TISCHLER, Alyson. a Rose is a Pose - Steinian Modernism and Mass Culture

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Alyson Tischler, “A Rose Is a Pose: Steinian Modernism and Mass Culture,” Journal of Modern Literature, 26.3/4 (Spring2003), pp. 12–27. © Indiana University Press, 2004.

A Rose Is a Pose:

Steinian Modernism and Mass Culture

Alyson Tischler

Milford, CT

Critics and commentators have held hugely divergent views on the quality and significance of

Gertrude Steinʼs literary works. They have agreed, however, on one point: that with the notable

exception of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), Steinʼs writings attracted very few

readers in her lifetime. In this book which became a bestseller, Stein departs drastically from her

characteristic style that had been dubbed “Steinese” by her reviewers. Instead, she invents a new

voice and writes from the point of view of Toklas in a style that could be read with little effort and

did not require the patience that one must bring to reading The Making of Americans (1925), Tender

Buttons (1914), and her other more difficult works. Although the book written in Toklasʼs voice was

Stein s̓ only work that circulated widely, Stein s̓ characteristically difficult style was more widely

known to the American public than we had previously imagined. For example, in a 1914 article in

The Evening Sun, a journalist reports on an international polo game and adopts “the phraseology

of Gertrude Stein for the purpose because it harmonizes so well with our clear understanding of

the game.” The farcical account of the rules begins: “Polo, a game not a basket but nevertheless,

molasses running up Woolworth but Wu Ting Fang, yes, no, no, yes, certainly, but by hakes and

that which is a turnip is not a peanut notwithstanding.”1 Stein had hired several clipping services

to comb newspapers for articles that mentioned her name, and hundreds of clippings that contain

imitations of her writing style are held in Yale Universityʼs collection of Steinʼs archival materi-

als.2 When the outbreak of World War II was imminent, Thornton Wilder convinced Stein to send

1. “Our Own Polo Guide: The Game Explained a la Gertrude Stein,” 13 June 1914, the Evening Sun, Gertrude Stein and

Alice B. Toklas Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, (hereafter abbreviated Yale), MSS 76, box 142. 2. While a handful of these clippings are taken from French newspapers, most come from American newspapers rangingfrom the most well known papers of the day to regional papers such as the Columbia, South Carolina Record . Stein hiredseveral clipping services during the course of her career. Henry Romeike, Inc. of New York City clipped most of the pieces

discussed in this essay. On the top of each clipping, the company prints its motto: “O wad some power the giftie giʼe us / Tosee ourselʼs as ithers see us.” These lines taken from Robert Burnsʼs poem, “To a Louse,” are a perfect motto for the clippingservice that sent Stein many of the references to her name in American newspapers. By turning lines of poetry into a corporate

motto, this clipping service collapses the distinction between high and low culture in a manner that resembles Steinʼs ownpractice.



Tischler: Steinian Modernism and Mass Culture 13

her papers from France to the United States for safekeeping and recommended the Yale University

Library as a repository. These papers have informed the research of several generations of Stein

scholars who have made strides in interpreting her writing by studying her manuscripts, but Stein s̓

vast collection of newspaper clippings has escaped scholarly attention.3

These clippings are worth examining not only for their intrinsic interest, but also because they

advance recent critical discussions on modernism and mass culture. In recent years, critics have

argued that quintessentially modernist forms, such as little magazines and novels that take place in

one day, are engaged in the commercial cultures of their time. Mark Morrisson s̓ The Public Face

of Modernism shows how little magazines, which have traditionally been understood as separate

from commercial culture due to their limited circulation and the nature of the high modernist texts

contained within, borrow techniques from mass market periodicals in an attempt to reach a large

audience.4 In Reading 1922, Michael North reads James Joyceʼs Ulysses and Virginia Woolfʼs Mrs.

Dalloway in the context of the popular-cultural events of 1922, the year that Ulysses was published

and Mrs. Dalloway begun; for example, North argues that the scene in Woolfʼs novel in which the

characters decipher the name of a product written in skywriting responds to the emergence of this

mode of advertising in 1922.5 Morrisson, North, and a chorus of recent critics have positioned them-

selves against the arguments put forth by New Critics, the Frankfurt School, and Andreas Huyssen

that delineate modernism and mass culture as polar opposites.6

Although some of the earliest critics of modernism launched similar arguments, Huyssenʼs

concept of a “great divide” separating modernism and mass culture has served as a touchstone in

recent critical works that propose an alternate view.7 Huyssen writes: “Modernism constituted itself

through a conscious strategy of exclusion, an anxiety of contamination by its other: an increasingly

consuming and engulfing mass culture.”8 Steinʼs clippings put the limitations of Huyssenʼs theory in

3. Scholars who have written about the manuscripts of Steinʼs writings include Ulla Dydo, Leon Katz, and John Whittier-Ferguson. See Ulla E. Dydo, “How to Read Gertrude Stein: The Manuscript of ̒ Stanza in Meditation,ʼ ” Text 1 (1981); Leon

Katz, “Weininger and The Making of Americans,” Twentieth Century Literature 24 (1978); John Whittier-Ferguson, “Stein inTime: History, Manuscripts, and Memory,” Modernism/Modernity 6.1 (1999). 4. Mark S. Morrisson, The Public Face of Modernism: Litle Magazines, Audiences, and Reception, 1905–1920 (University

of Wisconsin Press, 2000). 5. See Michael North, Reading 1922 : A Return to the Scene of the Modern (Oxford University Press, 1999). 6. For a recent discussion of the interpenetration of Steinʼs writing and the marketplace, see Sara Blair, “Home Truths:

Gertrude Stein, 27 Rue De Fleurus, and the Place of the Avant-Garde,” American Literary History 12.3 (2000). Blair readsSteinʼs “If I Had Three Husbands” as a text about domesticity and the marketplace in the context of Broom, its original site ofpublication. Other critics who have written influentially on modernismʼs engagements in the marketplace include the writers

featured in a 1996 collection edited by Kevin Dettmar and Stephen Watt. See Kevin J.H. Dettmar and Stephen Watt, eds., Marketing Modernisms: Self-Promotion, Canonization, Rereading (University of Michigan Press, 1996). See also LawrenceS. Rainey, “The Price of Modernism: Reconsidering the Publication of the Waste Land,” Yale Revue, Winter 1989 and Jennifer

