STEIN BECOMES A CLASSIC AT LAST

Author: By Linda Simon

Date: SUNDAY, March 22, 1998

Page: G2

Section: Books

In the half century since her death, Stein's image as a brilliant iconoclast has been overpowered by her image as a gossipy, eccentric hostess and witty storyteller: in short, a ``personality.'' Although her experimental writing has been given due consideration by a handful of scholars, rarely do those works appear in college syllabuses: She was too reticent in her autobiographies to make those works useful for the burgeoning field of Queer Studies; and her lectures on literature always have taken second place to those of, say, Henry James, or T. S. Eliot, or even Ezra Pound.

Stein, though, was so convinced of her own genius that she predicted that, posthumously, she would be heralded by a wide readership. ``Those who are creating the modern composition authentically,'' she wrote, ``are naturally only of importance when they are dead because by that time the modern composition having become past is classified and the description of it is classical. That is the reason why the creator of the new composition in the arts is an outlaw until he is a classic, there is hardly a moment in between.'' Now, with the publication of her works the Library of America series, Stein's prediction has come true. She has become, at last, a classic.

The Library of America's edition contains a fair and judicious sampling of Stein's experimental and popular works. Because the Stein oeuvre is huge, scholars Catherine R. Stimpson and Harriet Chessman had some difficult decisions to make, and they made them well. They include, for example, ``The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas'' but not ``Everybody's Autobiography,'' which, while it has a certain charm, served mostly to embellish the Stein myth, but with less bite and venom. They provide, in each volume, a thorough chronology of Stein's writings; notes on the sources for the texts; and a smattering of endnotes, mostly identifying proper names. Unfortunately, however, they offer no guidance in interpreting and understanding Stein. Providing an introduction to each volume would have been enormously helpful, especially for first-time readers.

The first volume begins with Stein's two earliest and most accessible works of fiction: ``Q.E.D.,'' a novella of loss and longing, based on Stein's relationship with a woman she met while studying medicine at Johns Hopkins University, and ``Three Lives,'' inspired by Flaubert's ``Trois Contes.'' In these works, Stein was intent on probing and exploring the ``bottom nature,'' as she put it, of her characters, a task that would engage her in the scores of experimental portraits that follow. Her first subject was a new friend, Alice Toklas, who emerged as ``Ada.'' After meeting Stein, we are told, Toklas ``came to be happier than anybody else who was living then.''

Nearly 400 pages of the first volume are devoted to those portraits, and to verbal collages, poetry, and her play ``Four Saints in Three Acts.'' Because the volume is organized chronologically, there appears in the midst of these works, most of which will be intractable for the common reader, her lecture ``Composition as Explanation,'' which she delivered at Oxford and Cambridge in 1926. The lecture serves so well as an explanation of Stein's own oddities of composition that it is regrettable that the editors do not highlight it for readers in any way. ``No one is ahead of his time,'' Stein advised her British listeners, ``it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who also are creating their own time refuse to accept.''

The second volume includes many works that Stein completed in the last 12 years of her life, when she wrote with a sense of confidence and authority born, in part, of the accolades she received from such friends as Thornton Wilder, Bennett Cerf, and Carl Van Vechten. If readers must choose between the two volumes, they will not go wrong with the second, containing Stein's cogent and insightful ``Lectures in America''; her lyrical homage and critique of her friend ``Picasso''; her philosophical ``The Geographical History of America or the Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind''; the fanciful children's story ``The World is Round''; and her play about Susan B. Anthony, ``The Mother of Us All,'' which her friend Virgil Thomson translated into an opera. Here readers also will find the splendid lecture ``What Are Master-pieces and Why Are There So Few of Them.'' Written in 1935, Stein's meditation on audience, identity, and creativity anticipated postmodernism and our persistent problem of recognizing not only masterpieces but even art itself. The richness of this volume alone justifies Stein's recognition, at last, as a ``classic'' of American literature.