by Lucy Daniel
Stein’s was a most ‘twentieth-century’ salon. For visitors it ‘became a kind of American oasis on the banks of the Seine’.11 It was a mass-market version of the salon at which pretty much everyone was welcome if they had an interest — visitors were trooping through in their hundreds even by 1913 and before the influx of Americans that the war brought. It was in fact more hectic before Alice stepped in and brought an element of decorum. It was an American salon in Paris, and Stein was a great declaimer on the subject of American democracy, but to say that Stein democratized the Parisian salon is going too far, because her gatherings were also all about choosing an elite; the writer Solita Solano, who was not asked to return, said sourly that they were ‘well-sieved’.12 But her elite was of a more idiosyncratic sort, not based on wealth or social standing. While salons had always fostered a certain egalitarian mingling — to a limited extent, the privacy of the salon made it a place where the classes could mix — she seemed an anomalous person to be taking charge of salon culture, being Jewish, American, middle class, with a doctor’s education.
In fact Stein belongs to an illustrious line of Jewish salonières in Europe, stretching back to the eighteenth century; there was, too, the salon of the Jewish Ada Leverson in 1890s London; after the First World War, the Jewish artist Florine Stettheimer (who in the 1930s designed the striking sets for Stein’s opera Four Saints in Three Acts) held a salon in New York, modelled on the Steins’.13 ‘Brother Singulars we are misplaced in a generation that knows not Joseph … we fly to the kindly comfort of an older world’, Stein wrote in 1903, self-conscious about the project of creating a new American bohemia in Europe. In Stein’s case, the fact that she was from somewhere else meant that she attracted other people from other places; her own anomaly brought anomalies to her door. Being a woman, a Jew and a lesbian was synonymous in the discourse of the day with inferiority, subversiveness and degeneracy. Being an American, for Stein, was an identity that could be used to blot out and supersede all other classifications. She may have been providing a Parisian refuge for unconventional America, but she also used her distance from the country to make a novelty of her own Americanness, and to attest that precisely that unconvention was an American quality. She never relinquished her claim to an American literary tradition.
If being an expatriate American had allowed her to supplant class and ethnic classifications, just as it did for other expats in Paris, this also encompassed strange new gender identities. Stein cites Picasso’s comment on the people he encountered at the Steins’: ‘They are not men, they are not women they are Americans.’14 27 rue de Fleurus became a home for those who considered themselves strangers and foreigners, refugees from conformity. Stein used her own marginality to the most extravagant effect. She was the epitome of unconventionality. She took advantage of the power of her exclusion, becoming the motherly mentor of all who could not find a home elsewhere. She attracted those of unexalted backgrounds, a cosmopolitan bunch of alienated souls. She was a natural show-off, and her famous laugh, her joie de vivre and the warmth of her reception when she liked you were enough to make you want to come back, and bring your friends.
The ‘Picasso chairs’, embroidered by Alice.
In the expat milieu, as of old, the salon was an introduction to Paris society, but now it was a new society, a multinational artistic community.15 Partly because of social phenomena like the salon, visual artists and writers had more opportunity and inclination for interaction in those days. It was a forum for little magazines, small presses and new collaborations, exchanges of ideas between those at work in different media. What went on at the Steins’ was philosophical debate, art appreciation and intellectual conversation. It wasn’t just tittle-tattle, as Stein’s later populist memoirs might suggest. She also gave advice which according to Natalie Clifford Barney was always immediate and pertinent. Barney called her ‘the most affirmative person I have ever met’ — and she must have met a few, being the hostess of the main rival salon in Paris.16 Stein gave people real answers to real problems when they came to her with them. (At her suggestion, Ernest Hemingway went to Spain, Paul Bowles went to Tangier and Richard Wright came to live in Paris.) It was also of course a meeting place, both an enjoyable gathering and a way of being seen and heard. It was held not in a grandly proportioned drawing room, but rather a medium-sized, cosy living space, where you were given liqueur and homemade cakes. Hemingway said: ‘It was like one of the best rooms in the finest museum except there was a big fireplace and it was warm and comfortable.’17 Her ‘at homes’ were just that, held from the home, and a sign of her outward-looking character that sits strangely with her internalized writings. They brought ‘genius’ into a domestic setting, just as the chairs on which they sat were lovingly embroidered by Alice Toklas from designs by Picasso. The salon was both a public and a private place, encouraging both commonality and intimacy. Some impecunious writers went because, apparently, ‘the teas were bountiful’,18 and others went to gawp at the spectacle. There were no formal readings, though guests might be treated to an extract from Stein’s work. Stein’s dominance was above all reliant on the traditional salonière’s metier: conversation and the rule of wit.