Wicke, Advertising Fictions : Literature, Advertisement & Social Reading, The Social Foundations of Aesthetic Forms Series(Columbia University Press, 1988). 7. Other critics have made arguments similar to Huyssenʼs. In his essay, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” (1939), Clement

Greenberg begins with the observation that a poem by T.S. Eliot and a Tin Pan Alley song are products of the same civilization.His essay goes on to interrogate the relation of modernism and mass culture. Greenberg lauds the avant-garde experiments ofBohemia and dismisses popular culture, categorizing the former as art and the latter as kitsch. According to Greenberg, the

avant-garde artist strives to maintain a high level of art and “imitate[s] God by creating something valid solely on its own termsin the way nature itself is valid.” In contrast, he views kitsch as unoriginal and formulaic because it uses “for raw material thedebased and academicized simulacra of genuine culture.” See Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” Partisan Review

6 (1939): 34–49. Dwight Macdonald extends Greenbergʼs arguments in his essays on popular culture and the Soviet cinema.

See Dwight Macdonald, “A Theory of Popular Culture,” Politics 1 (1944): 20–23 and Dwight Macdonald, “The Soviet Cinema:

1930–1938,” Partisan Review 5 (1938): 37–50. For an excellent overview of the early critical discussions of modernism andmass culture, see Richard Keller Simon, “Modernism and Mass Culture,” American Literary History 13.2 (2001): 342–53.

8. Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism, Theories of Representation andDifference (Indiana University Press, 1986).



14 Journal of Modern Literature

relief. Stein preserved the newspaper clippings that mention her name — both the lively imitations

and the rare songs of praise — with the same care as the manuscripts of her own work. The very

fact that these clippings and her drafts are preserved side by side in the archives suggests that Stein

hardly experienced the “anxiety of contamination” that Huyssen describes. Moreover, scholars like

Morrisson have marshaled ample evidence of modernismʼs engagements in mass culture. But Steinʼs

clippings cast a different light on the critical project of writing against the “great divide” because

they reveal that the producers and consumers of mass culture were also engaged by modernism.

Figure 1. “A rose is a pose is a rose

is a pose,” The New York Times,1934, Yale, MSS 76, box 143,

folder 3352.




In a clipping dated 1934, the department store Bergdorf Goodman turns Steinʼs most famous

phrase into an advertisement for women s̓ hats: “A rose is a pose is a rose is a pose,” read the cursive

letters which meet to form an oval (fig. 1).9 Steinʼs original phrase became known to the American

public in 1933 when it appeared on the cover of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas in the form

of a circular seal. In 1933 this seal was also featured in Time Magazineʼs September 11 cover story

on Stein. Like Steinʼs original seal, the text of a “rose is a pose” takes the form of a loop. And the

sentences that compose both Steinʼs seal and the adʼs revision of it are as circular as they look.

In both examples, the sentences are self-enclosed and self-referential. Stein defines a “rose” as a

“rose”; the ad is as circular as Steinʼs seal because it defines “rose” as “pose,” and then “pose” as

“rose.” Indeed, Steinʼs sentence and the adʼs version of it adhere to P.T. Barnumʼs definition of the

perfect advertisement. In Advertising Fictions (1988), Jennifer Wicke recounts how Barnum drew

crowds to his museum in New York City through advertisements that promised an exciting event

such as an “authentic buffalo stampede.”10 But upon witnessing this event, spectators realized

that the ad had been a fiction, since the stampede consisted of an ordinary calf that was set loose.

Wicke argues that Barnum s̓ ads were not intended to be read literally: “The perfect ad, according

to Barnum, performed a species of rope trick: its words so lacked referentiality that they turned

back upon themselves, content at the vanishing point in favor of a self-reflexive aesthetic loop far

more akin to poetry.”11

In addition to the loops that are formed syntactically and spatially by Steinʼs and the advertise-

ment s̓ “rose” sentences, Steinʼs sentence and the adʼs rendition of it generate their own aesthetic

loop. The ad and Steinʼs sentence form an enclosed system whereby the ad refers to Stein s̓ sentence

and Steinʼs sentence signifies the advertised spring hats. Steinian modernism and mass culture form

a dialectic that can be perceived in the archival materials which reveal her process of composition

and preserve clippings of newspaper articles and advertisements that allude to her.12 It is beyond the

scope of this discussion to develop a detailed account of Steinʼs process of composition. In brief,Steinian abstraction represents a move away from referentiality similar to that of advertising lan-

guage. The unpublished drafts of The Making of Americans reveal that her process of composition

unfolds as the progressive excision of referents from language.13 The archives reveal that this novel

began as a personal history replete with the names of Steinʼs family members and friends and colored

by the Jewish traditions that marked their lives as first- and second-generation immigrants from

Eastern Europe. But in later drafts of this novel, all discussions of Jewish ritual disappear, as do the

references to friends and family. Steinian abstraction is produced by the removal of referents from

the surface of the text. These referents are suppressed, locked away in the archives in unpublished

notebooks. When Steinʼs writing was transformed into advertisements in the 1930s, it was offered

9. “A rose is a pose is a rose is a pose,” the New York Times, 1934, Yale, MSS 76, box 143, folder 3352. 10. Wicke, Advertising Fictions : Literature, Advertisement & Social Reading, p. 62. 11. Wicke, Advertising Fictions, p. 63.

12. Jennifer Wickeʼs study, Advertising Fictions (1988), argues that advertising and literature form a dialectic. Wicke argues

that from the beginnings of the modern practice of advertising in the nineteenth century, the two cultural practices exist in astate of “discursive rivalry and mutual independence” (p. 173). 13. The Making of Americans is exemplary of Steinʼs process of composition. Despite the fact that The Making of Americans

was not published in its entirety until 1925, it is actually one of her earliest works. Stein wrote the first version of this novelin 1903, and then she produced two more versions in the period of 1906 to 1908. The Making of Americans is Steinʼs only

major work whose archival materials indicate that it underwent significant changes in the process of composition — all threeof its handwritten manuscripts have been preserved.




within the context of a familiar language that also departed from the conventions of referentiality.

