Scene4 Magazine | letters to the editor

Comments on Gertrude Stein Continued

2012-02-06T03:29:22Z

Karren Alenier is a much cherished part of the Steinista tribe, indeed, and we agree quite happily to disagree. We all have a blind eye somewhere and Stein herself was the first to admit her political stupidity and inexperience: "Writers are not really interested in politics..." etc. To be on the record, this was the point of my detailed article in the Los Angles Review of Books, Was Gertrude Stein A Collaborator? (In a shorter version - Exclusive: Was Gertrude Stein A Hitler Fan?

An academic like Catharine R. Stimpson has begun to see Will's book with different eyes, as I was privileged to hear from herself. Others, like the great Stein expert Marjorie Perloff, have never been taken in. If you want a non-sensationalist account of Stein's war years, I refer you to the book by Dominique Saint Pierre, "Gertrude Stein, le Bugey, la guerre" -- an impeccable study by an historian, devoid of the inflated speculations in Barbara Will's book.

Renate Stendhal

What Poets Can Learn From Songwriters

2012-02-01T07:05:00Z

Great article. Poetry is not a dying art, but it does feel as though it's been pushed way off to the side. Audience sustains creation. The answer is not to just throw out a bunch of trivial repetitions or to totally reject them. Style is not the only issue, and bad poems in any style need to be called out. My idea is that the poem should give the reader an experience that is not available anywhere else, not even from another poem. That's like the great Dickinson saying that she knew it was poetry if it felt like the top of her head had been taken off. We practice an essential art, but our own weight condemns us to obscurity. Poets are not better people than non-poets. Our art is what it is. It'd be damn nice if people saw more of the heights and less of the flat plains of the "work". We, I, need/needs a true audience. Especially loved the idea of a good poem needing to be heard over and over. Hell yeah! It being in my blood/now yours.

Richard Benton

read David Alpaugh's article

The Will to Find Steinian Truth

2012-01-28T14:55:42Z

With all due respect to Renate Stendhal, who I cherish as a person Steinian, I find the work that Barbara Will published in Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and the Vichy Dilemma refreshing for its non sensationalization of a tough Stein scenario.

I am on the record and urge you to read what I said in my recent Scene4 article An Invitation to Gertrude Stein's Tea Party.

As noted Stein scholar Catharine Stimpson said recently at a conference held partially at the National Portrait Gallery where the exhibition "Seeing Gertrude Stein" just closed, "Gertrude Stein was stupid about politics."

I consider Gertrude Stein, Renate Stendhal, and Barbara Will part of my Steinian family. I won't stop loving any of them.

Karren Alenier

The Obscene Critic

2012-01-18T05:53:38Z

Karren Alenier's article on the Washington Post's obscene review of Gertrude Stein and the exhibition Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories at the National Portrait Gallery in D.C. brilliantly analyzes one particular case of openly declared "hatred" for Stein. This sort of hatred has followed Stein from the moment she began to publish, in the early twentieth century, but it is worth noting the context that gave rise to this "indecent exposure" in a serious newspaper like the Washington Post. Stein's present renaissance with two epochal traveling exhibitions has brought out people like critic Phil Kennicott who, as Alenier reminds us, assigns himself, a "seat in the corner with the Stein haters that include 'the worst sort of critics--anti-Semites, misogynists, homophobes and philistines.'" It is worth noticing that Stein's old enemies found new fodder and an academic seal of approval for their attacks in Barbara Will's book, Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ and the Vichy Dilemma (2011). The inflammatory book fed into the Stein controversy that was triggered by the exhibition Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, linked to the question how Stein and Toklas had managed to survive in Nazi-occupied France. Will's speculations about the "true Stein" and her alleged "collaboration" with a fascist friend and fascist regime unleashed a cultural hysteria, a sort of license to kill that took over the media and blogosphere. I have no doubt that this cultural atmosphere provided the justification for the Washington Post to publish the infamous article. Will camouflages the fact that her book is in fact about Bernard Faÿ, an intellectual friend of Steins's from the twenties, a once respected historian and author who during the war became a Gestapo informer and persecutor of the Freemasons in France. Hardly anybody today would care about Bernard Faÿ and his twisted fate as a condemned collaborator who was ultimately pardoned by French President Mitterand. Gertrude Stein is being used to create a story that pretends to be sensationalist news when the facts and allegations have already been published and rehashed numerous times, most recently by Janet Malcolm in Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice (2007).

