Gertrude Stein (Critical Lives)

by Lucy Daniel

  Although it clearly pandered to her megalomaniac tendencies, fame also disturbed her. Having a readership was a more difficult and painful thing than Stein could have imagined. In The Making of Americans she had expressed her doubts that she would ever even have a reader, but now it had made her doubt herself.

  Gertrude and Alice on the radio, 1934.

  Stein was one of the first subjects of the burgeoning phenomenon of literary celebrity at a time when modern celebrity in general was changing. Fame no longer had the same value or meant the same that it had, and pop culture was on the horizon. The ability to drive the publicity machine was now becoming the most important factor in achieving celebrity.48 Stein’s connection with this false celebrity did her as much harm as good. That her image actually detracted from her writing made her telling of her own life more problematic. It has made criticism of her work and speculation about her life eternally intertwined; she herself was presented with these problems and confronted them in her writing. In her lectures she addressed in detail the differences publicity, broadcasting and what she saw as the newspaper mentality were making to literary expression — not just her own — in America.

  Florine Stettheimer’s invitation to hear her fellow hostess speak.

  She wrote that it was ‘upsetting’ to see her name in lights; when she saw herself on the newsreel she was unnerved; and the night before her first lecture she had to call a doctor because her throat was so constricted she couldn’t speak.49 It was a combination of being stagestruck and a deeper anxiety, a vacancy that she had discovered in the midst of adulation. And it made her lose her voice in another important way too. In 1933–4 she stopped writing for the first time in thirty years. Stein was a strenuous writer, a writer of enormous stamina — but she was brought to wordlessness by fame, by suddenly having a readership, a ‘buyer’.50 She admitted that it made her ‘nervous’. It becomes clear, from reading the subversions of her own straightforwardness in Stanzas in Meditation and Everybody’s Autobiography, that The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas was practically a piece of self-exploitation, so traumatic was it in the writing and its repercussions, for Stein.

  But her lectures and university appearances were a great success. Back in Boston, they called her ‘Radcliffe’s most famous daughter’.51 In these lectures, later published as Lectures in America, she addressed her audience as the genius she had proclaimed herself to be, and rather than capitalizing on The Autobiography, took it as an opportunity to deliver her thoughts on serious questions such as ‘What Are Masterpieces and Why Are There so Few of Them?’, and ‘What is English Literature?’, which she went at in her usual sidelong manner. Often it was as though she had to plead with or cajole her audience into understanding her: ‘Oh yes you do see./ You do see that.’52 It is uncertain whether this was down to self-doubt — doubt about her own ability to make herself understood — or doubt of her audience’s capacity for understanding her. (In Radcliffe, faced with the po-faced women she had distrusted since her time there, she changed her pleas for her audience to understand to a curt: ‘Maybe you will, but I doubt it.’53 ) She wrote her lectures in one of her ‘difficult’ styles, and in fact offered few concessions to ease understanding. Nevertheless there was a similar sense of demystification to that she had engendered in Oxford in 1926, because of the informal question and answer sessions that invariably followed them. In Chicago, she gave her famous explanation of the rose line:

  I notice that you all know it: you make fun of it, but you know it. Now listen! I’m no fool. I know that in daily life we don’t go round saying ‘is a … is a … is a …’. Yes, I’m no fool, but I think that in that line the rose is red for the first time in English poetry for a hundred years.54

  When she talked off the cuff, as Bennett Cerf put it: ‘she talked as plain as a banker’.55

