The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder.

Brown, John L.

The editors of this impressive volume of the Gertrude Stein/Thornton Wilder correspondence evidently did not design it for the general public, but rather for the reader with a special interest in contemporary American literature. Scrupulously and abundantly documented, the volume contains notes and a critical apparatus that together occupy nearly as much space as the letters themselves. An embarrassment of riches!

Stein and Wilder met in Chicago in November 1945, during her lecture tour on "What Is English Literature," arranged after the success of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933). The autobiography was the first of her many works to find a large audience in the United States, although she had been a Left Bank celebrity for many years, an icon of the avant-garde for such experimental works as Three Lives and The Making of Americans (written in 1908 but published only in 1925, a history of her family but also of "everyone who was or is or will be"). In the 1920s she had considerable influence on expatriate writers like Hemingway, who became a close friend. Like Wilder, she was interested in the theater. The opera Four Saints in Three Acts, with music by Virgil Thomson, has remained a perennial success ever since its first performance in 1934. The two correspondents also shared a lively interest in the cinema. While Stein was relatively unknown to the general public in 1927, Wilder had already achieved celebrity, having won that year's Pulitzer Prize for his novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey. He also enjoyed a reputation as a dramatist, with works such as Our Town (Pulitzer, 1938), and as a writer of screenplays.

Stein and Wilder, different as they were in age and background, immediately struck up a deep and affectionate friendship which lasted until Stein's death. Even Stein's lifelong companion Alice B. Toklas, usually so disapproving of Stein's young gentlemen friends (notably Hemingway), accepted Wilder, since he "might be helpful without being cumbersome."

The correspondence begins with a brief note from Stein thanking Wilder for his kindness during her visit to Chicago. She looks forward to "our always knowing each other," and she is "awfully happy" that they became friends. Her letters are usually brief, colloquial, and relaxed, with constant use of expressions such as "I kinda feel" and "I got so much to tell you." Wilder writes at greater length and in more literary, language, with frequent quotations from French and American writers, although he adjusts to Stein's colloquialism as the exchange goes on. The tone becomes increasingly intimate. Stein greets her "dearest Thorny," and Wilder hails his "Blest pair of sirens, pledges of Heaven's joy." (He always addresses both Stein and Toklas.) From the beginning he feels the influence of Stein, an influence not only literary, but personal as well. She was "a guide and mentor" but also a mother figure. He tells her that "the third act of Our Town" is based on your ideas as on a great pillar." "Everything I write," he declares, "is influenced by your style, but I can't swing the serpentine phrases correctly."

For his part, however, Wilder was of much service to Stein, by introducing her work to American publishers and to influential figures in the theater and the cinema. She suggests that he try, to sell The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas to the movies. One finds comparatively little literary discussion in their exchange. Few American authors are mentioned. Hemingway, despite his long intimacy with Stein, is alluded to only briefly. Much more than on individual authors, the letters dwell on the technique of writing, notably on "narration," the subject of Stein's lectures at the University, of Chicago. Of course, the correspondents indulge in a good deal of gossip, some of it diverting, about places they have been and people they have seen, and between the two of them they have seen practically "everybody."

The exchange was frequently interrupted, especially during the years of Wilder's military service. In his last letter (July 1945), he addresses his "angels, bright and fair" and excuses himself for his long silence. But his "beloved Algertrudice" is always there, "wise, sweet, and unhurried." He is having Four in America published at his expense by the Yale University Press and he is writing the introduction. Stein died of cancer in July 1946, and Wilder writes a moving expression of sympathy to Alice B. Toklas: "Long after you and I are dead, she will be becoming clearer and clearer as the great thinker and the great soul of our time."

John L Brown Washington, D. C.