Indeterminacy, a nice John Cage site with 186 of his stories. [what a namedropper!]
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Meeting Gertrude Stein . . . a miscellany of first encounters:
...I spent an hour in the famous studio of Gertrude Stein, with Miss Stein and Miss Toklas, surrounded by countless paintings of Picasso and Matisse. Gerty was very pleasant and very voluble, and when she got around to trying to sell me the 4 or 5 hundred copies she had left of her early books (published by herself with the imprint "Plain Editions"), she reminded me very much of Edna Ferber. While this negotiation was in progress, Miss Toklas' imposing mustachio quivered with emotion, the while she interposed nervous comments intended to help drive the bargain home...
...
Gertrude had great natural charm, tremendous charisma. Marvelous head. Those wonderful flashing eyes. A deep, firm voice. So I couldn't help but be very much impressed by her at times, except that often she'd erupt with crazy ideas. She thought Hitler was a great man ... this before the war, of course, but how a Jewess could be attracted to such a notion at any time is difficult to understand. She was certainly a woman of strong opinions -- indeed to the point of megalomania. She felt she had influenced everyone. We had a big fight one day when I mentioned I was reading Proust. She said, "How can you read junk like that? Don't you know, J., that Proust and Joyce both copied their work from The Making of Americans?" She finally cooled on me. I simply didn't accept everything she said. That was disrespectful.
...
"You know the Big Four in American literature, don't you?" she went on. "Ending with me?" Before I could express my ignorance she answered her question. . "There is a natural line of descent. Poe to Whitman to Henry James to myself. I am the last. The only living one."
... my God, I suddenly thought, I have landed in the presence of a megalomaniac.
...
She could not think politically at all. Thus she assured me: "Hitler will never really go to war. He is not the dangerous one. You see, he is the German romanticist. He wants the illusion of victory and power, the glory and glamour of it, but he could not stand the blood and fighting involved in getting it. No, Mussolini -- there's the dangerous man, for he is an Italian realist. He won't stop at anything." She did not understand Fascism; she did not understand that the moods and imperatives of great mass movements are far stronger and more important than the individuals involved in them. She knew persons, but not people.
