Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog Page 4

  One of the reasons I’m so glad I read her thoughts on punctuation is that now I know that Gertrude Stein hates commas. “Commas are servile and have no life of their own,” she says—in context it makes sense—and “what does a comma do, a comma does nothing but make easy a thing that if you like it enough is easy enough without the comma.” And once you realize that her strange constructions are often (well, sometimes) perfectly ordinary constructions—just un-commafied ones—they seem almost normal (well, some of them). Armed with the knowledge that commas are slavish, enfeebling little suck-ups that are always “helping you along holding your coat for you and putting on your shoes,” I found I could read her work with enjoyment—with, in fact, a kind of crazed delight.

  Gertrude Stein (it’s impossible to call her either Stein or Gertrude, you have to say Gertrude Stein22) does use commas occasionally, but often they are substitutes for question marks (as in her remarks on the preceding page), because she loathes question marks even more than she loathes commas. “I could never bring myself to use a question mark,” she writes. “I always found it positively revolting.” Her revulsion is based on the question mark’s appearance. It’s okay, she says, as long as it’s used as decoration or (weirdly) “as a brand on cattle,” but “connected with writing it is completely entirely completely uninteresting.” It’s even less interesting than adjectives. Not only are they “not really and truly interesting,”23 but also they aid and abet nouns, which are about as uninteresting as it’s possible to be.

  So what is interesting, Gertrude Stein, if you’ll pardon the question mark?

  Well, by 1935, in the talk on grammar that she gave to audiences around the U.S. on her triumphal lecture tour (and I have no doubt that they were slack-jawed and bug-eyed), she makes it clear that grammar is not only interesting, it’s one of her enduring passions. The lecture in which she pours out her heart on the subject is entitled “Poetry and Grammar,” but it’s much more about grammar (well, sort of) than about poetry. Gertrude Stein, of course, wrote poetry (sort of) and in one of her poems (called “George Hugnet”),24 she has this to say: “Grammar is as disappointed not is as grammar is as disappointed.” (No, sorry, commas don’t help with that one, actually.)

  Some of her other pronouncements about grammar are more intelligible, some—believe me—less, but what really shines through this lecture is how very much she loves grammatical ideas, and how intensely she feels things grammatical, and how much she has thought about aspects of grammar that no one has ever thought about before. Gertrude Stein’s thought processes are unlike anyone else’s—except perhaps some of the characters in Through the Looking Glass—but to her they are crystal clear, and she is always definite in her ideas and implacable in her prejudices and vehement in her feelings. “One of the things that is a very interesting thing to know is how you are feeling inside you to the words that are coming out to be outside of you,” she tells us on the essay’s first page, and she comes back to this over and over: how do you feel about it, she keeps asking (sans question mark), like an obsessive therapist. “Do you always have the same kind of feeling in relation to the sounds as the words come out of you or do you not.” Gertrude Stein, for example, has feelings about “the apostrophe for possession” and can see that “for some the possessive case apostrophe has a gentle tender insinuation that makes it very difficult to definitely decide to do without it.” She, however, not being such a wimp, does do without it (“mostly,” she qualifies) but admits that she turns to it now and then to indicate possession—as one might Google a long-lost lover—because she “has regrets.”25

  Has anyone else ever ever had this kind of relationship to a mark of punctuation? I myself have always had an intense partisanship toward the colon as a way to introduce an elaboration or an explanation or a clarification, but it can’t approach the passion of Gertrude Stein for periods: “Periods have a life of their own a necessity of their own a feeling of their own a time of their own. And that feeling that life that necessity that time can express itself in an infinite variety that is the reason I have always remained true to periods.…” Heaven for Gertrude Stein would consist of cherubim and seraphim writing down verbs, prepositions, and articles followed by a firmly placed period—impossible in real life, but surely possible in heaven, or what’s a heaven for? To stand by your favorite mark of punctuation, your favorite part of speech, is the mark of a true fanatic, a fierce grammarista who makes Sister Bernadette look like an amateur.

  Who knows what Gertrude Stein would think of federal cufflinks or the death of Farmer Bill? But about, for example, sentences and paragraphs she is perfectly clear: “Sentences are not emotional but paragraphs are.” And her entire writing life, she tells us, is devoted to trying to find a balance between those two. Sentences, of course, are what diagramming is all about, and when Gertrude Stein gets on that topic, all hell breaks loose. She gets revved up in her lecture on “The Making of The Making of Americans,”26 where she states, “English grammar is interesting because it is so simple.27 Once you really know how to diagram a sentence really know it, you know practically all you have to know about English grammar.”

  Despite her infatuation with grammatical traditions, some of Gertrude Stein’s own writing may have been a sly, subversive construction of her own personal grammar—an impulse that may be akin to her famous statement, “I like a view but I like to sit with my back turned to it.” Turning her back on the Sister Bernadettes of the world, she became one of the few writers to construct completely undiagrammable sentences. What would Reed and Kellogg do with (from her novel Lucy Church Amiably) “He made many many tickle them as well as well as withstand”? How would Sister Bernadette tackle (from the play Old and Old) “The grass, the grass is a tall sudden calendar with oats with means, only with cages, only with colors and mounds and little blooms and countless happy eggs to stay away and eat, eat that”?