  This was the Depression, and having written a gloriously upbeat memoir about a community of mischievous artists that seemed to celebrate frivolity, for the newspapers Stein was the light relief. Her own life, and the lives she wrote about that intersected her own in The Autobiography, were the celebrity lives that represented a distraction from the grinding hardships being faced by many of her readers. Inevitably there were those who found her distasteful. Isaac Goldberg wrote admonishingly of her in 1934: ‘an expatriate American, writing a language all but hermetic, poles removed from the common people and from their problems and interests, addicted to snobbery (the Alice B. Toklas is one of the most snobbish documents printed in this century, and perhaps in any other), suddenly is catapulted into the democracy of popularity. And she loves it.’56 This was strong criticism, but also epitomized critical bafflement about where to place Stein. That licence that Stein had given to those who populated her microcosm of bohemia, her flagrantly apolitical stories of artists doing as they pleased, for many did not sit well with the times. Her own seriousness, in fact, sits uneasily with the figure she had become. By 1933 she had already nurtured two generations of writers, but in October 1934 she was the laughing stock of The New Yorker’s Talk of the Town column — even down to her underwear.

  After the American lecture tour Random House had offered to publish one book of hers a year, to which she responded with eager incredulity. Despite the enterprise of Plain Edition, Stein had never gone solo in her publishing efforts by choice, or to strike out as an avant-garde, but only by necessity — Tender Buttons was the first thing of hers anyone else agreed to publish, and that was ten years after she had started writing. Then it wasn’t until Useful Knowledge in 1928 — another fourteen years — that any mainstream publisher would touch her work, or want to pay for it.57

  In The Autobiography she complained about how unadventurous the large publishing houses were — but she desperately wanted the money and acclaim that she thought they could bring her. Small print runs and inadequate distribution dogged her print career. She was hoping, as she had with her lectures, to use her celebrity as a way of getting people to read her other work. It did help her to achieve a wider circulation, but she also shot herself in the foot. She riled people into making more and more ridiculous parodies. The other stuff was not easy enough — it wasn’t what people wanted. Later Alice recounted the story of how James Branch Cabell, sitting next to her at a dinner party, leant over conspiratorially and asked: ‘Is Gertrude Stein serious?’ Alice’s answer was concise: ‘Desperately’, she replied. ‘That puts a different light on it’, said the writer.58

  In May 1935 Stein and Toklas set sail again for France. The story of what had happened on her triumphant return to America, during the Depression, is told in the second of her autobiographies, Everybody’s Autobiography. It is both a sequel and a response to her first autobiography, and a full reading of it is somewhat dependent on having read Alice B. Toklas. Everybody’s Autobiography could be seen as even more a commercial stunt; it clearly traded on the first autobiography’s popularity; the name-dropping was still there — but there was a change. It is a fascinating book: a serious writer writing about fame from her own point of view as a personality, having gained a celebrity completely unrelated to her serious writing, her life’s work — perhaps a paradox unrepeated anywhere else in literary history. In Everybody’s Autobiography Stein reclaimed her indirect style. There is an undermining, puzzling technique at work as she redoes scenes from The Autobiography in a voice that felt truer to herself: more sceptical. It was a continuation of the story in Hollywood and the reception of the former autobiography, and how it affected her. Calling it Everybody’s Autobiography was a stretch, but it was a nod to her identity being in the public domain.

  Stein had deliberately put autobiography to the same purpose as publicity, without compunction or false feelings about authorial truth. She had a disdain for pretending it was ‘true’. In Everybody’s Autobiography she said it was impossible to ‘remember right’; her whole writing career had been about a similar inability, so she was hardly likely to pretend otherwise now. But after celebrity, she had to become a new
kind of autobiographer. In the introduction she wrote that ‘anything is an autobiography’. ‘Alice B. Toklas did hers and now anybody will do theirs’, and Stein, wresting back her story from ‘Alice’s’ clutches, becomes a sort of everyman.59 Her first autobiography had been emptied of her own discourse. Alice B. Toklas was self-advertisement. Now she would begin to address once again how to really write about herself. This included oppressive thoughts about death, and connectedly, the book records her displeasure at being told (very early on, by her brother Leo) that it was her personality people were interested in, not her work. ‘Identity always worries me and memory and eternity.’60

