User:DeRossitt/Gertrude Stein in Pieces

Gertrude Stein in Pieces is a 1970 book by literary scholar Richard Bridgman.

Overview
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Reception
Ray Lewis White in American Literature: Current study of Gertrude Stein devolves from two seminal works—Gertrude Stein in Pieces by Richard Bridgman (1970) and Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company by James Mellow (1974).... Bridgman's work remains the best critical survey of Stein's writings, a self-described "preliminary inventory of Gertrude Stein's literary estate." ... Bridgman, acknowledging the impossibility of knowing Stein wholly at once, has inspired close studies of "pieces" of Stein, studies that have resulted in many articles and in several dissertations and books. The present book began as one of those Bridgman-inspired dissertations....

Virgil Thompson reviewed Gertrude Stein in Pieces for the New York Review of Books

Michael Hoffman in American Literature: This is the best book yet on Gertrude Stein. A thorough examination of all her writing, it culminates two decades that have seen more than half a dozen books devoted to examining America's most enigmatic author, including the work of Donald Sutherland, Elizabeth Sprigge, Ben Reid, John Malcolm Brinnin, Allegra Stewart, and the present reviewer.

Mr. Bridgman's scholarship is impeccable. He has read more widely in Stein than anyone else who, has written about her. He has established a definitive chronology of the Stein canon, revising in many places that of the Yale Catalogue.

He sees her writings as a lifelong attempt to deal with inner turmoils arising from a dominating father and brother, sexual confusions, and finally the working out of a relationship with Alice Toklas that brought the strongest measure of serenity to Stein.

Mr. Bridgman's book will be the foundation for all future studies of Stein, and its very limitations point out the questions that future scholarship ought to ask. Why did Stein's writing take its peculiar shape at a time when advanced work in all the arts was taking similar forms? What does this tell us about twentieth-century culture and the spirit of "modernism"?

Claire Sprague in American Quarterly: Hence the book's title and Mr. Bridgman's thesis: that her genius sees and creates "in pieces" rather than in wholes and perhaps parallels her perception of the American character as one that always begins, always builds, never completes.

This volume may be the best currently available about Gertrude Stein, especially for the thorough and sensitive discussion of her early works, their strong erotic component, its sensible surfacing of her lesbianism, and its generally engrossing and effective interweaving of her life and art.

Earl Fendelman in American Quarterly: as methodical a trek through her life's work as is ever likely to be assembled.

Bridgman accepts fragmentation as the principle of Stein's work and argues that since "she saw parts but no whole" it is appropriate that the separate stages of her work should be treated independently.

However much Stein herself may have protested seeing her work anatomized the way it is in this book, there is no denying the usefulness of the chronological treatment.

a greater historical precision than has ever before been brought to bear on Stein's career.

Kenneth H. Baldwin in Books Abroad: interestingly, his analyses of individual texts show that seemingly opaque and fragmented pieces suddenly become quite transparent and coherent when they are read as indirect records of Gertrude Stein's personal life, especially the ups and downs of her domestic life with Alice B. Toklas.

One finishes Bridgman's study impressed by his ability to make a complete literary and psychological portrait from the "pieces" provided, his ability to make sense out of nonsense.

A. T. K. Crozier in Journal of American Studies: But the fashioning of crowns is no answer to the kinds of question which need to be asked about Stein's work, which indeed should be asked since we have had Richard Bridgman's analysis of the career (Gertrude Stein in Pieces, 1970) to provide the diachronic complement to Donald Sutherland's contentions on behalf of a synchronic and purely qualitative version of Steinian writing (Gertrude Stein, A Biography of Her Work.)

Scott Donaldson in Modern Fiction Studies: followers, the pieces of Gertrude Stein's writing, saving those few which Richard Bridgman was unable to decipher, fit together into a psychological autobiography so that, although Bridgman calls his book not a biography but a descriptive reading, the two are really inseparable.

S. B. Purdy in the Journal of Modern Literature: His book is the most detailed and valuable biographical and critical study of Gertrude Stein—indeed the appended "Gertrude Stein Chronology," indices, and bibliography give it sufficient raison d'être alone, though the inclusion of the lady's grades in school (along with a lengthy treatment of her student themes in the text) is one of those inexplicable excesses of American scholarly publishing that has come, alas, practically to be expected of the biographical critic.

Bridgman's search for sense, and his distaste for nonsense, leads him well into an unusual weighting of individual works, with whatever is written in more or less conventional English (The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas; Brewsie and Willie) more often receiving high marks, and the unconventional and enigmatic works (The Making of Americans; A Novel of Thank You; Four in America...) marked down with a severity that is not the odd for its being based on behind-the-scenes knowledge of Gertrude Stein's careless and often apparently muddled methods of composition.

Since we are hardly any longer in need of books that "debunk" Gertrude Stein, Bridgman's conclusion, that she is best savored "in [small] pieces," does not entirely dispel the puzzlement of why he should go to such lengths to denounce her.