Written, extruded

Here's the journalist Janet Malcolm on Gertrude Stein, chiming in with a long, woman-hating tradition (on which see DeKoven and Stimpson) of describing Stein's writing as a kind of bodily effluvium:

Her literary enterprise was itself almost entirely work-free. Mabel Dodge’s four-volume autobiography, “Intimate Memories,” begun in 1924 (after her fourth marriage, when she became Mabel Dodge Luhan), gives us a rare glimpse of Stein at her desk during the long visit she and Toklas made to the Villa Curonia in 1912. It was late at night, and Stein was “writing automatically in a long weak handwriting—four or five lines to the page—letting it ooze up from deep down inside her, down onto the paper with the least possible physical effort; she would cover a few pages so and leave them there and go to bed, and in the morning Alice would gather them up.” Stein never, or hardly ever, revised (a rare false start to “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas” exists among Stein’s papers), and in “Everybody’s Autobiography”she said that she never wrote much more than half an hour a day (but added significantly, “To be sure all day and every day you are waiting around to write that half hour a day”). Stein didn’t even type her work; she just oozed into her notebooks and Toklas did the rest.

First of all, whuh? Really, we're going to just take Mabel Dodge Luhan at her word?

Ok, now that that's out of the way, I'm struck (and plain irritated) by the judgmental tone that Malcolm takes when it comes to Stein's writing. Lazy!, Malcolm scolds. "Work-free." It's as though Stein isn't writing so much as pooping. "Stein didn’t even type her work; she just oozed into her notebooks and Toklas did the rest."

There's a strange Protestant ethic running through the passage that suggests that there's something reprehensible about not doing your own typing (that is, if you're a woman!). Malcolm's Stein is indolent, lazy, not a worker but a sort of repulsive literary Jabba the Hutt (on which, again, see Stimpson).* Underlying this tone of revulsion is a sharp distinction, particularly inappropriate in Stein's case, between work and rest. If it's work, Malcolm seems to suggest, it's imbued with intention, attention, and is therefore art--and if it is not (as Stein might say), then not.

Where does Malcolm's work ethic get us in understanding Stein's actual writing?

Not very far, I think. Rather, I tend to think it gets us further in understanding a twinned horror of female literary accomplishment and the female body, which persists even at this late date.


*Full disclosure: Stimpson does not actually use the words "literary Jabba the Hutt." Probably to her credit.

I pretty much think Marjorie Perloff's review of Two Lives is right on, especially this part:

But then Malcolm—and this is what makes her book finally so unsatisfactory—has no use for the bulk of Stein's writing. She dismisses it early in Two Lives as "unreadable," making a sharp distinction between the "experimental writing" of Tender Buttons or the Portraits and nonfiction of the twenties and "conventional" work, like The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, written in the thirties to attract a larger public. I find this distinction dubious: even Alice B. Toklas uses a panoply of modernist devices, and certainly it has little or no plot or "rounded" characters. (94)

DeKoven, Marianne. "Introduction: Transformations of Gertrude Stein." Gertrude Stein. Spec. issue of Modern Fiction Studies 42.3 (1996). 469-483. Project Muse. Web. 25 July 2010.

Malcolm, Janet. "Gertrude Stein's War: The Years in Occupied France." The New Yorker (2 June 2003). The New Yorker. Web. 25 July 2010. This is an excerpt from her book Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice (2007).

Perloff, Marjorie. Rev. of Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice by Janet Malcolm. Common Knowledge 15.1 (Winter 2009). Project Muse. Web. 29 July 2010.

Stimpson, Catharine R. "The Somagrams of Gertrude Stein." The Female Body in Western Culture: Semiotic Perspectives. Spec. issue of Poetics Today 6.1/2 (1985) 67-80. JSTOR. Web. 18 April 2008.

Once again, I should reiterate that I don't play piano and never have.

But at some point in high school I borrowed one of my mother's music books and learned to more or less plunk out Beethoven's "Für Elise," that old standby of piano pedagogy. (I was significantly less good at it than this seven-year-old.) I was pretty terrible at reading music for two hands then (I still am, but less so now) and, then as now, had no piano technique.

I've recently been trying to remember how to play it. Katherine doesn't seem to have the music in her house, and I don't want to play it so badly as to track it down in the music library. Instead I've been trying to remember, and it has been a lesson in the strangeness of memory.

So far all I can remember is the opening sequence and a little bit of the B section. I remember how the rest of it sounds, but not how to play it. I started with nothing; I couldn't remember a thing except for where to place my right hand for the first note. Slowly it comes back.

I don't at all remember how the music looks on the page; consequently I can't reconstruct any of the fingerings logically.

I also have no visual memory of where the right hand goes; it is necessary that I not look at my right hand. That memory is in the muscles.

Conversely, I must look at the left hand. The left hand does some hopping around, and when I learned the piece I didn't have the technique to memorize that kind of motion. I always looked at the left hand when I learned the piece, and I must look at the left hand to remember.

It's funny, because I didn't remember what my left hand was supposed to look like at first. I started to remember by making some jabs at the keyboard and listening, trying to remember the right sound and the right movements and, finally, the right visual cues. It's the visual cues that make playing the left hand a sure thing.

It's different with the right hand. Staring at it does nothing (and anyway I couldn't play the left-handed part while looking at my right hand). Sometimes I make a lot of mistakes and sometimes I don't. There's nothing solid for me to rely on to prevent mistakes. If there's music in front of me I can remind myself to be sure to play that accidental, or concentrate on the sequence I'm about to play. Without music, without any visual sense of where my fingers are supposed to go, I can only prevent mistakes one way: suspending intention and dwelling in a physical memory. I have to trust my frankly unreliable fingers to remember on my behalf.

What else do my fingers know that I don't? I ask this by touch-typing on a computer keyboard, of course.

Like many people, I had some formal musical training (violin) when I was pretty young and left off serious study about mid-college. I don't consider myself a musician.

Now I find myself with sudden access to a piano. I do not play piano; I never have. I have, however, tried to pick out music on pianos many times. It's the sort of thing I find irresistible: there is the music, there is the keyboard. See what you can realize just by taking a stab at it.

It's startling to me to notice what is and is not difficult about it to me now, in contrast to earlier periods in my life. Reading bass clef seems more natural than it once did. Reading two lines together seems easier. It seems less necessary to look at the keyboard than it once did. On the other hand, I'm far more aware of my lack of fingering technique, and the limitations it imposes, than before. And I can feel the effects of typing a dissertation in my hands.

It seems the relationship between my brain and my hands has changed without my noticing. Hello, my fingers; we meet again.