[New-Poetry] Stein - Malcolm - Ozick = Stein

[editor]

This paragraph, from Philip Hensher reviews *Two Lives: Gertrude and
Alice* by Janet Malcolm, from

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2007/10/25/bomalc120.xml

“There is, too, the vexed question of how Stein and Toklas managed to stay
alive in Vichy France, and their attitude to their Jewishness--Toklas
converted to Christianity in old age. It seems to enrage Malcolm that
Stein wasn't more interested in her ethnic identity.”

especially that last sentence, reminded me of a short essay that appeared
in the New York Times Magazine, November 24, 1996, by Cynthia Ozick
entitled “A Prophet of Modernism: Gertrude Stein.” In it, Ozick writes of
the “copycat Cubist”: “She intended to seize and personify modernism
itself, and she succeeded. Consequently, we cannot imagine Gertrude Stein
without Picasso. Like him, she wanted to invent Cubism--not in oils but in
words. She worked to subtract plain meaning from English prose. Whether
she was a charlatan or a philosopher, it is even now hard to say.” “No one
now reads Gertrude Stein, though a few of her titles have lives of their
own: ‘Four Saints in Three Acts,’ which Virgil Thomson made into an opera;
‘The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas,’ written by Gertrude Stein about
Gertrude Stein.” “During the German occupation of Paris, when Jews were
being hunted by the thousands, these two Jewish women fled to obscurity in
the countryside; their Montparnasse flat, with its paintings, was left
unmolested. And when Gertrude Stein died in 1946, at 72, her name was a
household word (or quip), her mannish head an avant-garde image, and she
had become one with the movement she touted.” “At the close of its century
of brilliance and triumph, modernism begins now to look a little
old-fashioned, even a bit stale or exhausted, and certainly
conventional--but what is fresher, and sassier, and more enchantingly
silly than ‘A rose is a rose is a rose. ...’? This endearing, enduring,
durable and derisible chant of a copycat Cubist is almost all that is left
of Gertrude Stein.” 

posted by Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino 

http://www.eratiopostmodernpoetry.com/

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