In the early days there was the core of regulars, with a changing group of guests, as in a traditional salon. Stein has given us some of the most vivid tableaux of the era; in the legend, she created comedic gems such as 1908’s ‘Rousseau banquet’, a real event which was recorded in the memoirs of various participants; in her version this dinner held to celebrate the Douanier Rousseau (Henri Rousseau the painter) became a comic burlesque of the times, an absurd and joyful excrescence of the moment, at which poets and painters joined in a drunken revel, and somebody ate Alice’s hat — the main suspect being the poet André Salmon, although in real life it was probably a donkey called Lolo from the Lapin Agile. When she made a party into a symbol of an entire epoch, one of the legends she was helping to create was that this was a time and a place not just of bacchanalian abandon, but of self-conscious myth-making. The idea that her telling of these ‘charming stories’ relied on was that here self-invention was not only possible but necessary; one remade one’s own life story, one told it over and over again until it seemed truer than the real one. She gave herself that licence, and made it part of her myth of bohemia. The French concept of redoublement would be precious to Stein, whose work often repeats itself in leitmotifs, refrains, and repetitive scenarios.
A bastion of oral culture before the dawn of the television age, the salon was a place for talking, for friendship, and giving and receiving confidences, all seen as feminine skills. Stein was a great listener as well as a talker. Later her salon became a place where younger writers were brought to pay homage to Stein, purely because of the legend that had sprung up around her, hoping for intimate individual chats. Many commented on the beauty of Stein’s voice, which is preserved in recordings she made of such works as ‘A Valentine to Sherwood Anderson’ (the very title of which draws attention to Stein’s use of charm and favour in her work and in the marketing of her work).
Stein’s work is far more oral than other modernisms, and perhaps that is related to her skill in the ‘feminine’ art of conversation. She invested the spoken word with authority. Conversation has, indeed, been seen as ‘one of Stein’s great forms’.19 When she addresses the reader it is also as a listener, ‘my receiver’ — like a telephone receiver. Her work is often more intelligible when off the page: when it was converted into operas and ballets, when she herself delivered lectures, when it is read aloud (take the annual marathon New Year readings of The Making of Americans that took place in New York until recently, for example). Her plays, she insisted, must be performed before they were published. Her work also recognizes the value of ephemeral talk.20 It benefits from being read, its rhythms are those of speech. Stein revived the nineteenth-century idea of conversation as an art-form. Sometimes she would read aloud from her own work to her devotees, or get them to read it to her, as
Paul Bowles remembered; she would listen appreciatively to the sentences she herself had constructed, and applaud the bits that struck her as particularly good. The salon was after all Stein’s audience — and for a long time she had more of an audience than she did a readership — and also replaced a family home.
Her sociability had an artistic function. The Making of Americans came directly from the character studies that derived from her hours of listening, and from that came the portraits and the rest of her mature output. There were several different languages in use at the salon, and it was all grist to Stein’s mill. Conversation propelled her prose, and the salon gave her countless subjects for her portraits and novels. The literary portrait itself was traditionally a genteel art form practised by the salonière, while The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is both about the salon and influenced by the voice of the salon. It reproduces the salon world in its idiom as much as its subject matter.
