User:DeRossitt/The Third Rose: Gertrude Stein and Her World

The Third Rose: Gertrude Stein and Her World is a 1959 biography of Gertrude Stein by poet and writer John Malcolm Brinnin.

Overview
Text

Reception
"A Very Difficult Author" by Virgil Thompson in New York Review of Books

Bernard I. Duffey in American Literature: Mr. Brinnin has chosen to work synthetically rather than analytically, and his efforts have resulted in a major contribution to literary portraiture. The analytic questions remain however; and it is to these that attention must be given before we have more than a friendly and discerning portrait.

A. L. Bader in The Antioch Review: The book is based on research skillfully and urbanely presented, and corrects many errors and misconceptions concerning her life and work, for some of which she was herself responsible. There is much new material about the Stein family and its German-Jewish origins, the years at Radcliffe and the Johns Hopkins Medical School, and the establishment of the famous menage at 27 Rue de Fleurus.

Mr. Brinnin's portrait in The Third Rose is an honest and balanced one.... Although literary criticism is not the avowed purpose of Mr. Brinnin, he devotes considerable space to an analysis of Gertrude Stein's aims and methods. He makes clear—what is not always recognized—that the "Stein style" is more than one style, that there is change, growth, development from the modified naturalism of Three Lives to the impenetrable opaqueness of the Portraits and Tender Buttons.

Despite his affection and admiration for her as woman and artist, it becomes apparent that he, like most of her readers, prefers the more conventional works.

Francis Murphy in Books Abroad: The Third Rose is the first important book to be published on Gertrude Stein since Donald Sutherland's study of 1951. Brinnin provides a readable, intelligent and sometimes moving account of Stein's life, as well as a perceptive reading of her work. It is the contention of this book that when Eliot said that Joyce was using in Ulysses a method which "others must pursue after him," he divided modern literature into two camps: the followers of Joyce and Gertrude Stein. While Yeats, Joyce, Eliot, and Pound sought for a mythology which would order their experience, Stein rejected the whole problem of myth and turned instead to painting. Alone among writers in English, she "scrupulously saw to it that writing expressed less than it would." Brinnin's account of Stein's relation to Picasso, and his study of her prose in relation to cubist and cinematic techniques make this a valuable study of the life and work of one of our great unread writers.

B. L. Reid in The Hudson Review: The great value of The Third Rose lies in its evocation of "Her World" rather than of "Her Work." Mr. Brinnin has written an excellent piece of biography and cultural history, and, with a keen ear for anecdote and a sharp eye for principles, has told us much that we still wanted to know about the psyche and the society of Miss Stein and "her" twentieth century, as she liked to consider it, in her proprietary way.

thoroughly scrupulous and always interesting

the effect of the splendid fullness and clarity of The Third Rose is to make Gertrude Stein easier to see and harder to care about.

Mr. Brinnin's book makes plainer than ever the fact that Gertrude Stein had available for fifty years an aesthetical life of extraordinary richness. Yet it is hard to see that anything came from within herself, or was taken into herself.

Dora Edinger in Jewish Social Studies: is. In this beautifully written volume, he has given a vivid picture of this strong, self-centered yet warmhearted, artist. Her fabulous circle of acquaintances, friends and, understandably, enemies, as well as her not always fully understood great and still growing influence on American belles lettres are described in detail.

Vivienne Koch in Poetry: Unfortunately, however, there is a certain lack of proportion in this analysis, to say nothing of a lack of humor, as when he devotes much of the middle section book to the supposed relationships of Miss Stein's quest, failure, achievement in words to the quest and achievement of the Cubist painters whom she collected and knew, knew and collected. This loose theorizing in the end doesn't really clarify Miss Stein's elusive meaning (although it is possible she is thought to mean more than she meant to mean) and sometimes slackens Mr. Brinnin's hold on the central subject, the magnificent Gertrude herself, her own best creation.

F. S. K. in The Clearing House: Mr. Brinnin does not allow the bubbly gossip of the times to push aside his serious consideration of Gertrude Stein's literary achievement. He admits that her role in modern literature is likely to remain tentative because of the excesses of her experiment. Her independent spirit would tolerate no stylistic compromises, and she became high priestess at the shrine of subjective understatement.

The Third Rose flows forward with even clarity that is characteristic of Mr. Brinnin's style. Although his treatment of the later relationship between Leo and Gertrude Stein is a little labored and makes a Somerset Maugham figure of Leo, it sheds light on a phase of Gertrude's life that she prefers to avoid in her Autobiography of Alice B. Tokias. The passages on modern art and on the influence of cubism on modern poetry provide an interesting aside in an intelligent and interesting book on the life of an important twentieth-century literary force. Unwaveringly, she tried to revitalize the English language.