by Lucy Daniel
Schmitz, Neil, Of Huck and Alice: Humorous Writing in American Literature (Minneapolis, MN, 1983)
Simon, Linda, The Biography of Alice B. Toklas (New York, 1977)
Steiner, Wendy, Exact Resemblance to Exact Resemblance: The Literary Portraiture of Gertrude Stein (New Haven, CT, 1978)
Stimpson, Catharine R., ‘Gertrude Stein and the Lesbian Lie’, in American Women’s Autobiography: Fea(s)ts of Memory, ed. Margo Culley (Madison, WI, 1992), pp. 152–66
––, ‘Gertrude Stein and the Transposition of Gender’, in The Poetics of Gender, ed. Nancy K. Miller (New York, 1986), pp. 1–18
––, ‘Humanism and Its Freaks’, Boundary 2, XIII (1984), pp. 301–19
––, ‘The Mind, the Body and Gertrude Stein’, Critical Inquiry, III/3 (1977), pp. 489–506
Toklas, Alice B., The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook (New York, 1954)
––, What Is Remembered (New York, 1963)
Wagner-Martin, Linda, ‘Favored Strangers’: Gertrude Stein and Her Family (New Brunswick, NJ, 1995)
Wald, Priscilla, ‘“A Losing Self-Sense”: The Making of Americans and the Anxiety of Identity’, in Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form (Durham, NC, 1995), pp. 237–98
Walker, Jayne L., The Making of a Modernist: Gertrude Stein from Three Lives to Tender Buttons (Amherst, MA, 1984)
Watson, Steven, Prepare for Saints: Gertrude Stein, Virgil Thomson, and the Mainstreaming of American Modernism (New York, 1998)
Weinstein, Norman, Gertrude Stein and the Literature of the Modern Consciousness (New York, 1970)
Weiss, Lynn M., Gertrude Stein and Richard Wright: The Poetics and Politics of Modernism (Jackson, MS, 1998)
White, Ray Lewis, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas: A Reference Guide (Boston, MA, 1984)
Wineapple, Brenda, Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein (New York, 1996)
Internet
PENNsound: Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania.
http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Stein.html
Link to recordings of Stein reading from The Making of Americans, Matisse, A Valentine to Sherwood Anderson, If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso, The Fifteenth of November … T S. Eliot, Portrait of Christian Bérard, Madame Recamier. An Opera, and How She Bowed to Her Brother, plus a 1934 interview with Stein. Working notes by Ulla Dydo.
Letters
Burns, Edward, ed., The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Carl Van Vechten. 2 vols: 1913–1935 and 1935–1946 (New York, 1986)
––, ed., Staying On Alone: Letters of Alice B. Toklas (New York, 1973)
––, and Ulla E. Dydo, eds, The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder (New Haven, CT, 1996)
Everett, Patricia R., ed., A History of Having a Great Many Times Not Continued to Be Friends: The Correspondence between Mabel Dodge and Gertrude Stein, 1911–1934 (Albuquerque, NM, 1996)
Gallup, Donald, ed., The Flowers of Friendship: Letters Written to Gertrude Stein (New York, 1953)
Page, Tim, and Vanessa Weeks Page, Selected Letters of Virgil Thomson (New York, 1988)
Steward, Samuel M., ed., Dear Sammy: Letters from Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas (Boston, MA, 1977)
Turner, Kay, ed., Baby Precious Always Shines: Selected Love Notes between Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas (New York, 1999)
Acknowledgements
‘Gertrude Stein’ by Mina Loy is reprinted courtesy of Roger L. Conover, Mina Loy’s editor and literary executor. Extract from Gertrude Stein’s autobiographical notes for Geography and Plays, the Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, reprinted by permission of David Higham Associates, and by kind permission of the Estate of Gertrude Stein through its Literary Executor, Mr Stanford Gann, Jr, of Levin & Gann, PA.
I would like to thank the British Academy for financial support in the making of this book. Thanks also to Kasia Boddy, Ros Coward, Ann Fraser, Rowland Hughes, Cathryn Stone and Paul Vlitos, and thank you above all to Terry Daniel and Annette Daniel, and to José Enrique Martinez Yabar.
