The Notebooks of Gertrude Stein

Book excerpt: Back in 1936, Thornton Wilder had warned Gertrude Stein to get her unpublished manuscripts into the safekeeping of the Yale Library because of the danger of another world war's breaking out on French soil. Charmed by the notion that all her work was to be safely harbor-ed for later publication and study, Gertrude packed several cases of manuscripts, letters and miscellany and sent them off. The packing was done with characteristic Steinian abandon: neatly piled manuscripts were dumped into crates, and correspond-ence, carefully alphabetized and filed at the end of each year by Gertrude's amanuensis, Alice Toklas, was pulled out in drawerfuls and overturned into the crates. Finally, all the scraps of paper that Gertrude never threw away, budget lists, garage attendants' instructions about the Fords she owned during the 10's and 20's ("regardez le carburetor"), forgotten old dentist's bills, were tossed in, too. Alice re-monstrated about their inclusion, but Gertrude used every hoarder's excuse: "You can never tell whether some laundry list might not be the most important thing." Two packages in brown wrapping paper at the bottom of the armoire, lying among chunks of manuscript of her novel, The Making of Americans, fell into the crates along with all the other papers...