Introduction

Six years before her profile landed on the cover of the September 11, 1933 issue of Time magazine, Stein’s reflections upon fame, audience, and public visibility appeared in the pages of Kenneth Macpherson’s avant-garde film journal, Close-Up: “There is no difference between what is seen and why I am a dream a dream of their being usually famous for an indifference to the rest … I am delightful and very well perfectly well disposed to be observed.”

The distinction between Time and Close-Up could hardly be more pronounced: one, representative of mass-market American media and modern advertising, the other bringing “theory and analysis; no gossip” to a coterie of sophisticated readers. The change of venues is significant, for in many ways, the years between her appearance in the two publications saw her incipient emergence as a figure much more “seen” than read, an author of iconic popularity with persistent literary and commercial obscurity. Describing its subject as “[w]idely ridiculed and seldom enjoyed … least-read and most-publicized,” the Time article foregrounds the compromise that attended her growing public identity. While in many ways Stein’s appearance on Time’s cover – its caption reading “Gertrude Stein: My sentences do get under their skin…” – marks her entry into the pantheon of cultural icons, it also recalls the cravings for attention and visibility that characterize her two-part Close-Up contribution. In this piece, titled “Three Sitting Here,” the eagerness for recognition – to be “seen,” “to be observed” – expressed as it is through her “insistent narrative” style produces something of a narcissist’s treatise. Articulating her desire for an audience that “find[s] her charming,” the self-portrait could not predict that her status as an icon of literary modernism would forever be at odds with her longing to write without concern for audience, as she put it, “indifferen[t] to the rest.”