“A CESSATION OF RESEMBLANCES”

STEIN / PICASSO / DUCHAMP

Marjorie Perloff

Originally published in Battersea Review 1, 1 (2012). Forthcoming in a volume of essays by Oxford University Press.

In 1935, as Gertrude Stein recalls it,[i] Picasso was suffering from what we might call painter’s block.  Finding himself at an impasse in his personal life, for two years he stopped painting altogether, taking up writing instead.  “He commenced to write poems,” Stein remarks, “but this writing was never his writing.  After all the egoism of a painter is not at all the egoism of a writer, there is nothing to say about it, it is not.  No” (Picasso 67).  And in Everybody’s Autobiography (1937), Stein recalls telling the great painter, who was perhaps her closest friend:

Your poetry . . . is more offensive than just bad poetry I do not know why it is but it just is, somebody who can really do something very well when he does something else which he cannot do and in which he cannot live it is particularly repellent, now you I said to him, you never read a book in your life that was not written by a friend and then not then and you never had any feelings about any words, words annoy you more than they do anything else so how can you write you know better. . . . all right go on doing it but don’t go on trying to make me tell you it is poetry.[ii]

 

Stein’s almost visceral reaction here was prompted, not just, as is often assumed, by Picasso’s invasion of her territory or by her surprisingly traditional insistence on the separation of the arts.  The deeper reason—and we tend to forget this when we discuss the relationship of the two—is that Picasso had never so much as pretended to read Stein’s writing.  For him, Gertrude was a wonderful patron and copain—he loved coming to her salon and gossiping with her on a daily basis—but her writing, especially given that it was in English–a language he couldn’t, after all, read–was hardly within the radius of his discourse.  Not surprisingly, when he did take on “poetry” in the mid-1930s, his models were the then prominent French surrealists, beginning with his good friend André Breton.  Here, for example, is the opening of a typical Picasso prose poem from 1935, as translated from the Spanish by Jerome Rothenberg:

I mean a dish a cup a nest a knife a tree a frying pan a nasty spill while strolling on the sharp edge of a cornice breaking up into a thousand pieces screaming like a madwoman and lying down to sleep stark naked legs spread wide over the odor from a knife that just beheaded the wine froth and nothing bleeds from it except for lips like butterflies and asks you for no handouts for a visit to the bulls with a cicada like a feather in the wind[iii]

This passage is characteristically Surrealist in its mysterious juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated images—“a tree a frying pan,” a “cornice . . . screaming like a madwoman”– its emphasis on violence–“stark naked legs spread wide over the odor from a knife”—and its collocation of elaborate metaphor and simple syntax.    A passionate advocate of Picasso’s early Cubism, which, as has been frequently observed,[iv] is a technique Stein herself adapted in such compositions as Tender Buttons (1914), Picasso’s Surrealist poetic mode is antithetical to Stein’s own, with its avoidance of concrete nouns, its syntactic ambiguity, and its reliance on indeterminate pronouns, articles, and prepositions to produce a poetic construct she took to be appropriate to the twentieth century.   “The surrealists,” Stein remarks dismissively in her discussion of Picasso’s painting of the early 1930s, “still see things as everyone sees them, they complicate them in a different way but the vision is that of everyone else, in short the complication is the complication of the twentieth century but the vision is that of the nineteenth century” (Picasso 65).

This critique of surrealism, whether just or unjust, is echoed by another of Stein’s contemporaries.  In describing his “Box of 1913-14” (the “Green Box”) to Pierre Cabanne, Marcel Duchamp explains that his assemblage of miscellaneous notes placed inside the box was designed as an art object “not to be ‘looked at’ in the aesthetic sense of the word”—indeed, to “remove the retinal aspect” which had dominated painting from Courbet to the present:

Before, painting had other functions:  it could be religious, philosophical, moral.  If I had the chance to take an antiretinal attitude, it unfortunately hasn’t changed much; our whole century is completely retinal, except for the Surrealists, who tried to go outside it somewhat.  And still, they didn’t go so far!  In spite of the fact that [André] Breton says he believes in judging from a Surrealist point of view, deep down he’s still really interested in painting in the retinal sense.  It’s absolutely ridiculous.  It must change.[v]

