Gertrude Stein (Critical Lives)

by Lucy Daniel

  Although Stein’s work was becoming more widely circulated, critics and reviewers were not debating her writing, but rather whether or not she was serious. In 1924–5 Edith Sitwell became part of the Gertrude Stein fan club. She came to Paris to interview Stein for Vogue, and while she was there she tried to persuade Stein to embark on a publicity campaign. Stein at first balked at the unsubtlety of the idea, but finally it was agreed that she would travel to England. She called the lecture ‘Composition as Explanation’ and delivered it in Cambridge and then in Oxford, in 1926. Harold Acton wrote an entertaining account of its reception, contrasting what the young men of Oxford expected of Stein — an exotic decadent — and the shock of the reality of the figure that greeted them. (Stein had in fact gone all out, as usual, to cut a dashing first impression, delivering the lecture in another of her costumes, a robe of blue brocade designed for her by a Parisian couturière.)61 The lecture audience was also struck by the difference between what she said and the way she said it: her easy, engaging manner, and her difficult prose; the voice that made you feel at home, and the words that made you feel at sea. ‘Nobody had heard anything like this before’, Acton wrote. Some members of the audience were offended by her words, and verbally attacked her in the two hours of questions and answers that followed. She dealt with them beautifully, attended by ‘her tall bodyguard of Sitwells and the gypsy acolyte’ (Alice).62 She was a hit. She felt ‘just like a prima donna’.63 Her own amusement and bafflement at her new-found status was telling. Her reputation was not coldly engineered; it was against her nature to be so gauche as to go all out for publicity, and yet she did have a way of winning people over that was one of her greatest talents.

  At this stage of her career Stein was better known for the parodies of her work that appeared in Life and Vanity Fair than for her work itself. She was a sitting duck. Lord Berners, who became a friend, did clever pastiches of Stein for the London papers. (He also later wrote the score for Stein’s ballet, A Wedding Bouquet, which was produced at Sadlers Wells with Margot Fonteyn and Ninette de Valois.) At least, she ruefully retorted, ‘my sentences do get under their skin’.64

  Back in Paris, James Joyce’s Ulysses was now taking centre stage. Although she and Joyce were the two great literary personalities in Paris at the time, they didn’t meet until 1930, when Sylvia Beach introduced them. They shook hands, exchanged stilted pleasantries, and went their separate ways. Stein was jealous of Joyce, and disapproved of Ulysses for her usually idiosyncratic reasons, but partly because she saw it as usurping the glory of The Making of Americans. Stein’s A Book Concluding with As a Wife Has a Cow: A Love Story was published in 1926, another vanity arrangement, illustrated with Juan Gris’ lithographs. Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press published Composition as Explanation. She wrote a ‘translation’ of Georges Hugnet’s ‘Enfances’ that was in fact a separate work, which cut out all the distastefulness in Hugnet’s poem (though it was about sex and death), and which led to one of those unbreachable sorts of rifts in which Stein’s friendships so often terminated. The cause of the disagreement, interestingly, was Stein’s insistence that she should get ‘top billing’ on the book’s cover. She still craved acceptance. By the example of those she had nurtured, from Picasso to Hemingway, Stein was beginning to grasp the way to disseminate herself to an even wider public.

  Seven

  It is a great paradox that the woman known as one of the most hermetic writers of the twentieth century also became a media figure and a celebrity author. In 1932, aged 58, she wrote The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and late in life Gertrude Stein experienced the most intriguing twist in her career: her book was a bestseller and made her a star. Her stardom came at a time when the nature of fame was changing, through the intervention of Hollywood and newsreels, radio and magazines. In turn it brought the theme of celebrity into her writing. That such an experimental writer should have experienced these changes first hand, so that she was then able to make them the subject of her experimental writing, is one more of the felicitous quirks of fortune in a life filled with them.

