Customer Reviews

How to Write

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Gertrude Stein's How to Write, as much about how to read as about how to write, is one of the great "unreadable" modernist classics. As a student of the psychologist/philosopher William James, she could predictably want to approach the task of explaining how to write from an observational/laboratory perspective rather than as a problem of providing discursive information. The reflexive style of the book has made it something of an underground favorite (thought the fact that Amazon.com lists it on the "available in 24 hours category suggests that it is considerably more above ground) for people of a post-structuralist bent. Its value is both philosophical and mental/calisthenic. Her fragmented sentences force one back on all one's language-processing resources, providing a kind of linguistic stress-test, while reminding one of the philosophical depths of language experience. One finds many crossed wires as one traverses the field of her writing: psychology and society, orality and writing, image and discursion, grammar as form and grammar as experience-just for starters. It is one amazing textual trip whether you bus in for a segment or sign on for the whole course. And as a small cheap book it can be lived with forever.

For anybody who intents to write this is a valuable book. Stein breaks the stereotypes and makes you completely shattered. You really dont understand what this is all about. Dont give up.. Read again. Read what is written. Words and sentences start becoming virgin, not "secondary" as in expressing something, some sense.
A tough book, but really useful and interesting. Even amusing it is.

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How not to write. I thought the book was about avoiding the strictures and shackles of such books like "The Elements of Style," but was disappointed. I gave this book the benefit of the doubt and it still came out wanting. It corresponds to the nonsense written by Derrida in our own day. For example, consider the following sentences (or, rather, non-sentences):

"now do none dare they leave with them this that they find very difficult of understanding and it is why they leave it they must be counting they must have meant to have a basket and a best at that time with vainly it is more than they meant when it is nearly coming to that if it is . . ." (p. 322).

Or consider:

"Fail fell a sentence to fill with well and well well very much which when they come with will they be well. . ." (p. 151). Even my dumb computer recognizes the grammar problems from the start. Is "stream-of-consciousness" an excuse for "lack of talent?" This is the same person who got an "A" for not taking an exam:

"It was a very lovely spring day, Gertrude Stein had been going to the opera every night and also going to the opera in the afternoon and had been otherwise engrossed and it was the period of the final examinations, and there was the examination in William James' course. She sat down with the examination paper before her and she just could not. Dear Professor James, she wrote at the top of her paper. I am so sorry but really I do not feel a bit like an examination paper in philosophy to-day, and left.

The next day she had a postal card from William James saying, Dear Miss Stein, I understand perfectly how you feel I often feel like that myself. And underneath it he gave her work the highest mark in his course."

from The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (p. 79).

If some average Joe with no political connections or wealth told Professor James that it was too nice a day to take an exam and instead pursued the beer hall, James's reaction would certainly be draconian and less understanding as it was in the case of Ms. Stein. Add to the fact "the dude looked like a lady." Gertrude Stein is a classic example of the unearned accolades of the powerful and privileged. Her book "How to Write" reminds me of William Burroughs's slop, or worse, Allen Ginsberg's nonsensical "Howl." These people are famous just because they're connected and for no other reason. One of her acquaintances was Hemingway. Well, to be frank, I read "The Sun Also Rises" and found it read like a Henry Miller narrative: lot's of people who are either rich or who have no visible means of income, having a good ol' time in some foreign country -- usually "France," in the case of Stein, Hemingway and Miller. Did they model the ghouls in "Don't be Afraid of the Dark?" after Ms. Stein's profile? You wonder. There is nothing to learn from her book "How to Write" other than how not to write. I think this woman really thought she had talent, a "legend in her own mind." I highly doubt a publisher would let anybody else get away with this nonsense.

The publishers should be arrested for larceny. Gibberish. Nothing but gibberish, on and on page after page. Stein wrote some fine things, but with this stack of trash she shows contempt for her readers. I'm reminded of the introduction to "Bored of the Rings," an infinitely more meaningful and mature work. If you have purchased this book, you might be able to easily fill in the blanks here: "A ___and his ___ soon are ___." If you haven't purchased this book yet, then there's still time. Navigate away from this page and never come back here again.