phlogma

Notes on James R. Mellow, Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company

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Stein’s characterological obsession is suggested as having its origin with Weininger. [It is more likely that Weininger provided her much needed corroboration for a pre-existing obsession. He basically validated her inclination. Though what may have ultimately motivated them can be enlighteningly distinguished, the consonance between them is striking.]

Adele’s eureka in Q.E.D. at having discovered a “mathematical” aspect to her relationship to Helen.

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Whether Gertrude, as a woman and a Jew, overlooked or dismissed the more rabid philosophizing of Weininger is not altogether clear.

[We suggest she did not have occasion to overlook it because she did not perceive it as “rabid.” See Stein’s recently discovered typescript in Wineapple.]

Stein recommended Weininger’s book to Marian Walker, her feminist friend from her Johns Hopkins medical school days. Marian wrote to Stein on June 11th, 1909:

By the way, in an idle moment I read the book on sex which you said exactly embodied your views—the one by the Vienese [sic]* lunatic. It struck me that you made a mistake in your statement—it was evidently before not after he wrote the book that he went insane. We had a considerable amount of fun, however, in calculating the percentage of male and female in our various friends according to his classification. But he was really a very half-baked individual.

Stein writes, “Pablo & Matisse have a maleness that belongs to genius. Moi aussi perhaps.” (From notes made during the composition of The Making of Americans.)

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Just as Walker thought Weininger “half-baked,” so Mellow considers The Making of Americans, and he seems to takes a dim view of Stein’s comment that it should be classed among the greatest literary works of the century, the other two being Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past and Joyce’s Ulysses. [We will have to investigate whether Weininger was not somewhere in the background of Proust’s work (there is a faint reference in Sengoopta to the effect) as we know it was behind the other two “greatest literary works of the century.”]