Gertrude Stein (Critical Lives)

Gertrude

Stein

Lucy Daniel

Reaktion Books

Cover

Contents

List of Illustrations

Introduction

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Selected Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Photo Acknowledgements

References

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.

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.

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 mantra, 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.