a fiction
requiring history and faith
by Douglas Messerli
Gertrude Stein Mrs. Reynolds (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1995)
Recently rereading Gertrude Stein’s wartime
novel, Mrs. Reynolds, I once again
took joy in having reprinted this book (from the Yale edition of her works left
unpublished at the time of her death) on my Sun & Moon Press imprint in
1988 and again in 1995. It was the very first volume in my ongoing Sun &
Moon Classics series, with more than 150 volumes published before the press
ceased publishing around 2000.
In my now third reading, I perceived, even more emphatically, not only
how mistaken had been claims by Janet Malcolm, Barbara Will and others
describing Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas as collaborators with the Nazis
during World War II, but realized that these Stein detractors had clearly not
bothered to carefully read or attempted to comprehend Stein’s serious war
writings, of which Mrs. Reynolds stands
at the center.
Mrs. Reynolds, the “heroine” of the novel is indeed a very plain but
pretty woman, like the figure in the Matisse painting from which I had stolen
for my cover design,* a woman who loves flowers for what they are as opposed to
what they might symbolize or represent: “Mrs. Reynolds liked roses to be roses.
This is the way she felt about roses.” The character, in fact, is a very
practical woman, who “had never been unwell,” a woman who may cry, but does
not—at least at first in this fiction—hint at or outwardly demonstrate
something hidden within; “Mrs. Reynolds never sighed.” Things, Stein suggests,
are what they appear to be in this work: “[Mrs. Reynolds’ husband] was a nice
man he looked nice and he was nice.” “Mrs.
Reynolds was quiet and easy, when she said, well, she meant well. She did” (Mrs. Reynolds, p. 9).
But from the very beginning of the fiction, Stein also warns us to be
careful upon what we focus. Although the language and events of this book may
be very straight-forward, almost transparent, the real concerns of both the
character Mrs. Reynolds and the fiction in which she appears relate to
something far more abstract. “Mrs. Reynolds is not all about roses, it is more
about Tuesdays than about roses” (9). The way the work functions, so Stein
straight-forwardly states, is more about dates, the days of the week and, as we
shall soon see, the years of events, than it is about Mrs. and Mrs. Reynolds’
domestic life.
“Tuesday was when Mrs. Reynolds was
born.” More importantly, Stein continues, Tuesday “was the day they made peace
from war and that was the day they made war from peace.”** And already in the
few first paragraphs Stein briefly shifts attention from her comments about the
book’s central character to memories of World War I, speaking of Mrs. Reynolds’
nephew and his friend, who together “went to be soldiers and they were both
killed by a bomb on the same day.” (10). The intelligent reader perceives, in
another words, that although a great part of this fiction might be
superficially concerned with talk about “bread in soup,” “eggs and butter,” and
“guinea hens and geese” (10), the book’s true subject is a far more profound
one.
The next few pages, devoted to the
process of the young baby growing up to become Mrs. Reynolds, may seem, like
almost anyone’s adolescence, to be very uneventful, with the major subjects
being things such as strawberries, box-hedges, and the girl’s youthful
friendships—innocuous events that might even lull the reader into the belief
that Stein’s fiction will be a strange kind of biographical telling of her
heroine, a kind of Bildungsroman.
Already by page 20, however, when Mrs. Reynolds turns 22, she suddenly begins
to notice the clouds in the sky:
Then the clouds began to come that
is she began to see the clouds there
were in the sky, rosy clouds and
dark clouds and white clouds and silver
clouds. Whichever clouds there
were, she noticed them and she looked
at them.
The discussion of clouds continues
for two more pages until Mrs. Reynolds finally becomes Mrs. Reynolds at the age
of 23: “And now Mrs. Reynolds was twenty-three and this year she was to be Mrs.
Reynolds.” Events, accordingly, are linked up with the years of being, and the
years of being are associated with larger events in the world.
Mrs. Reynolds coming of age also hints at another major structural
element of the book, that of predictions and foretellings. The first prediction
of this tale, very much centered around one major prophesy, that of Saint
Odile, is uttered by a distant cousin’s brother’s son when the future Mrs.
