Gertrude Stein (Critical Lives)

by Lucy Daniel

  She inspired rivalries among her followers, such as that between Van Vechten and Wilder. Hemingway said she never spoke well of any other writers unless they could advance her cause in some way. The only exceptions, he claimed, were Scott Fitzgerald and Ronald Firbank.34 There is no record of any meeting with Firbank. Fitzgerald held her in the high, affectionate and slightly daunted regard of an apostle; he sent her a copy of Tender Is the Night when it was published, with the inscription: ‘Is this the book you asked for?’35

  This was her dream: to find herself among male artists and intellectuals — and conquer them. It was a reversal of the salon hostess’s traditional role, to enhance the men’s conversation and advertise their achievements. Stein’s work was on a separate tack from male modernism, and above it, in her own mind. She set herself up as a ‘teacher’, a charming pedagogue, more a mentor than a traditional society hostess. Her favourites, in the courtly sense, were mainly men. She loved being loved. She enjoyed most people’s images, interpretations, and constructions of her, even when they were slightly derogatory (like Skinner, Sitwell, Zangwill) — because she was so interested in herself, she revelled in other people’s interest in her. But to be fair to Stein, she also had an enormous, insatiable interest in other people.

  She threw parties at which people kowtowed to her primadonnaish behaviour. She was famous for teasing her male guests, her delight in making others squirm. She would ask people if they had read The Making of Americans (not the most commonly achieved of feats even in her circle), and when they said yes, she would ask them their opinion of a particular passage on a particular page, knowing full well that they would be unable to answer. Her baiting of the young men around her was like an intellectual parlour game. Sylvia Beach claimed that ‘Gertrude Stein had so much charm that she could often, though not always, get away with the most monstrous absurdities.’36 Paul Bowles remembered being chased round the garden of Stein’s country house in Bilignin by Basket the famous poodle (the ostensible reason was to dry out the wet poodle after his bath), dressed in a pair of lederhosen, known as his ‘Faunties’, that Stein had made him wear, as she shouted at him ‘Faster, Freddy, faster!’ (she insisted on calling him Freddy), and when he asked if he could stop: ‘No! Keep going!’ Bowles: ‘There was no way of doubting that she enjoyed my discomfort. But … I was flattered by the degree of her interest.’37 They all endured it. Partly because of the ‘cajoling ways’ she had learnt in childhood — a charm she ascribed to being the youngest child, that never left her38 — and partly because to hang out with Gertrude and Alice was to have arrived on the Paris scene.

  Stein and Toklas’s techniques included snobbery and favouritism — for example Alice Toklas called the Russian painter Pavel Tchelitchew ‘a dreadful little arriviste’ (after he had done portraits of both of them and the dog).39 Alice’s hostility to some could be intimidating. Picasso’s mistress Françoise Gilot said her voice was like ‘the sharpening of a scythe’.40 She was also the preserver of the salon’s good manners. Hemingway satirized this as being struck over the head with a bicycle pump by the maid in order to get him to leave. ‘Miss Stein was always charming’, he adds, and in this context the word ‘charming’ becomes as catty a veiled insult as she ever dealt him.41 ‘Charming’ is even more obviously a pejorative term in his spoof ‘Autobiography of Alice B. Hemingway’,42 ‘charm’ being a feminine skill equated with dissimulation. Hemingway said that Stein ‘had such a personality that when she wished to win anyone over to her side she could not be resisted.’43 She could deliver stinging judgements to people’s faces and they wouldn’t mind, if she was smiling — as Bowles recalled. That was partly because her relationships were self-serving on both sides. In this way she kept up the role of motherly, teasing, flirtatious mistress of ceremonies, as well as the main attraction. Those she kept around her were eager to please. The main criterion for being asked back was an ability to scintillate, not necessarily any talent.

