Gertrude Stein (Critical Lives)

by Lucy Daniel

  In The Autobiography she carefully disparaged other writers who might threaten her throne, or to dislodge her crown — Marinetti (‘very dull’), Pound (‘a village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not’17 ), and, most treacherously, Hemingway. Veiling all with a veneer of politeness, Stein allowed ‘Alice’ a fugue of barbed observations: Hemingway is ‘yellow’; ‘he looks like a modern and smells of the museums’; he was created by Gertrude Stein and Sherwood Anderson, ‘and they were both a little proud and a little ashamed of the work of their minds’.18 A mutual friend, Hutchins Hapgood, attributed Stein’s bad treatment of Hemingway in The Autobiography to the latter’s anti-Semitic portrayal of Robert Cohn in The Sun Also Rises.19 Another reason was Hemingway’s vicious Sherwood Anderson spoof in The Torrents of Spring, which Stein must have seen as ungrateful and disloyal. But even Anderson himself was slightly appalled ‘when you took such big patches of skin off Hemmy with your delicately held knife’.20 The cloaked venom Stein had used against Hemingway also worked for others. The Autobiography is full of the most intricate and ladylike put-downs.

  The variety of Hemingway’s retaliations attests to the depth of his hurt; first he sent Stein a copy of Death in the Afternoon inscribed: ‘A Bitch is a Bitch is a Bitch is a Bitch. From her pal Ernest Hemingway’;21 then he wrote ‘The Autobiography of Alice B. Hemingway’ (an unpublished parody); years later he hit out at her again in A Moveable Feast; and made various sniping attacks, in print, in correspondence and in conversation to their joint friends and acquaintances. Having fallen out, they carried on a certain grim rapport in their mutual insults. Even so, Hemingway’s acknowledgement of Stein’s advice was lasting, in a letter to Ezra Pound he wrote in 1933.22 Stein and Hemingway did apparently make up in the late 1930s. But years later when they met he supposedly said: ‘I am old and rich. Let’s stop fighting’; to which she retorted: ‘I am not old. I am not rich. Let’s go on fighting.’23

  In 1935 came another backlash against The Autobiography, in the ‘Testimony Against Gertrude Stein’, a deputation brought by a squadron of her former friends who, rather missing the point, complained that it wasn’t true. Eugene Jolas complained of the book’s ‘hollow tinsel bohemianism and egocentric deformations’.24 Matisse complained that she had said his wife looked like a horse. The piece was published in Transition.

  Stein had a passion for and natural way with irony and paradox in all her work. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is a deeply ironic text: an almost self-parodying comment on autobiographical form as well as a funny, easily digestible read. For somebody so obsessed with realism and reality, realness and particularly the realness of identity and character, how could a piece of writing purporting to reveal the ‘real’ her be anything else? Nobody believed more than Stein that a writer’s work was more important than her personality. That is the greatest joke of the book.

  With formidable lightness of touch, The Autobiography riddles away at the problems of autobiographical form. The book ignored, in fact blatantly disavowed, traditional autobiographical constraints such as modesty. It also undermined traditional ways of coping with time and the necessary distance from oneself as subject matter that exists in most autobiographical narrative. Her writing mixes what she’s saying, her subject, with interruptions that happen while she’s saying it, or trying to say it. She continued this technique in Everybody’s Autobiography, where she cut to the heart of the matter with the phrase: ‘That is really the trouble with an autobiography … you do not really believe yourself why should you’.25 This is what the ‘Testimony Against Gertrude Stein’ had naively failed to realize. Stein’s book was a semi-fictional portrayal, of course, of great comedic strength. It relied on caricature, of everyone, including herself and Alice. It was written as Alice’s version of events, not Stein’s own. Importantly, ‘Gertrude Stein’ in the book is seen through wifely eyes; this is deliberately and hilariously not the same view that the dominant literary culture had of Stein. When people think of Stein’s proclamations of her own genius in this book they often overlook that, written in character, it is Stein’s comment on the reliability of any biographical or autobiographical voice. She always rejected conventional rhetoric, and she continued to do so in the autobiographies.