After the First World War Paris filled with Americans fleeing prohibition and taking advantage of the exchange rate, and Gertrude Stein was surrounded by her countrymen again for the first time since she had left America. The new generation flocked to visit the now-renowned Miss Stein — she had always promoted the arts, not just art, but now there was a new incarnation of Stein’s salon that became more literary and more American. By the 1920s the salon was no longer based around the Saturdays; Stein would be in every afternoon from five o’clock onwards, and people dropped in as they pleased. Throughout the 1920s and ’30s young men made their pilgrimages to the shrine of Gertrude Stein and she coined the term ‘lost generation’ in description of them, while for them she was the embodiment of Left Bank bohemia come to life. She had become a mythical personage.
After the war social nicety, punctilio and protocol no longer had the same meanings, and traditional salon culture disappeared. Stein, in any case, had never been one for politesse (although she still had her rules). While a stereotypical hostess would be keen to engage and please her guests, Stein did not pander to anyone else’s idea of how she should behave. The painter Maurice Grosser wrote: ‘She was not at all the gracious and ingratiating hostess she is usually pictured to be. To the contrary, she was brusque, self-assured, and jolly.’21 (Alice, on the other hand, was most certainly a born hostess.) She spoke her down-to-earth American English; she dressed bizarrely; if she didn’t like you, you knew it immediately. One reading of the partnership sees Alice as the salonière, who orchestrated everything for Stein as her main literary lion, taking on the role of a Marcel Proust or an Anatole France. Stein had no patronage to offer, except the cachet of being with her. She created her own mystique and became her own salon’s greatest draw. Gertrude Stein helped turn the cultural work of the nineteenth-century salon, which had always been a private institution, into part of the twentieth-century publicity machine. Self-interest guided her own flair for self-publicizing, but in promoting herself through her salon she also contributed to a new era of image management and marketing of personalities. The new mass media made the old networks the salons encouraged into a forum for a new kind of celebrity.22
Stein was a canny manipulator of her own public image, at a time when these things were not ruled over by publishing companies and marketing strategists. She paid close attention to the way her work was printed and packaged, insisting on fine paper and bindings, so that the finished product was a beautiful object. She fetishized her own self-published work, according to Toklas’s expensive tastes. She used her famous contacts when for example Man Ray’s photography graced The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, or Cecil Beaton provided the dust-jacket image for Wars I Have Seen. Just as an earlier salon hostess would often have a portrait of herself as the ‘belle savante’, done by one of the frequenters of the salon,23 Stein was seen to best effect in front of Picasso’s portrait of her. Early on Stein had bought Marie Laurencin’s portrait of the habitués of the salon — Apollinaire, Picasso, Fernande Olivier and Laurencin herself. She made no disguise of her attachment to the outward accoutrements of fame, and before mass media her paintings were the most appropriate signs of her status. They, like the salon itself, were her marketing tools.
Marie Laurencin, Group of Artists, 1908, oil on canvas.
There were sculptures by Lipchitz (1920) and Davidson (1922). There were busts by various young American sculptors, and photographs by Man Ray, later a portrait by Picabia. Recent critics have objected to the way in which Stein’s physical characteristics — her weight, her supposed androgyny — infiltrated the early discussions of her work.24 But Stein herself encouraged the dissemination of her own image as part of her literary persona. When she wrote Everybody’s Autobiography, she used as the frontispiece a photograph with the caption: ‘Gertrude Stein, wearing the dress in which she delivered her lectures in America.’25 She also changed the face of female ‘genius’, by moving away from norms of femininity both in her person and in her work. Wyndham Lewis’s memorable description of Stein as ‘a monument sitting on patience’26 owes its aptness to the fact that through her physical presence she had become an idol, an icon.
She was, in the time-honoured role of the salonière, a creator of other people’s literary reputations. She was part of the tourist trail, particularly for any young man wanting to make it as a writer. In November 1919 the American Sylvia Beach opened her bookshop Shakespeare and Company in the nearby rue de l’Odéon. Stein was the first to subscribe to its lending library (although according to Beach this was just a goodwill gesture, and she didn’t take an interest in the books). Sylvia Beach would act as an introducer of Stein’s fans to her (there was still enough sense of protocol to require that somebody did the introducing): ‘the poor things would come to me, exactly as if I were a guide from one of the tourist agencies, and beg me to take them to see Gertrude Stein.’27 Stein was as well-visited as a monument or a museum.
