Gertrude Stein (Critical Lives)

by Lucy Daniel

  In 1908 Stein had written the first of her abstract portraits in words. The idea appealed to her because it did not require the pretence of a story. A portrait is only a snapshot, only concerned with the moment it describes — not a narrative, a story or a history. Later Stein would talk about trying to capture ‘a space in time filled with moving’ in her work. Portraiture would remain a major concept in her writing right up until and including the Autobiography. Between 1908 and 1912 she wrote 25 portraits. The first one of an individual was ‘Ada’, which was about Alice Toklas, and the portrait ‘Sacred Emily’ is the first appearance of Stein’s famous catchphrase: ‘Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose’.

  While she made her friends and acquaintances the objects of her study, she was herself a popular subject for portraits; as well as Picasso’s, there was, in 1907, the portrait of Stein by Félix Vallotton, and in the same year she was sculpted by Elie Nadelman. Later she was also pleased when Alvin Langdon Coburn, a prominent American photographer, took her photograph for a collection on remarkable women. It was the first time a professional photographer had asked her to pose for him.35 And she very much enjoyed posing.

  Stein claimed to have an artist’s eye but not his hand.36 In summer 1909 she first saw a Cubist painting, and returned Picasso’s compliment by writing a word portrait of him. She was seeing things in the same simultaneous, dynamic and contradictory way that she described as Picasso’s vision in this portrait. Stein’s word portraits of Matisse, Picasso and Isadora Duncan, among others, were attempts to render a subject while allowing the play of ideas and sensations around the writer also to enter the composition. The thing that remains constant is Stein’s — the artist’s — vision (this was an idea Matisse had expounded).

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

  This was the beginning of what is commonly seen as Stein’s ‘difficult’ work. The short, assertive sentences Stein used here were incontrovertible, and therefore a form of defence against criticism, of which she was by this stage getting plenty from her brother Leo. There was a further rejection of emotion. Her practice is all about control, not lack of control, although fragmentation has replaced narrative. She was making her writing more and more precise by depriving things of their historical, literary or even syntactical context.

  A writer surrounded by painters, it was easy for Stein to draw parallels between the two disciplines, and the ‘scribbled and lined and dirty paper’ that was a common medium. Picasso liked using paper in his collages, such as Au Bon Marché (1913), which coincided with Stein’s portrait ‘Flirting at the Bon Marché’ (the Bon Marché was the department store where she loved to window-shop); he also used calligraphy. Seeing her writing as an object, like a painting, was an appealing idea; the surface of the words was becoming more important than their meaning. This technique was interestingly connected to but divergent from that used by Apollinaire and what would later be called ‘concrete poetry’. Although she was using painterly metaphors and discussing the graphic elements of her work, her interest was in language and words, not in, for example, the visual impact of their arrangement on the page.37 Her work received important recognition when Alfred Stieglitz, the young leading light of photography and rue de Fleurus regular, published her portraits side by side with Picasso’s in his magazine Camera Work in 1912. Stieglitz also pollinated the flowers of New York society with news of Stein and her work.

  As well as taking her cues from artistic methods, Stein’s work in turn influenced the way painters thought about their work. There was a profusion of ‘object portraits’ in the art of the Stieglitz crowd who visited Stein’s atelier in the 1910s and ’20s, including Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp, in the form of collages of found objects, pieces of sculpture and portraits made up of typographic elements.38 Marsden Hartley wrote about the influence she had on him, and Charles Demuth, the American painter, was inspired by Stein’s word portraits to create a series of eight ‘poster portraits’ of his friends, based not on physical likenesses but images with which the painter associated them, including an homage to Stein entitled ‘Love, Love, Love’. Stein wrote about Marsden Hartley in her play IIIIIIIIII, which was circulated at Stieglitz’s 291 gallery in New York when Hartley exhibited there in 1914. (One of the miniature ‘portraits’ of Hartley which the play contains reads, for example: ‘Point, face, canvas, toy, struck off, sense or, weighcoach, soon beak on, so suck in, and an iron.’39 ) In 1916 Hartley produced One Portrait of One Woman, in which Stein is represented by a large flame or halo; several lesser halos or candles cluster around her hearth.40 The young painters were fond of laying their tributes at Stein’s feet (or in Picasso’s case the reverse, as his Homage to Gertrude was intended for the ceiling above her bed).