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

  There was a certain flippancy and fleetingness to the culture which she encouraged. ‘Give me new faces new faces new faces I have seen the old ones’, she wrote, quoting a favourite song of Alice’s, in Everybody’s Autobiography.44 Stein and her salon could be seen as a step along literature’s way to becoming a commodity, a tributary of show business.45 Carl Van Vechten, one of her most loyal subjects, who she named as her literary executor in her will, wrote without embarrassment after her death about their relationship: ‘We talked little of her work, although we often read it.’46 (This probably says more about Van Vechten, a promoter, publicist and party animal, than it does about Stein.) Such frivolity, typical as it was of salon discourse, was also implicitly a feminine attribute. Being a ‘liar’ as Leo, the ‘Testimony Against Gertrude Stein’ which appeared in Transition, and, in a sidelong way, Hemingway, accused her of being, was almost part of the trade. There was a slippery and somewhat untrustworthy quality that belonged to charm. Stein’s word experiments were another facet of this. Her playfulness and her relativism — the fact that her work is not about truth, just about process — also make them untrustworthy. But shallowness and surface were not the values she deliberately fostered. When she wrote The Autobiography she could hardly forgive herself for the gossip it seemed to glorify. Nevertheless the book, the salon and the image of Stein herself fed into the growing consumer culture surrounding the arts in general. As she magisterially pronounced in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, ‘everybody came and no one made any difference.’47

  By now there were other rival expatriate salons, and the old private cliques that prospered in the drawing rooms of the Faubourg mansions were no longer relevant to a dynamic, democratic café society that relished publicity and wanted as big an audience as possible. In the expat community everyone knew what everyone else was doing. Stein did not frequent the café scene, which was where much of Parisian society had moved; she let it come to her. There were other contemporary women who filled the role of salonière at one time or other — Bloomsbury hostesses including Lady Ottoline Morell, ambitious writers and social butterflies such as Violet Hunt, society ladies like Nancy Cunard. These three themselves each paid visits to Stein’s atelier. Following Stein’s lead, Mabel Dodge initiated her fairly short-lived Wednesday evenings in Greenwich Village in 1913. In the 1920s Sylvia Beach’s bookshop also functioned as a salon of sorts.

  The other main Parisian salon was Natalie Clifford Barney’s. Barney arrived in Paris in 1902, a year before Stein. Her regular meetings were held on Fridays. Barney’s salon was a meeting place for lesbians, but she also held another version at which everyone was welcome. Sapphic parties were held in the back garden, and a literary salon in the drawing room, and she held formal evenings at which writers were inducted into her ‘academy of women’.

  Stein’s finances were not in the same league as those of the heiresses Barney and Cunard. One of the things she counselled Hemingway about was financial prudence, although she didn’t need a job, so there was financial freedom of a sort — more than Hemingway had. Stein’s salon was a middle-class salon. Neither was hers a lesbian salon, a community of women writers in the manner of Barney and Renée Vivien, or Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier. In The Autobiography Stein mentions Barney, as well as her friend the Duchess of Clairmont Tonnerre, one of the sights of ‘Paris-Lesbos’.48 But Stein’s was, in fact, a remarkably heterosexual salon.

  Barney promoted other Left Bank writers, and women writers in particular, giving them opportunities to circulate their work. Stein, in contrast, preferred male writers, and her salon was more concerned with self-promotion.49 Gertrude Stein was not a promoter of others, but of herself, and she didn’t see the salon as a forum for women’s rights, just her own. (There is also the fact that biographers have preferred to dwell on her relationships with male contemporaries rather than her relationships with women.) Barney’s was probably more magnanimous and less self-serving. Though the two were f
riends who enjoyed a walk in the park together, Stein did not as a rule venture to Barney’s evenings, though she made an exception in order to attend an evening celebrating herself in 1927, featuring Mina Loy and Ford Madox Ford, and 200-odd assorted admirers.

