Stanzas in meditation

One of Stein's most difficult works, Stanzas in Meditation is a poem of 164 stanzas written in language that is abstract, elusive, and allusive--and so idiosyncratic as to defy meaning. The problem of exegesis is compounded by its history of composition. Stein wrote the poem in 1932, revising as she composed; Alice B. Toklas fulfilled her customary task of typing it. Soon after, Toklas became aware of an early love of Stein's named May, and while preparing a second transcript, Toklas noted recurring instances of the word "May" (as verb as well as proper noun). Insisting that Stein expunge "May" and "may" from the text, Toklas instituted a dramatic revision. Hollister (Univ. of Texas, Austin) and Setina (Baylor Univ.) undertake a strenuous challenge of textual scholarship: to reveal Stein's manuscript along with a record of its variants. In more than 100 pages of notes (the result of painstaking research among the Stein papers at Yale's Beinecke Library), the editors indicate Stein's compositional changes and those made later on the two typescripts. Reprinting prefaces by Donald Sutherland and John Ashbery, and including an illuminating introduction by Joan Retallack, this edition will surely be unsurpassed as a scholarly resource on Stein. Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. L. Simon Skidmore College

Reissue is a reissue is a reissue. APPROACHING Gertrude Stein's writing critically is tricky. Because she strove to reshape literary conventions - syntax, language usage, narrative order and the sense of making sense -any comment on her choices may already be rebuffed in her poetics and practice. Stein is a trickster. This may be why, as I read "Ida" and "Stanzas in Meditation," both reissued in corrected, authoritative editions from Yale University Press, I remembered a Jonathan Richman lyric I'll paraphrase as "Pablo Picasso never got called a jackass." Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) is called a genius, and it's from that vantage her writing is read - or not read, since awe and reverence are regularly met by dismissal and ridicule. Curiously, not every "genius" is equally suffocated by the label. Readers know the extraordinary reputations of Shakespeare and Virginia Woolf, but some prefer "Richard III" to "Richard II," or "Mrs. Dalloway" to "Orlando." They feel at liberty to discriminate. Fewer readers imagine they can create their own Stein; many feel she is beyond their capacity to understand. Maybe this is because she has been claimed as the sine, qua non of the avant-garde. But she aligned herself with her time. Being part of the "contemporary composition" was central to her work, a point she made in her trenchant essay (originally a lecture) "Composition as Explanation": "The only thing that is different from one time to another is what is seen and what is seen depends upon how everybody is doing everything." Here, Stein wielded the novelty and surprise of her prose partly to explain how novelty and surprise surface from generation to generation, and theorized why the new in art and writing may first be thought ugly, then later beautiful or classic. In that same essay, she declared: "No one is ahead of his time." (Andy Warhol, who like Stein is both adored and mocked, once said, "I'm very much a part of my times, of my culture, as much a part of it as rockets and television." There are other parallels between Warhol and Stein, including their renown as aphorists. Stein: "Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose." Warhol: "In the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes." But people have called Warhol a jackass, and everything else.) "For Stein," Peter Nicholls writes in his important book, "Modernisms: A Literary Guide," "language is to be grasped not as a means of reference to a world of objects which can be dominated, but as a medium of consciousness." Stein's works of consciousness depend on a reader's consciousness, and unconscious, to engage them. Otherwise, her writing is flat, the rhythms and play of her words lost along with her biting wit and clarity. "Ida" was published by Random House in 1941. The Yale reissue contains reviews from the day and versions from Stein's notebooks, showing the novel's development from its beginnings in 1937. The editor, Logan Esdale, has written an excellent introduction (and notes throughout) containing necessary biographical and textual information. One learns that fame was much on Stein's mind when she was writing "Ida" - her own fame and that of Wallis Simpson, the American divorcee who became the Duchess of Windsor. Stein's celebrity rested on "The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas," published in America in 1933. The book became very popular and gained Stein a wide readership. With the