers where anyone's love of things - language, life - begins. Do you care about "delicate" articles, not-dull conjunctions, do you care to see the worth of the verb to be, do you care if "servile" commas are jettisoned? The most difficult because if you aim to rub elbows with her challenge it becomes excitingly and depressingly difficult to know what you are doing. What is an essay, a novel, a sentence, a book review? "A place for everything and everything in its place./ In place in place of everything, in a place." It is not unlike being faced with the simple complex beauty of Duchamp's Fountain, the slick glistening white, the graceful curves flushing the systems.

2. Stein's methods, her creamy aesthetic, are continuously calming, not harsh or slavish: "Somebody has said that I myself am striving for a fourth dimension in literature. I am striving for nothing of the sort and I am not striving at all but only gradually growing and becoming steadily more aware of the ways things can be felt and known in words." As she shows dazzlingly in The Geographical History of America, her interest in the possible impossibility of identity ("Somebody tears come to my eyes when I say somebody, and why well because the word sound like that that of something like a dog that can be lost. Anything that can be lost is something anybody can get used to and that is identity.") had everything to do with process, which goes on when you are going on in what you are doing. It was her growing garden.

Stein allowed herself to do and see. "Define what you do by what you see never by what you know." She wrote so that writing exists only when the writer writes and when the reader reads - otherwise it should be forgotten. She saw the long tradition of literature and saw the why bother that came with it. She moved the words around so the why bother was a beginning. A dandy, she resembles Warhol in her ability to continue, to move on, to disregard, to bother. She did so never minding or perhaps not knowing what a novel was or a poem was or an autobiography was only what they might be when she concluded with them. She wrote, not caring about being right but writing.

3. She is often funny. Most people never have given her enough of a chance to see how funny she can be. It is funny that she wrote a novel (What Does She See When She Shuts Her Eyes) that is only a few pages long; funny that she has plays (see the brilliant Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights) in which stage directions, characters, and dramatic action exist if they exist at all inseparably from the plays playing language; funny that although the word lesbian never appears in her voluminousness, since she saw it as natural to the world as color, she wrote, proleptically, the most vigorous theory of lesbian desire - not by writing it but allowing it to oxygenate everywhere, as in the title of her melodrama Three Sisters Who Are Not Sisters.

A similar volte-face occurs in one of her most provocative works, Four in America, where she wondered what kind of military general Henry James would have been since "Henry James is not a queen but a general. Oh yes you do you understand that." Oh but let me give the entire thing succinctly (yes, she can be succinct). She prefaces Four in America:

What They Thought and Bought

FOUR IN AMERICA

If Ulysses S. Grant had been a religious leader who was to become a saint what kind would he have done.

If the Wright brothers had been artists that is painters what would they have done.

If Henry James had been a general what would he have had to do.

If General Washington had been a writer that is a novelist what would he do.

If you are to write about Henry James or about what is or is not going on in his work, you may not be able to see him right away. So her essay on James begins by asking, "What is the difference between Shakespeare's plays and Shakespeare's sonnets" and by considering the phrase (her free translation from George Hugnets poem Enfances) "Before the Flowers of Friendship Faded Friendship Faded." The considering goes on long enough - but is in no way simply a digression - that when the first appearance of his name occurs she states, "Henry James nobody has forgotten Henry James even if I have but I have not." From Shakespeare's plays and how they are "lively sound" rather than like the sonnets "smooth," from looking at paintings, how Picasso did what he saw, she learned to see sounds and let them just do. They led her to ponder the family name James. How it is important in understanding who Henry James was and what he did to wonder how Henry, Alice, and William James might be connected to "a wicked family named James," the relations of Jesse James - this is connected to how important it is to follow the wrong meanings and sounds of words no matter where they might lead. She finds that Henry James had "no relief from any pang," a statement worth volumes of Leon Edel. Consider the cataract of his language as a way to deal with his having no relief from any pang, a buffer between pang and him.

4. This new edition of Stein's writing returns to print many of her most vital works, like "Henry James"; it also gives Stein a sort of recognition as a writer that she has never before had. I say "sort of" because these two volumes do not really begin to provide a complete Gertrude Stein, and it is frustrating to keep seeing Stein in part instead of whole. She was a big lady. She said once: "I am not sure that anything but a lifework has meaning." And so there is still - even with the staunch editorial guidance of Catharine Stimpson and Harriet Chessman, whose chronology, notes on the text, and notes are shrewd and elegantly unobtrusive - well, I guess I would say a nervousness and doubt, a refusal to embrace and acknowledge the luxury and meaning of her vast lifework.

The Library of America has given us already the collected poems, prose, and plays of Robert Frost, the collected poetry and prose of Wallace Stevens, even the complete plays (in three volumes, each weighing in at over a thousand pages) of Eugene O'Neill, and so it is disappointing that the editors have chosen to excerpt Stein's work. These volumes, even at 800-plus pages each, feel skimpy. Why is there, for example, only "Henry James" from Four in America instead of the complete work, which has never been reprinted since its posthumous publication over fifty years ago? Ditto for the excerpted Narration: Four Lectures. This is especially egregious since works like The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, included in full, are readily available elsewhere. Where is Alice's shadow text, the crucial Everybody's Autobiography, in which Stein heart-breakingly considers the importance of American failure and loneliness. I miss the exuberant, erotic Pink Melon Joy, the strange, daunting A Novel of Thank You, and the work of Stein whose title I most envy, Mildred's Thoughts, where Stein announces her reign as a happy "baby queen."

The impossible was her horizon. Her most opaque goings-on are one and the same as her translucent necessities. Like the Marquis de Sade and the body, like Warhol and art, she went along with wording to a point from which it might never recover; but in doing so, where de Sade pursued a ruthless, menacing enlightenment and Warhol culture and being's glamorous voids, Stein pursued pleasure and joy. She is one of the most joyful creative forces of the twentieth century. Most still refuse to see this. Much of her joy is, paradoxically, contained within refusal: the refusal that writing be contingent on or about something, the refusal to deny the plush of the monochromatic. Her writing is like a desert, but too few remember the possibilities of a blank expanse: the desert in bloom, the miraculous oasis, even the mirage.

Her work's joyfulness grows with life and words everywhere, even in absence, boredom, and sleep, springing. She is waiting to "patiently tell all about everything."

Bruce Hainley is a contributing editor of Artforum and index. His work also frequently appears in Frieze and The Nation.