  It’s in “Poetry and Grammar” that Gertrude Stein tells us: “I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences. I suppose other things may be more exciting to others when they are at school but to me undoubtedly when I was at school the really completely exciting thing was diagramming sentences and that has been to me ever since the one thing that has been completely exciting and completely completing.” And why? Because when one is diagramming sentences, “one is completely possessing something and incidentally one’s self.”28 Gertrude Stein always took it personally. Certainly Sister Bernadette never told us that diagramming sentences would lead to the possession of one’s self—a concept that would have been only dimly comprehensible at my school back in 1955. She just told us that it would be part of our final grade.

  Gertrude Stein and Sister Bernadette did have one thing in common. Both were obsessed with dogs. However, Sister Bernadette was a very small nun teaching grammar, and her dog barked; Gertrude Stein was a very large poet writing books, and her dog sighed. In her grammar essay, she asks (no question mark), “Will you listen to one or two sentences where I did think I had done this thing” (i.e., balance the unemotional sentence with the emotional paragraph), and in her book called How to Write29 she goes on to provide this example: “A dog which you have never had before has sighed.” Anyone who has ever heard a dog sigh knows just how poignant it can be—and how much more poignant if it’s a new dog, a dog you have never had before. What does it mean? Is it a sigh of longing for his old home? Or a sigh of contentment at being in a new one? Whatever the case, Gertrude Stein is exactly right: her sighing dog is both a sentence and a paragraph.

  And, unlike most of her sentences, it can be neatly diagrammed.

  In fact, Gertrude Stein’s thoughts about the unemotional sentence vs. the emotional paragraph lead directly back to her own dog, Basket.30 On the subject, she tells us this: “I said I found this out first in listening to Basket my dog drinking. And anybody listening to any dog’s drinking will see what I mean.”

  That’s it. She doesn’t elaborate.
Commas don’t help. Nothing helps. And yet her sincerity, her confidence in the rightness of what she’s saying—in the interestingness of it—is absolute. And so is the utter mad uniqueness of her vision: who else has ever said such a thing, or thought it, or written it?

  It’s probably appropriate to end a discussion of Gertrude Stein with one of her short poems. It’s called “A Dog,” and it bears even less relation to a dog than her essay on Henry James does to Henry James, but it has a curious charm, and if we think of the invisible dog in the poem as an invisible sighing dog, perhaps we can feel its hot breath as we read:

  A DOG

  A little monkey goes like a donkey that means to say that means to say that more sighs last goes. Leave with it. A little monkey goes like a donkey.

  And so leave with it we shall. But we shall not attempt to diagram it.

  Gertrude Stein and one of the Baskets

  * * *

  Henry James, whom Stein adored (“Henry James nobody has forgotten Henry James even if I have but I have not”), was perhaps the antithesis of Gertrude Stein. Or perhaps Hemingway (whom she also adored—for a while, anyway) was her antithesis. In any event, the two were definitely the antitheses of each other. James, whose style H. G. Wells famously described as that of “a magnificent but painful hippopotamus resolved at any cost upon picking up a pea,” was the king of the orotund, elaborated, endlessly qualifying sentence, particularly in his later years when he compulsively revised his books, dictating them to a secretary and making them ever more dense, more detailed, more complex, more difficult. As Gore Vidal put it, James “believed that a work of art was never finished, merely abandoned.” And, as James himself said in a letter to his niece (quoted by Leon Edel in his introduction to volume four of The Letters of Henry James), “I hate American simplicity. I glory in the piling up of complications of every sort.” But James is underrated as a writer of accessible prose. For example, near the beginning of The Portrait of a Lady, during afternoon tea on the lawn of an English country house in “the perfect middle of a splendid summer afternoon,”31 we find this delightfully Sister Bernadettish sentence:

  His attention was called to her by the conduct of his dog, who had suddenly darted forward with a little volley of shrill barks, in which the note of welcome, however, was more sensible than that of defiance.

  She affronted, inscrutably, under stress, all the public concussions and ordeals; and yet, with that slim mystifying grace of her appearance, which defied you to say if she were a fair young woman who looked older through trouble, or a fine smooth older one who looked young through successful indifference with her precious reference, above all, to memories and histories into which he could enter, she was as exquisite for him as some pale pressed flower (a rarity to begin with), and, failing other sweetnesses, she was a sufficient reward of his effort.

  At his other, more elephantine extreme, James can construct convoluted but still perfectly lucid sentences like this one, from near the beginning of his long short story The Jolly Corner, one of his knottier works:

  To which Hemingway might reply, as Jake Barnes did in The Sun Also Rises:

  Isn’t it pretty to think so?

