PARTISAN REVIEW
by an OWI propagandist, published in the
New York Times
when the
book appeared. Only one aspect of Miss Stein was discussed, her "fri–
volity." A writer like Miss Stein had many aspects; but frivolity is not
her prevailing mood. Like that other egomaniac, Walt Whitman, an
intellectual bent seems to have been accompanied by a nonrational urge
in the same direction. Both were impelled to identify themselves with
"everybody," and, in a long, often tedious, Sears Roebuck cataloging,
to explain everybody to everyone. Both often appear to be seeking
frantically for an elusive "somebody" in the "everybody" of public
crowds; both fill up lines with instantaneous, nonliterary expressions,
flinging them up carelessly, as personally, intimately, freshly, as a child
sees; both were caught up
in
the crowds of war, paying less attention
to events and programs than to the elements beneath. Whitman dis–
covered the anonymous "unknown" soldier; Stein, the anonymous civ–
ilian who is neither always heroic nor always afraid but who eats,
sleeps, scrambles for food, looks for hopeful portents, awaits events,
resists, and sometimes succumbs to the enemy.
If
we accept the Porter
version of Miss Stein's salon, it appears only as the paradox: of an ex–
perience that was in general unusually democratic, oddly equalitarian for
a writer who has often been identified with esoteric snobbism. By what
standard of responsibility is she to be measured? By Silone or Malraux?
By Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells? Is Glenway Wescott's
Apartment in
Athens,
which the author acknowledged was his "contribution to the war
effort," to be the standard, and are we to accept its historical distortions?
Even: a few names suffice to indicate the difficulty. In her chosen orbit,
Gertrude Stein was responsible, and more may be learned from her
failures than from any number of glittering, successful works patterned
on models with which we are familiar. She was under the spell of the
private life that goes on whether there is justice or injustice, struggle
or ennui, and she hoped by abolishing the chronological sequence to
express life by its values only.
There are no Dali snails crawling over corpses in Stein's prose; no
descent into degenerative processes solely for the thrill.
If
her influence
was pernicious, where is it to be found? In the banalities of Hollywood,
the brutality of best sellers? Various writers proclaimed their indebt–
edness to the laboratory methods of her prose; Sherwood Anderson,
Hemingway, Thornton Wilder, to name three. Miss Porter's portrait
would seem more convincing if she detailed this evidence; she implies
that Miss Stein's chief followers were "ill-mannered" brats from the
Middle West, intent on sex and rum, and who had "never read a book."
This has a witty ring, but is it true? Is the
lumpen illiterati
determined
570