onset of fame, Stein questioned how her work would be received because of it. Stein constructs a cubist portrait or skewed biography of Ida, who was born with a twin, Ida-Ida, to kind parents. "It was a nice family but they did easily lose each other. . . . Her parents went off on a trip and never came back. That was the first funny thing that happened to Ida." Odd, sad and happy events populate the novel's pages, while doppelgängers lurk everywhere: Ida becomes Winnie, because she's winning; characters like parents to Ida come and go, and men who may, or do, become her husbands appear, disappear, reappear. Ida herself leaves and returns, often going to another state (either a place or a frame of mind). A reader experiences the pull of freedom, and Ida's contradictory desires - wanting a home, needing to escape; wanting to be known and not. Her identity is in doubt and it's not. With these radical changes, there's a bounty of tension and release. Words appear and reappear - like Ida's husbands - but in different syntactic roles, scrambling meaning and Ida too. There's psychological and logistical weight on Ida: whom does she know; what does she know; which dog has died; where will she live, and with whom? Most urgently, who knows her and what does that knowing do? "Ida sat on. She said to herself. If a great many people were here and they all said hello Ida, I would not stand up, they would all stand up. If everybody offered me everything I would not refuse anything because everything is mine without my asking for it or refusing it." There isn't a better description of celebrity affect. Release from textual and narrative tension comes, in part, through Stein's remarkable voice, as well as from internal and external rhymes, some so childlike one might be listening to a book read aloud. "Well what did Ida do./ Ida knew just who was who./ She did. She did know." And, later on the same page: "There are so many men./ What do you call them there./ There are so many men./ They did not all know Ida./ Now then." Ida frequendy rests: "When anybody needed Ida Ida was resting. That was all right that is the way Ida was needed." Reading the word "rest" again and again creates a weird sensation. The story sort of stops, and a space opens up where you can disappear like Ida, or stop too. It provides a rest, as in music. "Ida" wanders from its theses in its second half. Interrupted by allusions to and fragments of other texts Stein wrote before or during "Ida" (like "Superstitions"), the novel turns into a repository of fleeting images and ideas its protagonist might hold. Something feels missing and amiss, even as Ida muses on missing. "Everybody began to miss something and it was not a kiss, you bet your life it was not a kiss that anybody began to miss. And yet perhaps it was." I love the insertion of "You bet your life." I made an insertion of my own: as I read, the word "Ida" started to become a pronoun and a verb: I da won't, I da will, I da wanna. "STANZAS IN MEDITATION" fulfills Stein's great ambition. Published posthumously in 1956, it's an amazing work - a lively, imaginative, modernist epic, with Stein at her playful, philosophical, poetic best as she riffs on the literary and cultural gamut. Joan Retallack's rich introduction, "On Not Not Reading 'Stanzas in Meditation': Pressures and Pleasures of the Text," reckons creatively and helpfully with the problem I'll call "Who's Afraid of Gertrude Stein?" Retallack also presents an important textual discovery from the Stein scholar Ulla Dydo: Stein's lover/wife, Alice B. Toklas, forced her to change the verb "may" to "can" throughout. (May Bookstaver was an early lover of Stein's, and Toklas -who apparentiy had no trouble reading Stein - was enraged finding her name so many times in the manuscript of "Stanzas in Meditation.") In the new Yale edition, "may" has been returned, according to Stein's original manuscripts. The editors Susannah Hollister and Emily Setina, literary sleuths, have done significant work restoring this book. I enjoy Stein most as a theorist: her ideas startle me, in whatever form they appear. (I call myself an inexpert) One of those ideas was that becoming a classic could kill a work of art. Readers' responses should shift, like Ida, with changing times, to make a book new(er); otherwise it doesn't truly live in the present. If Stein becomes an endpoint for literary invention - a classic - her work can't be read in the present tense. Literature can't rest on its laurels. I figure that if Stein were alive now, she'd be rambunctious differently. And she wouldn't be writing like Gertrude Stein. Fame was much on Gertrude Stein's mind when she was writing 'Ida' - her own and that of Wallis Simpson. Lynne Tillman is the author, most recently, of the story collection "Someday This Will Be Funny."