(Im)Personating Gertrude Stein

Abstract

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) has always been considered Gertrude Stein’s most ‘readerly’, her most ‘transparent’ text. In an important essay on Stanzas in Meditation, the difficult set of abstract poetic compositions written the very same summer as the autobiography, Ulla E. Dydo observes,

The language of the Autobiography may surprise by its cleverness and felicity, but it never calls attention to itself by its difficulty. The life and times of Alice Toklas and Gertrude Stein make easy reading. The difficult language of Stanzas on the other hand, demands a reader’s full and equal attention to every single word as word. … The two books do not even sound as if they were by the same author. Gertrude Stein herself was quite clear about this difference. The Autobiography was the first of a series of books which she characterized as her ‘open and public’ books, or as ‘audience writing’. … On the other hand, works like Stanzas — virtually everything Stein wrote up to 1932 and a good deal that she wrote after she became famous — she described as her ‘real kind’ of books: a literature of word compositions rather than a literature of subject matter.¹