  James—a contemporary of Reed and Kellogg—was born in 1843 into a wealthy and cosmopolitan family in New York City, on Washington Square, and he learned English grammar (and French) from tutors in Geneva, London, Paris, Bologna, and Bonn long before diagramming was invented. Would learning diagramming have made his prose plainer, less intricate? His grammar is sometimes eccentric, he’s occasionally difficult to decipher, and God knows his endless qualifications, delayed verbs, and freakish adverbial obsessions would have been greeted by Sister Bernadette with exasperation and possibly a rap on the knuckles. But Henry James, hippopotamus though he may be, is not someone to be tampered with by a chalk-wielding tyrant selling subject-verb agreement. Let him pick up his pea! And see how exquisite it is when you really examine it.

  Hemingway, born in 1899, grew up outside Chicago in Oak Park, and went through the public school system there. Learning diagramming would have been unavoidable. If he was writing them then, his simple declarative (and readily diagrammable) sentences would probably have flummoxed his teachers, who were part of the Reed-Kellogg educational tradition that favored sentences that were as ornamented, embroidered, embellished, and frilled as the Victorian furniture of the era. His own mother wrote on the day of Ernest’s birth: “The sun shone brightly and the robins sang their sweetest songs to welcome the little stranger into this beautiful world.”

  To be a successful father there’s one absolute rule: when you have a kid, don’t look at it for the first two years.

  (Ernest’s own comment on the little strangers he fathered was “To be a successful father there’s one absolute rule: when you have a kid, don’t look at it for the first two years.”)

  Hemingway skipped college, left home as soon as he graduated from high school, and went to work as a newspaper reporter in Kansas City. He was there only six months before, in 1918, he signed on with the Red Cross as an ambulance driver in France, but it may have been at the Kansas City Star that the flowery prose of his upbringing was transformed into the vigorous, straightforward style that would characterize his writing thereafter. His letters home are casual, brisk, and colloquial, but—like most intelligent young people of the time who came from a public school education—he had a fastidious grasp of grammar that probably came naturally to him. It’s doubtful he had time to labor over sentences like “Don’t worry or cry or fret about my not being a good Christian” (in this possessive-plus-gerund construction, many people today would tend to write me, which is technically incorrect, for my) and “That was no idle Jest about the Great none other than that Mae Marsh, whom you and Sam glimpsed” (his whom is right on the money). These niceties were at his fingertips, thanks to the Oak Park schools. Diagramming would have been one aspect of a rigorous education in the finer points of the English language, but only one—in those days, impeccable grammar was taken for granted as the mark of an educated person.

  We live in a world of transgressions and selfishness, and no pictures that represent us otherwise can be true, though, happily, for human nature, gleamings of that pure spirit in whose likeness man has been fashioned are to be seen, relieving its deformities, and mitigating if not excusing its crimes.

  As for James Fenimore Cooper, Mark Twain’s avatar of all that was wrong with the literature of his day, here is the last sentence of The Deerslayer, published in 1841:

  And as Twain (speaking of antitheses) commented in his essay:

  There have been daring people in the world who claimed that Cooper could write English, but they are all dead now.

  In Paris in the 1880s, Marcel Proust was spared diagramming at the Lycée Condorcet. Would a Sister B in his early life have simplified what developed into his famously complex sentence structures? Forced to diagram those baggy monsters at the blackboard, would young Marcel have slimmed them down? Proust is even more famous than James for long sentences32, but in fact, he was equally capable of short, pithy ones. A la Recherche de Temps Perdu begins très simplement. The first sentence of Swann’s Way (the Scott Moncrieff translation) is:

  For a long time I used to go to bed early.

  On the other hand, the final sentence of Time Recaptured—written ten years later, just before his death, is:

  But at least, if strength were granted me for long enough to accomplish my work, I should not fail, even if the results were to make them resemble monsters, to describe men first and foremost as occupying a place, a very considerable place compared with the restricted one which is allotted to them in space, a place on the contrary prolonged past measure—for simultaneously, like giants plunged into the years, they touch epochs that are immensely far apart, separated by the slow accretion of many, many days—in the dimension of Time.33

  Playing a party game in which guests were asked to fill out questionnaires,34 Marcel at thirteen answered the question
, “What is your favorite occupation?” with “Reading, dreaming, and writing verse.” He was not, perhaps, a prime candidate for the earthbound rigors of diagramming.…

  In fact, what’s really tempting to wonder is whether such a sensitive, dreamy, eccentric boy would have been damaged by such ritualized pursuits. Maybe it was better that young Proust be slumped in his chair letting his mind wander, perhaps to concoct what, in the same questionnaire, he said was his idea of earthly happiness: “To live in contact with those I love, with the beauties of nature, with a quantity of books and music, and to have, within easy distance, a French theater.”

  Moving forward sixty or so years, and across the ocean to northwestern New York State in the late 1940s, we find Joyce Carol Oates having grammar drummed into her by Mrs. Dietz. In The Faith of a Writer, Oates describes the one-room schoolhouse where “We learned to ‘diagram’ sentences with the solemn precision of scientists articulating chemical equations”

  I secured his head in the clamp & now brought the ice pick (which I had sterilized on the hot plate) to his right eye as indicated in Dr. Freeman’s diagram but when I inserted it through the bony orbit NO NAME freaked out struggling & screaming through the sponge & there was a gush of blood & I came.