  This new kind of portraiture was the context in which Stein’s ‘portraits’ existed — although she had begun writing them over a decade earlier. The words she used were also ‘found objects’, often obscure impressions of everyday life or snippets of conversation, taken from their ordinary surroundings or functions in order to create another reality. There are also collages and found objects in the work of Picasso, Juan Gris and Braque, all of whose work the Steins collected; for example, Picasso’s Still Life with Calling Card and The Architect’s Table, in which Picasso painted Stein’s calling card into the composition.

  By 1908 Stein had been at the point of rejecting realism. In 1912, still trying to expunge emotion and the problem of memory and association from her work, she moved from portraiture into still life, in Tender Buttons. She started writing ‘plays’. (For her, calling something a ‘play’ was less to be constrained within the limits of genre suggested by that word than to suggest that she herself was at play when she wrote it.) Dialogue then began entering other pieces, not just the plays. She started incorporating overheard speech, and began using columns in her work. She wrote a piece called ‘One Sentence’, a misleading title for a piece that was thirty pages long (and not a sentence), and ‘Storyette’, a one-paragraph story. These were endlessly experimental years, and each new composition seemed to yield new methods. This was the most concentrated period of creativity in her life. It was a casting aside of literary decorum that coincided with her discovery of a new domestic arrangement.

  She was becoming estranged from Leo. By the 1930s, offended by the offence he took at her work, Gertrude would deny his existence. When once she happened to see him in the street, she merely nodded, then went directly home and wrote a piece called ‘She Bowed to Her Brother’. Already in 1910 another person had taken his place as the main influence in Stein’s life. When she started writing she claimed that it was for ‘myself and strangers’; now she was writing for somebody else, her perfect reader, Alice Toklas.

  Five

  Gertrude Stein and Alice Babette Toklas, the authors of their own great twentieth-century love story, found each other through an unwitting go-between. During the writing of The Making of Americans, while Stein was filling piles of notebooks with her analyses of friends and acquaintances, she pounced on Annette Rosenshine, a young woman with a hare lip, a cleft palate and a lack of social skills, who had travelled to Paris with Stein’s brother Michael and his wife Sarah. Stein used Annette as a typist and errand-runner, but also as a guinea pig for her theories on character. Every afternoon at four o’clock the girl would submit to intrusive enquiries about all aspects of her personality out of devotion and a faith in Stein’s ability somehow to cure her of her malaise, and the neuroses Stein had invented for her. She became one of her early disciples. She also let Stein peruse her personal correspondence. The letters from Annette’s San Francisco friend Alice Toklas piqued Gertrude’s interest. They told of Toklas’s flirtations with other women, her bohemian life in San Francisco, her artistic interests, her sophistication and her certainty that coming to Europe would be the break for freedom that she needed. For nigh on a year Annette showed Alice’s letters to Gertrude. So when, Alice barely having stepped off the boat, Stein and
Toklas met in 1907 Stein already knew this strange fellow Californian who seemed half-bluestocking, half-gypsy. Stein, perhaps calculating the demeanour which would most attract Toklas, was immediately stern with her; Alice seemed to fall instantly for Gertrude. Annette fell out of favour, and Toklas replaced her as secretary. Soon she became a regular at the Saturday nights. They took long walks together in the Bois du Boulogne. Then when they took a holiday together in Fiesole in the summer of 1908, Gertrude made Alice a proposal, and Alice accepted.

  Female marriage was not unheard of. There was a nineteenth-century precedent, particularly in ‘bohemian’ circles, which could sometimes also be recognized and accepted by wider society, and involved cohabitation, legal arrangements and one partner referring to the other as her wife.1 By 1910 Toklas had moved in to 27 rue de Fleurus as Stein’s wife. This turn of events probably led, indirectly, to the eventual departure of Leo from both the flat and the affections of his sister. But Stein’s melancholy years were over. Her dependence on Alice in her life and work had begun. They would be together for another 36 years, until Stein’s death. After that, Toklas devoted the rest of her life to polishing the public memory of Stein.

