Gertrude Stein (Critical Lives)

by Lucy Daniel

  Stein’s identity papers.

  According to Toklas, they simply ‘refused to face’ the danger that faced them as Jews, and when the US entered the war, as Americans.5 In 1943 Stein, drawing unnecessary attention to herself, brought a lawsuit against the owner of their house at Bilignin who was forcing them to move, and one day when she went to see her lawyer he informed her that he had been told directly by a Vichy official that Stein and Toklas must leave at once, ‘otherwise they will be put into a concentration camp’.6 Again, plans for escape were made and again Stein and Toklas turned back at the last minute. Stein decided ‘it is better to go regularly wherever we are sent than to go irregularly where nobody can help us if we are in trouble.’7 Stein later wrote that the mayor had told her, when enemy aliens were being rounded up by German soldiers, that she and Alice were too old to be sent to a concentration camp and would not survive it, so he did not tell anyone about them. They were not made to sign the register of Jewish residents at Culoz.8 Having friends in high places had never been so important.

  Stein’s story of being protected by the kind-hearted villagers was appealing, but it was only part of the truth, and the reasons for Gertrude and Alice’s survival are still somewhat obscure. Francis Rose, a protégé of Jean Cocteau, one of the second-rate painters Stein had latched onto before the war (she was rumoured to have bought 400 of his works) and who would eventually design her gravestone, was also an intimate of several senior Nazi figures. He claimed to have asked Goering to ensure the safety of Stein and Toklas. More controversial still is Stein’s relationship with her prewar friend Bernard Faÿ, he who had translated The Making of Americans, ‘Melanctha’ and The Autobiography into French.9 Faÿ was given a position as head of the Bibliothèque Nationale by the Vichy government, and it was probably due to his influence with high-ranking Vichy officials that their names did not appear on any lists of Jewish residents, and that Gertrude and Alice were safe during the war.

  Naturally they were grateful to him. It seems that they were unaware of the darker side of his wartime activities. In 1944 Faÿ was arrested for collaborating and at his trial in 1946 was sentenced to hard labour for life, later reduced to twenty years. Gertrude wrote a long testimonial on his behalf, wrote to him in prison and sent him gifts. After Stein’s death, Alice Toklas devoted much of her time to campaigning for his release. When they first met Faÿ must have seemed just another of the harmless, sycophantic, slightly ridiculous if useful young men who flocked around Stein. But events proved that he was not harmless. Janet Malcolm has recently uncovered more about Bernard Faÿ. She writes on evidence from his trial that he ‘was responsible for many deaths’, and that ‘540 Freemasons were shot or died in the camps’ as a result of his collaboration.10 It is not suggested that Stein or Toklas knew anything about this. Nevertheless Stein’s deep bond of affection for Faÿ, unperturbed by his post-war arrest, raises questions about her judgement. That he also may have saved her life makes the matter more complex.

  Relatedly, another stain on Stein’s reputation has been caused by her championing of Marshal Pétain, the head of the Vichy government, for the selfish reason that under the terms of the Armistice the unoccupied area of France in which they lived had felt to her ‘pretty free’, as opposed to ‘not free at all’ if they had been occupied;11 she saw Pétain as their personal saviour, but she was much vilified for this after the war, as she has continued to be more recently by critics and biographers measuring up her politics. It would not have been so bad if Stein had not became a propagandist for Pétain, translating his speeches into English during 1941 and 1942 and writing an effusive preface for them. Bernard Faÿ met Pétain at Vichy on a monthly basis, and would often travel to visit Stein and Toklas after those meetings. Stein was clearly under his influence, and it was probably at his suggestion that she began the translation. A blend of political ignorance and personal gratitude led her to sing Pétain’s praises. But she continued with the translation even after it was known that Jews were being deported.12 Her American publisher referred to the translation as a ‘disgusting’ document.

