Come All Over Patriotic

BREWSIE AND WILLIE (114 pp.)--Gertrude Stein--Random House ($2).

"I was always in my way a Civil War veteran," confesses Gertrude Stein--and, indeed, her new book about World War II veterans has much of the quaint, rheumy, talky quality of old soldiers. It is, of course, superimposed upon the girlish extravagances with which Author Stein has perplexed the English-speaking world for a generation.

"My gracious, my good gracious," laments a homeward-bound G.I. in Brewsie and Willie, "Oh my good gracious, oh my good gracious . . . my good gracious. I just could kind of just cry when I think we all got to scratch around and worry, worry and scratch around, and then those bills, pay everything on the installment plan, and coming in and coming in, oh dear, sometimes I just burst out crying in my sleep, I am older than you boys ... I could just burst out crying."

Baby Talk. Expatriate Author Stein talked with scores of G.I.s in France ("they made me come all over patriotic"), and Brewsie and Willie is a report on those conversations. Many of them sound as though they had been fabricated by epigrammatic babies in a precocious nursery. Samples:

P:"A leader is someone who leads you where you don't want to go."

P:"In America they think if perfection is good more perfection is better."

P:"Industrialism is like chewing gum."

P:"Any man can sleep with a woman but every man is kind of special proud of it."

P: "Psychoanalysis . . . says anything always means something."

But between the lines of baby talk, Brewsie and Willie is a serious lecture on the postwar responsibilities of America's younger generation. When Brewsie and Willie (and other G.I.s named Peter and Lawrence, Nurses Pauline and Janet) begin their improbable discussions, they are full of beans and America-first; when they emerge a hundred pages later, they are more respectful of Europeans, less enthusiastic about themselves.

Peter: "We love sweets like babies, we don't love no lumps of cheese, and tough bread, no we just like to eat soft stuff, soft bread, soft ice cream, soft chocolate, soft mush, soft potatoes, soft jam, and peanut butter, we don't except at a little meat we don't really chew. . . . Soft eats make soft men."

Lawrence: "The trouble with us we are bein' ruled by tired middle-aged people . . . here in Europe they are ruled by the young or by the old, and by God they're right, young ones can make fools of themselves that's all right, and old ones if they are old enough to be really old they got the energy of being old, but I tell you . . . nothing is so dead dead-tired, dead every way as middle-aged."

Brewsie: "They say we are sad and I think we are sad because we have different feelings but we articulate all the same. ... I don't think we think, if we thought ... we couldn't have Gallup polls and have everybody answer yes or no. ... We always know how we gonna think tomorrow because we are all going to think alike."

Plain Talk. In an epilogue "To Americans," windy Author Stein winds up her lecture with a piece of plain talk.

"I am sure," says she, "that this particular moment in our history is more important than anything since the Civil War. We are there where we have to have to fight a spiritual pioneer fight or we will go poor as England and other industrial countries have gone poor, and don't think that communism or socialism will save you . . . you have to learn to produce without exhausting your country's wealth, you have to learn to be individual and not just mass job workers, you have to get courage enough to know what you feel and not just all be yes or no men, but you have to really learn to express complication, go easy and if you can't go easy go as easy as you can. . . . Look facts in the face . . . every darn one of you so that a government by the people for the people shall not perish from the face of the earth. . . ."

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