Wednesday, July 28, 2021

Milton Mayer on Mortimer Adler and Gertrude Stein

Preferred Citation: Mayer, Milton. Robert Maynard Hutchins: A Memoir. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1993 1993. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft4w10061d

Part Three, Ch. 11, pp. 109-09

On one immortal occasion—immortalized by, among others, Gertrude Stein—Hutchins invited Gertrude and Alice B. Toklas to dinner at the president's house at Chicago. Gertrude's version of her encounter with Mert (whom Hutchins had also invited with deviltry prepense) is recorded in her Everybody's Autobiography . It begins with her asking Hutchins what ideas are important and Hutchins' handing her a list of the books he and Adler were teaching in their honors course. She observes that none of them was originally written in English, and Hutchins (according to her) replies that there have been no ideas expressed in English. She replies that she gathers that in his view there are no ideas that are not sociological or governmental, and he says, "Well, are there?"

"Well yes I said. Government is the least interesting thing in human life, creation and the expression of that creation is a damn sight more interesting, yes I know and I began to get excited yes I know, naturally you are teachers and teaching is your occupation and naturally what you call ideas are easy to teach and so you are convinced that they are the only ideas but the real ideas are not the relation of human beings as groups but a human being to himself inside him and that is an idea that is more interesting than humanity in groups, after all the minute that there are a lot of them they do not do it for themselves but somebody does it for them and that is a darn sight less interesting. Then Adler began and I have forgotten what the detail of it was but we were saying violent things to each other and I was telling him that anybody could tell by looking at him that he was a man who would be singularly unsusceptible to ideas that are created within oneself that he would take to either inside or outside regulation but not to creation, and Hutchins was saying well if you can improve upon what we are doing I challenge you to do it take our class next week and I said of course I will and then Adler said something and I was standing next to him and violently telling him and everybody was excited and the maid came and said Madame the police. Adler went a little white and we all stopped and then burst out laughing. Fanny Butcher had arranged that Alice Toklas and I should go off that evening in the homicidal squad and they had come and there they were waiting. Well we said good-night and we went off with the policemen."[2]

All of Gertrude Stein's versions are unauthorized versions—as she herself would have been quick to say. There is another unauthorized, but widely attested, version (by the other dinner guests) of her "standing next to him and violently telling him and everybody was excited." This version has it that the violence was beyond telling, with the excited poet hitting the excited prosist on the head with her fist (she was taller enough than he to do it) and saying, "Young man, you like to win arguments. I won't argue with you any more. You fail to hold my attention."

2. Gertrude Stein, Everybody's Autobiography (New York: Random House, 1937), pp. 205-7

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