Gertrude Stein and the Making of Frenchmen

Abstract

cultural scene alone, any more than Beckett's can be appreciated in sole conjunction with his native Ireland. Paris was the scene of Stein's choice, and English her language. For years she was practically compelled to publish her writings in France and to promote them by finding French writers to translate them. Yet not only did she assert again and again that English was her language and associate with Ernest Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson and other American writers, but she also toured the States in order to explain her work to an American audience. A cursory investigation of the presence of Stein in current literary criticism reveals that she persists in belonging to both cultures. In fact, there are fewer Stein titles available in English than translations of her books in France, where several journals have recently devoted special issues to her. According to Catherine Stimpson (in a lecture) her present-day American public of fairly select readers comprises mainly scholars, feminists, and avant-garde authors, notably the talk David Antin and the language poet Lynn Hejinian. In France, Stein attracts readers from similar groups, eliciting a particularly active response among experimental writers. It is not by coincidence that David Antin, who has stressed the present relevance of Stein in interviews and essays, remains in close contact with French avant-garde poets, especially Jacques Roubaud, an anthologizer of American poetry whose relation to Stein we shall discuss later in this article.