User:DeRossitt/Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company

Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company is a 1974 biography of Gertrude Stein by James Mellow.

Overview
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Reception
Earl Fendelman in American Quarterly: The art critic James Mellow, for example, does a creditable job of relating the aesthetic concerns of Cezanne, Picasso, Matisse, Hartley, Gris and Picabia to Stein's literary theory. Although Mellow does not always press the argument, he does provide evidence that what Stein says about the painters (even though it is sometimes derived from earlier remarks by her brother Leo) could apply with equal force to the presentation of character in The Making of Americans or the subjective descriptions of Tender Buttons.

In Mellow's book there is a sense of the ground on which Stein stood, even if it is limited to the aesthetic ground, that is lacking in Bridgman. Mellow clarifies the assumptions which Stein shared with the artists who surrounded her and outlines the changes in perception which they helped to realize. Often it is not possible to say exactly who influenced whom. All of them drew attention to the processes of art, all celebrated abstract form while at the same time filling their works with mundane objects and references-as in the collages of Picasso or Braque and the word portraits of Stein. The pictorial and literary approaches to these conceptions are in- terdependent, as Mellow shows, with the laurels of originality perhaps going to Stein in at least the one case of the "object portrait," which Mellow's careful dating suggests grew out of the attempts at this conceit initiated by Stein and later taken up by the Stieglitz group at the Gallery 291 in New York. It is an interesting example of the common attitudes of all the artists who helped create the cultural watershed of the 1913 Armory Show.

her understanding of the changes that World War I would bring when she stood on a street corner with Picasso and saw the "cubist" camouflage of the passing vehicles; her penetration into the abstraction of America when she saw its checkerboard farms from an airplane. For Stein these were not merely symbolic moments but true epiphanies in which reality revealed itself. It was the kind of experience she hoped to induce by her writing.

Mellow would be in a better position to understand and explain this experience were it not for the fact that he does not particularly care for what Gertrude Stein wrote. As soon as he diverges from the lines that con- nect her to the art world he loses his focus, and his critical grasp is reduced to brief summaries and passing comments. Even his vocabulary for describing her work is problematic. She is "hermetic" or "gnomic" or just "lengthy" and "boring." The commentator's point of view seems to be that of a casual reader rather than of an explicator of literary innovations.

William Baker in The Antioch Review: In his full and rich biography of Gertrude Stein, Mellow has paid more attention to her circle of friends and acquaintances than her other ten biographers, but the title, Charmed Circle, should not disguise the fact that biography is its essence.

His patient and careful explanations of her experimental writings are notable. Typical is his handling of the story of Melanctha with its thoughtful penetration into the effect of the writing style. But it is in evoking the quality of Stein's Parisian life that he excels. Shortly after reading Mellow's biography I visited Paris and checked his impressions of the atmosphere of the famed 27 rue de Fleurus. It is about 500 steps from there to the Luxemberg Gardens: Gertrude and Alice must have walked the route hundreds of times in their thirty-two years in the road of flowers. I looked at the gardens, the pigeons, the children and their nurses, and I saw what Mellow was trying to capture as part of the "ordinary daily life" of Gertrude Stein. His re-creating of the texture of that life is superb.

Benjamin Anastas in The Iowa Review: Charmed Circle, the first of the biographies, is a meticulously researched recreation of the artistic community on the West Bank of Paris.

Mellow uses paintings—much as Stein did herself—as the map for her passage into modernity.

Mellow's understanding of Stein's sometimes obscure written work is impressive.

James Mellow has done both Stein and our literature a service by recording both this "difficult" vision of the world and the circumstances of its genesis.

Matthew Kangas in Journal of American Studies: Gertrude Stein's difficult writings are not unravelled in Charmed Circle. That is accomplished in Richard Bridgman's brilliantly thorough study Gertrude Stein in Pieces (Oxford, 1970). Mellow's book, however, does provide the fullest, most entertaining biographical study of this toweringly vain woman (' Einstein was the creative philosophic mind of the century and I have been the creative literary mind of the century ') who felt herself the centre of all the turbulent artistic ex perimentation going on in Paris in the first half of the century. Charmed Circle presents a convincing picture of Stein not as the dominating literary influence she thought she was but as a compellingly attractive personality who was more a sounding board for the modernists than a catalyst.

Strother Purdy in Modern Fiction Studies: James Mellow, being one of us, has written a book that is, simply, perhaps cannot be more than, the largest assemblage to date of material, mainly biographical and partly critical, on Gertrude Stein. As such it is a very useful possession for those interested in that vexatiously whimsical, tenacious, writer.

Of GS's literary theories Mellow is frequently a skilfull proponent; of her literary practice he is, amusingly, frequently disdainful, employing terms such as "maddening," "numbing," and "aimless."

Elizabeth Hardwick in The Threepenny Review

Ray Lewis White in American Literature: "Mellow's book is a superb biography of Stein, written with great sympathy for Stein's intriguing public-private life and with full knowledge of the literary and artistic milieu in which she flourished."