  After the war, Stein was even suspected by some former friends of having collaborated; Maria Jolas stated as much. The allegations were unfounded, but questions over her behaviour and opinions have lingered and infected her posthumous reputation. Katherine Anne Porter also criticized Stein’s stance during the war, objecting to what she saw as her attitude that it was all a bit of a wheeze. Stein could often sound flippant when she was in reality anything but. After reporting the conversation about the concentration camp in Wars I Have Seen, for example, she writes: ‘It took us some weeks to get over it but we finally did.’13 Of course Stein was not underestimating the seriousness of the situation; she was however bound by a lifetime’s habit of putting a cheerful face on everything. When they got back to Paris after the war she castigated Alice for bemoaning the fact that their apartment had been looted of knick-knacks, telling her their problems had been trifling compared to those faced by others.

  She had in fact made an abrupt about-turn with the Pétain speeches, and abandoned the translation. Although apparently having written it for publication in America as an apologia for Pétain, Stein appears to have reconsidered. Later she revised her opinion of Pétain, extenuating herself with an element of obfuscation, admitting her own ultimate confusion as well as the complexity of the situation, by saying: ‘So many points of view about him, so very many, I had lots of them, I was almost French in having so many’.14

  Despite the many petty quarrels that Stein was renowned for during her life, she can be both admirable and exasperating in the breadth of her philosophical tolerance. To Cecil Beaton she once explained: ‘I can’t put up with anyone who has set ideas, with anyone who is parti pris.’15 That breadth of philosophical tolerance is in most contexts one of her most appealing characteristics. In a letter to Francis Rose she simply said: ‘living in an occupied country is very complicated.’16 Stein could be infuriatingly open-minded. Her arguments were never watertight, and it was almost as if she never meant them to be.

  The older Stein made a series of ill-advised comments on the political situation that gave her a reputation as a reactionary. In the 1930s she opposed Roosevelt and his New Deal, seemed to lend support to Franco, and gushed over Pétain, all of which earned her detractors. Many have been disappointed and mystified that Stein should espouse right-wing solutions to economic and political problems; her lesbianism and her avant-gardism seem to make her a natural ally of those with Leftist sympathies, and people have found it hard to believe that she was simply not to be corralled under any unifying belief system, or that one person could be so radical and so conservative at once. In fact, she had always been a conservative; her first novella had extolled the virtues of being middle class and living temperately. Critics have been disappointed in her for her failure to live up to the meanings with which they have loaded her.

  During the war Stein and Toklas were clearly frightened. Two Jewish American women in their sixties living alone in occupied France would have been hard pressed not to be. Biographer Janet Hobhouse put the fact that they decided to stay down to ‘childishness’ rather than ‘courage’. Stein has been seen as not identifying enough with her Jewish heritage.17 It is very hard to make such judgements. If any of her comments seem crass, they are clearly also a front. Stein was never one to give a typical reaction. Her lifelong attitude to adversity was optimism, but it was in her writing that her true feelings were played out. For the first time in her work of the period she began to address the depression of her youth.

  Stein’s war writing, as unconventional as any of her other work, begins with Paris France (in fact written before war broke out), known as Stein’s ‘love letter’ to France. It is not really about Paris, but about rural France and the people among whom she lived. It begins with some barely optimistic comments about civilization and progress. Here she told herself, managing composure on the brink of apocalypse, that she had to be ‘
completely conservative’ ‘in order to be free’.18

  Once the occupation began, Stein continued writing, but in her barely intelligible scrawl; Alice no longer typed any of it up, so that German soldiers would not be able to read it if they got hold of it. In public they had to speak in French and not English, a circumstance that made her more patriotic than ever about her language. Stein was still being published, in the journal Confluences, until her name appeared on a Nazi list of proscribed authors in May 1943. Local children performed the plays she wrote for them — words by Gertrude Stein, costumes by Pierre Balmain — plays full of signs and portents.19 The war was taking her back to her democratic roots. She had always objected to her plays being performed in an elitist setting, and this was, in the best way, art for the people. In one of the plays, perhaps her best, ‘Yes is For a Very Young Man’, Stein explores the ideology of saying yes and no, of assent and dissent, and of affirmation and negation: ‘What is there to say but yes, no does not mean anything.’ The piece has been read as evidence of Stein’s involvement in the Resistance; there is the possibility, but no proof, that she was providing information to the Resistance during these years.20

