Stein is a demanding writer, especially when she experimented with eliminating adjectives, imagery, and grammar. She argued that you either got her meaning or you didn’t. The results were hit or miss. They still are.
Ben Hecht reviewing Geography and Plays (1922), admired some of her pieces but referred to the book as mainly being filled with trivial statements with “complicated attenuations of thought.” H.L. Mencken, wordsmith and scholar of American English, named Stein the 8th most boring author. Carl Van Vechten thought Stein humorous and suggested reading her texts aloud. Neither Hecht nor Van Vechten commented on Stein’s picnics. But there are three in Geography and Plays, all described in Stein’s characteristic idiomatic syntax. It’s unclear if these descriptions are prose or poetry. It doesn’t matter. What matters most is her picnicky spirit. (When I read the texts aloud or silently, sometimes I get them; other times, they’re duds.)
“Every Afternoon. A Dialogue” seems joyous at the prospect of picnicking:
We will picnic.
Oh yes.
We are very happy.
Very happy.
And content.
And content.
Picnic food is at last mentioned in the monologue “He Said It.” “We are going to have a picnic with chicken, not today,” Stein declares: “we are going two have eggs and salad and vegetables and brown bread and what else.”
Thirty-two years later, Toklas’ The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook makes a case for picnic sandwiches, especially chopped beef and chicken salad.
Featured Image: Unknown photographer. “Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, and Pavel Tchelitchew in the Bugey” (circa 1927; http://brbl-dl.library.yale.edu/vufind/Record/3581034. The Bugey is the region of eastern France where Stein and Toklas lived during World War II. The picnic basket is nestled beside Toklas. Are they content? Happy? No one is smiling.
See Gertrude Stein’s Geography and Plays. Boston: The Four Seasons Company, 1922; Ben Hecht. Review of Geography and Plays. Chicago Literary Times (July 1923); Carl Van Vechten. “How to Read Gertrude Stein,” The Trend (August, 1914); H. L. Mencken. “Literary Survey,” Vanity Fair (August 1923); Alice B. Toklas. The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1954; Janet Malcolm. Two Lives: Gertrude Stein and Alice. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008.