While the department stores whose advertisements mimicked Stein s̓ style stood to profit from her

notoriety, Stein also benefited from these imitations. Steinʼs style that reviewers had considered so

foreign that they dubbed it “Steinese” was positioned by her imitators in mass-cultural contexts

whose language operated similarly.14

DON MARQUIS, ACCIDENTAL PROMOTER

In a clipping in Steinʼs collection, a writer uses Steinian language to create a farcical soap ad:

White white pure white. White is pure and pure means white. Means Ivory which is white

and pure and soap. Pure pure poor who said poor it is not poor it is pure and it is pure for

ninety nine percents and it is pure for forty four one hundredths of another percent and

after that it is not pure.15

This imitation of Stein is typical of the parodies of her style that appeared in American newspapers

as early as 1914. Indeed, the parodic soap ad bears crucial similarities to the “rose is a pose” adver-

tisement. Not only do they both develop Steinian language in advertisements for specific products,

but also they offer a similar glimpse of her writingʼs lack of referentiality and its resulting aesthetic

loop. Just as the Bergdorf advertisement describes “rose” as “pose,” and then “pose” as “rose,” the

imaginary Ivory soap ad is also circular in its definitions: “White is pure and pure means white.”

The parody had an effect on Steinʼs reception similar to that of the advertisements that mimic her

style: both genres make visible the fact that Steinian abstraction departs from language that is

conventionally referential. In this vein, the parodies of Stein that proliferated in the 1910s and the

1920s were the necessary precursor to the advertisements of the 1930s. The parodies made bothreal excerpts of Steinʼs writing and renditions of her style available to the American public in the

period before she had produced the bestselling Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) and while

her books were printed in small quantities. The majority of parodies appeared in The Evening Sun;

since all of the Steinian advertisements of the 1930s promote department stores in New York City,

it is safe to assume that the creators of the Steinian advertisements had learned about her writing

style by reading parodies in the Sun.

Parodies of literary modernism have received surprisingly little critical attention. Jeffrey Weiss,

an art historian, argues that the mockery of avant-garde art comprises a central and often forgotten

chapter of the history of modern art:

Incomprehension of avant-garde art is often ignored or dismissed as a philistine response

beneath historical study. This is unjust, if only because expressions of incomprehension

occupy a far greater share of the period literature on modern art than any other kind

14. One of the earliest references to “Steinese” appears in a clipping entitled “New York Letter” from an unnamed newspaper

dated June 12, 1914. This clipping includes an anecdote about a writer named John Rompapas who decided to “translate”Stein s̓ portrait of Mabel Dodge from “Steinese” to English and send it to Stein for her perusal. Rompapas did not receive areply from Stein: “He received no reply, for Gertrude Stein is fond of playing Sphinx about her work.” “New York Letter,”

Clipping from untitled newspaper, Yale, MSS 76, box 142, folder 3333. 15. Allan S. Becker, “If Gertrude Stein Wrote a Soap Ad,” Yale, MSS 76, box 145.




of interpretation; it might justifiably be called the dominant esthetic condition of the

period.16

Parodies of Stein should be approached with the same seriousness that Weiss asks art historians to

bring to the study of the reception of avant-garde art. However, while Weiss suggests that those who

mocked avant-garde art did not understand it, Don Marquis, Steinʼs most prolific parodist, grasped

the principles of Steinian abstraction. His column, “The Sun Dial,” makes these principles apparent,

so apparent that his readers wrote back and contributed their own parodies of Stein.

Don Marquis was a writer of many trades: a journalist, a poet, a novelist, a humorist, and a play-

wright. He is best known for his characters Archy and Mehitabel, who were featured in newspaper

columns, in several collections of Marquisʼs works, and later, in a Broadway musical, television

show, and animated film.17 Archy is a cockroach who, in a previous life, was a free verse poet. His

friend, Mehitabel, a cat, also believes in reincarnation and claims that she was once Cleopatra.

Archy refuses to allow his new bodily form to prevent him from writing poetry but faces one major

impediment: as a cockroach, he cannot hit the shift key and a letter key simultaneously and can thus

write only in lowercase letters. When he introduced these characters in his daily column “The Sun

Dial” in 1916, Marquis recounted how he had arrived at his office earlier than usual one morning to

discover a giant cockroach jumping on the keys of his typewriter. Marquis had left a blank piece of

paper in his typewriter, and it is on this page that Archy introduces himself to Marquis, explaining

that he uses his typewriter every night to write poems. In the subsequent columns devoted to the

antics of this literary cockroach and his cat companion, Marquis presents the poems that are alleg-

edly left by Archy in Marquis s̓ typewriter. These poems that contain Archyʼs conversations with

Mehitabel appeared in “The Sun Dial” from 1916 to 1922. For the next four years, Archy s̓ poems

appeared in Marquisʼs column in the New York Herald Tribune, and in 1927, a collection of these

poems entitled archy and mehitabel was published and was an “instantaneous hit,” as his friend andbiographer Edward Anthony put it.18

The lowercase writings of Archy evoke the poems of e.e. cummings; like his human counterpart,

Archy even signs his name with no capital letters. Marquis offers a parodic account of the invention

of the literary modernist: Archy s̓ departure from grammatical rules is not by design and is the result

of his misfortune of being reincarnated as a creature who is ill-suited for typing. Indeed, two years

prior to the debut of Archy and Mehitabel, Marquis had begun to poke fun at literary modernism and

wrote parodies on both the bohemians in Greenwich Village and Steinʼs writing style. In order to get

material for his column, Marquis frequented the salons and tearooms in Greenwich Village to study

the culture of bohemians. These observations were the basis of a series in “The Sun Dial” called

“Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers,” which often appeared alongside Marquisʼs

parodies of Stein.19 His belief that the bohemians were pseudo-intellectuals was only confirmed

