Gertrude Stein suffered from
Chronic Talent Deficiency, or perhaps not. Perhaps she enjoyed
every minute of it. As for the Stein-
Alice B. Toklas connection, they were
lesbian lovers.
To call Gertrude Stein a literary cubist is to make a serious mistake. The concept of literary cubism is a bunch of happy horseshit. This is because a simple truth. Words have meaning. Visual cubism works because colors and shapes do not have intrinsic meanings. A splash of red on a canvas could be the bloom of a flower, or a pool of blood. It only takes on meaning when other elements in the painting are compared against it.
A single word, on the other hand can be a very powerful thing. I will take as my example, the most powerfully evocative word in the English language. Phonetically, there is very little difference between the word "nigger" and the word "ginger". To your cubist, these words are practically the same. Anyone attempting to argue this point is out of touch. One of them, spoken suddenly will get you, at the very least, some strange looks, and at the outside, severely beaten. The other outburst will not merit nearly as strong a reaction.
Yet Gertrude Stein is hailed as some sort of genius, for doing what nobody else did. Nobody else did it because what Gertrude Stein did is of little literary value. Anyone truly wishing to torture themselves is invited to check out (*link excised as linked site no longer exists*)
Amongst other things, that link contains a download of a small DOS program which will convert any ASCII file into the same sort of incoherent babble that Gertrude Stein wrote.