Sitting for Jo Davidson, photographed by Man Ray, 1922.
Francis Picabia, Gertrude Stein, 1933.
It was a performance, and was not entirely healthy for Stein as a writer. Although the central pillar of her reputation was her innovation (‘the “innovator” legend’ she had thrust upon her, Robert McAlmon carped) she was now seen as the older generation. Sherwood Anderson was one of the young men who now claimed her as an influence. He had discovered her in 1914 before writing his Winesburg, Ohio, which was a bestseller in 1919, and in Paris in 1921 he was determined to meet the writer who he already saw as a mentor. She would continue to act as his instructor, and the following year he wrote a rapturous introduction to her Geography and Plays. He became one of her most loyal friends and facilitators. He had imagined her reclining on a chaise longue, sipping absinthe and surveying the world through jaded eyes; the woman he met could not have been more different from the image that had been contrived of her in America.
The young men Sylvia Beach brought along were invariably scared of Stein’s formidable reputation. In March 1922 the same was true of Ernest Hemingway, who had arrived in Paris the previous December. He was to become the new doyen of her court. Young Hemingway’s demure, grateful letters to her are a surprise. She wrote about their master/student relationship in ‘Objects Lie on a Table’. He was never reticent about stating how she had helped create the Hemingway style, partly through her advice — both literary and personal, partly as he emulated her written work (for example in ‘Mr and Mrs Elliot’, quite a close relative of Stein’s ‘Miss Furr and Miss Skeene’) and partly because she opened his eyes to various aspects of bohemian living (most obviously played out in his story ‘The Sea Change’, about a young man’s sudden, jealous contact with lesbianism). In 1923 she wrote a portrait of Hemingway called ‘He and They, Hemingway’. She encouraged him and gave him practical advice, as well as lecturing him on principles of composition, on rhythm and repetition. In 1923 she and Alice became godmothers to Hemingway’s first baby. According to Stein, Hemingway listened to and looked at her, and handed over all his work for her appraisal. ‘I ha
ve a weakness for Hemingway’, she said.28
Other American visitors in the 1920s included Hart Crane and Thornton Wilder; the latter became one of Stein’s closest friends who, in 1974, remembered that ‘she was the great influence on my life.’29 By the early twenties Cubism was ‘dead’; and Dada had been born (in its literary incarnation nothing much to do with Stein, although newspapers facetiously labelled her ‘the mama of Dada’ because of her association with visual artists like Picabia and Duchamp) and Surrealism was the latest thing (Stein thought it essentially old-fashioned, unchallenging). She took up with Jean Cocteau and Erik Satie, Picasso’s new friends. Stein said that Cocteau had been the ‘first French writer to speak of her work’; he liked her work and claimed that it influenced him, though in effect their relationship went very little further than mutual flattery.30 Each saw the usefulness of being associated with the other.
The rue de Fleurus became a meeting place of egos partly by serendipity and partly because Stein was a networker extraordinaire. Her fairly mercenary attitude to acquaintances, her indisputable careerism and her egotism were all defining factors. And she was, after all, blindly ambitious, although she presented a magnanimous, serene face to the world. Equally, the people who came were sometimes more interested in themselves and what kudos she could offer them than in her or her writing. It was known that she could make literary reputations. She wielded her power judiciously, and was careful not to invite people who might undermine, embarrass, or doubt her, or anyone who might usurp her — like Pound or Joyce. (When Pound asked to come and see her again, having recently broken one of her chairs, she claimed to have dismissed him with the words: ‘I am so sorry … but Miss Toklas has a bad tooth and besides we are busy picking wild flowers.’31 ) She gradually filtered out anyone who wasn’t an absolute believer in her. T. S. Eliot objected to her on the grounds that she only expected ‘devotion and faith’. Any other attitude was, he thought, intolerable to her.32 The salon was an important social network that involved a great deal of mutual stoking of one another’s egos: which also led to back-stabbing. Stein by this time was also stocking up well on ex-friends. ‘How did you quarrel with so many all at once?!!!’ Carl Van Vechten asked her incredulously.33