  Some of Stein’s most innovative work in her long writing life was in the realm of autobiography, and even her most experimental poems, fictions and dramas were often autobiographical in genesis. Often, too, they related everyday events and feelings, as if she were using them as an encoded diary. Later she wrote what were officially announced as autobiographical works. Not only The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, but Everybody’s Autobiography, Paris France, and Wars I Have Seen — all were experiments in the art of autobiography and memoir, and played with the generic limits of life writing. Her war memoirs are different again from the rest of her work: another new strand to her Protean style, although she was by then in her seventies.

  In a sense all Stein’s writing is autobiography — to a far greater extent than can be said for most authors. Because most of her writing is about the nature of identity and how it might adequately be expressed through words, hers is the most self-referential oeuvre imaginable: her theme was herself and the workings of her mind. She is her own subject, in the scientific as well as the literary sense. Although in The Making of Americans Stein had rejected the possibility of a selective autobiography, most of the material is autobiographical; it is a ‘history of me and the kind of suffering I can have in me’.1 Critics have struggled with a conception that Stein’s ‘I’ must be somehow democratic, like Whitman’s, for example.2

  By the early 1930s she still held to the doctrine that one should write without a readership in mind. Her work was finally gaining a serious critical foothold. The Dial had published Marianne Moore’s review of The Making of Americans, and in 1930 William Carlos Williams wrote a review of ‘The Work of Gertrude Stein’, published in Pagany. The most important step came in 1931 with Edmund Wilson’s Axel’s Castle, a breakthrough because it took her seriously (mentioning her alongside Joyce, Proust and Eliot), and he was a major critic. Sherwood Anderson wrote to her — sycophantically, but with an element of truth: ‘anyone who follows writing sees your influence everywhere.’3 And yet Stein’s writing was not going well, she had become unconnected from it, dissatisfied. She was taking stock of her achievements. In ‘Forensics’ in How to Write she claimed, somewhat optimistically: ‘At last I am writing a popular novel.’ But then added a typically undermining question: ‘Popular with whom[?]’4

  As her renown spread she began to write about fame itself. She wrote numerous plays, one of which was Four Saints in Three Acts, a piece commissioned by the composer Virgil Thomson, who would write an opera score for it. (He said that when they met they immediately got on, ‘like Harvard men’.5 The opera was produced in 1934 at the height of her American celebrity.) She had an interest in saints as figures whose legends stood above time, rather like geniuses. She was interested in the idea of how a life became legendary; she herself ‘always wanted to be historical’6 — and she chose as the two main characters Spanish saints Ignatius and Teresa, because they were her ‘favourites’, rather as if the lives of saints she had been reading were a fun indulgence, like celebrity biographies.7 She teasingly thought the libretto might get her on the radio and receiving royalties. She was right about her imminent success.

  Advised by Jo Davidson, who sculpted the statue of her that now stands in Bryant Park, that she should try to sell her personality, she told him that she thought the public only had a right to be interested in her personality ‘in so far as it is expressed in the work’.8 She was desperately concerned that her work should not be seen as a curiosity. But Stein needed money — in the early 1930s she was forced to sell some of her paintings simply to get money to publish her own work. Gertrude and Alice decided to sell Picasso’s Girl with a Fan to start their own edition of Stein’s work, to be called Plain Edition. (Lucy Church Amiably was the first book to be published under this imprint, in 1930.) Stein and Toklas were nothing if not entrepreneurs.

  So she decided to write her autobiography, with the deliberate intention
of making it a bestseller. She said she wrote The Autobiography between October and November 1932, apparently dashing it off in six weeks. (It probably took longer, but she was also writing Stanzas in Meditation and other shorter works during the same period.) The publication of this highly readable and entertaining memoir made her famous after a lifetime of being called unreadable. Its deceptively straightforward style floored everyone, fans and critics alike. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas was a conscious piece of myth-and image-making.

  The timing was perfect. The Autobiography was the first and most hotly anticipated in a string of revelations of ‘legendary women’ — to quote Hemingway, who wasn’t quite prepared for the stinging treatment he would receive in its pages. Edith Wharton and Mabel Dodge, for example, both published their autobiographies within a year or two of Stein’s. In The Autobiography, in which Stein got in on the rising tide of celebrity culture, her talents as a raconteuse were made available to all the world; you no longer had to visit her salon to be party to the bitchy, clever, piquant wit.

