Colored Hats.
Colored hats are necessary to show that curls are worn by an addition of blank spaces, this makes the difference between single lines and broad stomachs, the least thing is lightening, the least thing means a little flower and a big delay a big delay that makes more nurses than little women really little women. So clean is a light that nearly all of it shows pearls and little ways. A large hat is tall and me and all custard whole.
*
Stein’s 1914 collection of prose poems, Tender Buttons, published in a recent edition by Green Integer, is like a whirling picture gallery. It places the writer centrally among the radical painters and writers, the “new moderns”, who were her friends and contemporaries in early 20th-century Paris. Some critics read it as an attempt to do in language what the cubist art she collected did in paint – to abandon traditional perspective in favour of multiple viewpoints, and foreground process. The work is divided into Objects, Food and Rooms, and Colored Hats comes from the first section, Objects.
Stein includes familiar everyday items, a few of them (carafe, glass, seltzer-bottle, coffee-mill) also explored by the cubist painter she particularly admired, Juan Gris. But Stein diversifies the still-life stock. Some of her objects are specifically feminine, with such titles as A Long Dress, and Mildred’s Umbrella. Colours, or references to colour itself, occur in text after text. The colours are extrinsic to the objects, none of which is treated even with the degree of representation retained by cubism. Tender Buttons might rebuke the revolutionary painters for not being revolutionary enough.
Colored Hats seems to debunk the solemnity of “high art” to enjoy the sensuous feminine carnival of dress and decoration. The opening statement suggests a clipping from a fashion-magazine’s advice columns. Although parodic, it acknowledges the planned artistry of self-display: “Colored hats are necessary to show that curls are worn by an addition of blank spaces …” However, those “blank spaces” seem ominous, and the sentence soon leads us into areas much less imaginable, and more like “blank spaces”, than the reassuringly placid “single lines and broad stomachs”. Stein links the disparate parts of her sentence with a comma-splice, retaining a grammatical structure, but not an easily joined-up narrative. The disparities are signalled even as punctuation splices them together.
“It is impossible to avoid meaning and if there is meaning and it says what it does there is grammar,” Stein famously declared in How to Write. The meaning perhaps is the grammar, but words remain encumbered with associations and denotations. While Stein playfully crumples or re-folds her words, she’s never, I think, ignoring how they might form connections and meanings.
“The least thing is lightening” makes grammatical sense, but remains opaque. Is “the least thing” getting lighter in weight, or less dark, or making things lighter in weight, or less dark? We might imagine a painter using a tiny dab of white for an arresting highlight, or a woman shaping her face with chalky powder. “The least thing means a little flower” Stein adds, as if to be helpful, and perhaps the flower is a real one, tucked into a hatband. There are other possible associations: Wordsworth’s “the meanest flower that blows” for example. Or is the image sexual?
Perhaps “the least thing” makes the “big delay” because it leads to sex: maybe there’s an in-joke implied for Stein and her lover about the interminable process of getting dressed up to go out. It seems that one “big delay” leads to another, and it’s the delay that “makes more nurses than little women really little women”. Where do the nurses come from: are they created by maternity, or even warfare? Stein has dismissed her commas (“more nurses than little women really little women”) and it’s as if words suddenly saw themselves in a mirror. A lesbian-feminist criticism of women’s roles seems to hover in the background: the repeated “big delay” might allude to the nine months of pregnancy, or the loss of the heterosexual woman’s mental fulfilment to her destiny as a nurturer. That rather lovely sentence beginning “so clean is a light …” seems wistful. The beautiful, constructed image depends on unseeing wealth (pearls) and the fatuous, male-defined charm of “little ways”. The clean light shows “nearly all of it” – but that “nearly” tells us “not enough.”
In an illuminating essay on Tender Buttons, Michael Edward Kaufmann argues for Stein as an etymologist rather than a Cubist. It’s a fruitful line of enquiry for Colored Hats. “Color” derives from Old Latin colos, a covering. The hat, of course, is also a kind of covering, originally associated with words for hood, cowl and helmet. Another word that hints at concealment is “custard” – that carefully prepared nursery dessert which Stein serves her surprised diners in her final sentence. “Custard” is from Old Provenҫal croustado, meaning a fruit-tart – literally, something covered with a crust. So, when Stein declares “A large hat is tall and me and all custard whole” perhaps she’s declaring herself at ease both in the large hat of the major writer and with the trivial, tender buttons and bows enjoyed by any “little woman”. As she looks at her “tall” words on the page she thinks happily, like a woman pleased with her new outfit, “This is me.”
Stein’s syntax and vocabulary, after all, are very peculiarly her own, however mobile and opaque. All the compositions in Tender Buttons are inscribed with such a personal style of saying and seeing that, after reading one or two, you would be able to recognise a Gertrude Stein sentence anywhere. They are stamped with her identity as a brave and witty explorer of language, art and sexuality. They are, and she is, the whole custard.