  Mabel Dodge, the socialite, memoirist and early rival for Gertrude’s affections, called Alice a ‘hand-maiden’,2 but she was far more than that, and formidable. For Stein, Toklas was both an exotic and a familiar presence. In San Francisco Toklas had met, somewhat incongruously, Jack London, and been a sometime frequenter of the city’s ‘Bohemian Club’. She had an inner grit and a determination to liberate herself.3 Her acerbic wit was well known, and of the pair she was often regarded as the better raconteuse.

  Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein, 1922.

  The iconic pairing of Stein and Toklas as one of the twentieth century’s most famous gay couples has meant a huge amount of discussion of the dynamics of Gertrude and Alice’s relationship. Following Ernest Hemingway’s sneaky revelations about the supposed overheard altercation between ‘lovey’ (Stein) and ‘pussy’ (Toklas), and its sadomasochistic hint (in his memoir A Moveable Feast), critics have speculated somewhat pruriently about the role of each woman in the relationship. Alice has been characterized as everything from a shrew to a doormat. Despite the inevitable unearthings of evidence of rows and bickering, misunderstandings, jealousies and possible infidelities over the years, Alice’s devotion to Gertrude was profound. Alice gave Gertrude every home comfort she needed and performed the roles of muse and amanuensis, lover, cook, editor and housekeeper. Gertrude’s luxury depended on Alice’s domestic devotion to her. They joked that Alice had to get everything ready before Stein emerged for the day because she couldn’t stand to see work being done. There had to be someone to do the housework in order for Stein to get on with the job of ‘being a genius’. Perhaps it is only the fact that Alice and Gertrude were both women that makes this seem remarkable. In some respects she carried out the duties of a servant; in others the discreet actions of a loving wife; sometimes she was Stein’s agent. She was content to be named in public as her ‘friend’, or her ‘secretary’. Many have suggested that Alice was the one who wielded power over Gertrude, who scolded and censured her, and chose with whom she could and could not be friends — that Alice, once crossed, was the real reason for magnanimous Gertrude’s many fallings-out. In a suggestive example, when Annette Rosenshine came back to Paris and the rue de Fleurus in 1928 to proudly show Gertrude her sculptures (twenty years after they had been intimate), Alice steered her away, abruptly and silently turning out the lights, so that Gertrude could not even see them.

  A large part of Stein’s cultural significance as a gay icon is due to her 40-year monogamous relationship with Toklas, because it was both so groundbreaking and so obvious and unembarrassed. As Terry Castle has written:

  Stein and Toklas got people used to them and to the style of human intimacy they so vividly embodied. For half a century they acted as if nothing strange had happened and everyone who met them agreed that nothing had.4

  (Although in the Paris they inhabited, behind their backs the details of everyone’s sex lives were talking points for everyone else.) It is a glossy image of an idyll which may not quite do justice to some of the prejudice the couple faced, and faced down, but there is a truth to it. They had a lot of front, but also a lot of optimism. More often than the occasional sniping, they were respected and loved, as a couple, by an extraordinarily diverse group of friends. The fact was that their relationship was more secure than those of most of Stein’s heterosexual Left Bank friends and contemporaries. Gertrude and Alice avoided being part of any lesbian clique in Paris; they did not cross-dress, nor were they melancholy misfits, nor did they fall in with the type of free-spirited Sapphic idealists epitomized by Natalie Clifford Barney and the frequenters of her ‘temple of friendship’.5 Although they were friends with Barney, and with Romaine Brooks and Radclyffe Hall, they had no interest in being part of a lesbian scene, and indeed were shocked by the behaviour of some of these groups of women.

  Virgil Thomson recounted a catty story about Stein’s lesbian ‘credentials’ within the Paris milieu. He once asked Stein and Toklas where Natalie Barney got her lovers from. Alice, who was ‘always thinking the worst’, said: ‘I think from the toilets of the Louvre Department Store.’ Gertrude was unconvinced, but her interest was piqued about who Natalie slept with. Out for a walk shortly afterwards, she bumped into a houseguest of Barney’s, who she proceeded to grill about her hostess’s sexual habits, in front of a crowd of people seated at the café Les Deux Magots. The guest went home and told Natalie about Gertrude’s ‘colossal indiscretion’. Later, at a dinner party where various renowned lesbians were being discussed, when Gertrude and Alice were mentioned, Barney announced: ‘Oh, nothing like that there at all. It’s entirely innocent.’ According to Virgil Thomson, this was Natalie’s revenge: to make Stein seem like an ingénue, and make ‘a fool of her in front of the lesbians’.6 Unlike Natalie Barney, Stein would never rely on any scandalous image of herself as lesbian, or capitalize on it in any way. In the daily narrative that she wrote of their life, Alice is her wife, and she is Alice’s husband, and that is how she saw herself.

