Janet Hobhouse Everybody Who Was Anybody: A Biography of Gertrude Stein, Anchor Books: New York, (1975), 1989
Chapter 8 Remarks are not Literature
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[p. 147] ". . . in [1933], she worried out these themes [p. 148] in a book called Four in America. For her exploration of the relationship between publicity and identity, and audience and creativity, she chose four people who were both "geniuses" and well-known public figures. She gave them roles they had not played in history in order to discover whether the identity of genius was absolute or whether it depended on doing something, some productivity as proof of being that genius. For her analysis of the relation of role played to individual identity she chose Henry James, George Washington, Ulysses S, Grant, and Wilbur Wright, two men of thought and two men of action. She meditated on the possiblity of Henry James having been a general, Washington a novelist, Grant, a religious leader, and Wilbur Wright a painter, in order to "find out just what it is that what happens has to do with what is." The book is hardly a lucid meditation. But the section on James, for example, makes exciting and strenuous reading as Gertrude thinks out loud about "the question of an audience," the differences between the knower and the thing known, and between knowing and communicating that knowledge. It was, in a way, her defence of her "difficult" style, in the face of the popularity of the easy, false style of The Autobiography. At one point she declares,"Clarity is of no importance because no one listens."
[p. 148] ""I am not I any longer when I see," she says, "that is, when I am conscious of the outside world, or audience. This sentence is at the bottom of all creative activity. It is just the exact opposite of I am because my little dog knows me." That last had been a favorite phrase of hers; it insisted on the relation of existence or idenity to recognitiion by something outside-the dog or audience. Now she worked out the argument that identity for the genius did not depend on an audience; nor did it depend on whether or nor he fulfilled his role, as an artist or general . . .