Alienating the Written Word: Gertrude Stein's (Un)familiar Languages
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Gertrude Stein often insisted that English was her one and only language; and she answered recurring accusations of obscurity by asserting that the words she used did belong to the English lexicon. Although she spent her early childhood in Vienna and Paris, and lived in France most of her adult life, she consistently pretended that she did not care much for French or German, which she dismissed as not her own. Stein's partner Alice Toklas remembered in her (own) autobiography What Is Remembered: "She did not like to read or speak anything but English although she knew German and French."1 This distaste for half-known, half-forgotten idioms may be more significant than it has seemed. If French is often taken into account in commenting on Stein's poems, as a lexical key or as the source of puns and wordplay, German has been largely overlooked, whereas in fact it may well act as a structural, more or less unconscious shadow to Stein's grammar; both foreign languages seem to have had the effect of estranging her English from the comfort of familiarity, thus enabling the emergence of the idiosyncratic grammar for which Stein became famous, derided, and praised. This article questions the exocentric quality of her English, the value of the familiar and her original use of translation.
Hearing French and German, Writing in English
Stein was twenty-nine when she moved to Paris, living first with her brother, then with her American partner. Many of her friends there were Anglophone as well. Yet a number of recollections [End Page 67] in her autobiographies, as well as some pieces of trivial correspondence, serve as evidence that she did speak French when necessary, to servants, friends and visitors, to neighbors in Bilignin, her country home, or in Paris. Most importantly, French was her common language of conversation with her Spanish friend Pablo Picasso; their letters testify to the broken yet carefree French they shared. Unlike Picasso, however, Stein had had the opportunity to learn the language before she came to France as an adult. She had spent a little less than a year in Paris when she was four and was, during that time, educated in French. She insisted on having spoken it as a child ("I was only four years old when I first was in paris and talked french there"), and in her autobiographical works she very often depicts herself in conversations with friends or street encounters in that language.2
As for German, it was part of her environment beginning in late 1874 (Stein had been born in February of that year), when the Steins settled in Austria, where her father wanted to start a new business with his brother. During the family's Viennese years, Gertrude Stein, like her siblings, learned both English and German, and her father reportedly called her a "little schnatterer" (chatterbox), a typical lexical importation of native slang into English.3 It is, however, doubtful that Stein spoke German with her parents: her father, Daniel Stein, was born in Bavaria but had emigrated as a child; his wife, Amelia Keyser, was born in the United States of a German father and a Dutch mother. Both of them were more likely to use American English when they were living in the United States. Nonetheless Stein seems to have remembered enough German to be able to converse, if somewhat imperfectly, with speakers of German dialects. Toklas, a Californian who herself came from a German-speaking family and had been educated in German and English, describes in What Is Remembered an episode during World War I, when she and Stein were volunteering for the American Fund for French Wounded in the South of France:
A wire from Mrs. Lathrop asked if we spoke German. If we did, we should close up the depot at once and return to Paris to prepare to open a depot for civilian relief in Alsace. There was no hesitation in my reply. We both spoke German and would be in Paris as quickly as possible.
(What Is Remembered, 109)
Toklas then adds:
Gertrude spoke a...
