PARTISAN REVIEW
283
Your Own Best Friend,
yet not scholarly enough to win the respect of
academics (in nearly a hundred pages devoted to psychobiographies of
Rimmler and Hitler there is not a single reference to the two most
prominent scholarly students of these' subjects, Peter Loewenberg and
Robert G.
L.
Waite). Unless therefore I misjudge the nostalgia mania,
Fromm is no more likely to regain the limelight than Rosemary Clooney.
He is now a figure out of our past, to be remembered with some
annoyance and embarrassment, if also with a measure of affection.
Paul A. Robinson
BECAUSE AND BECOME
THE GEOGRAPHICAL HISTORY OF AMERICA OR THE RELATION
OF HUMAN NATURE TO THE HUMAN MIND.
By
Gertrude Stein.
Introduction
by
William H. Gass. Vintage. $1.95.
"For a very long time everybody refuses," Gertrude Stein
wrote
In
1926,
"and then almost without a pause almost everybody
accepts." Yet almost without a pause, for a very long time indeed,
Gertrude Stein has remained among the refused in modem literature.
If
at all, she is known as an early and intelligent advocate of Picasso's art, as
the literary midwife who scrubbed down Hemingway's just-born style,
or simply as an eminence who presided over a salon through which
passed one by one the great artistic figures of her period--Picasso,
Braque, Matisse, Calder, Lipschitz, Thomson, Pound, Wilder,
Hemingway--artists whom everybody eventually accepted. The brief
flare of celebrity that surrounded Gertrude Stein when she toured the
United States in
1934-35
not only distorted her literary achievement
(she was celebrated as the writer of
The Autobiography of Alice B.
To klas
,
not of
Tender Buttons
or
Lucy Church Amiably),
it also
somewhat garishly reduced her complex style to an avant-garde version
of Gracie Allen's whimsical double-talk. Outside the circle of her notable
friends and on her own, she seemed merely droll, someone to be drawn
out and then patronized. When she was asked the meaning of "a rose is a
rose is a rose" at the University of Chicago, she saw at once t he
questioner's ironic presumption. "But I notice that you all know it," she
declared, "you make fun of it, but you know it. Now listen! I'm no fool.
I know that in daily life we don't go around saying '... is a ... is a ... is
