Gertrude Stein – Fanny Butcher- Alice Roullier – Alice B. Toklas in Chicago 1934
“I have just finished one play about Sweet William and his Lillian it is called Listen to Me, I was worried lest it have too much meaning, but Alice says not, says it’s nice…”
[letter from Miss Stein to Thornton Wilder, March 25, 1936]
[letter from Miss Stein to Thornton Wilder, March 25, 1936]
“She was – let us admit once and for all – very funny. Her random distribution of labels – Act One, Act Twenty-Three, Scene Four, Scene One, Scene I, Scene One – has become a classic literary joke. The cagey final paragraph of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is a masterpiece of wit and nonsense. It is a humor of destruction: a humor which, like that of the Marx Brothers, negates commonly accepted axioms of reality, and leaves the perceiver dangling, reeling, and grateful for the ictus that enables him to agree with organized chaos by the simple act of laughing.”
– Leonard Bernstein [from the original (May 3) draft of a review for of “Last Operas and Plays” for the New York Times, May 22, 1949]
– Leonard Bernstein [from the original (May 3) draft of a review for of “Last Operas and Plays” for the New York Times, May 22, 1949]
WHAT IS A GENIUS?
AVATARS OF THE SALTIMBANQUES AND THE KIRALFY BROTHERS SPECTACLES
- “I am working a lot, tremendously, a book, and two plays, one is done, I guess it’s pretty good it is about Sweet William and his Lillian and is called Listen to me, I tried to make it like my memories of the Kiralfy brothers and the Lion tamer, and then I got worried lest it meant too much…” March 26, 1936 Stein letter to Carl Van Vechten.
- Below, an arrangement of paintings in Stein’s apartment at 27 rue de Fleurus in Paris)
“I have just finished a play, I think it partly good, it is called Listen to Me. I had an idea of making an old fashioned thing like Wilson used to do in the Lion Tamer.” March 1936 Stein letter to Bennett Cerf.[Photo of Francis Wilson in The Lion Tamer below]
- Thornton Wilder’s introduction to Stein’s Four in America (coincidentally or not) identifies the dramatic action that we are trying to get at with Listen To Me.
“Four in America is not a book which is the end and summary of her thoughts about the subjects she has chosen; it is the record of her thoughts, from the beginning, as she “closes in” on them. It is being written before our eyes; she does not, as other writers do, suppress and erase the hesitations, the recapitulation, the connectives, in order to give us the completed fire result of her meditations. She gives us the process. From time to time we hear her groping toward the next idea; we hear her cry of joy when she has found it; sometimes it seems to me that we hear her reiterating the already achieved idea and, as it were, pumping it in order to force out the next development that lies hidden within it. We hear her talking to herself about the book that is growing and glowing (to borrow her often irritating habit of rhyming) within her.”