What Did Gertrude Stein See in Her Friend Pablo Picasso?

This piece appears in the columns section of frieze 245, ‘Wordplay’

Given how much of a torturous struggle it is for you, why do you continue to write? This was the final question posed to me by the audience at a recent event at a London bookshop. I had admitted to being a very slow writer – a single sentence can take weeks to complete – and to finding the entire process of writing a book almost unbearable. After an awkward silence, I replied that writing is the one area of my life where I do not have to compromise at all. My only duty is to be truthful to the content of my mind and do my bloody best to put that on the page.

No wonder I reach for Gertrude Stein. She never compromised. For her, the act of writing had to be unfettered. ‘If I Told Him’ (1923), her second portrait of her friend Pablo Picasso, epitomizes her unique discipline. Fortunately, my first encounter with it was via a recording of Stein’s own reading, so I always experience it with her voice, her rhythm, her tone in my mind’s ear. I can do as the text instructs: ‘Have hold and hear, actively repeat at all.’

It opens with a riddle – ‘If I told him would he like it. Would he like it if I told him’ – which hooks you in so hard that the desire to decode it at once is strong. What does she mean? Why aren’t there any question marks? But the lure of these questions that are not questions is another reason to listen, uninterrupted, to Stein’s recording, rather than allow yourself to linger on the printed page. I must surrender to her, embracing the text, allowing it to flow into me, over and over – ‘actively repeat at all’ – so that I feel her within me. Only then can I begin to understand that what she captured, in these first two sentences, were her earliest thoughts when she embarked on this journey to, as she rightly describes it, ‘exact resemblance’.

As the piece progresses, I come to realize that I am following Stein’s internal tics. It is as if she has put into words the reading of an electroencephalogram while contemplating Picasso. I begin to understand that she is not writing for us. Nor is she attempting to write something outside of herself. This is work born from a meditative state. Stein is capturing not only her thoughts about the subject, but the sensations and visions inside her mind and body as if she were filming them from within. As she wrote, some years after this particular piece was published in Vanity Fair, ‘I wondered is there any way of making what I know come out as I know it, come out not as remembering’ (‘Portraits and Repetition’, 1935).

I don’t want to call Stein experimental. When I am with her work, the overwhelming sense I have is of a writer hell-bent on capturing a very pure, uncensored truth. And while I agree with those who have described ‘If I Told Him’ as cubist, each sentence a splinter of perception, I fear this is to place Stein in Picasso’s shadow. That would be wrong. Without fear or desire, what she achieves in this work is to follow her consciousness – her instincts, her looping thoughts, her sometimes whimsical, beautifully child-like wordplay. For Stein, writing the portrait is an act not only of generosity but of courage. It is as much a revelation of her self as an embodiment of the subject. By the end, you can feel that the attempt to capture Picasso has emptied her of him. It is an astonishing and exhausting achievement precisely because it is not about remembering or describing.

This is why it is so risky to quote only slices of its whole: listen to her reading it, listen to yourself reading it, and you will see the absurdity of trying to take scissors to water running from a tap. This is how she crosses such a vast expanse of ideas, touching upon all of them just long enough to tickle us with the feathers of her mind.

This article first appeared in frieze issue 245 with the headline ‘See and Repeat’

Lara Pawson’s ‘Spent Light’ is published by CB editions

Gertrude Stein’s ‘If I Told Him’ can be accessed via the Poetry Foundation

^{Main image: R.H. Quaytman, Stein (detail), 2024, tiff. Courtesy: the artist}