16. Jeffrey S. Weiss, The Popular Culture of Modern Art: Picasso, Duchamp, and Avant-Gardism (Yale University Press,

1994), p. 51. 17. Archy and Mehitabel came to life in 1957 in the Broadway musical Shinbone Alley. In 1960 Shinbone Alley appearedon television in the United States, and an animated film by the same title was released in 1971. 18. This sketch is drawn from Edward Anthonyʼs biography of Marquis and Marquisʼs 1927 collection, archy and mechita-

bel . See Edward Anthony, O Rare Don Marquis (Doubleday, 1962) and Don Marquis, Archy and Mehitabel , 1st ed. (Doubleday

Page, 1927). 19. In 1917 a collection of Marquisʼs Hermione pieces from “The Sun Dial” appeared as a book entitled Hermione and

Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers. This book was met with favorable reviews. See Anthony, O Rare Don Marquis,

pp. 172–73.




when he spent an evening at a tearoom where patrons read their poems aloud. Marquis and one of

his friends shared the task of reading aloud a poem on Hermione that was slated for publication in

“The Sun Dial,” and the crowd applauded wildly, missing the fact that it was a satire.20 As Marquis

indicated in his initial column on Hermione and her friends, he viewed the bohemians of Greenwich

Village as pretentious individuals who thought highly of themselves and of their work, but were

artistic failures: “I saw a Genius on the Brink / (Or so he said) of suicide, / I saw a Playwright who

had tried / But couldnʼt make the public think; / I saw a Novelist who cried, / Reading his own

Stuff, in his drink.”21

Gertrude Stein played a role similar to those of Hermione, Archy, and Mehitabel in “The Sun

Dial” and functioned like a fictional character. In the months following the release of Tender But-

tons (1914), Stein was featured as a commentator on the dayʼs events. The topics she addressed

ranged from the dawn of war to thoughts on the Christmas season. In a column entitled “Gertrude

Stein on the War,” which appeared on October 3, 1914, Marquis has written a poem which contains

his imaginary dialogue with Stein.22 Marquis asks Stein to respond to the question of why coun-

tries are at war: “I asked of Gertrude Stein: ʻExplain / Why they are fighting on the Aisne.ʼ / She

mused a space and then exclaimed: / ʻWhat seal brown bobble can be blamed?ʼ ”23 In addition

to the occasional parody of Stein, “The Sun Dial” featured excerpts of Tender Buttons (1914), a

poetic work divided into three sections, “Objects,” “Food,” and “Rooms.” This book is a playful

meditation on domestic life in which objects that fill the home — and the home itself — are made

anew and colorfully transmuted. Tender Buttons creates a world in which roast beef is defined by

the fact that in “the inside there is sleeping, in the outside there is reddening” and salad becomes

“a winning cake.”24 In “The Sun Dial,” Marquis includes an excerpt of Tender Buttons that had

originally appeared in the “Objects” section under the heading “A PLATE” and offers it instead as

commentary on the Christmas holiday season: “A Christmas thought — well, can you prove that it

isnʼt about Christmas? — by Gertrude Stein: ̒ Plates and a dinner set of colored china. Pack togethera string and enough with it to protect the centre, cause a considerable haste and gather more as it

is cooling . . . . ̓ ”25 (See fig. 2.)

The joke of Marquisʼs column is that Steinʼs language is so abstract that nearly any subject

heading can be attached to it. This excerpt which was not intended as a Christmas thought reads

in this context as such: this exhortation to “pack together a string” is almost convincing as holiday

cooking advice. What Marquis finds amusing in this excerpt of Stein is the ease with which her

language seems to conform to the heading that he has chosen for this column. Notably, what is

absent from her meditation is any indication of the temporal context (plates for what occasion?)

and the precise usage of the plates (what kind of food is served on them?). While playfully pointing

out the way in which Steinian language lacks referentiality, Marquis inadvertently helps to explain

Steinʼs project to his readers.

20. Anthony, O Rare Don Marquis, p. 175.

21. Don Marquis, “The Sun Dial,” quoted in Anthony, O Rare Don Marquis, p. 171. 22. Marquis s̓ dialogue with Stein on the subject of war appeared well before she began to take on the subject of war in herown writing. Wars I Have Seen (1945) describes Steinʼs impressions of World War I and World War II. Paris France (1940)and Mrs. Reynolds (1952) focus on World War II.

23. Don Marquis, “Gertrude Stein on the War,” “The Sun Dial,” Oct. 1914, the Evening Sun, Yale, MSS 76, box 142, folder3333. 24. Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons: Objects, Food, Rooms (Claire Marie, 1914), pp. 33, 57.

25. Don Marquis, “The Sun Dial,” 1 Dec. 1914, the Evening Sun, Yale,, MSS 76, box 142. Here Marquis has taken anexcerpt from “A Plate” in the “Objects” section of Tender Buttons. See Stein, Tender Buttons: Objects, Food, Rooms, p. 33.




Marquis, then, was an accidental promoter of Stein s̓ writing. Not only did he include excerpts

of her latest work, but also he provided his readers with a brief lesson in how to read Stein by sug-

gesting that it entails the abandonment of a conventional understanding of referentiality. There is noevidence, however, that Marquis and Stein ever knew each other personally. The anecdotes about

Marquis s̓ visits to Greenwich Village that carefully document — and provocatively mock — the

literary movements of the time suggest that he would have read as many of Steinʼs books as he

could get his hands on, if for no other reason than to find more material for his column. Since

Stein presumably read the clippings of Marquis s̓ columns that mention her name, she was at least

familiar with his writing. In addition, it is likely that she encountered the book collection, archy

and mehitabel (1927), because it was illustrated by George Herriman, the creator of the comic strip,

Krazy Kat, which Stein adored.

Figure 2. Don Marquis, “The Sun Dial,” 1 Dec.

1914, The Evening Sun, Yale, MSS 76, box 142.




