Life keeps hurtling forward, bursting forth. It’s spring in California, the jasmine’s come in and the streaky roses. It’s been raining hard all morning; just now it stopped abruptly. Lyn writes in My Life, “she observed that detail minutely, as if it were botanical. As if words could unite an ardent intellect with the external material world.” This is Lyn, vitally observing, drawing it all into relation, the mind and the world, botanical, passionate. Making words hold life, making words as life. “Such that art is inseparable from the search for reality,” she writes.
Hugh Sykes Davies
1936 review of 'Narration' by Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein was not always revered as a muse of literature. Far from it. Her climb to fame was long and arduous. The English surrealist Huge Sykes Davies dropped this boulder in her path.
Narration. By Gertrude Stein. (The University of Chicago Press.) 11s.6d. [Eleven shillings and sixpence.] This piece was first published in ‘Books of the Quarter,’ in Criterion, UK, 15/61, July 1936, pages 752–5. It is 1,700 words or about four printed pages long.
“In fact all Miss Stein’s old virtues have forsaken her. The trick of constant repetition which gave pleasure when it was used in prose with no rational end, for purely aesthetic purposes, has adapted itself very ill to the making of statements with meaning. It is bad enough to hear a silly theory advanced once, it is agony to hear it advanced twenty times in quick succession.”
More … In Jacket 20, here.