  The plays and other pieces that she was producing are not doctrinal or dogmatic; rather they are filled with surrealistic moments, dramas, tensions, little sinister, unexplained tableaux that seek to represent the psychological confusion of those years. In her epilogue to Mrs Reynolds, the peculiar allegory she wrote about Hitler and Stalin between 1940 and 1942, she wrote: ‘There is nothing historical about this book except the state of mind.’21 That is a good dictum for Stein’s war writing, in which history becomes a state of mind. During the war Stein read books of prophecy for solace, and Mrs Reynolds is full of dreams and signs, but also about the unexceptional nature of day to day life in the occupation, a tribute to unexceptional things; it celebrates contentment, but not unthinkingly: it is a hard-won contentment, in spite of hardship. Battling with horror internally, it faces the world with equanimity.

  The most successful of her war writings, Wars I Have Seen was written, a diary of sorts, between early 1943 and August 1944, when the American troops arrived. It is her chronicle of the last stage of the war. Here the themes of the war years came together, though chaotically; here Stein described a world in which chaos and coincidence ruled, and there was no possibility of progress; no facts could explain the situation; realism was dead. Wars I Have Seen was, perhaps, based on her old friend Mildred Aldrich’s World War I book of letters, A Hilltop on the Marne, in which Aldrich, at the time in her sixties, recorded the everyday experience of living in wartime, in a house which overlooked the plains on which the battles of the Marne took place. Stein, subsisting on the edge and under the weight of another world war, now also in her sixties, was like Aldrich reporting the mundane and the trivial side of war, although in her very un-mundane manner. Wars I Have Seen also records the divided loyalties of life under occupation, the turning of villager against villager, as some were denounced to officials for dealing on the black market, and the Maquis sent little coffins to those accused of collaboration. One of her alternative titles for it was ‘An Emotional Autobiography’.

  The last stages of the book, dealing with the liberation, are practically euphoric. When the first Americans arrived in the local town, she rushed to meet them: ‘Alice Toklas panting behind and Basket very excited’, as she put it, with a rather unflattering reversal of roles for Alice and the dog.22 Wars I Have Seen was a popular and critical success when it was published in 1945.

  After the war, Stein learned that in August 1944 the Gestapo had been in her apartment in the rue Christine, carrying a photograph of her, calling her Picasso paintings ‘la saloperie juive’ and threatening to burn them.23 In war writing such as Wars I have Seen Stein had been forced to set aside her autocratic tendencies and see herself as part of history. The war had changed her. During the occupation, Stein was forced to live in the present, and among people again; she could no longer isolate herself, and she went at her work with a new and less cavalier engagement in public affairs.

  Aged 71, she was in fine shape as a writer. In liberated Paris Stein became a maternal figure for American GIs as she entertained them and listened to their stories. Yet another generation of young men was falling for her. She told Cecil Beaton that the GIs came to see her and Picasso because they recognized that they too were fighters.24 Her image was still as famous as ever — to promote Wars I Have Seen a photograph of Stein and Toklas appeared in response to a glamorous publicity photo of Kathleen Winsor, the author of Forever Amber, with the line: ‘Shucks, we’ve got glamour girls too’, which greatly amused her.25 The war over, in June 1945 she embarked, under the auspices of Life magazine, on a tour of US army bases in occupied Germany, bringing food and chatting with GIs. Stein wrote a piece about it with the sprightly title ‘Off We All Went to See Germany’, and it appeared with a spread of photographs of herself and Alice on the roof of Hitler’s Berghof at Berchtesgaden (she had wanted to steal one of Hitler’s radiators to grow flowers over, but found it too heavy to appropriate). She was still as concerned as ever to disseminate serenely triumphant images of herself.