Stein s̓ career was propelled by the actions of several promoters, but Marquis was different from

the others because he was not Steinʼs friend. For example, in the 1920s, when Stein and Ernest

Hemingway were close friends, Hemingway pitched The Making of Americans to Ford Madox

Ford, who was then the editor of the Transatlantic Review, and Ford agreed to print the first one

hundred pages of the novel as a serial. Steinʼs most devoted promoter was her friend, Carl Van

Vechten, who helped Stein overcome many of the obstacles that she faced during her career. He

convinced publishers and editors to print her works and took every opportunity to laud Stein in

public; for example, in 1928, when journalists interviewed him about one of his books, he changed

the subject to Stein and declared her as “one of the greatest influences of our age.” 26 In 1914, the

same year that Marquis published excerpts of Tender Buttons in his column, Van Vechtenʼs essay,

“How to Read Gertrude Stein,” appeared in the magazine Trend . Like Marquis, who explained the

basic principles of Steinian abstraction to his readers, Van Vechten similarly — although much more

deliberately — offered his readers a framework through which they might begin to read and appreci-

ate Steinʼs writing. In this essay, Van Vechten compares Steinʼs writing to music and suggests that

its sound is more important than its sense.27

The lively responses from the readers of “The Sun Dial” were a testament to Marquisʼs success

as Steinʼs accidental promoter. In September of 1914, after the column printed an excerpt of Tender

Buttons in which Stein poses the question, “Why is there no oyster closer?” along with Marquisʼs

interpretation of this phrase, several readers wrote back. A reader named “Ted” asks Marquis to

find out where Stein was when she asked this question. Ted imagines that Stein wrote this ques-

tion while in the Midwest and longing for fresh oysters. Another reader who goes by the initials

“J.E.M.” imagines a scenario in which Stein searches for oyster stew in the middle of July. But she

is unfamiliar with game laws, and when she finds out that July is the closed season for oyster stew,

she poses the question.28

In September of 1914, Marquis printed his readersʼ questions without providing answers, but inthe following month, Marquis began to respond to readersʼ queries. A reader who used the pseud-

onym “Puzzled Reader” sent a letter to Marquis asking: “Who is Gertrude Stein?” As an answer,

he offers a poem that is allegedly written by Hermione and her friends. Marquis portrays these

bohemians as snobs who are unsympathetic to the readerʼs query. Mocking the readerʼs lack of liter-

ary knowledge, they reply: “Who is Meredith? And Hardy? Who is / Conrad? Who is James? / We

might crush you, and we chose to, / under tons of modern names!” After testing the readerʼs knowl-

edge of a long list of authors, Hermione and her friends reply to the query about Stein: “But prefer-

ring to be honest, to adopt / the candid line, / All we know of Gertrude Stein — really — is / that

she is Gertrude Stein!”29 Marquis, then, offers a circular answer to this question and defines Stein

as Stein. Marquis has placed his poem and Steinian language in an aesthetic loop; the similarity

of his response to the readerʼs query and Steinʼs own writing style is underlined by the title of this

installment of “The Sun Dial,” “Gertrude Is Stein, Stein Gertrude.” This refusal to provide a plainresponse to the “Puzzled Reader” was motivated, most likely, by Marquisʼs desire to poke fun at

both Stein and his Greenwich Village characters. However, despite these intentions, his circular

26. “America Has Literature, Says Tourist Van Vechten,” the New York Herald , 12 September 1928, Yale, MSS 76, box 142,

folder 3344. 27. Carl Van Vechten, “How to Read Gertrude Stein,” Trend , August 1914.

28. “The Gertrude Stein Club,” the Evening Sun, 26 September 1914, Yale, MSS 76, box 142, folder 3333. 29. “Gertrude Is Stein, Stein Gertrude,” the Evening Sun, 15 October 1914, Yale, MSS 76, box 142, folder 3333.




response fueled his readersʼ interest in Stein. Readers continued to write letters with questions about

Stein and even contributed their own renditions of her writing style with the hope that they would

be printed in the column.

Following Marquisʼs excerpts and imitations of Steinʼs writing, some of his readers authored

their own attempts at Steinian language. Several days after the poem that defines Stein as Stein

appeared, Marquis printed a readerʼs imitation of her style under the heading, “Cʼest Magnifique,

Mais Ce Nʼest Pas La Gertrude”: “She was something saying nothing. A vivid stewpan, an example

of tender courage, but do buttons ever migrate?”30 In another letter, a woman explains how her young

niece came to write Steinian sentences:

My 8–year-old niece is a devoted admirer of Miss Gertrude Steinʼs. She believes that Miss

Stein has solved the problem of self-expression that now chains an unenlightened world to

school benches and its ABC s̓. School time cuts into oneʼs play time frightfully, you know.

Miss Steinʼs way is so much more satisfactory — you just write it, and there it is! After a

preliminary course of Miss Steinʼs, my niece wrote me the following letter:

“Pig you the papa it is you by you bear the Jack you bear is a cat and the cat is.

— ELSIETTE”31

“The Sun Dial” portrays Stein in a different light than other columns and reviews of the period

which characterized her writing as elitist. For example, a 1914 clipping from The Oklahoma City

Oklahoman which is in Steinʼs collection portrays her writing as the provenance of a select few:

“Miss Gertrude Stein, it is a pleasure to report, has become so intelligent that she is utterly unintel-

ligible to all except herself and T.S. Eliot. This places her away ahead of relativity, which is only

understood by six or eight.”32 In contrast, “The Sun Dial” departs from this view of Steinʼs writing

as “Steinese” and portrays it as a style that could be approximated by anyone who had encounteredreal or fanciful versions of Steinʼs work in newspapers. That “Steinese” rhymes with “Chinese” is

significant, for it depicts her writing as foreign and inaccessible to most speakers of English. But in

Marquis s̓ column, Steinʼs writing is imitated so widely that it is no longer conceived as the cryptic

outpourings of the pen of a single author and is re-imagined as a much more accessible form of writ-

ing. “The Sun Dial” offers an inclusive vision of modernism: it is not the language of a select group

and is instead a mode of expression that can be used by the ordinary citizen to overcome the limits

of ordinary language and, as in the case of Elsiette, break free from the conventions of writing.

