THE GUILLOTINE: No 29: GERTRUDE STEIN

As a writer who has already been written off, Gertrude Stein may appear too easy a target. Even in her own lifetime she was a figure of fun, with her Spencer Tracy hairdo and comfily mannish build, and her cause was scarcely helped by the fact that her own high opinion of her genius was widely unshared - except, of course, by her devoted companion, Alice B Toklas.

With most literary figures about whose stature posterity is still in two minds, the question is almost always: Was X ... a great writer? With Gertrude Stein it is: Was she a writer at all? Her admirers, mostly women, have subjected her work to a rigorous feminist reading. Her detractors, mostly men, have insisted that she was the opposite of Moliere's Monsieur Jourdain - she imagined she'd been writing prose all her life and she hadn't. As for the general public, it made the book she wrote as a potboiler, her memoir The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas, a best-seller and the book she regarded as her masterpiece, The Making of Americans, a worst-seller. (Quite literally - it has, apparently, been the worst-selling book written by any household name in the 20th century.)

For a motivated reader Stein's work nevertheless does have its rewards. Again and again, if worried at for long enough, her notoriously impenetrable prose, garrulous and turgid as it can be, yields up unexpected windfalls. She may not have been the great writer she supposed herself to be but she was a superb deviser of sentences, most famously "Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose, is a rose". Why have those 13 words proved so memorable? Perhaps because they remind us of that other serenely self-sufficient cluster of monosyllables: "To be or not to be."

Single sentences, however, aren't enough to keep a writer posthumously alive, and Stein's experiments in "spatial" prose were less persuasive. She was influenced above all by her friend Picasso, whose avant-gardism she strained, with very middling success, to translate into linguistic terms, forgetting that one needs but a few minutes to study a Cubist painting and several weeks at least to wade through The Making of Americans. Ironically, then, if she does survive, it will be as the delightful memoirist of her potboilers - and, of course, as the companion of the woman who, in The Alice B Toklas Cook Book, concocted a wonderful recipe for hash fudge.