40. Gertrude Stein

 

“We are Americans.” -Gertrude Stein

 

Gertrude Stein’s final book, published in 1946, the year after the war she spent in questionable circumstances ended and the year she would die of stomach cancer, concludes with both a challenge and a rallying cry for her fellow Americans. While the rest of Brewsie and Willie—slim novel or novella or compendium of oral history—consists of relentless streams of dialogue spoken by American G.I.s, nurses, and other hangers-on, as they linger in postwar Paris, the final two pages of the book, titled “To Americans,” come directly in Stein’s voice. Beginning with protestations of her newly rediscovered patriotism, she goes on to define the present moment in American history as being “more important than anything since the Civil War.” For Stein, the U.S. found itself at a crossroads in its economic and spiritual development; having gone all in on industrialization, it now stood to become suddenly impoverished due to the diminution of both markets and natural resources while at the same time threatening to turn its citizens into a faceless mass of “job workers.”

Part prophecy and part anguished pleading, Stein’s prediction of industrial wipeout may have been off by a few decades, but it echoes both her well-voiced concerns about modernity and the opinions of many of the book’s characters, particularly those of the armchair philosopher Brewsie. Toward the end of the war, many American G.I.s went to visit Stein at her Paris home, which they came to look at as “a landmark on the order of the Eiffel Tower and Montmartre and the Arch of Triumph,” per contemporary reviewer Charles Poole, and out of their open-hearted conversations, she built her final book. The book makes no particular claims on authenticity, of offering anything like the transcripts of the dialogues, so it’s neither surprising nor particularly disturbing that the characters sound, in both their halting, repetitive syntax and their personal and political concerns, much like Stein herself. With Brewsie as the book’s principal voice, joined increasingly by other members of the chorus, the soldiers debate the legacy of the Civil War, worry over the future of an industrial society, and insist that communism and socialism are not the answer.

If anything, it’s Willie—less voluble, but more cantankerous and small-minded—that provides something of a welcome counterpoint. Introduced sparring with the more nimble-brained Brewsie on the first pages (“You get the hell out of here, Brewsie.”), he finally gets his moment towards the book’s end. Contradicting a pessimistic statement from Brewsie to the effect that humankind is unlikely to continue, Willie offers up an even more frightful vision of the future: that humankind will, in fact, continue, that it will be unkillable. “Don’t you make any mistake about that,” continues Willie in words that sound increasingly like prophecy, “atom bombs or potato bugs or concentration camps or religion or poverty or no jobs or education, it does not make it go any other way, they just do go on living, they don’t disappear.” We are destined to continue as a people, Stein says, even if as she wrote these words, she knew that she would not. And so she leaves it up to us in a final plea for national solidarity (“We are Americans”) to figure out what exactly the hell it is that we, as a nation, newly emerged from half a decade of armed conflict, are trying to do.