For a long time I’ve wondered where exactly Gertrude Stein wrote those words which you see quoted again and again. Even a casual google turns up dozens if not hundreds of examples, but nobody ever seems to give the source, and occasionally you even see it unattributed. And that admirable book, “The Atheist’s Bible: An illustrious collection of irreverent thoughts”, edited by Joan Konner (Harper Collins 2007, available HERE) doesn’t say where Stein wrote it.

I’ve just tracked it down and you can read a bit about the book from which it comes HERE.

The quotation is from the last book Stein wrote, Brewsie and Willie, first published in the USA in 1946. In it, she imagines American GIs and nurses discussing their doubts and fears about returning from the second world war to a changed country.

I’ve always thought the quotation – and it looks like everyone else does too – a wonderfully pithy statement.

But Stein wasn’t always so good at hitting such an existential bull’s-eye. Indeed much of what she wrote is either tediously unreadable, incomprehensible, or both.

See for instance THIS article:  Gertrude Stein: A Literary Idiot by Michael Gold (and you can read some fascinating things about Gold HERE  To say that he didn't like Stein's writing would be an understatement.  The fact that he criticised her from the viewpoint of a communist ideologue doesn't invalidate what he said, at least not this time.
 

Here's the first paragraph:

Michael Gold
(1893-1967)

Michael Gold was the eldest of three sons born to the Graniches, Jewish immigrants living on New York’s Lower East Side. During the Palmer Raids of 1919–20 he took the name Michael Gold after a Jewish Civil War veteran he admired for having fought to “free the slaves.” When his father’s health and business failed, the son had to go to work at age twelve to help support the family. His anger at capitalism was initially more personal than political, more subjective than ideological: unlike the mass of impoverished ghetto dwellers, he had been reared to expect better. ...

 

But see:

 

FROM THE LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS WEBSITE

London Review of Books, cover date 13 December 2007

 

Husbands and Wives
Terry Castle

* Don’t Kiss Me: The Art of Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore edited by Louise Downie
* Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice by Janet Malcolm

 

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n24/cast01_.html

 

In particular the murky story of exactly how it was that Stein and Toklas survived the war, under the protection of a creepy Nazi collaborator.