  In fact, Stein very rarely employed any material in her writing that was not culled directly from and concerned directly with her everyday life. In Tender Buttons she had begun to mainline the everyday details of her life into her work. In The Making of Americans she was writing about the act of writing as she performed it. So it was not flippantly that she converted such strategies into the remarks that turn up in The Autobiography, remarks that are highly disruptive to the traditional conception of an autobiography as representing a measured truth, even if only a partial one. In Alice B. Toklas and Everybody’s Autobiography she plays with time frames: ‘one just broke this morning …’;26 ‘In the bath this morning …’.27 She draws attention to the fact that she forgets things, and doesn’t mind the fact that her separate accounts contain conflicting information, if one is looking for a factual version of events. She brings her own fabrication and raconteurism into scrutiny. Most cunning of all is the The Autobiography’s final sentence, which makes it clear that a sly filtering has taken place. In the last lines of the book, ‘Alice’ denies having written it, but Gertrude Stein is not speaking either — Stein herself never makes an appearance as author. They have both disowned it.28 By stating ‘I am going to write it as simply as Defoe wrote the autobiography of Robinson Crusoe’, Stein/Alice was of course drawing attention to the very un-simplicity of the device. Robinson Crusoe was not, of course, an autobiography. She had turned Alice into a fiction, and many of the book’s first readers thought Alice no more than a literary device.29 The ending not merely questions the reliability of the narrator but puts her unreliability up in lights, at the same time as it shows the unreliability of distinctions between fact and fiction, the unreliability of all storytelling. She entices, enthrals and engages with the reader, only to playfully subvert their attentiveness in the final sentence, which allows her to shirk the yoke of conventionality once more.

  Later Stein would admit that in writing The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas she had ‘lost her personality’.30 Properly speaking Stein became a personality and lost her identity. Its writing and its reception became a traumatic experience. It was written for a readership, and Stein was not used to writing for a readership. It was in fact probably the first thing she had written for a readership other than Alice. She had apparently told Hemingway — in the same breath as her famous ‘remarks are not literature’ comment — ‘If you have an audience it’s not art. If anyone hears you it’s no longer pure.’31 She did not write for anyone’s pleasure. (This was also her rationalization of her lack of popular success, her valorization of her status as artistic outlaw.) The reception of The Autobiography, however cleverly it was written, made her into light entertainment. Maria Jolas in her testimony used the phrase ‘Barnumesque publicity’. Stein packaged herself so successfully that she lost control of herself as a commodity.

  Furthermore, if by writing in a voice not her own she could create her most successful book, it made her doubt the value of her own voice. She said of her sudden explosion into narrative that it demonstrated that ‘most narrative is based not upon your opinions but upon someone else’s’.32 In a way she had given over her voice and her story to Toklas, and she did not enjoy the experience (just as she always insisted on being the only person allowed on a stage she was to speak on). Questions persist about whether she was emulating Toklas’s real voice, and how much of a hand Alice had in the manuscript. In the original edition’s photographic illustrations, chosen by Stein, the last illustration is a facsimile of Stein’s writing, the final ironic piece of evidence. Early in her career Stein had elaborately rejected the usefulness of a piece of writing in one’s own hand as evidence of memory or personality; its use here, just when she was shifting between he
r own identity and Alice’s, is deliberately multivalent and suggestive. (Gertrude and Alice’s love story had also started, and been carried out and propelled on paper, via the handwritten words passing between them, as Stein left correspondence, questions and love notes for Alice along with each day’s work to be typed up, and Alice responded in writing.) The frontispiece of the book is a photograph by Man Ray of ‘Alice B. Toklas at the Door’. It is a photograph of the room, the salon, where the book is being written, as if it has captured Stein while writing the book, although it was actually taken a decade earlier. Stein sits with the paraphernalia of writing: weighty tomes on her desk, a pen in her hand, her paper in front of her, and her face obscured; her form is in shadow and only her hands, writing, are illuminated. Gertrude is in the foreground, Alice in the background, too far away for her expression to be made out; but Alice is surrounded by light, and Gertrude in the darkness. It seems to relay into one image the writerly isolation that Stein had lived with since The Making of Americans, as well as Alice’s viewpoint throughout the book; on the threshold, looking in. Both women are represented, and both are effaced.

