Not for the Tired

FOUR IN AMERICA (221 pp.]--Gertrude Stein--Yale ($3.75).

Gertrude Stein had leisure, intelligence, curiosity and quite a bit of gall. She never got tired of playing games with language. She preferred to live in Europe, but America and Americans always fascinated her. Four in America is an inquiry about the American soul as exemplified in four great men: Ulysses S. Grant, Wilbur Wright, Henry James and George Washington. A year ago last July, a few weeks before her death, Miss Stein sent the manuscript to Yale, which has now published it in its entirety for the first time.

The book is written in Stein style at its Steiniest, and reading it takes more than most readers want to give. Even admirers of Gertrude Stein will be grateful to Thornton Wilder for his luminous introduction. Wilder's advice to the reader: be intelligent enough to put aside the vanity of intelligence; relax and listen. The reward: a pleasurable sense of listening to nonsense that is unique.

It may seem a modest achievement. Miss Stein starts the fun & games by supposing that Grant had become a religious leader, Wright a painter, James a general and Washington a novelist. In defense of her little game, she apparently fetches some reasons from afar: Grant's first name was Hiram (an Old Testament name) but he dropped it in favor of his middle name, Ulysses (a soldier's); Wright, like Miss Stein's favorite modern painter, Picasso, invented contraptions that gave people a new sense of being alive; James planned his novels as a good general plans an operation; Washington wrote "the great American novel" which America is.

Stops and Starts. Far-fetched and solemn jokester though she was, Gertrude Stein as a writer was about as gabby as they come. Maddeningly persistent and maddeningly placid, in Four in America she seems to take all day to say--with many stops and starts, reveries, irrelevancies and fond repetitions--what a good sharp professor could put in a few paragraphs.

Sample passage--so paradoxical that she herself calls it foolish:

"A real American a true American an American cannot earn a living. If he could earn a living he could be waiting. Waiting is what makes earning a living be a part of existing and succeeding. No American can succeed no American can earn a living. It is only because Americans are part European that they can earn a living because and this I cannot say too often because waiting is part of earning a living and there is no waiting in an American. . . . That is what you can call demonstrated or elucidated.

"I like elucidating even better than demonstrating. Of course I do."

Who Will Wait? Some readers will agree with Thornton Wilder that although such writing may not really "elucidate" anything, it contains an interesting insight. They will agree that it is typical of Americans to be impatient, to move on rather than to stay put, to "make money" rather than earn a living in the closefisted way of the French peasant. If the ordinary reader cannot wait while Miss Stein circles about such ideas, that goes to prove her point.

Mr. Wilder is sad about this. "Neither her company nor her books," he says, "were for those who have grown tired of listening. It was an irony that she did her work in a world in which for many reasons and for many appalling reasons people have so tired."

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