Duchamp’s critique of the retinal has its counterpart in Stein’s writing, but the two artists have rarely been linked.  For all the critical studies devoted to the relationship of Stein and Picasso (or, as in the current exhibition The Steins Collect,[vi] on Stein’s debt to Cézanne or Matisse or to the cubism of Juan Gris), what has been curiously ignored is the reverse situation:  the influence, if any, of Stein’s verbal composition on the visual artwork of her contemporaries.   And here Duchamp, whose move to New York in 1915 necessitated the acquisition of English, even as Stein’s expatriation to Paris meant that her “art discourse” (especially with the Spaniard Picasso) was to be conducted in French, is the pivotal figure.

The two first met, according to the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in Paris in 1913:

It was not long after this [the winter of 1913] that Mabel Dodge went to America and it was the winter of the armoury show which was the first time the general public had a chance to see any of these pictures.  It was there that Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending the Staircase was shown.

It was about this time that Picabia and Gertrude Stein met.  I remember  going to dinner at the Picabias’ and a pleasant dinner it was, Gabrielle Picabia full of life and gaiety, Picabia dark and lively, and Marcel Duchamp looking like a young Norman crusader.

I was always perfectly able to understand the enthusiasm that Marcel Duchamp aroused in New York when he went there in the early years of the war.  His brother had just died from the effect of his wounds, his other brother was still at the front and he himself was inapt for military service.  He was very depressed and he went to America. Everyone loved him.  So much so that it was a joke in Paris when any American arrived in Paris the first thing he said was, and how is Marcel.[vii]

 

“The young Duchamp,” she wrote a few days later to Mabel Dodge, “looks like a young Englishman and talks very urgently about the fourth dimension.”[viii]   We know that Stein at this time was keenly interested in questions relating to mathematics and so this was a compliment.[ix]

Indeed, Stein’s account in Alice B. Toklas is unusually flattering and without her usual malice—quite unlike, say, her references to Matisse or Pound or Hemingway.  The “young Norman crusader”: Duchamp was the son of a notary in the little Normandy town of Blainville, a fact Stein refers to with amusement in Everybody’s Autobiography, where she remarks how many artists–Cocteau, Bernard Faÿ, Dali– were the sons of notaries (EA 26).  Duchamp was handsome and charming.  And in 1917, Stein was made aware of the brouhaha over Fountain by a letter from her friend Carl Van Vechten:

This porcelain tribute was bought cold in some plumber shop (where it awaited the call to join some bath room trinity) and sent in. . . . When it was rejected [by the Salon of Independents], Marcel Duchamp at once resigned from the board.  Stieglitz is exhibiting the object at “291.”  And has made some wonderful photographs of it.  The photographs make it look like anything from a Madonna to a Buddha.  [figure 1 and 2][x]

 

Did the Readymades influence Stein’s writing?   Yes and no.  Like Duchamp—and I have discussed this issue elsewhere[xi]—her compositions resemble Duchamp’s “objects” in their wholesale rejection of the mimetic contract–a rejection that, to my mind, goes well beyond Cubist distortion and dislocation of what are, after all, still recognizable objects and bodies. In this sense, Duchamp’s dismissal of the “retinal” is also hers.  Such prose poems as “A Substance in a Cushion” and “A Box” in Tender Buttons, for example, can be related to Duchamp’s Green Box and the later boîtes en valise in their emphasis on what cannot be seen or inferred from the outside.   More important, as different as their artistic productions were—Stein, after all, did not use “readymade” or found text—they drew on each other’s work in striking ways–ways that have largely been ignored.

