CHARMED CIRCLE: Gertrude Stein and Company

by James R. Mellow ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 4, 1973

Mellow's intelligent, conscientious biography of Gertrude Stein is serious and frank where Brinnin's perhaps livelier Third Rose (1959) managed to be both gossipy and evasive. Mellow is concise and astute on the work of the artists who made up the pre-World War I ""charmed circle"" at 27, Rue du Fleurus, and his discussions of Stein's writing show considerable rapport with the material but not so much admiration that he can't call her word portraits a ""queer, crabbed, obstinate experiment"" or say of The Making of Americans that if a monument, it is an architectural folly, something like Gaudi's Guell Park or the Watts Towers. Along with his own brief assessments there are frequent quotes from the works and from a widely divergent variety of reactions to them, all of which somehow add up to a reasonable picture of the subject's strength, importance and peculiarity. Stein's use of her dally life in her writing is noted throughout, and Mellow draws on Bridgman's critical study Gertrude Stein in Pieces (1970) regarding the erotic content in her later work and on Leon Katz' research which uncovered the early lesbian affair that formed the basis of QED. Here and elsewhere Mellow presents and evaluates all accounts and sources of information, so that although we have heard the stories before, we feel here that we are getting past the gossip -- on the breaks with Leo and with Hemingway, for example, or on that glorious climax of antic bohemia the Rousseau banquet, to which Mellow adds his own disclosure that it was probably not Andre Salmon but a neighbor's goat named Lolo who ate the flowers from Alice's hat. Oddly enough all of this careful quoting and balancing does not belabor the material; rather, in setting the record straight, Mellow brings substance and dimension to his portrait.

Pub Date: Feb. 4, 1973

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Praeger

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1973

Categories: NONFICTION