Ryan Ruby in Bookforum:
DESPITE HER REPUTATION as a long-winded writer, Gertrude Stein had a talent for pithiness. Of Oakland, the town where she grew up, she famously remarked: “There is no there, there.” Of one of her literary nemeses, Ezra Pound: “A village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if not, not.” Of the younger American expat writers who flocked to Paris during the ’20s: “You are all a lost generation.” Of the atomic age: “Everyone gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.” Of pithy remarks: “Remarks are not literature.”
According to Alice B. Toklas, the woman who had for forty years served as her devoted secretary, editor, cook, bouncer, companion, and lover—as well as the narrator of her most famous book—Stein kept her wits and her wit to the very end. On July 27, 1946, the two waited in a hospital in a suburb of Paris, where Stein, who was suffering from stomach cancer, would undergo the surgery that would kill her. Toklas recalls: “I sat next to her and she said to me in the early afternoon, What is the answer? I was silent. In that case, she said, what is the question?”
More here.
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