The key text here is Geography and Plays, published in 1922.   After the War, when Duchamp, having returned to Paris, called on Stein with their mutual friend Henri-Pierre Roché (the writer who had introduced Gertrude and Leo to Picasso and was the subject of a 1909 Portrait)[xii], the discussion was evidently about Stein’s desire to publish a collection of the shorter experimental texts– poems, prose pieces, portraits and plays—she had been writing since 1908– for example, her masterpiece “Miss Furr and Miss Skeene.”[xiii]   Walter Arensberg and Henry McBride were enlisted, and Sherwood Anderson, newly arrived in Paris in 1921, offered to write a preface.  After a number of rejections, Edmund F. Brown’s Four Seas Company of Boston agreed to publish Geography and Plays [figure 3], surely one of Stein’s most seminal collections and available today both at Project Gutenberg and Google books; there is also a fine reprint edition with a useful introduction by Cyrena N. Pondrom.[xiv]

         Geography and Plays contains the well-known early portraits of Harry Phelan Webb, Constance Fletcher, Georges Braque, Carl Van Vechten (“One”), and Mrs. Whitehead; the rhyming musical pieces like “Susie Asado” “Pink Melon Joy,” and “Accents in Alsace,” and the plays “Ladies Voices” and “What Happened.”  Roughly at the center of the volume, Stein placed “Sacred Emily” (1913), a ten-page poem Duchamp is quite likely to have known, which contains the first instance of what is probably Stein’s most famous line: “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” (187).  In later appearances of her tribute to the rose as merely itself (e.g., “Do we suppose that all she knows is that a rose is a rose is a rose,” in Opera and Plays), the noun “rose” is preceded by the indefinite article:  in “Poetry and Grammar,” for example, where Stein defines poetry as “concerned with using with abusing, with losing with wanting, with denying with avoiding with adoring with replacing the noun,” she illustrates “noun—the name of anything”—with the comment:

When I said.

A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.

And then later made that into a ring I made poetry

“In that line,” Stein was to declare later, “the rose is red for the first time in English poetry for a hundred years.” [xv]

But in “Sacred Emily,” Rose is a proper name: it has already appeared in the opening section:

Compose compose beds.

Wives of great men rest tranquil.

Come go stay philip philip.

Egg be takers.

Parts of place nuts.

Suppose twenty for cent.

It is rose in hen      (178)

This passage recalls “Susie Asado” in its punning and rhyming short and seemingly quite unrelated phrases.  “Compose” rhymes with “rose,” philip philip” sounds like a bird call, “Egg be takers” puns on “egg beaters,”  “place nuts” seems to be a misheard reference to “placements” or “place names,” just as “twenty for cent” should be “twenty percent”, but, then again, since “per” means “for,”  “twenty for cent” is oddly accurate.  By the time we come to line 7, what might have conventionally been a “rose in bloom” becomes a “rose in hen” (the eggs have already been laid), with its sound allusion to Don Quixote’s beloved horse Rosinante, as well as its erotic reference of the verb form “rose” which functions here.

Then too Rose as a high frequency (and hence boring) proper name is contrasted to the “Sacred Emily” of the title.  The reference is probably to Emile Zola, a sacred cow indeed in turn-of-the century France.  The second line, “Wives of great men rest tranquil,” surely refers to the great author’s death, while asleep in his bed, from carbon monoxide poisoning from a blocked chimney, even as his wife, “composed” in the bed beside him, miraculously survived.  Again, the sculptor of Zola’s tomb [see figure 4] was Philippe Solari—the “philip philip” invoked in line 3.[xvi]

I do not mean to suggest that “Sacred Emily” is “about” Zola.  Stein does not operate in this way; rather, “So great so great Emily.  / Sew grate sew grate Emily” becomes the occasion for the celebration of Stein’s own domestic happiness with Alice. The sentence “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” is followed by these lines:

Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.

Loveliness extreme.

Extra gaiters.

Loveliness extreme.

Sweetest ice-cream.

Page ages page ages page ages.

Wiped Wiped wire wire.

Sweeter than peaches and pears and cream.

Wiped wire wiped wire. (187)

 

“Loveliness extreme,” with its allusion to Edmund Waller’s famous “Go Lovely Rose,” jostles in Dadaesque fashion with those “Extra gaiters” evidently needed for protection, or again “extricators” from difficult situations, and with the “Sweetest ice-cream” that echoes that other 1913 poem “Preciosilla” (“Toasted Susie is my icecream”).  The lines that follow introduce the phonemic play that, in these years, became one of Stein’s signatures: “Page ages page ages page ages,” where the words (nouns or verbs?) merge with one another and also call up “passages’; and the echolalia in “Wiped Wiped wire wire,” where a single phoneme makes all the difference.  The ugly monosyllables of “Wiped wire wiped wire” are in turn undercut by the cloying sing-songy simile “Sweeter than peaches and pears and cream.”