Reynolds is just seventeen, predicting that at the age of 23 she will become
Mrs. Reynolds. And indeed, through the machinations of another couple, Epie and
Leonardo, the young heroine is introduced to her future husband. The same
morning Mrs. Reynolds dreams that “there were five artichokes blooming in the
garden,” a reference, possibly, to James Joyce’s Ulysses, where Bloom recounts his memory of the evening in Matt
Dillon’s garden with Dillon’s bevy of six daughters (Tiny, Atty, Floey, Maimy,
Lou, Hetty) who with the seventh, Molly, create a kind of floral landscape:
“Open like flowers, know their hours, sunflowers, Jerusalem artichokes. In
ballrooms, chandeliers, avenues under the lamps.”*** Just as this passage calls
up Bloom’s marriage to Molly, so does it in Stein’s work presage the young
23-year old girl’s encountering of her life-time companion, Mr. Reynolds.
Mr. Reynolds has also been affected by war; “He had lost two brothers in
the war. …Very much later and in another war [presumably the war of which
Stein’s fiction is concerned] he lost his only nephew.”
Over the next few pages Stein recounts the marriage and the relatives
that attend the ceremony; but suddenly, with the introduction of Mr. Reynolds’
younger brother William, who lives next door with his wife, Hope, everything
changes. For William, quite obviously a very different kind of man than his
elder brother, has two friends who quickly become the foreboding figures who
consume the days and nights of Mr. and Mrs. Reynolds’ life.
The parents of the wife [Hope]
sometimes came and stayed with them
[William and his wife] but
mostly they had other kinds of people with
them.
The ones they knew best
were two men.
The one was Angel Harper.
He became very well-known but they [Mr.
and Mrs. Reynolds] did not
know him any more then.
The other was older he was
Joseph Lane. He had bushy eyebrows and
was older than any of them and
it did not make any difference to him
how young he was or how old he
was. (24)
Stein goes out of her way to dissociate the central couple of her story
from William and Hope, describing William as a man who stays in bed “when
anything happens, which did happen very much that winter.” Although Hope, a
teacher, does go out and even encounters others, she too has very little to do
with Mrs. Reynolds and her husband. Stein goes even further in insisting upon
the dissociation of the two families:
She [Mrs. Reynolds] and her
sister-in-law were neighbors but it would
not be very likely that they
would be either going out or coming in at
the same time.
Anyway neither the
brothers nor the sisters-in-law met, they really
never met.
Why, one might well ask, does Stein make it so evident that Mrs.
Reynolds has no relationship with her in-laws and, as she later reports several
times, never met either Angel Harper or Joseph Lane? Even more importantly, why
does she associate these two figures—whom readers quickly discern represent
Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin (only four pages later Stein writes “Angel
Harper later was a dictator.”)—with a relative of Mr. and Mrs. Reynolds?
As the fiction progresses, the reader naturally associates Mrs. Reynolds
more and more with Stein herself. As Steven Gould Axelrod acutely notes in his
intelligent essay on the fiction, “Mrs.
Reynolds: Stein’s Anti-Nazi Novel,” “the novel reflects the perspective of
a woman whose experiences closely resemble Stein’s own. Held hostage in Vichy,
France, she is frightened for her life, horrified by the violence occurring
around her, and clear in her loathing for Hitler” (essay read in manuscript).
Even in these few early pages, Stein has associated Mrs.
Reynolds—through the character’s desire for “roses to be roses”—with Stein’s
own famed maxim, “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose,” from 1913, later restated
as “A rose is a rose is a rose,” her version of Williams’ later, 1927 dictum,
“No ideas but in things.” And. if Mrs.
Reynolds’ dream is actually a reference to Joyce, she has connected her heroine
with the Jewish figure of Leopold Bloom, aligning her character to her own
religious beliefs. As the work moves forward, moreover, we cannot help but feel
this woman, walking the streets of a small, provincial French village, where
she regularly speaks with the inhabitants, is extremely similar to the Stein we
come to know in Bilignin as described in her Paris France.
