Gertrude Stein, William James, and habit in the shadow of war

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 2003 by Liesl M. Olson

   Sow an action & you reap a habit; sow a habit & you reap a character;
   sow a character and you reap a destiny.
   --William James (1)

   She worked everyday. She dictated her works to Alice Toklas who wrote
   them down. She lived like anyone more or less. She went out to
   market, bought food. She had that awful dog. She had to take it out
   for a walk all the time.
   --Paul Bowles (630)

   And anyway except in daily life nobody is anybody.
   --Gertrude Stein, Everybody's Autobiography (109)

Gertrude Stein, one of modernism's earliest experimenters and the celebrated mother of the avant-garde, called attention throughout her life to the ordinary functions of her not-so-ordinary life. Stein's emphasis on habit, both in her autobiographical works and in her fiction and poetry, seems to contrast startlingly with her bohemian years in Paris--her friendships with the great painters of the twentieth century, her rotating salon of artists and intellectuals at 27 rue de Fleurus, her longtime lesbian partnership with Alice B. Toklas, and the innovative, often baffling style of her texts. Gifted with an ability to recognize promising young artists when they were still relatively unknown (Picasso, Hemingway, and Braque, to name a few), Stein was by all accounts "modern" before modernism had fully arrived. In "Composition as Explanation" Stein self-confidently claims that it would have taken her contemporaries another 30 years to appreciate the masterpieces that she could recognize early on, except that World War I catapulted Europe into the modern age. The war, according to Stein, effectively forced the acceptance of a new modernist aesthetic.

But what Stein wrote about her pioneering approach to art stands out against her love of habit, something we often associate with conventional, even old-fashioned, living. To Paul Bowles, 20 years old when visiting Stein in 1931, her habits seemed markedly run-of-the-mill (630). One might say that Stein (like Wallace Stevens) deflated the myth of the eccentric writer; she was rooted in domestic habits and, more to the point, made these habits the subject matter of her work. T. S. Eliot emphasized the distinction between "the man who suffers and the mind that creates" (41), but the relationship between Stein's life and work, marked by habit, consistently became the material for her writings. Stein's household felicities--her late mornings, her love of large meals, her relationships with her servants, her attachment to Basket the poodle (and subsequent poodles named Basket)--constituted a life of specific routines that, even when the two world wars ravaged Europe, she was exceptionally reluctant to give up. While the wars undeniably changed Stein's life and had an enormous influence on her work, they also had the effect of establishing even more indispensable habits for Stein; and this renewed emphasis on habit becomes the subject matter for her World War II writings. Habits seem both to mask the disruption that war creates, dissolving the consequences of the world into the space of the home, and paradoxically to work as a way in which war itself can be represented, as the importance of habits is dramatically amplified.

Stein rates habit--rather than, say, innovation--as the singular most animating force in the English literary tradition. Similarly, William James--Stein's mentor, with whom she studied in the 1890s when she was a student at Radcliffe--celebrates habit as a result of the freedom to choose, and the subsequent indication of a fully formed character. (2) James's belief in habit is striking in and of itself, but even more so in light of a dominating ethos against habit articulated by influential writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson, James's pragmatist progenitor, and Walter Pater, one of literary modernism's key precursors. Stein, in one sense, inherits James's positivism (he sees habit as a means toward self-improvement), and yet she does not understand habit primarily in terms of productive action. Rather, habit serves a kind of pleasure--the pleasure of repetition. Stein views habits as neither life denying in Pater's sense, nor prosaic: "Repeating is a wonderful thing in living being," she writes in The Making of Americans, a text in which she praises the "monotony" of middle-class life and lays out the sweeping proportions of her attraction to repetition, both linguistic and thematic (265). The entrenched dailiness of Stein's subject matter in her prewar work becomes central to her World War II writings: habitual actions accumulate value and take precedence over the traumatic events of war. While one might assume that habits would be disrupted during a time of crisis (or substituted by an active reaction to war's violence), Stein's response to the Second World War was to keep her life as consistent and pleasurable as possible. In looking at her World War II writings, however, my intention is not first and foremost to denounce Gertrude Stein's real life choices--which have been well documented already and are unquestionably problematic (3)--but to look closely at how habit functions in her writings and to examine the consequences of what she learns from William James. I will also consider Stein's somewhat elliptical emphasis on what she calls "daily island life" ("What Is English Literature" 15) and how her historical notion of literature frames her lifelong reliance on repetition, culminating in a strange and exaggerated reliance on "daily island life" during a time of war.