Gertrude Stein

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Gertrude Stein (1874 - 1946) was an American author who lived in Paris, France, and is best remembered for creating deliberate linguistic conundrums.

Stein's most famous work was a best seller, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, published in 1933, and it largely lacked the kind of confounding language that has caused Gertrude Stein to be remembered nearly a century later.

Stein's possibly least famous book, published in 1947, was entitled Four in America; it consisted of four subdivisions purporting to be about “Wilbur Wright”, “Henry James”, "Ulysses Grant" and “George Washington”. As of 2020, Four in America is out of print, has never been digitized, and is likely to be found in only two or three libraries in the United States. Even used copies via the internet are difficult to come by.

Four in America is now something of a curiosity, because a single sentence of that book has become a much misquoted and always misrepresented internet meme. Some claim that Stein said she admired Ulysses S. Grant; others claim that Stein said she could not “think of Grant without weeping”. The actual sentence which this meme sprang from is to be found in the quarter of the book allegedly devoted to Grant, on the 77th and last page, and reads: “I cannot think of Ulysses Simpson Grant without tears.” But do not be deceived by that apparently lucid statement; it perches atop one of the most abstruse, dense, and discouraging paragraphs ever written in the English language:

I cannot think of Ulysses Simpson Grant without tears. He was so what shall it be not by any night not by any day not by any light not by any way, but Ulysses Simpson Grant, which one is, that one is, who can come that one can come, for which they come not of for which they come but they can in that case but which they can in that place can place, I place him there. Do you too. Do you two place him there which do you do. I do I place him there. I which I place him there, not only for me to be me, I am an American which if which I can be only I know, I know all about sitting and standing but I do not sit and stand in the way not yet nor has been. From Four in America, page 77, by Gertrude Stein (1947).

To make any sense of the paragraph quoted above, it is helpful to resort to Four in America's 26-page introduction by Thornton Wilder. Wilder elucidates a theory about Stein’s mangled, rebellious and challenging use of language. Per Wilder, Stein believed that we are now living in “end times” where language has become superficial in effect, and normal use of language does not reach the real person inside each of us. Thus (surmises Wilder), Stein tried a variety of unorthodox mechanisms to cut through our mental fog, to make us sit up and think differently, to jar us out of complacency, to challenge what we really know. Possibly, to want to read this book, wrote Wilder, requires a kind spiritual readiness.

Besides the realization that anyone claiming to know what Gertrude Stein thought or felt about Grant, based on that book, would be living in a state of sin, readers can benefit from becoming innoculated against quotes thrown around glibly on the internet without providing a specific reference.