by Lucy Daniel
Questions of self-censorship arise in relation to Stein’s erotic work, which is the most stylized of all her work. When the sentence ‘This must not be put in a book’26 occurs in ‘Bonne Annee’, it seems to be a plea from Alice about leaving some parts of their private life beyond the putting of them into words. Stein was always courting Alice’s approval in her work, and Many Many Women, for example, is stunning in its resistance to readability. Is the opacity related to hiding her relationship with Alice? Was her obscurity part of a disguise? Or was the erotic element of her work simply one strand of her enjoyment of a secret richness in words? The old idea that Stein disguised her lesbianism with linguistic play has given way to the idea that she was revelling in it.
In some ways Stein was surprisingly open about her sexuality, and some of the work is a celebration of gayness. In much of Stein’s work gender is often random, ambiguous or interchangeable,27 and her use of the word ‘queer’ or ‘queerness’ in The Making of Americans, as well as her use of the word ‘gay’ in A Long Gay Book and ‘Miss Furr and Miss Skeene’ (1911, a portrait of two American painters of her acquaintance who were lesbian lovers) was provocative:
To be regularly gay was to do every day the gay thing that they did every day. To be regularly gay was to end every day at the same time after they had been regularly gay. They were regularly gay. They were gay every day. They ended every day in the same way, at the same time, and they had been every day regularly gay.28
The word ‘gay’ in 1911 was not yet generally familiar as a synonym for ‘homosexual’. However, by the time the piece was published in Vanity Fair in 1923, after which it became famous, Stein’s insistence on the ‘regularity’ of the couple’s ‘gayness’ could be said to be even more explosively loaded. But then again she could also be surprisingly coy. In The Making of Americans intimate or sexual details are skewed, hidden, locked away. While some women of her era were coming out in print, Stein trod a thin line of discretion.
Surely these new techniques were more than strategies of concealment. When she fell in love with Alice she had found an exciting new subject but she knew she couldn’t really write about it — QED had been unpublishable, inaccrochable. But QED had also been an artistic failure — Tender Buttons was a crucial work because it released her into another world where she could write about these experiences, lovingly, poetically, philosophically, sophisticatedly. And in works like ‘Lifting Belly’ she was anything but coy.
Stein’s sexuality was connected to her developing style in a complicated way. While not as simple as a lesbian code, Stein used certain words (such as ‘Caesar’, with its implied homonym ‘seize her’) in order to broach erotic subjects. ‘Ada’ was Stein’s name for Toklas in her writing. She uses rhythm and acoustic effects like this: ‘Aider, why aider why whow, whow stop touch, aider whow, aider stop …’.29 In so doing she connects verbal trickiness, puns and euphemisms, the illicit or deceptive side of grammar, with the erotic life itself. That was partly because these were love offerings, and perhaps being ‘put in a book’ was never of paramount or primary importance. In ‘Lifting Belly’ she asks ‘Can you read my print[?]’.30 Though apparently intended for publication (Stein considered everything she wrote important enough for publication — and even wanted her receipts and shopping lists to be hoarded by the archive at Yale when she deposited her papers there), they were sufficiently obscure not to arouse unwelcome intrusion into the details of their life. Or so she thought. Since her death, critics have seized on them precisely because they do seem to offer a cipher that, if only it could be broken, would provide a way of probing and interpreting the true dynamics of the Stein/Toklas relationship. By 1925 the erotic strain in her writing would run its course, and so too would this element of her style.
Stein’s ‘double life’ was more pronounced than others because she was ‘toiling in obscurity’ at the same time as basking in (minor) celebrity. Her work had so far gained little purchase on literary markets or the literary mainstream; she had miscellaneous pieces published in little magazines; people knew she was writing, but true champions of her writing were few, and those she had were ineffectual; publishers gulped at the unmarketable prospect her work represented. Leo was famously dismissive, which added to the developing rift between them.