Photo Acknowledgements
Photos courtesy of Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library: pp. 6, 10 (© DACS 2009), 15, 26, 33, 51, 67, 79, 96 (© Man Ray Trust/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2009), 101, 115, 123, 129 (© Man Ray Trust/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2009), 130 (© ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2009), 135, 157 (© Man Ray Trust/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2009), 160, 162 (by permission of The Carl Van Vechten Trust), 164, 165, 170, 175, 182, 185, 190, 191; photo The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of Gertrude Stein, 1946 (47.106): p. 65 (Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, © Succession Picasso/DACS 2009); photos The Baltimore Museum of Art: The Cone Collection, formed by Dr Claribel Cone and Miss Etta Cone of Baltimore, Maryland: pp. 90 (BMA 1950.300), 128 (BMA 1950.315, © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2009); photo Smithsonian American Art Museum: p. 188 (gift of Mr and Mrs Jacob Kainen and museum purchase through a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, © ARS, NY and DACS, London 2009).
References
Preface
1 Edmund Wilson, The Shores of Light (New York, 1952), p. 579.
One
1 Gertrude Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography (New York, 1937), pp. 242–3.
2 Gertrude Stein, Wars I Have Seen (London, 1945), p. 8.
3 Quoted in Diana Souhami, Gertrude and Alice (London, 1991), p. 159.
4 Stein refers to the death of these siblings in The Making of Americans (Normal, IL, 1995), pp. 89, 796. This moment also surfaces elsewhere in Stein’s work, for example in Everybody’s Autobiography, pp. 115, 134.
5 Gertrude Stein, Paris France (London, 1940), p. 21.
6 Quoted in James R. Mellow, Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company (New York, 1974), p. 356.
7 Gertrude Stein, Lectures in America (New York, 1935), p. 150. Here Stein was quoting from her own A Long Gay Book.
8 Gertrude Stein to Robert Bartlett Haas, [23] January 1938, Yale Collection of American Literature, quoted in Brenda Wineapple, Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein (London, 1997), p. 61.
9 Gertrude Stein, Brewsie and Willie (New York, 1946), p. 113.
10 Stein, The Making of Americans, p. 3.
11 Ibid., p. 3.
12 Gertrude Stein, Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein (New York, 1972), p. 69.
13 Stein, The Making of Americans, p. 408.
14 Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography, p. 132.
15 Stein, The Making of Americans, p. 3. These opening lines have provoked much comment. Stein is generally believed to have borrowed the story from Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics.
16 Ibid., p. 125.
17 Ibid., p. 45.
18 Stein, Lectures in America, p. 66.
19 Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography, pp. 135–7.
20 Mellow, Charmed Circle, p. 344.
21 William Carlos Williams, The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams (New York, 1951), p. 254.
22 Stein, Selected Writings, p. 71.
23 Gertrude Stein, ‘The Birth of a Legend’, in Rosalind S. Miller, Gertrude Stein: Form and Intelligibility (New York, 1949), p. 134.
24 Stein, The Making of Americans, p. 36.
25 Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography, p. 138.
26 Stein, The Making of Americans, p. 134.
27 Gertrude Stein, As Fine as Melanctha (1914–1930), vol. IV of The Yale Edition of the Unpublished Writings of Gertrude Stein (New Haven, CT, 1954 ), p. 158.
28 Stein, Selected Writings, p. 71.
29 Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography, p. 157.
30 Miller, Gertrude Stein, p. 109.
31 Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography, p. 16; Stein, Wars I Have Seen, p. 36.
32 Gertrude Stein, ‘In the Red Deeps’, in Miller, Gertrude Stein, p. 108.
33 Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography, p. 142.
34 Stein, Selecte
d Writings, p. 68.
Two
1 Alice Toklas said Stein was ‘very Californian … almost a foreigner’ when she went East, quoted in Brenda Wineapple, Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein (London, 1997), p. 45.
2 Gertrude Stein, college theme, in Rosalind S. Miller, Gertrude Stein: Form and Intelligibility (New York, 1949), p. 115.
3 Gertrude Stein, ‘In the Library’, ibid., p. 141.
4 Ibid., p. 120.
5 Ibid., p. 115.
6 Evidence supporting Stein’s sensitivity over charges of literary incompetence is found in her tutor’s comments: ‘standpoint of a morbid psychological state’; ‘awkward and unidiomatic uses of language’; ‘wretched sentence structure’; ‘incoherent’; ‘lacking in organization, in fertility of resource, and in artfulness of literary method’, ibid., pp. 108–56.