  She had been in 1937 to London, where she had been snapped by Cecil Beaton, and had more parties thrown for her, pursuing her fame in British literary circles, in a watered-down version of her American success. Just as she had found seeing her name in lights ‘upsetting’, she found the triumphant London staging of A Wedding Bouquet, a ballet based on one of her plays, disconcerting; she felt, staring out into the darkness of the auditorium taking her bows, that it had nothing to do with her. Stein’s anxiety stemmed from the separation of her public image from her work. In her treatment of time in Everybody’s Autobiography once again she was at home with her insistence on the present moment, as a way of overcoming that distance and despair. Rather than optimism, this was what Bridgman calls her ‘pessimistic stoicism’.61

  Partly because of the smokescreen of self-conscious naivety in The Autobiography, and partly because of her instinctive reaction that if a readership was not available the next best thing was a public, Stein’s work and her image got horribly interlocked. Stein’s image was about the whole product, the display, the element of performance. Whereas once writing had been a private act, now she made a pose of writing in public places; Lucy Church Amiably was composed outdoors; she wanted it to be like a landscape, so, like a painter, she went and sat in the landscape in order to absorb it. She listened to acoustic patterns to get the thread of a piece. She wrote to the noise of a tap dripping; she wrote in the car (for example, she wrote ‘Composition as Explanation’, her complex exegesis of her own style, in a garage while someone was fixing her car). The car itself, the source of much hilarity and hi-jinks, was like the poodle, another prop. When she stood and took her bows on the London stage she realized that the writer had become the image, the act, and it upset her, because it seemed to foretell how literary history was already summing her up. That she wrote about these issues and made them the focus of her art made the boundaries even less clear. This confusion of subject matter is also one of the things that has made Stein criticism so bound up with biography.

  Gertrude Stein as a puppet in Identity by Donald Vestal, Detroit Institute of Arts, 1936.

  Evidently concerned about her own misrepresentation, she entered her period of explaining her own work. In Lectures in America and Narration (the published title of four more lectures delivered in 1935 in Chicago) she began explaining how she wrote in such deceptively simple-sounding titles as ‘How Writing is Written’, or ‘Poetry and Grammar’, where she invented a comic snobbery about punctuation: ‘I could never bring myself to use a question mark’; commas were servile and the use of them was ‘positively degrading’.62 In The Autobiography itself she had defensively written: ‘Gertrude Stein, in her writing, has always been possessed by the intellectual passion for exactitude in the description of inner and outer reality.’63 Her writing had become full of defences of her style, and herself.

  In Lectures in America she now called Wells, Galsworthy, Bennett — the very men to whom she had hopefully sent Three Lives a quarter of a century earlier — the ‘second-class’ writers. She claimed that literature had needed to move out of the nineteenth century, and it was the USA that had taken it into the twentieth century. It was she, an American woman, who had naturally been at the forefront of such a mission.64 The freedom to use words as she liked; she saw this as an American condition. The America she had seen left a lasting impression on her, and on her return to Paris she turned once again to patriotic themes, in ‘What America Means to Me’, The Geographical History of America, and Four in America. In these pieces she also continued to write about the problem of identity, and reputation. Four in America imagines — erratically — what would have happened if George Washington had been a novelist, Henry James a general, Wilbur Wright a painter and Ulysses S. Grant a religious leader. And in Four in America she decided that ‘I am I because my little dog knows me’ (which had been one of her repetitive slogans) is a false proposition; she could no longer believe that her existence or identity depended on the world’s view of her.

  During her 1937 visit to London for the opening of A Wedding Bouquet she had been startled by the publicity surrounding Wallis Simpson. When Stein had lived in Baltimore at 215 East Biddle Street forty years earlier, Wallis Warfield, later Simpson, lived opposite at number 212. Struck by the coincidence of the fame each of them had recently achieved, as much as their enormous differences, Stein decided to write a novel on the subject of her former neighbour. Ida, a Novel would be published in 1940. It was about identity, and had a central character, Ida, who was both idle and an idol, and who was mainly interested in shopping. It was a droll book, and had its moments of black humour. She sent a copy to Mrs Simpson, who thanked her and hoped one day to be able to understand it.

