Free Life Sentences by William H. Gass Page A

fallen back to an indifferent year.
                   Those who had seen him living could not know
                   how completely one he was with all that flowed;
                   for these: these deep valleys, each meadowed place,
                   these streaming waters
were
his face.
                   Oh, his face embraced this vast expanse,
                   which seeks him still and woos him yet;
                   now his last mask squeamishly dying there,
                   tender and open, has no more resistance,
                   than a fruit’s flesh spoiling in the air.

Old Favorites and Fresh Enemies

A WREATH FOR THE GRAVE OF GERTRUDE STEIN
    A small boat crowded to the gunwales with journalists met the docking of Gertrude Stein’s steamship in New York. Her name ran like an illuminated rabbit around Times Square. Her picture appeared above columns of newspaper copy that made a place for both quotes and those feeble but funny imitations of her style.
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
had been a big hit, and pieces of it had come out in
The Atlantic Monthly
. Now her caricature was flaunted in
Vogue
. There was money in nearly every mail.
Three Lives
had been reborn in the Modern Library. Strangers smiled when they met her figure on the street, moving like a stately teepee, and nodded to Miss Toklas too. College students were charming; lecture halls were full; attentions were paid. She was called Gertrude because Americans were chummy, then Gertie because GIs were chummier. And Gertrude flew, for the first time, over mountains, deserts, lakes, plains, seeing American history through the scope of its geography. Reaching, like Balboa, the Pacific, Stein went west, as she said, in her head, as we each did, obedient to our destiny, though San Francisco, where her father had investments in a cable car company, felt as strange as foreign money. She liked to sample regional food and be fed by the rich, although in Iowa she asked for Vichy water and got tap.
    Let me quote: “Then we arrived in Saint Louis. We ate very well there. I was interested in Saint Louis, and it was enormous the houses and the gardens and every way everything looked, everything looked enormous in Saint Louis. They asked us what we would like to do and I said I would like to see all the places Winston Churchill had mentioned in The Crisis.” (This Winston Churchill’s ten novels sold about five hundred thousand copies each. The British press reviewed him as if their Winston, not ours, had written them. The two Churchills met once but did not get on.) To continue: “They were very nice about it only it was difficult to do because naturally they should have but they really did not know a lot about what Winston Churchill mentioned in The Crisis.… we found the Mississippi River … and some of the homes and then we gave it up and went on to see something that they could find … the house of Ulysses Grant.”
    Gertrude Stein had begun—she liked to begin things in February—as a pampered baby girl whom her father described as “a little schnatterer … She talks all day long and so plainly. She’s such a round little pudding, toddles around the whole day and repeats everything that is said or done.” At least she hadn’t been a boy. “What is the point,” she said, “of being born a boy when you’re only going to grow up to be a man.” She grew herself into a homely girl, a homely Jewish girl, a queer homely Jewish girl, in time a queer homely Jewish woman, and finally into a bizarre avant-garde gay Jewish woman writer known in Paris, her hometown abroad, as the Mother Goose of Montparnasse.
    She was homely, but also disinclined, so she got out from under men. “Menace” was