Cyrena Pondrom remarks that “Sacred Emily” “proceeds as an interplay of three extensive sets of reference—the sexual, the domestic, and the aesthetic (G & P xlv).   I think this is accurate: the poem begins, after all, with “compose”—composition—of “beds,” followed by the observation that “Wives of great men rest tranquil”—a reference to Stein’s own “wife” as well as Zola’s.  Indeed, like “Ada” or “Susie Asado,” “Sacred Emily” is an erotic love poem for Alice.  A rose is a rose is a rose:  a rose is eros.  By line 18 of its opening page, the erotic theme is distinctly audible in:

Murmur pet murmur pet murmur.

Push sea push sea push sea push sea push sea push sea push sea push sea

Sweet and good and kind to all.   (178)

And eros is the dominant motif of the entire book, coming to a kind of crescendo in “Accents in Alsace,” which culminates in the passage;

Sweeter than water or cream or ice.  Sweeter than bells of roses.  Sweeter than winter or summer or spring.  Sweeter than pretty posies.  Sweeter than anything is my queen and loving is her nature.

Loving and good and delighted and best is her little King and Sire whose devotion is entire who has but one desire to express the love which is hers to inspire.

In the photograph the Rhine hardly showed

In what way do chimes remind you of singing.  In what way do birds sing.  In what way are forests black or white.

We saw them blue.

With for get me nots.

In the midst of our happiness we were very pleased.  (G & P 415)

 

“Accents in Alsace” (1919) is followed by a portrait that was the last piece written for inclusion in Geography & Plays: namely, “Next.  Life and Letters of Marcel Duchamp”  (G & P 405-406).  Its “nextness” can, I think, be related to the fact that the year of its composition (1920), Duchamp, back in New York, had given birth to his female alter ego Rrose Sélavy, who, from then on, signed many of his personal letters and paintings and played a major role in his art-making.  Asked by Calvin Tomkins why he felt the need to invent a new identity, Duchamp responded, “It was not to change my identity, but to have two identities” (Tomkins 231).  His first thought, he said, had been to choose a Jewish name to offset his own Catholic background.  “But then the idea jumped at me, why not a female name?  Much better than to change religion would be to change sex . . . Rose was the corniest name for a girl at that time, in French, anyway.  And Sélavy was a pun on c’est la vie” (231).  Talking to Pierre Cabanne, Duchamp explains that he added the extra “R” to “Rose” because this gave him a further pun on “arrose,” “arroser” meaning to water, to sprinkle, and hence also to make fertile, enrich. “Sélavy,” one should also note, contains the name “Levy”– as common a Jewish name as Stein.

The iconic image of Duchamp’s Rose is Man Ray’s famous photograph of 1920-21, signed “lovingly Rrose Sélavy alias Marcel Duchamp” [figure 5].  In this soft-focus photograph, Rose wears a cloche hat with a brim that comes down to her eyebrows; it is the lack of facial hair,” Dalia Judovitz notes, “that engenders sexual ambiguity.  Duchamp’s shaved face and discreet smile, generously framed by a fur collar (a punning diplacement of facial hair), invokes the illusion of a feminine presence.”[xvii]  Then again, this Rose hardly looks like a woman: Duchamp’s own masculine features are unmistakable.  But the ambiguity is intentional: the image is riddling, at once Marcel and Rose, masculine and feminine.  Two further Man Ray photographs of Rrose Sélavy, this time in an even more elaborate headdress, sweeping velvet cape, and bead necklace, recalling Renaissance portraits of painters [figures 6, 7], are even more ambiguous.