  The cover of The Autobiography, originally published in 1933 by Harcourt Brace. Photographed by Man Ray.

  The first readers of the book were shocked by its lucidness, having been made to believe that Stein was unintelligible. This was a jolly, readable, entertaining jape of a book. It did indeed become the bestseller that turned the cult figure into a fully fledged celebrity. It did, as she wanted it to do, fix her public image, despite the elaborate rhetorical absenting of herself. Later she said that she had told all she wanted to tell about her life in her autobiographies; she felt that readers could find out anything they wanted to know about her, the answers to all their questions, from her books. She wanted her legend to stand as she had made it. As Janet Flanner wrote: ‘She thought she had no personality aside from her writing.’33

  The book also dislodged popular notions of her as an ivory tower-dweller. As one of her biographers, Janet Hobhouse put it: ‘The American public fell in love with the character of Gertrude Stein, like Victorian readers with Little Nell.’34 In 1934 the French edition also made her a celebrity there. She was a 60-year-old debutante, emerging from obscurity.

  She was more serious, of course, than the success of her most popular book, a humorous book, allowed her to be seen as. It was indeed almost as though she had revealed a double personality, which is why she wrote Stanzas in Meditation, in her other style.35 Stanzas in Meditation is a parallel text for the Autobiography, and could not be more different from it. It was written at the same time and takes as its subject Stein’s apprehensiveness about the venture she was embarked on. In this work she agonised over what she was doing — writing plainly — and wished people would listen instead to the ‘real’ her. In Stanzas in Meditation Stein acknowledged the worrying interchangeableness of her own and Alice’s authorial personae when she wrote: ‘I have often thought that she meant what I said.’36 She also made one of the first uses of what would become one of her mythical refrains: ‘What is the difference if there is no question and no answer[?]’37 The question and answer structure had been part of those playful early compositions in which Alice became interrogator and answerer, and their roles intertwined. That ‘double personality’ was also what enabled her to say, in Everybody’s Autobiography, that she discovered in writing autobiography that you ‘could not be yourself because you cannot remember right … you are of course never yourself’38 — a typically sceptical, Steinian statement. That doubleness has since become an easy cliché in terms of her reception; that there was the writing that could be read, and the writing that could not be read, the easy, charming and loveable Stein, and the difficult, subversive and untrustworthy one.39

  Four Saints in Three Acts, 1934.

  She was getting a lot of fan mail from American readers. The opening of Four Saints in Three Acts had taken place in New York. Virgil Thomson, who had commissioned the piece from her and written the score, was in charge of the production. Partly cashing in on the trend for ‘exoticism’ that had grabbed white New Yorkers since the Harlem Renaissance (which Stein’s friend Carl Van Vechten had played a role in), it was Thomson’s idea to have an all-black cast. The result was a sensation. On the opening night Van Vechten wrote to Stein that he hadn’t seen an audience more excited since the Rite of Spring (where his path had first crossed Stein’s). ‘The difference’, he added, ‘was that they were pleasurably excited.’ Toscanini was there applauding.40 Her friends wrote to her telling her to come to America and lap up the glory. Gertrude and Alice bought a new set of clothes each — Gertrude sported a new line in trim, business-like suits, and a leopard-skin hat. Stein, who throughout her Paris years had always insisted on how American she was, was to return to the USA after a thirty-year absence. According to biographer Linda Wagner-Martin, while Alice was fearful of the homophobia they might face, Stein was more concerned about possible anti-Semitism.41 In the end neither of their fears were founded, and none of their preconceptions could not have prepared them for their incredible reception.