By Spring 1913 ‘the old life was over’.31 Leo moved out, taking half the collection with him, but leaving the Picassos. When Leo left Gertrude had been living with him on and off for the best part of 40 years. The break-up, and the break-up of the gallery, made the New York Sun. As Leo moved to Florence, Picasso and others of the old crowd moved to the suburbs. By 1913 the salon no longer existed in the same way as it had in those first extraordinary years. By 1910 Leo had stopped coming and Gertrude had taken the helm. Society hostesses such as Lady Ottoline Morrell now came to see her in Paris, along with artists such as Augustus John, Jacob Epstein, Marcel Duchamp and American painters Max Weber, Joseph Stella and Charles Demuth. Wyndham Lewis came, and blast solicited a contribution from her. ‘The futurists are in town’, she wrote excitedly in 1913, as if the circus had arrived.32 ‘They have a catalogue that has a fiery introduction demolishing the old salons.’ Theirs was an iconoclasm of which she approved (though she would later denounce the Futurist worldview). ‘After all we are all modern’, she concluded her letter — there is a palpable sense of her delight at being part of a movement, the movement that would become known as modernism.
Leo’s departure coincided with the first flowering of her international fame. It was in 1913 that US interest in Stein was roused by the ministrations of her well-connected socialite friend Mabel Dodge, whom she had met in Italy and about whom she had written ‘The Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia’. Dodge was as much of an instinctive self-publicist as Stein was, and saw to it that the portrait bearing her name was distributed during the hugely publicized event that was the Armory Show, a month-long exhibition of modern art in New York, including Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase. The Steins had lent Matisse’s Blue Nude to the show, which became a succès de scandale; a copy of it was burnt along with an effigy of Matisse. Gertrude Stein was associated with this scandal, when the reprinted ‘Portrait of Mabel Dodge’, along with an essay on Stein by Dodge, hit the headlines. The papers were agog with the outlandishness of both the words and the images associated with Stein. This was her first big publicity coup. The Chicago Tribune poked fun at the Stein mystique:
I called the Canvas Cow with Cud
And hung it on the line,
Altho’ to me ’twas vague as mud,
’Twas clear to Gertrude Stein.33
‘Hurrah for gloire’, cried Stein.34 There was something innocent about Stein’s instinct for fame. There was nothing cynical about it. Throughout her life she would rely on various unpaid propagandists (Dodge, Van Vechten, Sitwell, Hemingway, Alice) who were willing to put themselves out in her service, out of personal loyalty. The ‘Portrait of Mabel Dodge’ was also circulating in London. Throughout 1913, Stein was to be fêted as one of the most important exponents of the international avant garde.
More and more Stein was dependent on Alice’s approval, and bowed to her in all questions of how to proceed with her work and her life. In 1913, at Alice’s instigation, she went to London to find a publisher for Tender Buttons. There she met up with Roger Fry and other members of the Bloomsbury set including Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey. Her international fame was growing, but the international situation was to curtail its flowering at just that point. Tender Buttons was published in 1914, and war broke out while Gertrude and Alice were in London. ‘It was a strange winter … nothing and everything happened.’35 In March 1915 Gertrude and Alice went to Mallorca, fleeing the war and their fearfulness. They were to stay there for a year. During this year in Mallorca Gertrude continued to write her love epistles to Alice, as a sort of staving off of the horror. And it proved a year of bonding, and settling into the roles that each would live in for the rest of their lif
e together. A year later, in March 1917 they set off in the Ford car they had shipped in from the US, in service of the American Fund for French Wounded, delivering supplies to hospitals. They had sold their last Matisse — the famous Femme au Chapeau — to fund their war work.36 After the war, in 1922, they were both awarded the Reconnaissance Française.
Working for the American Fund for French Wounded.