7 Miller suggests that ‘Woman’ displays ‘an antipathy [Stein] harboured all her life’ towards illogical and hysterical women, ibid., p. 103.
8 Gertrude Stein, Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein (New York, 1972), p. 78.
9 Brenda Wineapple provides a coherent narrative of Stein’s movements and her preoccupations in these years, see Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein (London, 1997).
10 William James quoted by Bert Bender, The Descent of Love (Philadelphia, PA, 1996), p. 118. See, for example, Münsterberg, The Americans (1905), Santayana, Character and Opinion in the United States (1920) and Royce, Race Questions (1908).
11 See Steven Meyer, Irresistible Dictation: Gertrude Stein and the Correlations of Writing and Science (Stanford, CA, 2001). Meyer provides an exhaustive reading of the relation of Stein’s scientific training to her later work.
12 Mina Loy, ‘Gertrude Stein’, Transatlantic Review, II/3 (October 1924).
13 Donald Gallup, ed., The Flowers of Friendship: Letters Written to Gertrude Stein (New York, 1953), p. 4.
14 Stein, Selected Writings, pp. 74–5.
15 See Tim Armstrong, Modernism, Technology and the Body: A Cultural Study (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 197–214.
16 See Wineapple, Sister Brother, p. 80.
17 Gertrude Stein and Leon Solomons, ‘Normal Motor Automatism’, Motor Automatism (New York, 1969), p. 10.
18 See Nancy Leys Stepan and Sander L. Gilman, ‘Appropriating the Idioms of Science: The Rejection of Scientific Racism’, The Bounds of Race: Perspectives on Hegemony and Resistance, ed. Dominick LaCapra (Ithaca, NY, 1991), pp. 72–103.
19 Meyer, Irresistible Dictation, p. 221.
20 Quoted in Newsweek, 8 December 1934, p. 24.
21 Gertrude Stein, ‘A Transatlantic Interview 1946’, in A Primer for the Gradual Understanding of Gertrude Stein, ed. Robert Bartlett Haas (Los Angeles, CA, 1971), p. 18.
22 Gertrude Stein, Narration: Four Lectures (Westport, CT, 1969), p. 15.
23 James R. Mellow, Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company (New York, 1974), p. 33.
24 Meyer, Irresistible Dictation, p. xvii.
25 Ibid., p. xxi.
26 Gertrude Stein, ‘Possessive Case’, in As Fine as Melanctha (1914–1930), vol. IV of The Yale Edition of the Unpublished Writings of Gertrude Stein (New Haven, CT, 1954), p. 144.
27 See Wineapple, Sister Brother, p. 81. See also Armstrong, Modernism, Technology, and the Body, p. 199, for a discussion of Stein’s ‘distracted writing’.
28 Quoted in Meyer, Irresistible Dictation, p. xv.
29 Gertrude Stein, ‘Ocean Symphony’, in Miller, Gertrude Stein, p. 121.
30 Stein, Selected Writings, p. 74.
31 Gertrude Stein, Lectures in America (New York, 1975), p. 137.
32 Laura Marcus, Auto/biographical Discourses: Criticism, Theory, Practice (Manchester, 1994), p. 67.
33 See Wineapple, Sister Brother, pp. 103–4.
34 Gertrude Stein, ‘The Value of College Education for Women’, in Wineapple, Sister Brother, p. 105.
35 Stein, The Making of Americans (Normal, IL, 1995), p. 783.
36 Ibid., p. 349.
37 Stein’s description for the dust jacket of Geography and Plays (Boston, MA, 1922).
38 Meyer, Irresistible Dictation, p. 79.
39 Lewellys F. Barker, The Nervous System and Its Constituent Neurones (New York, 1899), pp. 725–6.
40 Stein, The Making of Americans, p. 375.
41 Lewellys F. Barker, Time and the Physician (New York, 1942), p. 60.
42 Bender, The Descent of Love, pp. 156–8. Bender concentrates on William Dean Howell’s Dr Breen’s Practice (1881), Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s Dr Zay (1882), Sarah Orne Jewett’s A Country Doctor, and Henry James’s The Bostonians (1886).