I refer readers interested in the personal and political complexities of Stein's survival to my analysis "Gertrude Stein a 'Collaborator', a 'Nazi'?" published in the Los Angles Review of Books, in the Women's Media Center as well as in my blog. Here I can only give one telling example of the perverse distortions propagated by this book that serves as the big canon in the latest wars against Stein: Will's way of setting up Stein as a Hitler fan. The academic professor tries to make use of the famous quote that every article nowadays repeats, wherein Stein suggests awarding Hitler the Nobel Peace Prize, in 1934. (New York Times Magazine, 'Gertrude Stein Views Life and Politics') "'I say that Hitler ought to have the peace prize,' she says, 'because he is removing all elements of contest and struggle from Germany. By driving out the Jews and the democratic and Left elements, he is driving out everything that conduces to activity. That means peace.'" The more objective commentators in the course of Stein research and biographical writing have recognized the irony - the Jewish humor with which Stein hands Hitler the prize for his mockery of "peace." Her irony is reinforced by many other anti-German, anti-Hitler and anti-Nazi comments one could quote from Stein's work. Will, however, does not quote them. She doesn't mention that a moment later in the same interview Stein says, "Building a Chinese wall is always bad. Protection, paternalism and suppression of natural activity and competition lead to dullness and stagnation. It is true in politics, in literature, in art. Everything in life needs constant stimulation. It needs activity, new blood." In 1939, in Paris France, Stein equates Hitler's "peace" with death for the arts and death for the country: "The characteristic art product of a country is the pulse of the country, France did produce better hats and fashions than ever these last two years and is therefore very alive and Germany's music and musicians have been dead and gone these last two years and so Germany is dead well we will see, it is so, of course as all these things are necessarily true." (Paris France, 1939). Will isn't stupid; she can't quite get around Stein's Jewish humor regarding the Nobel Peace Prize for Hitler, but she nevertheless finds a way. She muses: "Stein probably wanted her audience to respond in both ways..." She claims there is "a strong element of conviction and intentionality in such pronouncements, as though (Stein) requires - indeed demands - that her words be taken literally." She eradicates Stein's Jewish humor by arguing, "her political 'pontifications' are not clearly ironic but apparently deeply felt." (all quotes page 71-72). Are we to take this sort of language - "probably wanted," "as though she requires, indeed demands," "apparently" -- as clean, academic scholarship? To my reading eyes, this language is an obvious attempt to manipulate the reader . Will rehashes another Hitler story, this one reported as hear-say by editor/publisher Jay Lansing. In 1934, Lansing heard Stein say that Hitler and Napoleon were both "great men." For Will, this unquestioningly gives the other Hitler comment a sinister "deeper meaning". Again, she won't accord Stein the benefit of a doubt. Was this another flagrant irony that was missed? Was Stein perhaps referring to the fact that both Napoleon and Hitler were in fact small, demented men and that most of the so-called "great men" of our history (from Alexander the Great onward), idolized by the masses, shared the megalomania that led to mass murder in their conquerors' wars? It goes almost without saying that Will would ignore quotes like this one: "There is too much fathering going on just now and there is no doubt about it fathers are depressing. " (Everybody's Autobiography, 1936) Will insists on finding a dirty under-belly in Stein at every turn. Three years before WWII, Stein commented in a letter to her friend W.G. Rogers: "...disguise it to yourself as you will the majority does want a dictator, it is natural that a majority if it has come to be made up of enormous numbers do, a big mass likes to be shoved as a whole because it feels it moves and they cannot possibly feel that they move themselves as little masses can, there you are, like it or not there we are. "(W.G. Rogers, When This you See Remember Me) This very realistic assessment, again with ironic-sarcastic undertones, is seen by Barbara Will as "chilling," a proof that Stein "firmly distances herself " from democracy: "Stein argues for the power, and, arguably, the rightness of authoritarian leadership." (Will, p. 97.) This sort of biased intimation is found throughout the book -- a book that has not yet been unmasked in its hostile, dishonest intentions. Will's earlier academic work, Gertrude Stein: Modernism, and the Problem of "Genius" (2000) provided valid, useful, even enthusiastic Stein research. But since then, the author has "probably, as though, apparently" suffered a conversion experience. She can be added to the detractors mentioned by Alenier's article and take her "seat in the corner with the Stein haters that include 'the worst sort of critics--anti-Semites, misogynists, homophobes and philistines.'" If we still wonder about the true intention of these attacks, these wars against Stein, I suggest going to the root of the word obscene: obscenitas, is latin derived from either ob-scaena, meaning against the scene of a stage (off-stage); or it might be derived from obs-caenum -- of mud or filth (Origins, the Etymological Dictionary by Eric Partridge). The intention, I argue, is to blast Stein off the stage and out of her sunny spotlight by besmirching her image in the exact fashion we can trace back to the origins of the term obscenity.