Post-war Paris would never be the same, and the world of their salon was gone as they knew it. Apollinaire, the poet raconteur, would die in the 1918 flu epidemic; Leo had left and they would hardly speak again. After the war Paris would be filled with expats; their little world was broken, their golden age gone. This golden age seems in the collective memory to have lasted for a generation, but in fact the events that made her a symbol of bohemia, and that were characterized and embellished in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, the salon itself in this first incarnation, existed only between 1906 and 1913. In 1913 Marsden Hartley was writing to Gertrude somewhat obsequiously, as young men tended to write to her, that 27 rue de Fleurus was ‘a place where genuine ideas thrive and mediocrity walks away with discretion’.37 Here were the seeds of myth, the making of legendary stories. It was what brought American visitors of literary and artistic ambition in their droves after the war: the ‘heroic age of Cubism’ and of ‘The Legend of Gertrude Stein’.38 Yet it only lasted for a few short, resourceful years. Was it her, or her satellites; her, or her position of being able to comment on those around her that made this reputation? This was a question she would torment herself with: was it me or was it my work?
Stein would not be back permanently at the rue de Fleurus until 1919 . Then it would be a different kind of salon, and she would be considered the old guard. Stein was nearing forty, and she had thousands upon thousands of pages of work that was still unpublished. She was ‘dead broke’.39 But during the war years Stein had been strengthened in all her artistic convictions, as well as in her personal life. She had been published sporadically and occasionally in Life, Vanity Fair and a number of little magazines. She had finally come into her own, away from Leo, and with Alice at her side. After the First World War, Stein was already a cult figure, and her star was once again rising, though in a different orbit.
Six
Stein’s working life consisted of extremes of sociability and solitude. What she did almost in her spare time, the time off from writing, came to constitute a major part of her cultural legacy. Stein’s own image for her salon, as refracted through the Alice Toklas narrator in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, was: ‘like a kaleidoscope slowly turning’.1 What this suggested was that as the years rolled by an astonishing number of bright colourful presences came and went, the dynamics shifted, but all the time there was a focal centre: Stein herself.
By writing about it she cultivated the myth of her embodiment of Left Bank bohemia, but as the lives of ‘heroic dissipation’ that went on around her became more and more well known, she became more famous for her friendships with the great than for her own work. The salon was instrumental both in building up her fame and in obscuring her literary reputation, and for years afterwards she was known for genius by association.
The litany of famous names she drops in the autobiographies and who stepped through her atelier door includes William Carlos Williams, John Dos Passos, Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy, H. D., Bryher, Wallace Stevens, Salvador Dalí, George Antheil, Jacques Lipchitz, Lincoln Steffens, John Reed, Jean Cocteau, René Crevel, Tristan Tzara, Ernest Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Paul Robeson, Erik Satie, Archibald Macleish, Josephine Baker, Hart Crane, Robert Graves, Laura Riding, Katherine Anne Porter, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Nella Larsen, Paul Bowles and Aaron Copeland. Stein kept herself permanently in vogue via the perennial rejuvenation of having young admirers and followers.
That she managed to be both the centre of the most famous salon in Paris and a writer of such stature was unprecedented. No other salonière ever achieved in her own work the sort of influence that Stein would have over the literature of her time through her own writing. It suggests an extraordinary dynamism on Stein’s part. But she was so successful as a hostess, and her writing was so audaciously different from anything else being produced, that at the time her writing was seen by the public as merely the byproduct of her persona, or even a joke. When in 1923 Carl Van Vechten, writing for the New York Tribune, was able to say: ‘Probably few writers are better known in this country than the American Gertrude Stein’,2 he meant that she, not her work, was phenomenally well known.
All the more extraordinary is Stein’s rise to such a position in Paris of all places, where she was considered distinctly déclassé by traditional salon society. Salons had been authorities on taste and fashion in the arts and beyond since their heyday in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By the end of the nineteenth century the salon was a very different entity, but it was still a cultural institution.
