John Ashbery's Enthusiasm for Gertrude Stein
Karin Roffman writes about John Ashbery's arrival in Paris nine years after the death of Gertrude Stein, and the writer's immense affect on his work, at the Yale Review. "John Ashbery's 1971 ArtNews review of Four Americans in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art's exhibition of Stein family collections, is the closest he ever came to spending an afternoon in Gertrude Stein’s company at 27 rue de Fleurus," writes Roffman. More:
Ashbery’s enthusiasm for Stein’s collecting instincts seemed initially to eclipse his appreciation for her poetry. Even Tender Buttons (1914), in fact, the work that incited his passion for Stein at sixteen after a friend pointed it out to him at the Deerfield Academy library, receives some neutral or negative comments. He mentions the “sureness of Gertrude’s taste as a collector” against the “unfathomable solidity of works like Tender Buttons.” He writes that in the book, “Stein’s method of composition is to make statements which cannot be disproved even when they may be ignored.” These claims suggest a not entirely pleasant experience with Stein, but Ashbery argues for a different approach to reading and thinking about her work through connecting her domestic and literary projects. He explains that Stein’s genius lies in her ability to create spaces for collections of things (paintings or sentences) to exist in new relations to each other: “She is building. Her structures may be demolished; what remains is a sense of someone’s having built.” Ashbery sees a direct connection between her collecting and poetic processes; she creates room for thinking about people and things.
Stein’s things have the effect on Ashbery that she had intended they should. In the early chapters of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), she suggests this reading of her life and work by offering examples of how being among her collections provokes a kind of thinking that she later calls, simply, “pleasure.”
Read all of "'Sitting at the Table' with Stein and Ashbery" here.