Recognizing that some of those neighbors, even somewhat distant friends
such as Stein’s admirer and, some argue, protector, Bernard Faÿ, may be
Nazi-sympathizers, Stein goes out of her way to dissociate herself from them,
insisting not only that Mrs. Reynolds has never meet Angel Harper (that she had
no knowledge of him and his ideas), but that she does not engage with those who
do know of him, refusing to consort even with her brother and sister in-law.
What gradually becomes apparent is that Stein’s choice of the word
“knowing” with regard to Angel Harper and Joseph Lane, does not necessarily
indicate that her brother and others are actual “acquaintances” with those
dictators, but rather hints that the gerund is a code word implying that those
with such “knowledge” are sympathizers or supporters of Hitler or Stalin—just
as one, so I have read, might identify oneself as an alcoholic attending AA
meetings by inquiring of another, “Do you know Bill?” (William Griffith Wilson
being the founder of that organization). With that word, Stein makes it clear
that Mrs. and Mr. Reynolds are utterly opposed to those who are “in the know.”
Soon after his early friendship with William, Angel Harper leaves: “he
went away and they never saw him again” (37). But William Reynolds and his wife
Hope continue to be tainted by their former relationship to him. Later, he and
his wife are visited by a couple, Mr. and Mrs. Madden-Henry, obviously a
British pair who are admirers of Angel Harper: “Mr. and Mrs. Madden-Henry
admired Angel Harper because he never coughed.” (96) Hope also expresses her
admiration of Harper, in a strange way, by suggesting the dual meaning of the
word “bat”: “Bat is a word that has two meanings, one that flies by night and
one that hits a ball.”
Possibly in this passage Stein is simply satirizing the situation by
playing with the satirical notion, held by many and particularly apparent in
Chaplin’s 1940 film The Great Dictator,
that Hitler’s rants often sounded very much like coughing fits; his name in the
film, Adenoid Hynkel, reiterates that fact. Not only is Harper a “bat,” a
frightening, vampire-like figure, but like the little tramp in The Great Dictator, “hits” the ball,
which Chaplin represents in the form of a giant globe of the world, around the
room.****
Others, such as Mrs. Coates, immediately begin to think very badly about
the Madden-Henrys, and, more importantly, Mrs. Reynolds—who has already
prophesized that Angel Harper would be drowned (“She never knew Angel Harper
which was just as well because she would have said of him that he would be
drowned dead….”) (62)—a short while later tells her husband that she “really
never wanted to see or hear William again” (138). Soon after William and Hope,
thankfully, move away.
If Mrs. Reynolds and most of her neighbors at first know little about
Angel Harper, once his name is invoked, the fiction is soon overwhelmed with
mentions of him and, to a far lesser degree, of Joseph Lane. After the early
naming of Harper, his moniker crops up throughout the rest of the fiction on
nearly every page and, at times, in nearly every paragraph. In short, as Stein
notes, even if Mrs. Reynolds and most of the others in her village had never
“known” him before he “went away,” it hardly matters: “…Ten years after, it
made no difference, because everybody knew about him and might he might be
afraid enough” (37-38).
The fiction itself becomes, just as Angel Harper is described, more and
more gloomy. A hoot-owl hoots “terrifically” (38), the winters seem colder, it
rains for “twenty-eight days in the daytime and in the evening and at night….”
(81). The link between these events and Hitler are made quite clear, as in the
very next paragraph Stein repeats: “By this time Angel Harper was very well
known, so well known that everybody knew about him.”
Already by page 50, the woman who began the work as one who “never
sighed,” begins to sigh quite often, an act in which she continues to engage
throughout most of the rest of the fiction.