Rose’s first appearance in a Duchamp art work was in the assisted readymade Fresh Widow [figure 8], in which a miniature French window, painted an ugly blue-green like that of beach furniture, contains eight glass panes covered with sheets of black leather.  The French window stands on a wooden base bearing large capital letters FRESH WIDOW COPYRIGHT ROSE SELAVY 1920.   It is a brilliant pun, made simply by erasing the letter “n” in both words. A fresh widow is a recent one (here perhaps a war widow) but also “fresh” in the sense of bold, not easy to repress or squelch.  What is this widow thinking?  We don’t know because the leather panes are impenetrable: we don’t know what’s behind them.  The window is also closed but the little knobs suggest it could be opened.

Rrose next appears in Belle Haleine, Eau de Voilette [figure 9, 1921], whose punning title overtly plays on “Belle Helène” and violet water—extract of violet.   But the perfume bottle itself is empty, and eau de voilette (veiled water) invokes the eau de toilette of Duchamp’s  Fountain.  The bottle is labeled with one of Man Ray’s photographs of Rose and signed “Man Ray and Rrose Sélavy.”   The same year, Duchamp put together a small wire bird cage, painted it white, and put inside some 152 sugar cubes (actually marble and very heavy), an ordinary fever thermometer, a cuttlebone, and a little porcelain dish. The construction was named Why not Sneeze Rrose Sélavy? [figure 10].  The thermometer used to measure a girl’s “heat,” the phallic shaped cuttlebone and female dish, the sugar that is really cold marble: these objects placed in the empty cage create a complex and witty spectacle of unfulfilled desire.  For unlike all those erotic eighteenth-century paintings of young girls who let the bird out of the cage and watch it fly about, this cage contains no bird and a good “sneeze” is needed to change things, to arroser la vie.  Eros c’est la vie.

What I find especially interesting is that when Marcel came back to France for a stay in July 1921, he started signing his letters to friends Rrose Sélavy, sometimes with variants like “Rose Mar-Cel” or “Rrose Marcel,”  “Marcel Rrose,”  “Marcelavy” (in a  letter to Man Ray), “Selatz” or “Mar-Sélavy,” (in notes to Picabia).[xviii]  After 1925 or so, the Rrose Sélavy signature disappears, replaced by Duchamp’s nicknames “Duche” and “Totor,” but most frequently simply “Marcel.”  The bisexual punning and wordplay, elaborate as it was in the early 1920s, gradually decreased in volume although Duchamp’s short book of puns, Rrose Sélavy was not published until 1939. Stein’s own most playfully erotic verse (“Happy happy happy all the. /  Happy happy happy all the.”) comes in the same period.

In Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein recalls her first visit, soon after the War, to Man Ray’s tiny studio on the Rue Delambre, where “he showed us pictures of Marcel Duchamp” (ABT 197).  Man Ray was photographing Duchamp as early as 1916-17 [see figure 11] and Rrose Sélavy had not yet been born, but it is hard to believe that Stein would not have been aware of Rrose’s presence when she was composing her portrait in Geography and Plays.   Conversely, although there is no proof that Duchamp based his pseudonym Sélavy on Stein or his sexy and “feminine” “Rrose” on her more equivocal Roses, it is, to say the least, an astonishing coincidence that Duchamp, who never seems to have expressed a particular interest in Jewish culture, would want to adopt a Jewish name and one that was the name of a lesbian writer whose name begins with an S, even as he chose as his first name the banal “Rose” that Stein had made so prominent.

The two artists, in any case, seem to have understood one another’s work perfectly.  Consider Stein’s portrait “Next.  Life and Letters of Marcel Duchamp”:

 

A family likeness pleases when there is a cessation of resemblances. This

is to say that points of remarkable resemblance are those which make Henry leading.  Henry leading actually smothers Emil.  Emil is pointed.  He does not overdo examples.  He even hesitates.

But am I sensible.  Am I not rather efficient in sympathy or common feeling.

I was looking to see if I could make Marcel out of it but I can’t.

Not a doctor to me not a debtor to me not a d to me but a c to me a credit to me.  To interlace a story with glass and with rope with color and roam.

How many people roam.

Dark people roam.

Can dark people come from the north.  Are they dark then.  Do they begin to be dark when they have come from there.

Any question leads away from me.  Grave a boy grave.

