The 1920s

Gertrude Stein’s network of admirers continued to expand in the 1920s. Stein placed her work in both mainstream and more obscure literary publications and, as was the case in the previous decade, each of her publications was greeted with significant publicity. The widely reviewed Geography and Plays (1922) introduced a new audience to Stein’s work, and several of the pieces from that collection were reprinted: in Vanity Fair, further establishing Stein as an exemplar of literary chic, and in popular anthologies such as Tom Masson’s Annual (1925), a collection of humor. Even the many works by Stein that appeared in little magazines were often discussed by newspaper columnists, who regularly talked about avant-garde literary trends. As Brinnin observes, “popular reviewers kept her name prominent in the columns of American newspapers, and some even spoke of her with respect instead of quoting her sentences for easy laughs.” ¹ Stein’s reputation did not diminish, as her writing remained frequently in the public eye. References to her in the popular press would have been recognizable to any reader. In 1924, the most popular magazine in America, the Saturday Evening Post, published a parody with no editorial explanation, “Investigations and Oil (After Gertrude Stein—With Apologies)”:

Little oil wells bubbling up, sometimes over. Oil is oil and this is this. Politicians many, and a lease, very strangely, very Sinclair. A resignation by the son of an American, like his father, wisely; then revelations, revelations many. A tempest in a teapot rises. Falls. Falls mightily. But you cannot understand unless you understand, and you do not. ²

Myrtle Conger’s parody of Stein, like those by Kenneth L. Roberts in Life in 1917, is actually a vehicle to make a political point; the nonsense is not nonsense at all, and turns out to be political commentary. In this case the subject is the Teapot Dome scandal that tarnished the Harding administration, but the parody appears to have been inspired by the apolitical parody that first appeared in the Little Review, “Oil and Water.” By 1927, when The American Caravan (ed. Van Wyck Brooks, Lewis Mumford, Alfred Kreymborg, Paul Rosenfeld) was published and distributed by a popular book club, the Literary Guild, it was assumed that readers were familiar with Stein’s style. A reviewer could simply assert that “Mildred’s Thoughts,” Stein’s contribution, “is a typical specimen of Miss Stein’s absurd interpretation of fluid consciousness.” ³