The Abominable Snowoman

THE THIRD ROSE (427 pp.)--John Malcolm Brinnin-- Atlantic-Little, Brown ($6).

Renouncing Babbitry for Babel, Gertrude Stein was a kind of saint to some and a stunt to others. She belongs not to the ages, but an age--the '20s. Fresh from his last safari (Dylan Thomas in America), Poet-Critic John Malcolm Brinnin goes in search of this Abominable Snowoman of modern letters. What he brings back is not startling, but it is a biographically complete if critically indulgent account of the concentric odyssey of Gertrude Stein, of whom it might be said: in her beginning was her end, because she was all middle.

Uncorseted Bliss. German-Jewish Papa Stein was a wool merchant, and some would argue that Gertrude was, too. As a baby, Gertrude, wrote her mother, was "a little Schnatterer. She talks all day long and repeats everything that is said or done." At Radcliffe, Gertrude became Philosopher William James's favorite Schnatterer and roamed the classrooms in uncorseted bliss ("She always seemed to like her own fat," a friend later said). She also experimented in what came to be known as automatic writing. This may have inspired her incantatory rhythms and inane repetitions, though Author Brinnin bristles at the thought.

At the turn of the century, Gertrude followed her brother Leo to Paris. Leo was the art pundit and collector in those early days, but he was everlastingly tinkering with his psyche, so that when a San Francisco spinster named Alice Babette Toklas appeared, "soft, small, and warmly murmurous," Gertrude switched boon companions for life. The two gentle ladies from America enjoyed living in the eye of the bohemian hurricane. There was the writer Andre Salmon, who foamed at the mouth with delirium (he later claimed it was soap) and nibbled the trimmings on Alice Toklas' hat. There was Alfred Jarry, an absinthe-minded playwright who carried a revolver and once shot down "some obstreperous nightingales." Oddest of all was Gerald Berners, an English lord who had a tiny piano built into his Rolls, and would flash a white mask at villagers, whose terror grew as ghostly strains of Scarlatti wafted from the disappearing car.

What Is the Answer? As young U.S. expatriates (including Ernest Hemingway) fled the middle class and the Middle West, they took refuge in "the mature Gertrudian bosom," as Van Wyck Brooks put it, "much like that of their far away prairie mothers, but of a most gratifying sophistication. Miss Stein gave them back their nursery rhymes and they had fine babbling times together." As for for own writing, apart from a trio of impressive short stories, Three Lives, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and the moving play-opera Four Saints in Three Acts, Gertrude Stein was not so much the hoaxer as the hoaxed. She tried to purify words by divorcing them from meanings and using them as pigments or notes. At best, the result was a kind of singing noncommercial.

Gertrude Stein had survived World War II by a year when a malignant abdominal tumor forced an operation. Coming out of anesthesia, she was sibylline to the end. Her next-to-last words were, "What is the answer?" And her last, "In that case, what is the question?"

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