  Stein was not a fan of chivalry — mainly because she wanted to be treated as a man — or etiquette — she made up her own rules. One of these was the seemingly bizarre habit of having Alice usher the wives out of earshot so she could convene with the great men alone. Alice would preside over the tea table and talk about hats and perfume with the women. This vetting process was one traditional piece of salon culture that Stein preserved, and was quite the opposite of Barney’s lesbian get-togethers. Djuna Barnes’s hostile reaction to Stein was partly due to this chauvinism, as she saw it. Sylvia Beach thought the ‘cruelty to wives’50 was odd on the grounds that it only applied to wives, rather than girlfriends, mistresses or other female companions. Perhaps the reason was simply that most of writers who came were male, and Stein was naturally interested in speaking to them rather than anyone else they had brought along. Banishing the wives allowed her to promote herself more persuasively among influential men, without the possibility of contradiction from a rival female. They joked that Alice’s autobiography should be called ‘Wives of Geniuses I Have Sat With’. Stein categorically wanted to guard her own place among the geniuses. Bravig Imbs, the writer and devotee of the Stein salon, explained that Alice acted as a ‘sieve and buckler. She defended Gertrude from the bores and most of the new people were strained through her before Gertrude had any prolonged conversation with them.’51 Alice also (according to Maurice Grosser), if she got very bored of the wife or girlfriend, would ‘enlist Gertrude’s help to try to make the pair break up’.52

  Stein’s salon was of course flourishing at a time when new liberties were flourishing for women. It was a feminine calling, but it was also the perfect role for her, she who had seen herself as an anomaly, a masculine woman, one who preferred the company of men to women. She could be of them and above them. The traditional salon had always been an area where women could have an influence, albeit surreptitious. Everything rotated around the salonière. Without a voice in print, she could dish out criticism at will. Stein too was very patchily published, and her print voice was nothing like as well known as it is now, thanks to the posthumous publication of her uncollected writing. But her role as a hostess allowed her to become a senior figure in the Paris literary scene, dispensing her judgements on a world that was still failing to take her work seriously. It made her, eventually, part of the establishment.

  The attendance of Anderson and Hemingway meant the years between 1918 and 1925 were something of a boom; suddenly her work was being published. The new atmosphere in Paris gave her new opportunities as well as new competition for her status as the chronicler of ‘the relationship of consciousness to language’.53 Obviously trying to keep up to date, in 1920 she wrote something called ‘A Movie’; in 1929 she also wrote a film scenario called ‘Film Deux Soeurs Qui Ne Sont Pas Soeurs’ — the first thing written in French she had ever published. In a piece called ‘I feel a really anxious moment coming’ she wrote about X-rays.54 New technologies had entered her line of consciousness. In the mid-1920s she turned to America again as subject matter, and became preoccupied again with the idea of a novel, which she had veered from in the previous decade. Examples of her later novels range from Lucy Church Amiably (a ‘pastoral’ novel) to ‘a short novel’. What is more, she began for the first time to explain herself, which she had never done before in her writing. Later in her lectures she would become practically a full-time explainer of her own work.

  In 1922 Geography and Plays (a luminous compilation of some of her unpublished experimental works) was published with Anderson’s introduction. Hemingway persuaded an unsuspecting Ford Madox Ford to begin serial publication of The Making of Americans in The Transatlantic Review. Now her short pieces were appearing with some regularity in The Little Review, Vanity Fair and Transition. It was also Hemingway who secured the long hoped-for publication of The Making of Americans; his friend Robert McAlmon finally published it in his imprint Contact Editions in 1925. The spectacle of Anita Loos and Gertrude Stein signing Gentleman Prefer Blondes and The Making of Americans together in a Paris bookshop must have been something to behold.

  When McAlmon fell out with Stein over getting her book into print, he wrote an anonymous parody — which he cuttingly called a ‘portrait’ — of Stein. Here he reported her as saying: ‘the Jews have produced only three originative geniuses: Christ, Spinoza, and myself.’55 Behind her back, many people were fed up with the atmosphere of hero-worship surrounding Stein. Pound later published the parody in Exile in 1938 and the words went down as if they were really hers. Many were beginning to see her as a false idol — and a very demanding one. It was perhaps a natural reaction to mistrust someone so ostentatiously charming.

