In 1933, Gertrude Stein published her groundbreaking work The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, which gained her instant celebrity. The following year she was invited to return to the United States for the first time since she departed for France in 1903, to give a series of lectures on art and literature. Newly famous, Stein delivered her lectures to packed audiences at universities, galleries, members’ clubs and public spaces up and down the country. The lectures are vital and provocative works which articulate the legendary writer’s thoughts on the effect of modernism on literary form, the relationship between narrative and history, and between a writer, their work and its audience. In her trademark style she meditates on the creative possibilities of repetition, the relationship of artistic creations to time, as well as her ambivalence toward her own literary fame and the destabilizing effect that notoriety had on her daily life. Listen to Me brings Stein’s sparklingly witty, illuminating lectures together in one volume for the first time, selected by her acclaimed biographer, Francesca Wade.
Listen to Me
Selected and introduced by Francesca Wade
Fitzcarraldo Classic No. 15 | French paperback with flaps, 328 pages
Published 5 November 2026
Listen to Me
Selected and introduced by Francesca Wade
COMPOSITION AS EXPLANATION
There is singularly nothing that makes a difference a difference in beginning and in the middle and in ending except that each generation has something different at which they are all looking. By this I mean so simply that anybody knows it that composition is the difference which makes each and all of them then different from other generations and this is what makes everything different otherwise they are all alike and everybody knows it because everybody says it.
It is very likely that nearly every one has been very nearly certain that something that is interesting is interesting them. Can they and do they. It is very interesting that nothing inside in them, that is when you consider the very long history of how every one ever acted or has felt, it is very interesting that nothing inside in them in all of them makes it connectedly different. By this I mean this. The only thing that is different from one time to another is what is seen and what is seen depends upon how everybody is doing everything. This makes the thing we are looking at very different and this makes what those who describe it make of it, it makes a composition, it confuses, it shows, it is, it looks, it likes it as it is, and this makes what is seen as it is seen. Nothing changes from generation to generation except the thing seen and that makes a composition. Lord Grey remarked that when the generals before the war talked about the war they talked about it as a nineteenth-century war although to be fought with twentieth-century weapons. That is because war is a thing that decides how it is to be when it is to be done. It is prepared and to that degree it is like all academies it is not a thing made by being made it is a thing prepared. Writing and painting and all that, is like that, for those who occupy themselves with it and don’t make it as it is made. Now the few who make it as it is made, and it is to be remarked that the most decided of them usually are prepared just as the world around them is preparing, do it in this way and so I if you do not mind I will tell you how it happens. Naturally one does not know how it happened until it is well over beginning happening.
To come back to the part that the only thing that is different is what is seen when it seems to be being seen, in other words, composition and time-sense.
No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who also are creating their own time refuse to accept. And they refuse to accept it for a very simple reason and that is that they do not have to accept it for any reason. They themselves that is everybody in their entering the modern composition and they do enter it, if they do not enter it they are not so to speak in it they are out of it and so they do enter it. But in as you may say the non-competitive efforts where if you are not in it nothing is lost except nothing at all except what is not had, there are naturally all the refusals, and the things refused are only important if unexpectedly somebody happens to need them. In the case of the arts it is very definite. Those who are creating the modern composition authentically are naturally only of importance when they are dead because by that time the modern composition having become past is classified and the description of it is classical. That is the reason why the creator of the new composition in the arts is an outlaw until he is a classic, there is hardly a moment in between and it is really too bad very much too bad naturally for the creator but also very much too bad for the enjoyer, they all really would enjoy the created so much better just after it has been made than when it is already a classic, but it is perfectly simple that there is no reason why the contemporaries should see, because it would not make any difference as they lead their lives in the new composition anyway, and as every one is naturally indolent why naturally they don’t see. For this reason as in quoting Lord Grey it is quite certain that nations not actively threatened are at least several generations behind themselves militarily so aesthetically they are more than several generations behind themselves and it is very much too bad, it is so very much more exciting and satisfactory for everybody if one can have contemporaries, if all one’s contemporaries could be one’s contemporaries.
(…)
‘This is the perfect Stein book for those who have been formed by Lectures in America since their first encounter, and for those who’d like to get acquainted with an inimitable and on-the-hoof presentation of the writer who changed twentieth-century literature and beyond, plus a few other Stein gems. It’s all here in this exquisite little volume and I’m glad I don’t have to keep looking for any of it. Such a mind, what a feat, this is beautiful writing, thinking, being.’
— Eileen Myles, author of a “Working Life”
‘[E]very writer who lingers over Stein’s sentences is apt to feel a little stab of shame over the heedless predictability of his own.’
— Janet Malcolm, New Yorker
‘A treasure chest of pioneering, valuable, mind-expanding writing.’
— Deborah Levy, author of My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein
‘There has rarely been a writer as pleasurable or charming as Stein.’
— Adam Thirlwell, London Review of Books
‘It’s high time Gertrude Stein’s wonderful essays and talks on composition and craft were widely read and appreciated. These works challenge us to slow down, pay attention, follow the iterations of Stein’s language – you never know where it’s going to go and that is one of its many joys. Gertrude has much to tell us! We should all be listening to Gertrude!’
— Lauren Elkin, author of Scaffolding
Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) is one of the original American Modernists. Born in Pennsylvania, she lived most of her life in Paris with her partner, Alice B. Toklas. Formally groundbreaking works like Three Lives (1909), Tender Buttons (1914) and The Making of Americans (1925) established her reputation as an avant-garde stylist, and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas made her an international celebrity. As an experimental writer she has been an inspiration to countless novelists and poets, from Ernest Hemingway and Edith Sitwell to Jack Kerouac and Robert Duncan.
Francesca Wade is the author of Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London Between the Wars (2020) and Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife (2025). She has held fellowships at the Leon Levy Center for Biography, the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. Her writing has appeared in the New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, Paris Review, Granta and other outlets.