  When Stein wrote The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in recreating the character of Alice, she seamlessly glossed over their living situation with the ladylike manners of Toklas herself; but simultaneously put it proudly on display for all to see, if they chose to look. The strategy has been alternately praised for its candour and noted for its ‘deceitfulness’. But truth and deceit were uncommonly problematic concepts for Stein in the telling of her life, mainly because she was such a great manipulator of her own public image. Having created her persona, in the 1930s she made one for Alice, too. In the telling of the Rousseau banquet, for example, the detail of their hats was paramount — it was part of the joke, the character of Alice that she was interested in hats and food, like any good wife. In most of the photography they used to illustrate The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, they were conspicuously together, a couple. It was a normalization of their relationship that was unblinking and blatant, which makes it even more curious that it was bypassed by most people who read the book. The possibility that Stein and Toklas were lovers was apparently not even something to be considered by the American public when it was published in 1933; it simply fell beneath the radar of the vast majority of readers. And yet it was there, silently proffered without embarrassment, in photographic evidence. Stein would allow no intrusion beyond what she was willing to offer in this straightforward and unexplaining way. Offering this was in fact a way of saying that there was to be no further access. She repeatedly said that people could get any answers about her life from her work; she would have been appalled at the speculation about her private life which has flooded Stein criticism.

  Although she saw herself as masculine, Stein did not cross-dress in the manner of such flamboyant Left Bank lesbians as Radclyffe Hall or the Marquise de Belboeuf. She did adopt a ‘costume’,
7 but her dress did not particularly mark out her sexual preference, as Ernest Hemingway’s apparent innocence on that point during the early stages of their friendship would seem to illustrate. Despite her fairly masculine clothes Stein was not androgynous, and she never wore trousers. Her own idealized image of herself, in the character Adele in QED, was: ‘large, abundant, full-busted and joyous’.8 Although that largeness was a conspicuous element of her public image, she was actually quite small: five foot two inches in height. There were rumours (completely unfounded) of sexual liaisons with Picasso, and Alice was very jealous of her relationship with Hemingway. For him and for other male friends, Stein was confusing, in her kaftans and waistcoats, her monk-like robes. Stein sported a combination of brown velvet and corduroy suits and skirts, brocaded waistcoats, tweeds and a succession of roguish hats that was hard to locate culturally and worn with a style that would have been hard to emulate. (Later Stein and Toklas were dressed by Pierre Balmain, that byword for French sophistication in fashion, having befriended the young man. Attending the opening of his collection with Cecil Beaton after the Second World War, they agreed not to tell people they were wearing his clothes, in case they did the up-and-coming designer a disservice.)

  Stein was charming and flirtatious, and enjoyed male attention. She liked being looked at, and relished clothes and accessories, hats and brooches in particular. What should she claim to have bought when her autobiography became a bestseller but ‘the finest coat made to order by Hermès’ — and a new collar for Basket, the poodle which was photographed almost as often as Alice, and a vital part of the Stein ménage in the public perception. (The Dutch painter Kristians Tonny even painted Basket’s portrait. Basket was succeeded by another poodle called Basket II. They also had an incestuously minded dog which they named Byron, given to them by Francis Picabia. Stein cast the light of celebrity even on the dogs around her — in one of her repetitive slogans: ‘I am I because my little dog knows me’, and in the statement that she liked to listen to her dog’s lapping of his water to find the rhythm of a sentence.) Most male accounts of Stein see her as a comforting, motherly figure. It wasn’t until 1927 that she cut her hair into the close crop that had by then become the fashion — unlike many of her contemporaries, until then she wore it long and lustrous, but usually piled up on top of her head as in Picasso’s portrait. When she finally cut her hair, Picasso chastized her for ruining his portrait of her (one wonders if she felt a certain satisfaction in doing so), and Sherwood Anderson said it made her look like a monk — a remark which pleased her.