Gradually, perhaps in imitation of Hitler’s autobiographical Mein Kampf, we begin to get glimpses of
Angel Harper as a child, a young boy, and a teenager:
When Angel Harper was a little
boy he did not drill other little boys
and make them march. Some do. He
did not. He sat and when he sat,
he sat. Enough said.
….
He talked to himself and he
said, all the same. And when he said all the
same he meant it. (68)
Although these brief memories have
no common thread, they generally show Angel Harper at a distance from others
and removed from the rest of world events. He often acts alone, watching,
focusing on his own inner thoughts. Many of them show a person not knowing how
to relate to others around him:
Angel Harper was bitter he was
where he was and he was bitter, he
ate what he ate and he was
bitter, nobody saw him just then and he
was bitter and little by little
it was as much worse and he was bitter.
(90)
This passage, in particular, reminds
one of Hitler’s anger with his father who stood against his desire to become an
artist, described in Mein Kampf.
As Axelrod makes clear in his essay, Mrs. Reynolds not only recognizes
Angel Harper as evil (“Angel Harper is annoysome, he is dangerous, he is
painful, he is owned and is annoysome…”), but she would have him dead: “And I
would be pleased if they killed him (98).” Mrs. Reynolds truly wishes that he
might become an “angel harper,” a dead man harping in some vague depiction of
an afterlife. In this case, as Axelrod has argued, I think we have to think of
the “angel” as a fallen one, as a satanic force rather than a creature of
paradise.
As the wartime situation grows in its horrors, Mrs. Reynolds becomes
more and more sad (282). She has bad dreams and fears for the future. What
begins as a wish for Angel’s death is transformed into hate: “If I knew about
him I would hate him, and I do know about him and I do hate him” (298).
Before long what began as descriptions of simple feelings, emotional
responses to Angel Harper that alternate with the very ordinary and uneventful
days of Mr. and Mrs. Reynolds—as they rise each morning, leave the house for
periods of time, eat dinner, and, ritualistically, go back to bed—begin to be
overshadowed by longer units of time which designate the years of the
dictator’s life.
This begins with a brief mention of Harper/Hitler being thirty-eight
(“Angel Harper was now thirty-eight and it was not at all too late” (108). And
in the next line Stein warns the reader to pay attention: “Listen here,” she
insists. Something is about the change, she hints, as if warning us that a new
element of narrative structure is about to be introduced.
On the very next page (109), Angel Harper is described as being
forty-three. A couple of pages later he becomes forty-four, an aging process
upon which Stein continues to focus until the end of her work. Narrative time
in Mrs. Reynolds shifts as the Hitler
figure grows older. The numerous figures of the earlier pages begin to
disappear; life becomes more difficult as people aimlessly pass by the
Reynolds’ window. Food becomes scarce. The small daily events that were so
crucial to the narrative pattern of the fiction, become more and more vague as
Mrs. Reynolds increasingly fears to even leave the house.
To understand this shift, I argue, one has to further make sense of Mrs.
Reynolds’ increasing fixation with Angel Harper’s age, particularly since, we
quickly perceive, more and more pages are devoted to each passing year. Stein
hints at the key to comprehending this shift by noting that in the year 1942
one naturally thinks of Columbus’ voyage of 1492, a voyage which her husband
links to wider world events that embrace even the distant USA:
Mr. Reynolds came in,
he did not meditate but he told Mrs.
Reynolds what every one
said. They said that suddenly in
September 1940 the
United States of America instead of being
a big flat land
illimitably flat, the land against which Christopher
Columbus bumped himself
in 1492 became a part of the round
world that goes around
and around.*****
In another words, through the Columbus simile, the reader is asked to
see the very flat world, where hardly anything happens, as a multi-dimensional
reality, as a world in real time and space; the sympathetic reader is asked to
infuse the flat narrative of Stein’s Mrs.
Reynolds with events in the real world to make sense of the emotional
responses of Mrs. Reynolds and others described in the book in order to make
it, too, part of the “round world that goes around and around.” If, as Stein
claims in her final “Epilogue,” “There is nothing historical about this book
except the state of mind,” she asks that the reader bring with him that “state
of mind,” that he impose historicity upon her flat fiction to comprehend the
significance of the author’s and characters’ observations.