The stereotypical image of a salon hostess suggests a glamorous, moneyed, fashionable, perhaps personally under-talented woman, encouraging the male artists around her. Stein was not that rich, nor glamorous in any traditional way; she was a rough and ready, middle-class Californian. There was not much she had in common with her forebears of the ancien régime like Madame de Staël, or with Madame Récamier (about whom Stein wrote a play in 1930),3 nor even, more recently, with Madame Arman de Caillavet, at whose salon Anatole France presided, or the Jewish salonière Geneviève Straus, on whom Marcel Proust’s Duchess of Guermantes was based — or any of the femmes savantes of French literary and artistic history whose role was to facilitate and encourage conversation and intellectual exchange between the mainly male luminaries they surrounded themselves with. Regular meetings of salons would allow these literary and artistic lions to display their social standing. The old-style salon, as much as being a cultural meeting place, was an introduction to Parisian society, and a genteel preserve. This was how salons had always worked; one built a salon by positing oneself as the elite, and the arbiter of the elite, but one had to be part of that closed world in order to do so. The salon was an institution, and as such was ready to be demolished. The modern iconoclasts frequenting the rue de Fleurus were champing at the bit to break down the old salon culture.
When Gertrude and Leo came to Paris very few of the expatriate Americans now associated with the Left Bank had already set up home there. On the other side of the Boulevard Raspail Edith Wharton, who arrived in Paris in 1906, set herself up in emulation of the old Faubourg salons, partly in order to gain entry to that social world. Wharton, a foreigner like Stein, infiltrated the Parisian haut monde and to some extent made it more cosmopolitan. Stein on the other hand, when she first arrived in Paris, was neither wealthy nor well-connected, and the truly well-to-do would not have touched her with a bargepole (that included Edith Wharton — the two women lived a stone’s throw away from each other for fourteen years and never met, though they had many friends and acquaintances in common4 ).
The Steins’ indifference to protocol, their eccentricity and conspicuous Americanness roused antipathy, and anti-Semitism, in some. Stein of course knew that she was persona non grata in certain circles. This was partly because she was American, partly because she was Jewish and partly because she was middle class. That was why, after The Autobiography, when she had the pick of Hollywood’s own glitziest social strata as dinner companions, she made a point of distinguishing between what she had had before and this new-found fame: finally, she said, she was able to choose who she met.
The Steins’ salon was far less formal than Wharton’s. In The Autobiography Stein refers to her habitués as being of ‘all degrees of wealth and poverty’; she also makes a point of adding that ‘there was no social privilege attached to knowing anyone there’.5 It was all done by connections — people brought along their friends, and the question would be put: ‘de la part de qui venez-vous?’6 One simply had to give a name to gain admittance, though even this was a mere
formality. When in the 1920s Stein’s reputation was fixed and her home had become a place of pilgrimage, the occasional aristocrat would happen by. The Infanta Eulalia of Spain found the people ‘delightful’ but the pictures ‘horrors!’7 (Stein: ‘Somebody brought the Infanta Eulalia and brought her many times.’8 ) In 1908 Mary Cassatt, the American painter, had turned away in disgust, with the words:
I have never in my life seen so many dreadful paintings in one place; I have never seen so many dreadful people gathered together and I want to be taken home at once.9
She was clearly expecting something more decorous from a Paris salon. Stein, happily subversive, was amused by such reactions. Many were appalled at the paintings on the Steins’ walls, and some came on purpose to ridicule or deride them.
In its first bloom the Steins’ salon was a product of the belle époque, and in reality, despite their eccentricity, they were far from being a couple of brash parvenus. Stein objected to the millionaire American collector Albert Barnes, for example, on the grounds that he came to the atelier and ‘did literally wave his cheque book in the air’.10 In the first years of the Steins’ Saturday evenings, theirs was an artistic salon, the focus of the edification was to see the strange and shocking paintings, and to listen to Leo’s explanation of them. In Everybody’s Autobiography Stein writes that in those early years she was silent in the face of Leo’s dominance. The literature Gertrude Stein was producing was a back-room business. But by 1910 Stein was in charge. The salon took on a more literary atmosphere, as Gertrude Stein’s salon, sans Leo. She would take and mould the salon they had started together and fashion it into the myth of her own making.
