The success of Woody Allen's film Midnight in Paris (2011) showed how potent (and profitable) the myth of expatriate American modernism continues to be. At the heart of this myth lies the caricature of the American artist abroad: provincial, monolingual, naive, and patently disinterested in foreign affairs. Gertrude Stein in Europe challenges this caricature by considering the manifold ways in which Stein engaged with and influenced the European modernist context where she lived and wrote for the entirety of her adult life.
This volume of essays derives its “urgency” from recent debates surrounding Stein's experience in Vichy, France during World War II – debates that have put front and center “the European aspects of Stein's cultural identity” (7). How can we continue to see Stein as a disinterested expatriate writer when faced with her evident engagement with – indeed enthusiasm for – the pro-Nazi Vichy regime? While Gertrude Stein in Europe only poses this question as a starting point, its mandate emerges from the sense that Stein and her modernist body of work were much more deeply embedded in European intellectual and social currents and networks than has previously been recognized. This intervention serves as a welcome addition to the thriving field of Stein scholarship.
Divided into three parts, the book begins with an exploration of Stein's milieu and the intellectual networks around her during the first half of the twentieth century in Paris. Moving well beyond the usual interlocutors (Picasso, Matisse, William James, Bernard Faÿ), the essays consider the importance to Stein of European artists like Francis Picabia, Edith Sitwell, and the radical aristocrat Elisabeth de Gramont, as well as the striking points of convergence between Stein's writing and European phenomenology.
Nevertheless, the choice of these interlocutors seems a bit capricious: figures like Sitwell pale in comparison to the enormous influence on Stein of someone like the Austrian philosopher Otto Weininger, whose work catapulted Stein forcefully into the midst of contemporary debates over the nature of art, gender, and genius (and who appears nowhere in these pages). And de Gramont was only one of many occasional friends passing through Stein's orbit in the interwar years. One might have wished for a stronger intellectual rationale for the choices in this part of the book.
The essays in Part Two consider the theoretical underpinnings of Stein's most experimental writing. While the importance of Europe as the book's organizing principle is somewhat attenuated, these essays nevertheless form the strongest core of the book. A particularly exciting subtheme here is the importance of Henri Bergson's theories of vitalism to Stein's sense of compositional time and linguistic “movement.” Like Bergson, Stein was interested in “the rhythm of the visible world” as it was intuited by the writer in the act of artistic creation (35). So too did Stein share with Bergson an interest in time as a “continuum of intensities” that might be approached less through the written text than through that new medium of possibility, the cinema (150). In a particularly suggestive chapter, Julian Murphet explores how the vitalism (or “inner dynamism” (170)) of Stein's writing is also linked to a certain verbal automatism: in her repetitions, her word layering, and her sense of temporal disjunction between the time of writing and the time of reading, Stein was, he argues, “doing what the cinema was doing” (149). Abigail Lang's essay on automatism in Stein's writing for the cinema and in her early interest in automobiles is also illuminating, suggesting how “strikingly cinematographic” Stein's writing really was (147).
The final section of the book explores the influence of Stein on contemporary European art and letters. Two translated essays from the early 1980s have mainly historical value, showing how vital Stein's work was to the postwar European avant-garde long before she became canonized in universities and performance spaces in the United States. Tania Ørum's fine chapter considers Stein's influence on Scandinavian artists and writers in the 1960s, where the phrase “a rose is a rose is a rose” was taken up as a kind of meme for aesthetic experimentalism and subsequently passed among artists through a chain of artworks. In France, meanwhile, postmodern artists continue to this day to engage in dialogue with Stein as an “artist who must be addressed.” We are reminded of the many remarkable ways Stein's work continues to live on in contemporary art, music, television, and film, generating ever more encounters and new connections.
Ending with a beautiful, precise meditation by the French poet Jacques Roubaud on the patterning of Stein's writing, Gertrude Stein in Europe offers a fresh take on a writer whose influence and appeal increasingly extend far beyond the modernist and American contexts.