When Angel Harper/Hitler becomes 44, for example, the year would have
been (given Hitler’s birth year of 1889) 1933, an important year for Hitler: in
that year he was named Chancellor of the Reich, which, in turn, allowed him to
gain control over the German police. On February 27 that same year, The
Reichstag was set afire, which, with Hindenberg’s support, led to the
suspension of basic rights and permitted detention without trial. In March of
that year, Hitler’s German National People’s Party acquired the largest number
of seats in parliament, and. along with the “Enabling Act,” transformed
Hitler’s government into a legal dictatorship.
An even longer chapter is devoted to Angel Harper at age forty-six
(128), Hitler’s 1935, the year the people of the Saarland voted to unite with
Germany and its Fürher expanded the Wehrmacht; relationships between Jews and
Aryans were outlawed. At forty-seven (133), Hitler reoccupied the Saarland,
breaking the Versailles Treaty of World War I. He sent troops to Spain to
support General Franco.
As the situation becomes worse and worse, as I said, more and more time
is given over to each year of Angel Harper’s life. Quite clearly, Stein is
paralleling her character’s increasing fears with the flurry of events
surrounding Hitler and his Third Reich. By the time he becomes fifty-one
(1940), the year Germany attacked France, conquered Luxembourg, Netherlands,
and Belgium, nearly everything in Mrs. Reynolds life has stopped:
…in every way it was a
day in which Angel Harper was more
fifty-one than he had
been then it was time that trains stopped
puffing and that chairs
were not there to sit in and that hens
stopped laying eggs and
when cows saw snow it excited them
and they jumped around
and perhaps some of them broke their
leg. Angel Harper was
fifty-on and there was no longing no
longing for anything.
The world in motion has become
almost dead, a world of stasis.
Contrary to the forces of Angel Harper, however, are two major
dynamisms. The first is the vague and distant (he is after all, as Mrs. Reynolds notes, “a foreigner”) presence of
Joseph Lane. As Axelrod has observed, if one supposed, given Stein’s “sometimes
conservative personal politics,” Stein might focus on Lane/Stalin’s evil
capacities, through the persona Mrs. Reynolds she surprisingly sees him to be
in opposition to Harper, arguing at one point, “It is very nice and quiet of
him to go on…and Mrs. Reynolds gave a sigh of relief” (237)—passages, which
Axelrod points out, clearly “refer to Soviet successes on the eastern front
beginning in late 1941.”
The second opposing force to Harper/Hitler comes from Mrs. Reynolds’
belief in predictions and prophesies, in particular the somewhat surprising
prognostication of the seventh century Saint Odile. It is clear that, as she
says of her heroine, Stein was not so interested in the Catholic convictions of
Saint Odile and others, but found their holiness to lie in their faith
expressed through their visions of the future, their commitment to the future
through the evidence of their predictions:
To prophesy for years is
more difficult than to prophesy for months.
This is perfectly well
known. She said spiders can exaggerate but
months and days. She was
fairly fortunate because after all prophecies
do come true yes they do.
As world events grow more and more
dire throughout the book, the years of Harper’s life growing into longer and
longer events outweighing the daily comings and goings of the Reynolds, that
figure’s belief in the saint’s seventh-century prediction permits her to grow
stronger in the face of current events.
Saint Odile had said,
listen to me my brother, I have seen the terror
in forests and mountains
where the Germans shall be called the most
war-like people of the
earth.
It will happen that
the time will come when a war the most terrible
war in the world will
happen and mothers will weep for their children
and will not be consoled.
From the Danube the
war will commence and will be a horrible war
on earth, on the sea and
even in the air, and warriors will rise in the
air to seize stars to
throw them down upon cities and make them the
cities burst into flames.
The patron saint of the blind, Odile of Alsace was born (c. 662-c.730)
at Monte Sainte-Odile. Born blind, she was rejected by her father Etichon and
sent away from her family’s wealthy home to be raised in Burgundy by peasants.
