Gertrude Stein (Critical Lives) Read online

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  Gertrude Stein

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  By Lucy Daniel

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  Reaktion Books

  Published by Reaktion Books Ltd

  33 Great Sutton Street

  London EC1V 0DX, UK

  www.reaktionbooks.co.uk

  First published 2009

  Copyright © Lucy Daniel 2009

  All rights reserved

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

  Printed and bound in Great Britain

  by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, Wiltshire

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Daniel, Lucy Jane.

  Gertrude Stein. – (Critical lives)

  1. Stein, Gertrude, 1874–1946 – Criticism and interpretation.

  I. Title II. Series

  818.5’209-DC22

  ISBN: 978 1 86189 516 5

  Contents

  Cover

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  Introduction

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Selected Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  Photo Acknowledgements

  References

  Illustrations

  Writing, posed in front of her portrait, 1914, photographed by Alvin Langdon Coburn.

  Jo Davidson, Gertrude Stein, 1922, bronze.

  Gertrude Stein, aged four.

  Stein, the medical student, late 1890s.

  Stein, with skull and microscope, late 1890s.

  Outside 27 rue de Fleurus, c. 1907.

  Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein, 1906, oil on canvas.

  The salon at 27 rue de Fleurus, c. 1912.

  Stein in characteristic pose, 1905.

  Félix Vallotton, Gertrude Stein, 1907, oil on canvas.

  Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein, 1922.

  Stein with dogs.

  Working for the American Fund for French Wounded.

  The ‘Picasso chairs’, embroidered by Alice.

  Marie Laurencin, Group of Artists, 1908, oil on canvas.

  Sitting for Jo Davidson, photographed by Man Ray, 1922.

  Francis Picabia, Gertrude Stein, 1933.

  Stein and Picasso in Stein’s garden at Bilignin, c. 1930.

  The cover of The Autobiography, originally published in 1933 by Harcourt Brace. Photographed by Man Ray.

  Four Saints in Three Acts, 1934.

  The window of Gimbel Brothers’ department store, New York, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1934.

  Gertrude and Alice on the radio, 1934.

  Florine Stettheimer’s invitation to hear her fellow hostess speak.

  Gertrude Stein as a puppet in Identity by Donald Vestal, Detroit Institute of Arts, 1936.

  Stein’s identity papers.

  Feeding the GIs.

  A window display devoted to Stein, 1946.

  Red Grooms, Gertrude, 1975, colour lithograph and collage on paper mounted on paperboard.

  Gertrude Stein with teleprinter, 1934.

  Gertrude Stein in old age.

  Writing, posed in front of her portrait, 1914, photographed by Alvin Langdon Coburn.

  Introduction

  The monumental presence of Gertrude Stein presides over New York’s Bryant Park, serenely overlooking the New York Public Library, in the form of the sculpture by Jo Davidson first cast in Paris in 1922. Sitting in characteristic pose, pensive, relaxed, taking in the world, on the verge of laughter, she seems to represent a little bit of Montmartre transported to Midtown Manhattan. An image of Left Bank bohemia, the American in Paris has also become a Parisian in America.

  What lies behind that burnished, Sphinx-like creation? The image of herself Stein projected in her work encompassed many contradictions central to modern intellectual life. Stein was a fierce patriot, and much of her work was about defining American national character, but she lived most of her life in Paris where, part-snob, part-democrat, she became the hostess of the city’s most important artistic salon. She was a scientist who became a literary giant, and a serious formal experimenter who ended up a bestseller and a literary celebrity. Seen as a feminist and a lesbian icon, she was conservative in her political views; she was obsessed by middle-class values, but was also the self-appointed queen of the avant-garde.

  She was perhaps the most important experimental writer of the century. Her claim to be the most experimental experimental writer is also closely contested. She produced, from the early 1900s onwards, work of such radical experiment that readers doubted not only her sanity but whether what she produced could even be classified as writing. In the 1930s she was reborn through a series of populist auto-hagiographies. From the beginning, the events of her life found their way wholesale into her work, while even her own works became her subject matter, and were enshrined as events in her written version, her legend, of her life.

  Even before her groundbreaking autobiographies, her personality was overbearing. It was a personality and a flamboyant life story that overshadowed, and still does overshadow, her work. ‘Remarks are not literature’, she once told Hemingway, but much of her literary reputation was erected on the rickety foundations of her own ‘remarks’. She was hoisted by her own petard by the brilliance of her self-invention. It was Edmund Wilson who wrote in 1934 that though ‘her influence has always been felt at the sources of literature and art … neither the readers of modern books nor the collectors of modern painting have realized how much they owe her.’1 The same is still true today. After years of solitary toiling, extraordinarily determined — almost pigheaded — adherence to her own beliefs in the theory of composition and, it is true, association with the greatness of others, Stein eventually achieved the fame she had always hungered for. This was somewhat crassly summed up in the realization of two lifelong dreams, an entry in Who’s Who and publication in The Atlantic Monthly (two ambitions all the more interesting, considering the outlandishness of both her style and her personality, for being so conventional). Stein wrote a bewildering number and baffling variety of works; there are 571 separate named pieces in the Yale catalogue of her work. But, though her work spans half a century and comprises novels, poetry, portraits, stories, essays, children’s books, scientific work, librettos, memoirs, plays, autobiography and lectures, as well as some work that seems genuinely unclassifiable, she remains both one of the most easily recognizable and one of the least-known of the century’s great literary figures.