  Endlessly inventive in her prose and in her life she moved seamlessly into new incarnations. She drifted away from influence over modern painters — all that had faded. But her writing was at least now more read. And still the younger writers kept coming; Henry Miller, for example, sent her Tropic of Cancer asking for advice. Apart from the continuing adventures in autobiography, the experiment did not ease up. Having overcome her writer’s block, Stein was becoming as prolific as she had ever been. Between 1936 and 1940 she wrote several children’s stories, in which familiar themes were apparent: ‘Once upon a time I met myself and ran’ is a startling refrain from The World is Round. She wrote another libretto, Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights in 1938 (first produced 1951), her enigmatic version of the Faust legend.

  All these writings are full of ‘pessimistic stoicism’; there was undoubtedly a darkness creeping into her work. Perhaps it was the sobering threat of impending war that made Stein also start to see the value of revision at this stage, an idea of final versions, final days, final statements. There was a Laurence Sternian ending to her philosophical meditation on the relation of human nature to the human mind, The Geographical History of America: ‘I am not sure that is not the end.’65 It was very far from being the end.

  Eight

  Stein appears to have been completely unsentimental about having to relinquish the scene of her decades of glory. In 1938 she was forced to leave 27 rue de Fleurus, as the landlord needed the apartment for his son. Stein and Toklas moved to the rue Christine, a street with its own illustrious ghosts; their new flat was in the building where Queen Christina of Sweden had once lived, and which their old friend Apollinaire had written about in ‘Lundi, rue Christine’. While Stein and Toklas were moving house, others were fleeing Paris, and France. By December 1939 her American friends were warning her to leave. They encouraged her to come back to the USA, where she was now famous, and had many friends, but she decided to stay put. She and Toklas put their papers in order, then went back to their country house at Bilignin in southeastern France, taking the Picasso Portrait of Gertrude Stein with them. (They had already sent many of Stein’s papers to Yale for safe-keeping.) They would not return to Paris until December 1944.

  When the Second World War arrived Stein was in her sixties. Stein and Toklas, both Jewish, lived in rural France under German occupation, where Stein continued to write, and produced several books about the war. German soldiers were even billeted in their house during August and September 1943, and again in July 1944 German soldiers came and stayed for the night. The pair kept out of the way and allowed the servants to see to the soldiers’ needs. Theirs was
a precarious situation. To what they owed their miraculous survival has been a point of contention.

  They had repeatedly been told by the American consul in Lyon to leave while they could. In early June 1940 they were packed and ready to go; but then they made the decision not to leave. Stein explained it with her ordinary, somewhat bombastic good cheer: ‘it would be awfully uncomfortable and I am fussy about my food.’1 When she retold the story in Wars I Have Seen, she made it into a reassuring tale of neighborly solidarity; the villagers had promised that they would look after them, ‘en famille’,2 so that they felt happier staying where they were, rather than going to live among strangers, even when Paris fell to the Germans.

  The region where they lived became part of the Vichy government, and at first German troops were removed from the area. In ‘The Winner Loses’ (August 1940) Stein hoped that, staying where they were, they would be ‘tremendously occupied with the business of daily living, and that will be enough.’3 Stein read the classics, and books of astrological predictions and prophecies. They did everything to supplement their meagre supplies, from fishing for crayfish with an umbrella to working the black market, and Gertrude would go out foraging, walking miles every day for a few eggs, some milk. While Gertrude’s famous charm came in very useful, her international renown also naturally made them extremely conspicuous. In 1943, their money running out, they made the journey to Switzerland in order to sell Cézanne’s Portrait of Madame Cézanne, and the perilous return journey back into France; after which Stein commented: ‘we are eating the Cézanne’.4 Her instinct was to turn everything into anecdote, even if it was a lugubrious one. Her friends asked why they had come back.