At a nearby monastery, an angel appeared to her, baptizing her Odile, whereupon
she recovered her sight. When her younger brother, Hughes, heard of her
recovery, he brought her home again, so enraging his father that the elder
killed his son. Odile revived her brother, and escaped, hiding from her father
who chased after her, in a cave. When he attempted to follow her flight, the
cliff face gave way, injuring him and forcing him to turn away, thus
establishing her as a kind of proto-feminist figure in church history.
Odile evidently made several prophesies, mostly about local events; but
the one referred to by Mrs. Reynolds is believed to speak of the German’s
defeat in 1941, when the eternal city of Rome will burn, and the Huns will be
forced to fight a new army that will come from across an ocean (55).*****
By the end of Mrs. Reynolds,
although still unsure of the precise date in which the terrible events will
end, the heroine is so convinced of the Saint’s predictions that she serves
almost as a proselytizer for Odile’s predictions of the future, sharing her
knowledge with nearly everyone with whom she meets. By the year in which Angel
Harper is fifty-two, Mrs. Reynolds, convinced in Odile’s prediction, is certain
that “he is nearly through.”
Accordingly, Stein asks that just as the reader has infused the book
with an historical reality, so too must he bring to it a faith that might
justify Mrs. Reynolds’ belief in what lies ahead in order to make certain that
Harper, like Hitler, is not “fifty-five” alive.******
It is not enough to simply focus, as have previous critics, on Mrs.
Reynolds’ life as depicted in the fiction, in short, but, as I argue, Stein
asks that we direct our attention to the world outside the fiction, which
includes the historical facts of Hitler’s rule and the religiously-inspired
divinations of St. Odile. By centering her fiction on both history and faith,
Stein illuminates what first appears as a flat, one-dimensional reality,
projecting it somewhat like a folded image in a pop-up card, creating a
three-dimensional perspective.
What Axelrod’s and my own readings also make quite clear, finally, is
that attending to Mrs. Reynolds helps
one to perceive a Gertrude Stein who—far different from the one hazily
described by writers such as Janet Malcolm in her rather scurrilous study Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice (2007) and
who stands apart from the even more disparaging attack on Stein by Barbara Will
in Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude
Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and the Vichy Dilemma (2011), as well as behaving far
differently from the figure described by numerous other
rumor-mongers—empathically expressed a strong hatred for Nazism in her writing
of the period, values that are just as apparent in her sensitive dialogue with
American soldiers in her Brewsie and
Willie that followed. If in Paris
France Stein seems to be attempting to keep her mind off of the horrible
realities hovering over her, in Mrs.
Reynolds she and her heroine squarely face those horrors of what she admits
has tragically resulted in “so many deaths.”
_____
*I was
equally pleased again by the collage I had created for the cover of that book
(under the pseudonym of my hyperactive designer, Katie Messborn), a Matisse
painting of a woman surrounded by geraniums and a floral patterned swathe of
cloth, witnessing from a large, American-like picture window, a meeting of
Hitler and Stalin (cut from National
Geographic) with an image of a small plane pasted above their heads. The
purple from which I cut the exaggeratedly looping drapes was almost the exact
purple Matisse had used in other elements of his domestic scape. I still think
it perfectly catches the feeling of Stein’s work, with its mix of everyday
living, fading fashion (the swathe of cloth seems to be falling from where it
has been pinned above a painting), and the menacing figures in profile in
seeming walking distance from the faceless woman entrapped within. In a
completely unconscious manner I took the one-dimensional decorative patterns of
Matisse and, by adding an historical photograph, transformed into an encounter
between the ordinary daily flatness of life with a three-dimensional
perspective of history.
**Presumably
the “peace” of which Stein is writing is the end of World War I. In actuality,
the armistice that ended that War was on Monday (“the eleventh hour of the
eleventh day of the eleventh month”), but we can forgive Stein’s carrying it
over until the next day, perhaps the day when she first heard the news. The
same war, however, is generally cited as having begun on a Tuesday, July 28,
1914, just as she claims in Mrs. Reynolds.