  Her retrospective embellishments, stylizations and reiterations of momentous occasions in her own life lit up a dazzling image of the separate lives of Stein: the icon, the salonière, the patron of modern art, and the private artist, the solitary writer. ‘I am writing for myself and strangers’, she declared. Among the slew of memoirs of Paris in the 1920s, none is complete without at least a passing sketch of Stein and her Saturday night gatherings at the rue de Fleurus, and the real events are misted over in anecdote and vendetta. The problem for Stein’s readers is often how to free her from the facade of her own making. And there is a separate story of how the cult of Gertrude Stein was created, both by herself and her constellation of admirers.

  Jo Davidson, Gertrude Stein, 1922, bronze.

  One

  For anyone familiar with the bravado of Gertrude Stein’s autobiographical voices, her legendary personal charisma and her stoical declarations of her own genius, repeated like a mant
ra, it comes as a shock that she chose to sum up her life, while reflecting on Darwin’s theory of evolution, as a realization of ‘the fact that stars were worlds and that space had no limitation and … civilizations came to be dead … and I had always been afraid always would be afraid’.1 Death and extinction loomed over her when she thought about her childhood: a darkness in Darwin’s vision that was, she saw, transferred to the intellectual climate of her youth, bound in with her own adolescent melancholy, her fear of sudden death and ‘dissolution’.2 The bombast of what Djuna Barnes called her ‘monstrous ego’3 was partly a way of covering up that loneliness and fear, as if by a series of mesmerizing, entrancing tricks she could distract people from her insecurity. In her grandest work, The Making of Americans, a book which started as a history of her own German Jewish family and their arrival in America, this would mutate into a megalomaniac urge to catalogue all possible variations of human life; in her need to leave a legacy to future generations, nothing would do other than knowing everything, and always being right.

  When Gertrude was a little girl, she overheard a conversation that would still make her shudder when she remembered it a lifetime later. Gertrude, the youngest of five siblings, was idly listening to her parents’ conversation when she gleaned the fact that another sister had been stillborn, and another brother had died very young. Her father was adamant that he had only ever wanted five children. Had it not been for the deaths of these two babies, buried on a chilly hillside in Pennsylvania, Gertrude Stein and her beloved brother Leo would never have been born.4 In this childhood moment of devastating realization — young Gertrude’s sudden sense of herself as a cosmological fluke, clawing her way into life through the jaws of destiny — seemed to be contained, for the adult Stein, the seeds of her lifelong fascination with personality, character and identity. She would live forever with the fear of her own insignificance. And from then on, it seemed, she was also intent on creating ‘a life’ for herself.

  At least, that’s the way she told it. For this childhood memory is but one of many paradigmatic scenarios with which Stein built up her own legend, in which truth and self-invention often overlapped. Gertrude was fully aware of both the value and the artifice of presenting her life as a series of witty and eccentric tableaux. From an early age she was in pursuit of ‘la gloire’. ‘Nobody really lives who has not been well written about’, she declared in a memoir written near the end of her life.5 With a Barnumesque instinct for self-promotion, she bound up anecdotes, bon mots, catchphrases and slogans into her personal myth. She even had her most famous line, ‘rose is a rose is a rose is a rose’, embroidered on her table-linen, printed on the china and embossed as a logo on her stationery. After the phenomenal success, in 1933, of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein’s first full-length work of pure autobiography, ‘God what a liar she is!’ wrote her by then estranged brother, Leo.6

  Her autobiographies cast only the occasional backwards glance that reaches as far as childhood. The state of childhood was disconcerting to the adult Stein; she wrote about the impossibility of envisioning herself as a child without irreparable damage not only to her self-image but to her image of the universe. It destroyed her sense of ‘the everlasting’; it made ‘a broken world’.7 Gertrude, in fact, succeeded in being born on 3 February 1874 to Daniel and Amelia Stein in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, a town which no longer exists, having been engulfed by Pittsburgh. In many ways Stein, the arch-modernist, was a product of the nineteenth century. She envisioned herself as born into an age of science and warfare. Darwin was ‘the great man of the period that framed my youth’.8 It was selling Union uniforms during the Civil War that had turned her father’s family from pedlars into wealthy manufacturers who owned a flourishing wholesale business. In her final book, Stein wrote: ‘I was always in my way a Civil War veteran.’9 Born less than a decade after the end of the Civil War, its stories surrounded her as she grew up. Her birthday was almost the centenary of the birth of the USA, and she would always proudly characterize it as the country of youth and innovation.