Marquisʼs column portrays modernism and mass culture as interpenetrating discourses that

form an aesthetic loop. Steinʼs writing and the array of imitations are locked in a firm embrace, and

the column does not make a distinction between the original excerpts from her books and the ver-

sions offered by Marquis and his readers. In fact, technically there are three categories of Steinian

language in his column — actual excerpts from Stein, Marquisʼs own imitations, and the readersʼversions of Steinian language — but the column does not create a hierarchy among the different

forms. A letter to the editor by a reader named Edgar attests to the collapse of the distinction among

Marquis, Stein, and the readers that occurred in the column: “Wonʼt you please stop printing Miss

30. “Cʼest Magnifique, Mais Ce Nʼest Pas La Gertrude,” the Evening Sun, Yale, MSS 76, box 142, folder 3333.

31. “The Gertrude Stein Club Grows,” the Evening Sun, Yale, MSS 76, box 142 folder 3342. 32. Clipping from the Oklahoma City Oklahoman, March 1914, Yale, MSS 76, box 142, folder 3333.




Stein s̓ ravings? I know it makes great column filler, but please, please have a heart !!!”33 Many of

these column fillers were not written by Stein, but for Edgar this does not make a difference and they

are nonetheless “Steinʼs ravings.” Thus, at the same time that Marquis pokes fun at Stein, he also

imagines modernism as more inclusive than many of the other commentators of the day claimed.

Marquis s̓ invitation to his readers to become authors of Steinian language had a lasting effect, and

throughout the rest of Steinʼs career, parodies of her writing would accompany her at every juncture.

And as the example of Marquisʼs column suggests, the imitations that were intended to mock her

writing had a magical effect on her career: the more frequently imitations appeared in print, the

more the American public came to appreciate and understand her writing.

A PLACE FOR STEINESE

In 1933, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas became a bestseller.34 This book attracted so many

readers because it promised to shed light on the question of who Stein was — a persistent query

throughout the clippings from the 1910s and 1920s. In addition, the autobiography owed its popu-

larity to the fact that it departed from Steinʼs characteristically elliptical style and implied that it

would paint a vivid portrait of the author that was not mired in abstractions. In the year following

its publication, a columnist in Vanity Fair reported that reading Stein had become a fad among those

who were fashionable:

A year ago, nobody went in for raising guppies. They didnʼt even know what a guppy was.

. . . Then some guppy-fancier came along with a package of guppy-seeds, and the rest is

history. . . . Bowls of guppies appeared in every home. . . . . By the end of the year, the

entire nation was guppy-poor. The only thing that saved the situation was when all the

guppy-lovers suddenly developed a new fad for reading Gertrude Stein, and as a resultthe fad for guppies gradually died out.35

This columnist does not limit the discussion of the fad of reading Stein to The Autobiography of

Alice B. Toklas. In fact, the connection between Steinʼs books and fashion revived interest in the

1930s in her earlier and more difficult texts. In 1934, Steinʼs play, Four Saints in Three Acts, which

had originally been published in transition in 1929, was performed to great acclaim in Hartford

and New York; in addition, The Making of Americans (1925) was published in its first mass market

edition in 1934. The success of her opera, Four Saints in Three Acts, and, on a smaller scale, The

Making of Americans, can be attributed to the fact that mass-cultural imitations — particularly

advertisements — acquainted the American public with her style. Ads like Bergdorf Goodmanʼs

“a rose is a pose” promoted Stein as Van Vechten and Marquis had done before, explaining how

to read her writing by highlighting the similarity between the circularity of her writing and that ofadvertising language.

33. “But Can You Deny Her Statements?” Evening Sun, 24 September 1914, Yale, MSS 76, box 142.

34. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas appeared consistently in the New York Herald Tribune̓ s bestseller list of “WhatAmerica Is Reading” in October and November of 1933. The bestseller lists from the Herald Tribune are reproduced in adissertation by Elinor Warner. See Elinor Warner, “ ̒ Officer, Sheʼs Writing Againʼ: Gertrude Steinʼs American Readers,”

University of Virginia, 1994. 35. Corey Ford, “New Fads for Old,” Vanity Fair, May 1934, p. 56.




The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas had turned Stein into a celebrity in America, and in 1934,

she responded to her newfangled fame by returning to her home country for the first time in 30

years and delivering lectures across the nation.36

At the height of her fame in 1934, Steinian lan-guage appeared in newspaper headlines that announced her arrival in America. For example, when

she landed in Chicago after lecturing in New York, a Chicago Herald headline, “Understand Ein-

stein? Just Try Stein-Stein,” was accompanied by the subhead: “She Arrives — She Arrives — She

Arrives — She Arrives — Arrives.”37 In addition to generating newspaper headlines, Steinian lan-

guage was also the inspiration for advertisements and window displays for department stores in New

York City. These examples deserve our attention because they show just how deeply intertwined

Steinian modernism and mass culture had become in the 1930s.

When Stein became famous in the 1930s, advertisers imitated her writing for the purpose of

generating income, hoping that her recognizable style would increase the sales of their products.

In 1934, at the apex of her fame, Steinian language was taken up by print ads, department stores

on Fifth Avenue in New York, and product designers. Four Saints in Three Acts was the subject of

Easter displays up and down Fifth Avenue. One of these displays is documented in a photographby Carl Van Vechten; as this photograph reveals, Bergdorf Goodmanʼs display entitled “4 Suits in 2

Acts” featured four suits that could each be worn in two different ways (fig 3).38 In a letter to Stein,

36. For another discussion of Steinʼs relation to fame and the American public, see Kirt Curnett, “Inside and Outside:

Gertrude Stein on Identity, Celebrity and Authenticity,” Journal of Modern Literature 23.2 (1999). 37. “Understand Einstein? Just Try Stein-Stein,” Chicago Herald, 8 Nov. 1934, Yale, MSS 76, box 145, folder 3355.