  Stein was a connoisseur of autobiographies and biographies, and had always teased Alice that she should write hers. The device of doing it for her, and using Alice’s gossipy voice to do so, was indeed a stroke of genius. Friends had begun to urge Gertrude to write her own autobiography. The reason she kept telling Alice to do it was that she was reluctant to enter into so blatantly commercial an exercise. The apparent jeu d’esprit that resulted wrong-foots and good-humouredly disconcerts the reader. When it was first published Stein’s name did not appear on the cover; the true identity of the author did not appear until the last, seven-word sentence of the last paragraph:

  About six weeks ago Gertrude Stein said, it does not look to me as if you were ever going to write that autobiography. You know what I am going to do. I am going to write it for you. I am going to write it as simply as Defoe wrote the autobiography of Robinson Crusoe. And she has and this is it.

  That the ending was a punchline turned the whole book into an elegant joke. But it was also one of its many punchlines, this ‘autobiography’ being a comic blend of non-fiction and fiction which artfully uses anecdote, irony, aphorism and paradox to achieve its effects.

  It was completely different from anything Stein had ever written before, and this was the book that fixed her legend and her image in the popular imagination. The image of the imperious and daunting Stein is really created, by herself, in the 1930s, with humorous panache. If she had never written The Autobiography the glimpses of her that her other writing shows would give a far different impression, and the world would have had a far different idea of Stein. When it became a Book-of-the-Month Club selection in 1933, it was an instant smash hit.

  Stein had often used a voice that sounded like Alice’s in earlier works, but never to the extent of a full-blown impersonation. Alice B. Toklas’s ‘autobiography’ is written in character. While in other works there was often a clash between Stein’s narrator and non-narrator selves, the one continually subverting the other, by using Alice’s voice in the Autobiography she pulled off the one thing she had always avoided writing — a story — with fantastic comic aplomb. It is one of the most successful comic voices of the era. When Alice says for example that, after Stein’s Oxford lecture, one young man ‘was so moved that he confided to me as we went out that the lecture had been his greatest experience since he had read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason’,9 the elaborately guileless voice of Alice B. Toklas becomes part of a humorous tradition that stretches from Huck Finn to Lorelei Lee.10 The put-downs and pointed asides have the feel of being well-handled, and indeed they were stories that had been honed over the years; they were what Janet Flanner, the New Yorker’s resident Parisian, referred to as its ‘respoken conversations’.11 (This also made it quick to write.)

  The Autobiography is a commercial book. The story it tells is also a deliberately constructed success story. Stein’s cheerful persona probably makes her unique among modernist writers, and like most of Stein’s work the autobiography is indefatigably upbeat. Within its pages she stages the moment when her friend H. P. Roché commented that a chance remark of hers would be good for the biography — at which point she records a sudden, romantic, Hollywood-style realization that one day she, Gertrude Stein from Allegheny Pennsylvania, would have a biography. And it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, for here it is: Stein’s fairytale of success, the ‘biography’ Stein was looking for, though she cannily avoids mentioning that she has penned it herself.12 This rags-to-riches story is slightly preposterous, but that is part of its appeal; it tapped into a myth of Parisian bohemia that many American readers wanted to believe in and vicariously enjoy, now that the Depression had curtailed the easy flow of tourists to the city.

  Using her Parisian contemporaries as walk-on characters, its subject was, as ‘Alice’ herself put it, ‘the vie de Bohème just as one had seen it in the opera’.13 By calling it bohemia, as by calling herself a genius, Stein gave herself and everyone else in the book an out of the ordinary licence to behave outrageously, but she tamed it all, brought the misrule into check in the end, by making all her characters middle-class success stories.14 What Stein managed to do through her perfectly finished anecdotes (none of them too risqué or revealing) was to turn individuals into embodiments of culture — into celebrities — and in fact transformed culture itself into celebrity-watching. After her autobiography America wanted more ‘lives of legendary women’; she epitomized a trend that was continued by people like Margherita Sarfatti (the Italian salonière and Benito Mussolini’s lover), who wrote their stories in deliberate imitation of Stein’s mother of all Paris memoirs. Others, like Robert McAlmon and Ernest Hemingway, wrote in retaliation.