  When their ship got to New York on 24 October 1934 there was a boatful of reporters and photographers waiting to greet them. The journalists bombarded her with questions. When they asked her ‘why don’t you write the way you talk?’ she shot back: ‘why don’t you read the way I write?’ They delighted in branding her ‘The Sibyl of Montparnasse’. The lights in Times Square announced: ‘Gertrude Stein has arrived in New York’; ‘As if we did not know it’, said Alice. The next week in The New Yorker there was a cartoon of a customs inspector saying: ‘Gertrude says four hats is a hat is a hat.’42 A Pathé newsreel was made of Stein being interviewed. Van Vechten organized a party for Stein and Toklas in New York, at which George Gershwin played. Stein was everywhere: on the radio, in the papers, and making personal appearances on a whistle-stop, sell-out lecture tour of the country, from New York and Chicago first, to Yale, Bryn Mawr and Harvard, then to Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, Ohio, Indiana and on to Virginia, Louisiana and Texas, lecturing, taking classes at universities and meeting fans: all orchestrated by Alice, who, as they toured the country, was referred to as Stein’s ‘secretary’ or ‘travelling companion’. (Even in most personal memoirs written about the period in which the couple appear, she was simply Stein’s ‘friend’.) Stein was front-page news wherever she went. Alice was oddly unobtrusive. The media hardly noticed this ever-present alter ego walking in Miss Stein’s shadow, even though the book had been written in her name.

  The window of Gimbel Brothers’ department store, New York, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1934.

  Stein understood the importance of becoming a personality in order to make money from her work, having seen her friends and protégés do the same. So she agreed to being carted around on a precursor of the modern celebrity book tour: in style — she was a national heroine. She was startled by the advances of the machine age in America, particularly the amount of electric light, but told Natalie Barney that she was able to cross the street in New York with impunity because even the taxi drivers ‘recognise me and are careful of me’43 — a sign of her unshakeable faith in the power of her own image. She was received at the White House and met Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, neither of whom impressed her. She visited Hollywood, where she had a natural affinity for the Californian stars, and for the literary celebrities of her home country, some of whom she already knew from Paris. At one dinner party Anita Loos, Charlie Chaplin, Dashiell Hammett and Lillian Hellman were all in attendance. She had chosen the guests herself, and had been particularly keen to meet Hammett, with whom she spoke about her love of detective novels, and what she saw as the unimaginative way in which male writers wrote about men, which she put down to a crisis in masculine confidence.44 On a live prime-time radio interview for NBC, Bennett Cerf, the president of Random House, said: ‘I’m very proud to be your publisher, Miss Stein, but as I’ve always told you, I don’t understand very m
uch of what you’re saying.’ To which she replied: ‘Well, I’ve always told you, Bennett, you’re a very nice boy but you’re rather stupid.’45

  Stein was never afraid to mix her love of the lowbrow with her high modernism. She upbraided Sylvia Beach for not stocking certain pulp writers in her very high-minded bookshop, and claimed to read one detective novel a day. In the USA she became obsessively interested in the language of advertisements, particularly the Burma-Shave commercials with their punning billboard rhymes. By this stage of her life Stein wore her learning lightly, and she sometimes succeeded in deceiving people into thinking that she was something of an idiot savant. She had spent a lifetime being mocked, and she had her own vindication. But it was a dangerous game which impaired her reputation.

  Her reaction to celebrity was to take it on as a sort of role play, a game. Even down to publicizing her insistence that she would ‘only’ lecture to 500 people at a time, which supposed exclusivity made her lectures more popular and ensured they were over-subscribed. Bennett Cerf later eulogized her as ‘the publicity hound of the world — simply great; she could have been a tremendous hit in show business’.46 But she dumped her agent, William Aspenwall Bradley, because he was too commercial, explaining to Carl Van Vechten (who was busy delightedly organizing parties to receive her everywhere she went): ‘There are some things a girl cannot do.’47