258
PARTISAN REVIEW
Whitehead has a style and so has Gertrude Stein and Whitehead
is a philosopher and so is Gertrude Stein but not a very good philosopher
what did they talk about I wonder, what did they talk about while
Alice Toklas entertained the wives of other geniuses, Mrs. Whitehead
and the wives of many other geniuses. Well of course there is such a
thing as the wisdom of a child but you can get too much of it and then
there is childish wisdom and you can get a great deal of that, also super–
stitions intuitions feelings history Shakespeare, oh dear me there is al–
ways Shakespeare and he is always right.
It is full of excitement to know that Shakespeare and everybody is
right about how people are. By this I mean, anybody can mean, that
when you are in a country thav is being occupied . . . everybody is funny,
that is they feel and they act in such different ways at any time. You
think they think one thing and they act another. . .. Others who are said
to be one thing say other things .... oh it is all so complicated and every
day and in every way I like the complications being so complicated. The
1914 war was a simple war with simple feelings and all the veterans
of that war are confused with this war ... I must say I like it, I like
things that look as if they were there when they are elsewhere.
Naturally if you are the youngest in the family and not
qu~rrelsome,
naturally if you are the youngest you are very well taken care of by
everybody, "also as being the youngest I had cajoling ways, one has
when one continues to be the youngest."
When I was then I liked revolutions I liked to eat I liked to eat I
liked to cry not in real life but in books in real life there was nothing much
to cry about but in books oh dear me, it was wonderful there was so much
to cry about and then there was evolution.
And now there is no evolution and no revolution and no food either,
there is quite a lot to cry about but Gertrude Stein never liked the nine–
teenth century in real life so now we have the twentieth century and
realism, realism is dead and things are really the way they look and not
the way they are, a star is the way it looks and it is not really not the
way anybody says it really is. So now we have the twentieth century.
Bennet Cerf who naturally doesn't like it much either says this book
is an on-the-spot story of what the common people of France endured
from 1940 to 1944 but is it. I think
if
you are interested in the way it
looked the way anybody endured or realism realism, the way anybody
says it really was, you had better not read Gertrude Stein telling you the
way she felt, she is not very reliable about feeling and anyway she was
not looking but listening. You had better read somebody who wasn't
there at all such as Alex Comfort, he is more reliable about looking and
feeling and that is the only way anybody can tell you how it really was.
But Gertrude Stein is a philosopher she has a wonderful eye for the
relationships of sound in words words and sometimes things and she is
charming, charming and not very vulgar, her sentences are wonderfully
preserved. No one can read her sentences without learning something
anything no one can read her sentences without learning.