What I do recollect is this.  I collect black and white.  From the standpoint of white all color is color.  From the standpoint of black.  Black is white.  White is black. Black is black.  White is black.  White and black is black and white.  What I recollect when I am there is that words are not birds.  How easily I feel thin.  Birds do not.  So I replace birds with tin-foil.  Silver is thin.

Life and letters of Marcel Duchamp.

Quickly return the unabridged restraint and mention letters.

My dear Fourth.

Confess to me in a quick saying.  The vote is taken.

The lucky strike works well and difficultly.  It rounds, it sounds round.  I cannot conceal attrition.  Let me think.  I repeat the fullness of bread.  In a way not bread.  Delight me. I delight a lamb in birth.     (G & P 405-06)

 

This is one of Stein’s particularly opaque portraits, and readers seem to have avoided it as wholly “non-sensical.”  Stein herself, after all, says in the third paragraph, “I was looking to see if I could make Marcel out of it but I can’t,” thus presumably admitting her failure to portray her subject.  Then again she published the piece and gave it a very specific name so that the reader is challenged to understand the portrait’s meaning.

The title “Next,” for starters, can be understood either spatially or temporally.  A can be next to B in a picture or A can be next in line at the grocery store; in either case, next is always a relational term.  One cannot be next alone.  Does this mean Stein is relating “Next” to the previous piece in Geography and Plays, “Tourty or Tourtebattre”?  Or that this composition is “next” on Stein’s list?  The question is left open:  certainly the subtitle is parodic, for the “Life and Letters” format, so common in the middlebrow portraits of the Eminent Victorians, hardly seems appropriate for the iconoclastic Duchamp who was anything but a Man of Letters. Still, the mock-title does set the stage for Stein’s opening sentence:  “A family likeness pleases when there is a cessation of resemblances.”    If, it is implied, we can get rid of representational art or poetry, of the need to make a portrait or still-life look like its subject—then its particular family likeness can become “pleasing.”  Take Duchamp’s “In Advance of the Broken Arm”—that ordinary snow shovel hanging on a wire from the ceiling [figure 12].  This readymade doesn’t resemble something else:  like Stein’s rose it is what it is.  As for its family likeness, the shovel has a very particular family: the readymades that live with it in the Arensberg Collection in Philadelphia or elsewhere.

The Henry and Emil to whom Marcel is now compared are almost surely Henry James, whom Stein regarded as her model, and again Emil(e) Zola, France’s great naturalistic writer.  Descriptive as Henry James is, he is never “pointed” like Zola.  Having made these analogies, the author hesitates.  Can Marcel really be placed in such a literary context? “But am I sensible.  Am I not rather efficient in sympathy or common feeling.”  When one reads this sentence aloud, one almost inevitably reads “efficient” as “deficient”—for it is standard phrasing to refer to someone as “deficient in sympathy or common feeling.” Is “efficient” then perhaps a misprint?  Or does Stein purposely take the cliché and invert it, calling herself not exactly overflowing with sympathy but at least “efficient”—capable of the “common feeling” that has made Zola such an icon.   It is the character of Marcel that seems to escape her.

Still, Duchamp’s place in the poet’s life remains to be assessed.   “Not a doctor to me not a debtor to me not a d to me but a c to me a credit to me.”   Duchamp is not her mentor nor her disciple—indeed not a “d” at all—but a “c” for “credit”—the “C” phoneme perhaps of “Sélavy,” for whose existence Stein can take credit.  And in the next sentence, she pays homage to the Large Glass [figure 13] : “To interlace a story with glass and with rope with color and roam.”  The portraitist wants to have control over her subject, but the fact is that Duchamp, the “dark” Norman crusader is a “roamer”:  he has, at the time of the portrait, gone back and forth between the US and France again and again and also spent time in Argentina the last year of the war.  One could never be sure where he might be.

“Any question leads away from me.”   Stein cannot “collect” Marcel’s art, which seems, at this moment in time, quite uncollectable, but she can “recollect” his chess-playing: the black and white board to be mastered.  “Black is white.  White is black. Black is black.  White is black.  White and black is black and white” (405).  But chess is also the paradigm for Marcel’s art in which, like her own, “words are not birds”; they don’t fly away.  And a few lines f