Look at Me and Here I Am: Writings and Lectures, 1909-45

by Gertrude Stein, Patricia Meyerowitz (Editor), Elizabeth Sprigge (Introduction)

Gertrude Stein's radical innovations and continual experiments with language were years ahead of her time. This volume of her writings attempts to dispel some of the misunderstanding that surrounds her work, presenting many of her lectures for the first time. Look At Me Now includes portraits of people&mdash'Matisse, Lipschitz, Picasso, Henry James, and others&mdash'portraits of objects, her poetry, her novel Ida, and her last work, "Brewsie and Willie." Her lectures reveal a precise and original scheme behind her writing, drawing on concepts from William James' theories of the aesthetic to Bergson's notion of time. Originally published in 1971 (Penguin) and out of print for a number of years, this accessible anthology presents some of the best of her startling achievements.

Genres: Poetry, Essays, Literary Criticism, Nonfiction

446 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1967

About the author

Gertrude Stein was an American writer who spent most of her life in France, and who became a catalyst in the development of modern art and literature. Her life was marked by two primary relationships, the first with her brother Leo Stein, from 1874-1914, and the second with Alice B. Toklas, from 1907 until Stein's death in 1946. Stein shared her salon at 27 rue de Fleurus, Paris, first with Leo and then with Alice. Throughout her lifetime, Stein cultivated significant tertiary relationships with well-known members of the avant garde artistic and literary world of her time.

Reviews

[D.A. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stein's lectures get more timely with each passing year. She's disarmingly funny and infinitely approachable. Often people perceive her more experimental work as difficult and nearly impenetrable. But these talks remind us that, while her surfaces might seem opaque, she is hiding nothing.

I took a point off only because the typeface in this book is so damn small. See if you can locate the essays in a better format. You'll be enchanted, I assure you.

[Sheryl · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't always get it.

[ThePageGobbler · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very hard to rate this one. The Tender Buttons sections towards the middle in particular are just hard to understand for a beginner, although careful study of the essays and lectures at the start makes the logic a little easier. These essays/lectures are fantastic, giving in Stein’s elliptical style a good idea of her idea of art, chronology, time, poetry and even the minutaie of punctuation. However, boiling a lot of these down to their elements reveal the same tired aristocratic ideas that led to the excesses of high modernism (and which are very apparent in Stein’s direct political writing), full of great men, geniuses, audiences who don’t really matter, etc. So while I’ll defer as to whether the challenging descriptions of butter and chairs are actually ‘good’ or not this streak alone reduces the benefit of the doubt that you naturally give Stein. The final extract, from Brewsie and Willie, the jingoistic address at the end aside, is some of the more fascinating stuff, perhaps because it allows itself to be drawn closer to a shared reality than the 40 pages of description of objects in a French household… Ida was great too if not quite as accessible

[Lysergius · Rating 1 out of 5]

Almost unreadable. Full of childish repetition and patronising asides, this is a worthless exercise in criticism. Not worth one star.

[Thomas Young]

So, if you bought this book then we can establish you are likely a Stein reader. Very few people would buy this volume as compared to the immensely popular Vintage publication edited by Carl Van Vechten. This volume has it's upsides in it's collecting a good deal of Stein's lectures. One major point I would like to give the book and it's editors credit for is that "Before the Flowers of Friendship Faded Friendship Faded" is paired here with the lecture that discusses it. The two texts are vital in understanding each other, and I have not found the two printed side by side very often.
There is one instance, however, where I did see these printed side by side that I remember: the volume printed by Peter Owen in the 60s or 70s, Writings and Lectures: 1911-1945. This volume, one will find, is the exact same as this present book. Thus, what you have here is a reprint with a new title. I do not own both volumes, so am not annoyed by this fact, however, I found that the book did a very poor job of indicating it was not a new collection.

Other problems I had with the book are the selections of works for the second half of the volume, "Fiction." The editors chose to include the widely available novel Ida in full in this reprint (the original volume can be forgiven, for Ida was hard to come by) while leaving the last novel Stein wrote, Brewsie and Willie, to be excerpted in a ridiculous fashion. The editors describe their reasoning: "due to the length of Brewsie and Willie and it's overall evenness, it was decided that 5 chapters would be sufficient to show the method of the book. They are the first three and the last two chapters. Also included for interest is the short epilogue in which a Gertrude Stein speaks directly to Americans." I would point out that Ida is a longer volume than Brewsie and Willie and the latter is a lengthy mediation on war and society that cannot be understood without the entirety of it's text. Brewsie and Willie is only about 70 pages in length, not that hard to extend a volume given that it is an academic printing, and the printers can just increase the price.

The book is cheaper than the Library of America volumes, but the Library of America set gives a much better sense of Stein. The latter contains her lectures, some novels, portraits, and poems. I highly recommend the investment and to avoid this.

[Stu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Highlights for me: all the lectures, but especially 'Plays', 'The Gradual Making of The Making of Americans', 'Portraits & Repetition', 'Poetry & Grammar'; the portraits 'Matisse', 'Picasso' and 'Mi-Careme'; the play entitled 'A List'; bits of the poem 'Before the Flowers of Friendship Faded Friendship Faded'; the 'Duet' part of 'Henry James', the first couple of parts of 'Ida'; the excerpts from 'Brewsie & Willie' (made me want to read the whole thing).