  Critics have pointed out the selfishness of making Alice the mouthpiece for Stein’s unmitigated self-congratulation and then calling it her ‘autobiography’. Though on one level it is a supremely solipsistic device, in reality Alice (who had often acted as a double and an answering voice in the writings) was in on the act from the beginning, helping with drafts and making numerous corrections, perhaps suggesting more serendipitous, or more Alice-like, phrasing. By writing what is essentially her own memoir through the point of view of another, someone who, though she could not have been closer to Stein, only met her when she was already the adult ‘Gertrude Stein’, Stein avoids having to write about her own childhood. She allows ‘Alice’ to gloss over this period of her life happily. Toklas was cast as the innocent abroad, which allowed Stein a faux-naif voice that not only recast all the unpleasant details in a happier light, but gave all her bitchiest observations even more impact for their fragile pretence of wide-eyed innocence.

  It also allowed her to enact a simultaneous display and concealment of her lesbian life, to parade and disguise their love. Catharine R. Stimpson, one of Stein’s pioneering commentators of the 1980s, questioned the ‘decorum’ of this strategy — the ‘tactfulness’ of hovering between letting readers know about their relationship and not letting them know — suggesting it is a kind of ‘repression’.15 It is possible to see Stein’s attitude to her own sexuality, as she expressed it in her work, as full of half confessions and deliberate obscuring; if it was so, it was as a product of the culture in which it existed. She flouted convention to the utmost, but she wanted recognition, and she wrote The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas for the mainstream. She gave dainty morsels of their domestic life together, as would a celebrity interview, but never gave away so much that could be completely pieced together. She acted as if she was being completely transparent, all the better to cover up her homosexuality. But at the time Stein’s lesbianism was both there for all to see and, because not commented on, almost see-through — and accepted. In illustrating the book, the couple chose impressive images of themselves together and of Stein alone, and interspersed them with images by Picasso and others, packaging themselves as the domestic nurturers of genius, both down to earth and brilliant. The glimpse into their home life satisfied
a similar need as a magazine spread or a documentary; it was an early celebrity biography, except that it was written by a serious writer.

  Stimpson commented on ‘the packaging of homosexuality’ in The Autobiography, how Stein changed her own ‘subversion’ into ‘entertainment’. As Stimpson argues, calling herself a ‘genius’ as Stein did neutralizes her other abnormalities (namely her lesbianism), makes them non-threatening, because a genius is not expected to fit in with ‘normal’ life; it exempts her from ‘normal’ behaviour without making her ‘abnormal’ in an unpresentable way.16 Stein does not include any details of her life in Paris that might be considered shocking — with a mercenary eye on the bestseller market, but it wasn’t in her to do so anyway. Because it could not state the actual relationship between the two women, the book could not be ‘true’, even if any life writing could. It is about her life with Alice Toklas, but it could not talk about the way they lived together. So it is instead a version of their life together. Stein is exceptionally self-reflexive and knowing about the limits of the real in the written word.

  The book’s comic buoyancy, its relentless way of ignoring anything negative — related to Stein’s ‘charm’ — is in fact an outcome of Stein’s search for approval and acceptance: not self-confidence at all, but its opposite. She clearly did feel stifled at the same time as trumpeting her achievements, because her anxiety flowed out into Stanzas in Meditation. Early on in the autobiography Stein pointedly confesses to being ‘a little bitter’ at the fact of all her unpublished manuscripts. She had always wanted to create something ‘everlasting’, and now she was beginning to worry that publication and recognition had not come to her, had passed her by, while those she had encouraged were garnering laurels and becoming public figures. Stein hated solitude. She needed to express herself continually, to communicate herself to others. She was forever building a splendid image of herself and the Autobiography is the apogee of that determination. It can be seen as another portrait, or series of portraits — think of the chapter headings such as ‘Gertrude Stein in Paris’; they merge with the photo captions. This self-portrait became, once again, more famous than the real Stein. Here she became a character, living inside an eminently readable book.