38. Elizabeth Arden was also among the stores to design a Stein-inspired Easter window, but unfortunately, neither Carl Van

Vechten nor any other of Steinʼs friends recorded the content of the display. See Steven Watson, Prepare for Saints: Gertrude

Stein, Virgil Thomson, and the Mainstreaming of American Modernism, 1st ed. (Random House, 1998), p. 5.

Figure 3. Photo by Carl Van Vechten of Steinian store Windows, 1934.

Reprinted from Steven Watson, Prepare for Saints (Random House, 1998)




Van Vechten records another instance in which Steinian language appeared in store windows; Gim-

bels displayed products which were named for phrases from the play; the Italian designer Marguerita Morgantina had created tablecloths called “Instead of,” “After a While,” and “Have to Have.”39

While advertisers used Steinan language to bolster their claim that their products were fashion-

able, Stein also benefited from these ads, not only because they provided her publicity, but also

because they helped to explain her most difficult prose to the public. The explanatory capacity of

the Steinian advertisement is exhibited particularly well in a 1934 advertisement for Wanamakers,

a department store located on Broadway. This ad for an ensemble of wraps and purses evokes Four

Saints in Three Acts with its title, “4 Wraps in Cellophane: With apologies to Gertrude Stein” (fig 4).

The ad goes on to use Steinian language to describe the wraps: “Might it be silver, if it / were not

cellophane. / Wrap number one red lac- / quer red red silver lacquer.”40 The ad then translates this

poetic description of the colors of the wraps into ordinary language: “In plain work-a-day phrasing

these mandarin coats are made of Cellophane combined with red, white, yellow, or blue rayon. . . .”

In setting up this distinction between Steinian language and “work-a-day phrasing,” the ad offers

a rudimentary explanation of modernist abstraction. The ad uses Stein as the voice that boldly

expresses the productʼs virtues — a voice that is distinct from the more subtle “work-a-day phras-

ing.” Using Steinian language to celebrate the products, the ad suggests that the relation of modernist

language to ordinary language is analogous to the relation of advertising language to “work-a-day

phrasing.” In particular, the Wanamaker ad foregrounds one of the salient traits of Steinʼs writing:

the use of pronouns with no clear referent: “Might it be silver, if It / were not cellophane.” This

kind of abstraction, the ad suggests, distinguishes both Steinian language and ad language from

“work-a-day phrasing.”

When Four Saints in Three Acts was performed in Hartford and New York in the winter and

spring of 1934, Steinʼs text, which received little notice when published in transition in 1929 and

then in Stein s̓ collection Operas and Plays (1932), became a smash hit. Variety magazine reportedthat this opera was discussed in more newspaper columns than any production of the last decade.

Certainly, Steinʼs collaboration with the composer Virgil Thomson and the fact that the cast was

composed entirely of African Americans contributed to the operaʼs success. As Steven Watson

writes in his history of this opera, “Never before had African Americans been cast in a work that

did not depict black life . . . . And never before had an all-black cast performed in an opera before

white audiences.”41 But clearly the Steinian advertisements and store windows contributed to the

operaʼs success by inscribing it in the context of mass culture, and in particular, fashion. This effect

on the operaʼs reception can be seen in a review of its debut in New York City in the New York

Times. The audience liked the opera so much that it “applauded and cheered itself hoarse.” The

reviewer attributes the success of the operaʼs opening night to the fact that the audience knew what

to expect: “It was known that the opera was about nothing in particular, hence the charm and its

grave beauty.”42 Some members of the audience may have arrived at this understanding of the opera

39. Gertrude Stein, Carl Van Vechten and Edward Burns, The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Carl Van Vechten, 1913–1946 (Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 305. 40. Emphasis in the original. “4 Wraps in Cellophane With Apologies to Gertrude Stein,” 12 Apr. 1934, New York Herald

Tribune. This ad also appears in the New York Times on April 17, 1934. This advertisement is not held in Stein s̓ collection ofclippings. Based on the fact that she retained the “rose is a pose” advertisement in her collection, its absence is most likely anoversight or a mistake.

41. Watson, Prepare for Saints: Gertrude Stein, Virgil Thomson, and the Mainstreaming of American Modernism, p. 6. 42. Olin Downes, “Broadway Greets New Kind of Opera,” New York Times, 21 Feb. 1934.




Figure 4. “4 Wraps in Cellophane With Apologies

to Gertrude Stein,” 12 April 1934, New York HeraldTribune.




by reading reviews of its performance two weeks earlier in Hartford. But for others — and this is

perhaps why the reviewer uses the passive voice to describe this kind of knowing — this sense of

the opera may have been absorbed passively through encounters with Steinian advertisements and

store windows. The Wanamaker and the Bergdorf advertisements explained Steinian language as

words and phrases that lack referents, language “that was about nothing in particular,” in the words

of the New York Times reviewer.

By 1934, the practice of imitating Stein that had begun in 1914 had developed into a full-fledged

marketing scheme in the world of New York retail. And at the same moment in 1934 that Four Saints

in Three Acts was one of the most talked about events of the year, The Making of Americans became

widely available to the American public for the first time. Stein had struggled for two decades to

get this work into print, and before 1934, her success was limited: excerpts were published in a

little magazine and in translation in two French editions; it was published in its entirety for the first

time in 1925, but only 300 copies were produced. But in 1934, The Making of Americans finally

reached a large audience. The re-release of The Making of Americans occurred at the same moment

as the mass media event of Four Saints in Three Acts: this novel arrived on American shores with

a splash, riding the current of Steinʼs fame in the 1930s. As the Springfield Republican reported in

January of 1934: “Harcourt, Brace & Co. announce that they will publish Gertrude Steinʼs ʻThe

Making of Americansʼ on February 8, the day on which her opera, ʻFour Saints in Three Acts,ʼ opens

in Hartford. Bernard Fay has edited and shorted ̒ The Making of Americans,ʼ originally over 1000

pages long, for its first popular American appearance.”43

Despite Steinʼs efforts to publish The Making of Americans, she was met with many more fail-

ures than successes. As Donald Gallup writes, “Its publication could hardly have been attended by

more numerous and varied misfortunes, continued over a greater number of years.”44 The Making

of Americans made its public debut in the Transatlantic Review, a little magazine that was edited by