  However celebrated it made her, and however great the company, seeing herself as a salonière, a nurturer of male authors and artists, detracted from her serious reputation. But this also made her a creator of culture. This was a double bind of her own making. She publicized herself, and for that she was admonished by contemporaries. Many had a false impression of her as a mere socialite. Michael Gold, the mouthpiece of proletarian literature, weighed into her in a piece called ‘Gertrude Stein: A Literary Idiot’ in The New Masses. His was a false image of her as an idle, wealthy dilettante, whose writing resembled ‘the monotonous gibberings of paranoiacs in the private wards of asylums’.56 Stein, seen as the fat, moneyed decadent, the irresponsible bourgeois artist lazily perverting the common language, wasn’t popular with the radical political writers of the 1930s. Ironically, a more right-wing critical reaction would also see her as a symbol of cultural degeneration. In the 1950s B. L. Reid epitomized that tradition when he spat out his now well-known final judgement: ‘Later ages will gather about the corpus of her work like a cluster of horrified medical students around a biological sport.’57

  Many contemporary discussions and parodies of her work mix up judgements about Stein’s body with imputations of mental illness or insanity, and babyishness, all adding up to the sort of degeneracy that she was seen to represent, the degenerate and hedonistic life of Americans in Paris. She got people’s backs up; many readers actually found her writing offensive, although — and because — as they invariably stated, they couldn’t understand it. Lampooning reviews appeared with titles such as ‘Officer, she’s writing again’ (a review of Tender Buttons); ‘Incitement to Riot’ (a 1923 review of Geography and Plays); and ‘Miss Stein Applies Cubism to Defenceless Prose’ (also 1923, in which the writer suggests that Stein is ‘ready for occupational therapy’).58 Her writing genuinely upset people. They called her insane, indolent, infantile, fat, Jewish, female. And they directly transposed these judgements to her writing.59 Even Edmund Wilson, at one point an admirer, referred to the ‘fatty degeneration of her imagination and style’ and to some of her prose as ‘echolaliac incantations … half-witted-sounding catalogues’.60

  Stein was no hedonist. She lived a temperate life, though she enjoyed good food and accepted good things when they came to her. She had wild dreams of making money from her work, but by the 1920s she didn’t really expect to. Her art was the thing which made her herself, it was the axis of her life. In fact, very far from one image of her as a fat, pampered baby or indolent socialite, one of the most striking things about her writing life is its extraordinary energy. (An energy that makes it nigh on impossible to briefly sum up her style, because she had so many of them.) She was no sphinx without a secret, she was an extraordinarily gifted communicator, which is what, for a contemporary public, made it so very alarming and intriguing that she chose to write in a way that often could not be understood. She had an artistic mission to fulfil that went beyond being an instructor or a facilitator for others — she wanted to lead the way. Her reservations about the cynical exercise of writing a b
estseller in the 1930s were heartfelt soul-searching, and as such are touching. Her joyful appreciation of the money she earned was tempered with reservations about putting herself on the market and a distrust of writing for what she called ‘the buyer’.

  The salon was certainly the forum for her to hone her biting wit, but separating the louche diction of the salonière — the epigrammatic backbone of the autobiography’s humour — from the self-questioning of the experimental writer is important. Her work (the novels, portraits, plays and poetry she was writing throughout the 1920s) was moving on apace, ever more outlandish and idiosyncratic, hermetic, while her life became more and more sociable. It was no act of wilfulness for one so patently able to express herself with formidable clarity to choose such obscure routes to making herself understood. She felt compelled to do so. It was only possible to explain her work by using the method of expression in which it was written. (That said, calling a piece as difficult as it is ‘An Elucidation’ is clearly perverse.)

  Those who saw her as an infantile writer, or a degenerate one, unwittingly laid bare the ultimate discrepancy in Stein’s public image, between the naive writer and the effete ‘genius’. The toughness of much of Stein’s work is sometimes hard to triangulate with the almost giddy persona she sometimes gave the world. That she was naturally funny, outgoing and eccentric did not prevent her from turning aside to create works of intimidating austerity. In later works she used her natural humour to good effect and played up that amenable voice. Seldom did she combine the two. But the one impinged on the other in terms of her reception. That other voice plagued her. Stein was the victim of harsh and hostile criticism for many years, while celebrated and cosseted by those who loved her. But the lifestyle, the milieu and the fact that she was a well-known face made it impossible to separate the two Steins. This was confusing; her humour was distracting, and detracted from the seriousness with which her literary experiments were received.