Sound over Sight: James Joyce and Gertrude Stein in transition

Abstract

In a literary memoir first published in the late 1940s, Samuel Putnam suggested that James Joyce and Gertrude Stein ‘were the two big thrills that transition had to offer its transatlantic customers’ (Putnam 1947, 135). It is undeniable that both writers received great attention through the scrutiny afforded the American expatriate magazine from its earliest appearance in April 1927. Little magazines are ostensibly devoted to uncovering and promoting new authors; it is somewhat peculiar, therefore, that transition became dominated in the minds of many readers by two well-known figures that even its editors admitted sheepishly were ‘both in middle age’ (t 3 1927, 177).¹ In terms of the circumstances of their own careers in the late 1920s, Joyce and Stein appeared in transition because both were in need of championing. James Joyce, by this time the world-famous author of Ulysses, was writing something new, something not yet recognizable as a novel, and something that his own friends and supporters treated, at best, with quiet suspicion and, at worst, with open scorn. Gertrude Stein, although a great collector of modern art and a literary personality in her own right, was still largely unread in either Europe or the United States. Both writers desired an outlet for their work and friendly associates who were capable and willing to defend this work from attack. But these two exceptional figures brought much more than notoriety to the fledgling little magazine. Both Joyce and Stein helped inspire through their professional courage the genesis of the programme of revolutionary letters that would come to define transition.