Free Life Sentences by William H. Gass Page B

made of men with an ace up their sleeve. Her father finally died and she was freed of her family. “Then our life without a father began,” she said, “a very pleasant one.” Her overbearing brother Leo took her under his smotherly wing until Alice Toklas, who could cook, came along, whereupon her bossy brother left for Florence with Cézanne’s apples and a lot of lovely drawings.
    So when, nearly sixty, she shook the hand of her fame in NewYork, she knew she had arrived. The identity she had worked on for so long was complete: she was Gertrude Stein; she had a wife; she drove a motorcar; she had a fortune invested in Picasso and company; she had her own course of life and could tell Ernest Hemingway where to get off. Yet all the applause, the circulating lights, those nervous hosts and earnest meals, made her uneasy. “I write for myself and strangers,” she had once said, but now there were too many strangers who cried hi! who knew what she wore and the waddle of her walk, but didn’t know what Vichy water was. “I am I,” she wrote with some disgust, “because my little dog knows me.” Well, the nose was enough for the mastiff of Ulysses. Yet the self she had struggled so long and hard to define could be pictured on an ID: her passport and her driver’s license proved she was she, the way our credit card does now, the dog tag our corpse, as our social security number certifies us, or our mother’s maiden name. She had become—for she knew her philosophy—the sum of her adjectives, like an apple being peeled by Bishop Berkeley, and she could be duplicated by anyone who claimed to have the same set of properties the way a spy assumes another’s identity.
    Suddenly she was no longer certain who had written her books, for the Gertrude Stein on their spine was but a bit of history, a tabloid tidbit; her snows of yesteryear would be carted away in dump trucks; dust would close her eyes as well as it had Helen’s; and brightness would fall from the air to run down drains. Had this overweight gay girl written
The Making of Americans
? Was
Tender Buttons
Jewish?
Three Lives
a stop on a Baltimore bus? How could such a local lady fall under the spell of Henry James or Sophocles—genders, nations, ages, worlds away? In an essay she called “What Are Masterpieces and Why Are There So Few of Them?” she addressed the problem. Why would her work, which had circulated only when friends gave away their copies, manage to endure, when the novels of St. Louis’s Winston Churchill, whose sales were in millions, would scarcely survive two decades?
    Because they had been written, not by Human Nature and all thecauses and conditions of our Identities, but by the Human Mind. “I am not I any longer when I see” was a better way to put it. To understand is to step into eternity. All flesh is grass, Isaiah wrote, where pigeons light occasionally, but the spirit is immensely and immeasurably present in every word of a masterpiece, which is why we—when we read—are spirits too, and recognize our kin. Human nature was incapable of objectivity, she decided. It is viciously anthropocentric, whereas the human mind leaves all personal interest behind. It sees things as entities, not as identities.… The human mind makes lifetimes out of moments, particulars into generalities, quirks into characters. The human mind can entice human nature into Elysium; though it can do nothing with the quaint, for, as Stein said, quaint ain’t … yet we are all witness to that transformation, when the human mind sips the tea and tastes the biscuit, to turn the simple offer: have some? into a summation; for we’ve seen how a paltry pun, a phrase, those perceptions personal to style, how the right writing can drag daily life in its drudgery and exhilaration, with its restless elevators, its solemn ceremonies, from one present tense to another and another and another—for today my little dog did deign to know me, and though I was not a warrior