TYPESCRIPT: Continuous Present as Composition.
Stein, Gertrude. Typescript: Continuous Present as Composition [i.e. Composition as Explanation.]
(Paris: Winter 1925-26).
8vo.; 12 leaves, rectos only; unbound; author and title in ink.
Original typescript for Composition as Explanation, here with an earlier title. Titled in ink by Stein on the
cover, with her name in another hand at the head of the first page. The few neatly written ink corrections to
the text are perhaps by Stein.
In this lecture Stein gave at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge in June of 1926, she tries to convey
the experience of writing from a personal point of view. She reflects on time as it relates to composition,
which she believes must take place in a continuous present rather than in a fixed past, present, and future.
The prose is Stein at her hermetic best, but it is far more personal than her other writings, including the
autobiographical ones. Here, she is attempting to give strangers – most of them not artists or writers – a
sense of the process of creating a new work and of the importance of using language in new and different
ways.
The lecture was published in 1926 by Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press, and a comparison of this typescript
with the published work shows only the correction of a few typographical errors and the addition of some
punctuation. Despite her best efforts and her longing for literary achievement, Stein will always be
remembered more as the hostess of the leading literary salon in Paris between the wars, and as a patron and
mentor of such artists as Matisse, Picasso, and Hemingway.
From the papers of Jane Heap, one of the founding editors of the ground-breaking literary magazine, The
Little Review, one of the first to publish such important modernist writers as Pound, Eliot, Hemingway,
Joyce, and Yeats. The magazine achieved notoriety after it was declared obscene for publishing part of
Ulysses. Heap was a devoted disciple of the spiritual teacher G. I. Gurdjieff; she and partner Margaret
Anderson moved themselves and The Little Review to Paris, in order to study at Gurdjieff’s Institute for the
Harmonious Development of Man. There, Heap took over as editor of the magazine and became a part of
Stein’s literary circle. After closing The Little Review in 1929, Heap devoted the rest of her life to teaching
Gurdjieff’s philosophy. One of her pupils, Annie Lou Staveley (1906-96), founded Two Rivers Farm in
Oregon to continue Gurdjieff’s work. Heap bequeathed the present item to Staveley, who gave it to the
current owner.
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