Sublime

Hemingway offered to modify the noun with “lousy” or “lesbian,” but if anyone was ever a bitch, he said it was Gertrude Stein.

“Just that. Listen, wasn’t it Odo who said that where there’s property there’s theft?” “ ‘To make a thief, make an owner; to create crime, create laws.’

By summer Scott and Ernest were seeing more and more of each other, occasionally at the home of Gertrude Stein.

At last he made what, for him, was a conciliatory gesture, by altering his reference to Gertrude Stein, calling her a “female.” He thought that would anger her the most, and please Perkins.

She may agree with the poet Mary Oliver that “creative work needs solitude. It needs concentration. . . . It needs the whole sky to fly in, and no eye watching,” or with Gertrude Stein, who warned, “It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.”