Renate Stendhal

read Karren Alenier's article

Why don't you speak better?

2011-12-11T05:11:24Z

Thank you for this interesting article. I don't disagree with you at all, but surely there is also an issue about simply making our speech clear and understandable to an audience on stage. When characters in a play speak with a particular regional dialect, perhaps we need to "cheat" that dialect slightly in the direction of a "standard" speech ("generalized Iowan": is that how you put it?) in order to ensure that the whole audience can understand the speech; while hopefully retaining the quality and character of the dialect.

Michael Elliott

read Nathan Thomas' column

Dickie Cory

2011-12-06T04:53:18Z

Once again, Alpaugh fires his comedic genius across our bow to awaken creative insight into the cannon balls of his poetry and essays. A brave new look a poor Richard's legacy. (Although, it always seemed to me that Cory was a "wannabe" defensive coordinator for the Penn State football team.)

C. O. Mccauley

read David Alpaugh's article

Another Layer to Richard Cory

2011-12-06T04:36:21Z

Thank you for giving a whole new meaning to this poem and to writing the story behind the
story. Fascinating!

Liz Koehler-Pentacoff

read David Alpaugh's article

Q Factor

2011-11-08T18:27:14Z

You're optimistic, Arthur, way too optimistic. You strike a chord with the media and it plays a song that no one hears.

Laird

read Arthur Meiselman's column

Red Wheelbarrow

2011-11-08T18:24:20Z

More fine words from David Alpaugh that make me think...and the ebay rip at the end, outstanding!...(jeez, and all along I thought WCW described how much a kid depends on his wheelbarrow just to get by this youth thing).

C.O. Mccauley

read David Alpaugh's article

What's in the red wheelbarrow today?

2011-11-08T10:04:25Z

Excellent explication, David. So much depends on setting and time. Perhaps if the object was glazed with the image of Michael Jackson or Steve Jobs, it might be worth more today.

Kay Renz

read David Alpaugh's article

Red Wheelbarrow

2011-11-08T09:57:12Z

David, I love William Carlos William's "Red Wheelbarrow". It doesn't need more than those few lines. What you did with your interpretation is brilliant. No more need be said.
Thanks,

Selma Soss

read David Alpaugh's article

David Alpaugh's Wheelbarrow

2011-11-08T09:54:23Z

A brightly glazed conceit! (And I don't mean hubris). Congratulations to David Alpaugh for having something new to say about this old chestnut of English classes. I myself have published a wheelbarrow poem in partial response to Williams':
THE LAZY MAN'S HAIKU
Out in the night
a wheelbarrowful
of moonlight.
(The Lazy Man was too lazy to find the full complement of syllables--5,7,5--for his haiku.

John Ridland

read David Alpaugh's article

Stein's Tea Party

2011-11-02T05:11:19Z

No matter what convoluted political and cultural leanings and swayings, this is important information which is crucial to know. All sides. All angles.

Grace Cavalieri

read Karren Alenier's article

Don't Pick Fights with Poets Redux

2011-10-20T16:36:45Z

As a poet attuned to the musical line, I want to say before the November issue of Scene4 hides the incredibly well thought out essay What Poets Can Learn from Songwriters by David Alpaugh that there are new ways to hear some of the poetic songwriters whose lyrics are surprising and get into your head when you least expect them to. For example, the Pandora app that brings tailored radio according to your favorite singer. I personally have tapped into Madeleine Peyroux radio which delivers to my ear Nellie McKay and other new songwriters as well as those from the past like Billie Holiday.

If you don't know the lyrics of Peyroux & McKay, see my review at
The Dressing titled Don't Pick Fights with Poets

Karren Alenier

David Alpaugh

2011-10-20T11:30:52Z

Many thanks to Scene4 for bringing us the eminently sensible, wise and salutary poetry columns of David Alpaugh. I find myself in almost total agreement with everything he says about poetry and the current poetry scene. Above all I agree with what he says in his current column: that poetry is an art, not identical but closely allied to song, that is meant to enchant and enlighten us. It is not supposed to be a credit on a resume, or a sacred mystery to be guarded zealously by the few hundred keepers of the flame.

Alpaugh's latest column reminded me of an argument I had a few years ago with two poet friends. I argued that a poem should reveal something of itself, but not all, on first reading; they insisted that a poem must be absolutely opaque the first five or six times you read it, and that anything less was a sacrilege.

Needless to say, these same friends regard the name "Billy Collins" as being in the same class as "Paris Hilton." The real tragedy is that my friends--whatever our differences in esthetics--are no more of the academy than I am. How deeply the poets have drunk of the Kool-Aid!

Miles David Moore

read David Alpaugh's column