  ‘It has always seemed to me a rare privilege, this, of being an American, a real American, one whose tradition it has taken scarcely sixty years to create.’10 Stein’s new America would always be defined by its marginal inhabitants: the alien, the immigrant, the rebel. Another family legend, worn with repetition: a journey to the new world fraught with turnings back, and multiple beginnings. Stein’s paternal grandparents had arrived in America in 1841 from Germany; they belonged to what became known as the ‘old immigration’, from the countries of central and northern Europe. Her grandmother had led them there with a wagonload of their possessions. At one point on the journey to the ship bound for America she had looked back to find her husband had stopped in the road and turned homeward; she had to go back and urge him to continue trudging towards their family’s glittering American future. Even with the self-conscious portentousness that accompanied so many similar journeys to the new world, Hannah and Michael Stein could never have known that their granddaughter would one day transform this story into her own historical beginning, a moment of epic struggle and conquest that became an American Genesis; that they would become symbolic progenitors of her vision of a new America — ‘the old people in a new world, the new people made out of the old’.11

  But in 1875, when that granddaughter was not yet a year old, her American family set sail back to the old world, back to the Europe of their fathers, and settled in Vienna, for the reason that Daniel Stein, that incontrovertible but easily distracted patriarch, for the time being had got it into his head that his children should be educated according to the best European methods.

  In adult life Gertrude Stein would become a mesmerizing, magnetic speaker whose mellow Californian tones were remembered by many who met her, whose conversation was what created her fabulous reputation; her talk drew the crowds to her Saturday evening salons, when all the while her written work lay stacked unread in cupboards, and she was hard pressed to find anyone to publish it. Ebullient, garrulous from the start, the baby Gertrude first chattered in German. When she tried to speak English her bizarre sentences caused great hilarity among her family and she would become quite cross. These were only the first of many occasions on which her attempts at communicating her ideas would be misunderstood, and indeed laughed at.

  Frequently in her autobiographies she made a point of emphasizing (strange and unnecessary though it might seem) that English was her mother tongue, as if to preempt detractors who thought that it was not. In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas she framed the same anxiety as a humorous anecdote: the one about the time she was paying for Three Lives to be published. An envoy, she claimed, came to see her from the publishers in New York; believing English must be her second language, they were concerned she had an insufficient grasp of its grammatical rules. When she answered the door the young man was embarrassed to find that she was American. Then, she explained, she had to persuade him to print the book the way she had written it, as she had done it that way on purpose. The story only really works with the knowledge that Stein by that time knew she could trust her readers to believe that Three Lives was a prescient masterpiece, of all her works the most widely trumpeted as a great and lasting accomplishment.

  Back in 1878, when Gertrude was four years old, the family moved from Vienna to Paris for a year. She would later recall very little of this first visit to her adopted hometown. But when, during the First World War, the streets were empty of vehicles, there seemed to be something in the atmosphere that she remembered: the smell of horse manure, she thought perhaps it was. She did not remember but loved to hear the story of a Parisian shopping spree; the five-year-old Gertrude returned triumphant to the USA decked out with a new sealskin coat, gloves and riding costume, and the proud owner of two talismanic objects that foretold her future scientific career: a microscope and a multi-part French history of zoology.

  Gertrude Stein, aged four.

  Her father having abandon
ed the particular educational theories that had taken them to Europe, the family’s new home was in Oakland, California, a wealthy suburb of San Francisco. After a short stay in Baltimore, the trip to California became in her recollections an epic journey across the open country with vistas of ‘Indians’, a magical, perennially replenished hamper of food, and her sister’s bright red ostrich plumed hat surreally blowing out of the window of the train into the desert. Her father was this type of man: he stopped the train to go and get it.12

  Daniel Stein had not come to California as a prospector, as the generation before him had; he was already a self-made man, but he headed with his family out West as a pioneer of sorts. He invested in the San Francisco Stock Exchange and in street railroads, as well as property. Energetic, volatile, argumentative, a sympathizer with the northern cause during the Civil War, and an espouser of healthy outdoor living, he wanted his children to be ‘individual and independent’.13 But at the same time he placed restrictions on Gertrude’s liberty which she resented. He was progressive, but a faddist, impatient, capricious and overbearing, particularly towards the meek and gentle Milly, his wife. To his children he could sometimes be frightening. ‘Fathers are depressing’, Gertrude succinctly, and repeatedly, noted.14 His domineering attitude to her was a driving force in her desire to overcome heredity and find a different basis for the formation of character: ‘living down the tempers we are born with’. Her idea of parenthood was, like many of her ideas of human relationships, rooted in antagonism. A scribbled note from 1903 which eventually became the epigraph of The Making of Americans emblazoned the late Victorian theme of intergenerational discord across her work:

  Once an angry young man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. ‘Stop!’ cried the groaning old man at last, ‘Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree’.15

  Cycles of aggression and repetition pervade her work. In The Making of Americans the relation between father and children involves ‘mostly fighting’.16 The father is angry, and psychologically violent. She refers to the children as ‘big struggling children’, with Darwinian significance, while the ‘little gentle mother’ is one of the casualties of evolution, who simply ‘died away’.17 In the novel Stein cast herself as Martha Hersland, the type of a vigorous, healthy American girl, perhaps in reaction to the memory of her mother’s weakness and ailing health.