  Feeding the GIs.

  And she turned once more to America. Brewsie and Willie is an extraordinary emulation of dialogue between the GIs she met on her tour and in Paris. It recreates conversations between American soldiers and nurses, about the future of America, demonstrating again Stein’s skill at emulating vernaculars. She had always used dialogue and conversation in her work, from ‘Melanctha’ onwards, partly as a way of remaining indefinite, exploring contradictoriness. The appeal of dialogue was also that it did not involve argument; Stein was not a practitioner of the prolonged argument. But with some polemic fervour, Brewsie and Willie launched a critique of what Stein saw as the spoilt American culture, from mushy food to the newly invented Gallup poll, which aroused her perennial objection to the idea of being expected to answer a simple yes or no to anything, and railed against the evils of industrialism in America.

  The book was a call for individualism, and a reminder that Stein was always not only an autocrat, but an individualist. ‘How can you pioneer when there ain’t no wilderness any more’ asks Brewsie. The nurse responds: ‘you got to break down what’s been built up, that’s pioneering.’26 A fair enough summing up of Stein’s artistic goals, which were always linked to her vision for America, and an American twentieth century. One of the most characteristic lines in the book is: ‘There ain’t any answer … that’s the answer.’ Stein’s fundamental incapability of furnishing ‘an answer’ in her work, at the very root of her style, was related to her view of the world. At the end of what was to be Stein’s last book, and the most unusual of her unusual war writings, the address ‘To Americans’ is a fairly startling farewell speech. The GIs had ‘made me come over all patriotic.’ As a valediction, it gives a strikingly different image of Stein to the one that had prospered in the public imagination, or even the one that has prospered since in the critical tradition that has sprung up around her work since the 1970s:

  You just have to find a new way … you have to learn to produce without exhausting your country’s wealth, you have to learn to be individual and not just mass job workers … you have to get courage enough to know what you feel and not just all be yes or no men, you have to really learn to express complication … look facts in the face, not just what they all say, the leaders, but every darn one of you … We are Americans.27

  It is a reminder of the array of contexts that feed into the arc of her career that she called herself ‘a Civil War veteran’, and ended in the age of the atomic bomb.

  Since the war Stein’s understanding of the race problem in America had advanced; she wrote, in an article for the New York Times, that American soldiers were now beginning to understand what imprisonment and persecution meant, and because of that they were beginning to understand that the race problem in America was also about persecution and a sense of
imprisonment.28 She too had become conscious of the meaning of freedom. The war may also have made Stein, belatedly, into a feminist. The Mother of Us All (1946) was a libretto (again commissioned by Virgil Thomson, and first performed to his music in 1947) about the life of Susan B. Anthony, the nineteenth-century women’s rights reformer and campaigner for female suffrage. It was a peculiar subject for Stein, who had never identified with female role models, and never aligned herself with any feminist ideologies, except that it treated a subject who was perhaps a Stein substitute. Anthony is a strong female figure who, in the end, reaches a sort of apotheosis. She is a great speaker. She is the type of the genius whose work stands above time. The play itself is filled with silences, and not with answers, it is anti-sentiment, and also quite anti-male. Its ending is bleak; the disembodied voice of Susan B. Anthony sounds out from behind a memorial statue of Susan B. Anthony; after having asked, much as Stein did during her lectures, ‘do you know’, and receiving silence and negation as the only response, the voice from behind the statue intones her final words: ‘My long life, my long life.’ If this was Stein’s memorial to herself, it was an uncharacteristically muted one.

  By the time Stein wrote this, the last full-length work she would ever write, she knew she was ill. She was in some pain from what was at first thought to be a bowel infection, and later turned out to be cancer. She had lost a lot of weight and had weakened. Still dwelling on death and destruction, her ‘Reflection on the Atomic Bomb’ would be the last piece Stein ever wrote. She died on 27 July 1946, aged 72, while being operated on for the cancer. She was buried in Père Lachaise cemetery. Alice eventually joined her there, twenty years later.