Ford Madox Ford and Ernest Hemingway, and appeared in monthly installments from April of 1924until the magazineʼs final issue in December of the same year. In total, approximately one hundred

pages of Steinʼs thousand-page novel were published. As a serial, it was praised by several review-

ers for its clarity and its interest. In May of 1924, the New York Herald proclaimed: “In an article,

ʻThe Making of Americans,ʼ in the Transatlantic Review, is something intelligible from the pen of

Gertrude Stein.”45 And one month later, a South Carolina newspaper wrote that Steinʼs novel was

“as lucid and skillful a piece of prose writing as one could wish.”46 But praise for Stein s̓ magnum

opus was short-lived and evaporated once the novel was published in its entirety in 1925. Review-

ers found Steinʼs novel to be infinitely more readable in the context of the Transatlantic Review.

This can be attributed to the brevity of the installments and to the fact that the magazine provided

a context that rendered Steinʼs difficult novel easier to read. For example, the early pages of the

novel recount its two central familiesʼ transatlantic journey from Germany to the United States. The

context of a magazine that focuses on transatlantic themes gave readers insight into the subject ofThe Making of Americans.

In 1925, The Making of Americans was published in its entirety by Contact Editions, and

only 305 copies were printed. This time, reviewers focused on the novelʼs length and difficulty.

43. Untitled clipping from the Springfield Republican, 29 January 1934, Yale, MSS 76, box 52, folder 926. 44. Donald Gallup, “The Making of The Making of Americans,” in Gertrude Stein, Leon Katz and Donald Clifford Gallup,Fernhurst, Q.E.D., and Other Early Writings (Liveright, 1971), p. 214. 45. Untitled clipping, New York Herald , 4 May 1924, Yale, MSS 76, Box 52, Folder 925. 46. Untitled clipping, Columbia, S.C. Record , 8 June 1924, Yale, MSS 76, Box 52, Folder 925.




For example, a reviewer in the Literary Digest International Review marvels at the novelʼs length:

“Gertrude Stein has recently published in Paris a book with the title ̒ The Making of Americans,ʼ a

book seven and one-half inches wide, nine and one-half inches long, and four and one-half inches

thick. It is printed in small pica type on one thousand pages with narrow margins. Some book!”47

Another reviewer views the reading of Steinʼs novel as an arduous task: “Some day, perhaps, we

will climb to its level; we are too lazy now, and there are so many other things to do.”48

When The Making of Americans was published in 1934 for the second time as its own volume,

reviewers responded more positively than they did in the 1920s. The 1934 edition was abridged to

400 pages, and, as was the case with its appearance in the Transatlantic Review, surely its brevity

had an impact on its favorable reception.49 But in addition, the practice of parodying Stein in news-

papers and advertisements contributed to the novelʼs brief episode of success in 1934. For example,

a 1934 review in the New Yorker places the novel in the context of the parodies that proliferated in

the period: “Those who are liking Gertrude and liking the books of Gertrude will be those who will

be liking this book of Gertrude.”50 Because Steinʼs style had penetrated American popular culture

in the 1930s, a novel that most reviewers had viewed as opaque, unreadable, and a quintessential

example of “Steinese” was viewed more favorably in 1934.51 As the Transatlantic Review had done

ten years earlier, mass-cultural incarnations of Steinian language created a context that helped make

her novel readable.

In Steinʼs archival materials, clippings of newspaper articles and advertisements that mimic her

style have been carefully preserved alongside the manuscripts of her original writings. The juxtapo-

sition of these mass-cultural and modernist texts in her papers throws a new light on recent critical

discussions that have emerged in opposition to Huyssenʼs concept of “the great divide.” A formula-

tion like Huyssenʼs no longer makes sense as a starting point for critical discussions once we have

encountered archival materials that position modernism and mass culture side by side. The circular

shape of both Steinʼs seal and that of the Bergdorf Goodman ad is a more apt spatial metaphor todescribe modernismʼs relation to mass culture. Steinʼs collection suggests that there is a rich and

diverse history of mass-cultural engagements with modernism that has yet to be excavated.

47. Willis Steell, “An American Novel That Paris is Talking About,” Literary Digest International Review, February 1925,

Yale, MSS 76, Box 52, Folder 925. 48. Clipping from a Buffalo, New York newspaper dated February 20, 1926, Yale, MSS 76, Box 52, Folder 926. 49. This edition was abridged and cut down to only 400 pages. It featured an introduction by Bernard Fay which invited

readers to read the novel in the context of the rhythms of American life. This edition was published by Harcourt Brace, andit sold for $3 a copy, a sharp decrease from its price when it was first offered in 1925 for $8 in paperback, $10 in half leather,

and $60 in Japanese vellum. Robert A. Wilsonʼs bibliography indicates that an unknown number of copies were published inFebruary of 1934. See Robert A. Wilson, Gertrude Stein: A Bibliography, (Phoenix Bookshop, 1974). Based on the fact thatthere were more reviews of The Making of Americans in 1934 than in either 1925 or 1926, and that Harcourt Brace was amajor publisher — and the same publisher of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, a bestseller in 1933 — it is safe to assume

that this edition circulated more widely than the 1925 edition. Clearly, the 1934 edition of The Making of Americans was not abestseller like The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas had been the previous year, but the evidence suggests that at least severalthousand copies were produced in 1934.

50. Clipping from the New Yorker dated February 17, 1934. Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Papers, Yale Collection ofAmerican Literature, Box 52, Folder 927. 51. Another favorable review from this year states that The Making of Americans “makes perfect sense when one reads it

slowly and with intelligence. It makes more than sense . . . and perhaps that is the trouble for most of us.” See Fanny Butcher,“Book Presents Gertrude Stein as She Really Is,” February 19, 1934, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Papers, Yale Collec-tion of American Literature, Box 52, Folder 927.





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Documents

TISCHLER, Alyson. a Rose is a Pose - Steinian Modernism and Mass Culture