Food

I don’t know much about Gertrude Stein, but I do know she spent a lot of time with Hemingway and the Lost Generation gang, especially around meal time. And since she’s devoted the middle section of Tender Buttons to food I would assume a good meal and good company meant a lot to her, as it does to most of us.

And so I decided to read this section differently than I did Objects, the first third of this book. I read objects very carefully, poem by poem and took notes on each individual poem and did my best to understand how each poem made me feel or my nest to imagine what she is writing about. I’m sure in most, if not every case, I was well of her intended mark, but I also feel like her poems are now as much mine as they are hers – not in the copyright sense, but in the way the artist must give up their art to whomever interacts with it. In this way I feel as if she’s still reaching out through her work to force her readers to come to terms with her and with themselves, to discover something about both parties that was previously unexplored.

However, with Food I decided to pretend I was an eavesdropper listening in to one of Stein’s feasts where I was only able to catch snippets of conversation. I read quickly and didn’t stop except to underline the word cheese a lot, frown at her use of a racial slur, enjoy the line “a neglected Tuesday”, an imagine what it must be like “to see in onion and surely very surely rhubarb and a tomatoe”. I felt this was important because I am not a genius like her or her friends, I am not part of the inner circle of literary giants who could make an artistic revolution around a breakfast table. I can only catch a few words here and there above the surrounding din because I am not part of her world, I do not know her, I can only interact with her across nearly a century of nearly incomprehensible ink.

And maybe this was her intention, to force a reader 100 years later to experience what she and her friends experienced as a Lost Generation, a generation of young people disillusioned by a world gone mad, a world that was quickly closing its borders and filling in the maps, a world that had little place for imagination over commerce. She represents, as Zweig wrote about, a World of Yesterday bounded by a terrible war that used the shattered wreckage of a thousand cities to build a barrier that we can never climb back over and return to “the old ways”. I might as well try to see as an onion sees with my eyes burning from the gas left over from the war that chocked and drowned countless  young innocents.

All that’s left are snippets of conversations about cheese. But at least now I have a slightly better idea how she felt, how her generation felt about the world. Fragmented, confused, but still trying to be understood.