***”Blooming artichokes,” in fact,
are thistles, and have little to do with Jerusalem artichokes (Helianthus tuberosus), which are the
roots of plants related to Sunflowers. The name bears no relationship to the
city of Jerusalem, but derives instead from the Italian word girasole because of the plants’
similarity to the garden sunflower (the word literally meaning “sunflower
artichoke”), which somehow became corrupted in English to the word “Jerusalem.”
Yet the dream of Mrs. Reynolds bears a great deal of resemblance to the Ulysses passage. However, one might
observe that if it is a literary reference, it would be one of a very few in
all of Stein’s writing.
****As far-fetched as this may
sound, such an allusion to cinema would have again tied Stein to the Jewish
issues very much at the center of that film. Similarly, only a few pages later
(121), a guest in Mrs. Reynold’s house, Valerie Harland, jokes, “To be or not
to be Angel Harper,” in response to which everyone laughs. This may simply be a
joke based on the Hamlet speech, but it might also refer to Ernst Lubitsch’s
1942 satire To Be or Not to Be, in
which Jack Benny portrays Hitler. Clearly, both of my statements are pure
speculation. There is no evidence of which I am aware that Stein saw either of
these movies or even heard of them. It does not change Stein’s heroine’s clear
abhorrence of Mr. Reynolds’ brother, William, his wife, and others like him.
*****Throughout the quiet and
patient Mr. Reynolds is associated with the US in his numerous comments about
what Stein calls “the romance of America.” See pages 58-59.
******A translation of the Odile
prophesy I found on the internet reads:
"There will come a time when war
will break out, more terrible than all other wars combined, which have ever
visited mankind. A horrible warrior will unleash it, and his adversaries will
call him Antichrist. All nations of the earth will fight each
other in this war. The fighters will rise up to the heavens to take the stars
and throw them on the cities, to set ablaze the buildings and to cause immense
devastations. Oceans will lie between the great warriors, and the monsters of
the sea, terrified by everything that happens on or under the sea, will flee to
the deep. Battles of the past will only be skirmishes compared to the battles
that will take place, since blood will flow in all directions.
“The earth will shake from the violent fighting. Famine and
pestilence will join the war. The nations will then cry ‘Peace, peace,’ but
there will be no peace. Thrice will the sun rise over the heads of the
combatants, without having been seen by them. But afterwards there will be
peace, and all who have broken peace will have lost their lives. On a single
day more men will have been killed than the catacombs of Rome have ever held.
Pyres will be erected greater than the greatest city, and people will ascend
the highest mountains to praise God, and nobody will want to make war anymore.
Strange signs will appear in the skies: both horns of the moon will join the
cross. Happy will be those who will have survived the war, since the pleasures
of life will begin again, and the sun will have a new brilliance...
"Woe to those who, in those days, do not fear the
Antichrist, for he is the father of those who are not repelled by crime. He
will arouse more homicides and many people will shed tears over his evil
customs. Men will set themselves one against the other and at the end will want
to re-establish order. Some will try to do so, but this will not succeed and
thus will end up even worse off than before! But if things will have reached
the summit and if the hand of man can no longer do anything, it will be put in
the hands of Him, who can send down a punishment so terrible that it will not
have been seen before. God has already sent the Flood, but he has sworn never
to send one again. What he will do will be something unexpected and
terrible."
*******Although Stein scholars (Ulla
Dydo and others) report that Stein completed Mrs. Reynolds in 1942, if you follow the years of Angel Harper’s
life which the fiction describes, the work indeed does end, as did the real
war, in 1945, with Harper/Hitler’s death. It is apparent that Stein went back
and revised these sections later.
Los Angeles, September 5, 2014
Reprinted from EXPLORINGfictions (September 2014) and PIP Poetry Blog (January 2015).
.jpg)