43 Wineapple’s chronology of the events of Stein’s student years, and her self-perception at the time, informs my reading of them here. See Sister Brother, pp. 123–31; 140–44; 149–51.
44 Stein, Selected Writings, p. 77.
45 See Wineapple, Sister Brother, p. 141.
46 Stein, Selected Writings, p. 78.
47 Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography (New York, 1937), p. 264.
48 ‘Then they make a baby to make for themselves a new beginning and so win for themselves a new everlasting feeling.’ Stein, Lectures in America, p. 150. See Meyer, Irresistible Dictation, p. 210.
49 This essay, probably written between October 1901 and early 1902, was discovered and attributed to Stein by Brenda Wineapple; see Wineapple, Sister Brother, pp. 409–14. See also Wineapple’s commentary on the essay, pp. 152–4.
50 Of course Stein was not alone in linking the decadent and the New Woman. See Linda Dowling, ‘The Decadent and the New Woman in the 1890s’, Nineteenth Century Fiction, XXXIII/4 (1979), pp. 434–53.
51 Wineapple, Sister Brother, p. 123.
52 Ibid., p. 413.
53 Ibid., p. 154.
54 Ibid., p. 181.
55 These recollections are quoted by Meyer, Irresistible Dictation, p. 86.
56 Stein, Selected Writings, p. 77.
57 Ibid., p. 78.
58 Edmund Wilson, Upstate: Records and Recollections of Northern New York (London, 1972), p. 63.
59 Gertrude Stein, Fernhurst, QED, and Other Early Writings by Gertrude Stein, ed. Leon Katz (New York, 1971), p. 102.
60 Ibid., p. 58.
61 Ibid., p. 100.
62 Leon Katz, introduction to Stein, Fernhurst, QED, and Other Early Writings, p. xviii.
63 Gertrude Stein, ‘Why do Americans Live in Europe?’, Transition, XIV (1928), pp. 97–8.
64 Gertrude Stein, ‘The Making of Americans’, in Fernhurst, QED, and Other Early Writings, p. 153.
Three
1 Robert McAlmon and Kay Boyle, Being Geniuses Together (London, 1970 ), p. 241.
2 Leon Katz was the first to explore Stein’s depression, in his doctoral thesis on The Making of Americans, ‘The First Making of The Making of Americans: A Study Based on Gertrude Stein’s Notebooks and Early Versions of Her Novel (1902–8)’, PhD dissertation, Columbia University (1963). Although unpublished, his thesis has been a fount of information for Stein critics. Some of his points about the affair with May Bookstaver and Stein’s state of mind at this time are reiterated in his introduction to QED. See Gertrude Stein, Fernhurst, QED, and Other Early Writings by Gertrude Stein, ed. Leon Katz (New York, 1971).
3 Stein, Fernhurst, QED, and Other Early Writings, p. 19.
4 Shari Benstock, Women of the Left Bank: Paris 1900–1940 (London, 1987 ), p. 178.
5 Stein, Fernhurst, QED, and Other Early Writings, p. 80.
6 Benstock, Women of the Left Bank, p. 189.
7 James R. Mellow, Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company (New York, 1974), p. 4.
8 Maurice Grosser, ‘Maurice Grosser on Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas’, in The Company They Kept: Writers on Unforgettable Friendships, ed. Robert B. Silvers and Barbara Epstein (New York, 2006 ), p. 154.
9 ‘Removed from [the American] literary heritage, Stein did not suffer an anxiety of influence.’ Benstock, Women of the Left Bank, p. 192. See
also p. 149 on Stein’s domestic situation.
10 Ibid., p. 47.
11 Paul Bowles, Without Stopping: An Autobiography (London, 1972), p. 119.
12 Brenda Wineapple, Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein (London, 1997 ), p. 139.
13 Stein, Fernhurst, QED, and Other Early Writings, p. 34.
14 Ibid., p. 29.
15 Gertrude Stein, Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein (New York, 1972), p. 42.
16 Ibid., p. 117.
17 Ibid., p. 50.
18 John Richardson, A Life of Picasso (London, 1996), vol. I, p. 396.
19 Gertrude Stein, Picasso (London, 1946), p. 18.
20 Stein, Selected Writings, p. 42.
21 See Benstock, Women of the Left Bank, p. 153.
22 Stein, Selected Writings, p. 47.
23 Janet Hobhouse, Everybody Who Was Anybody: A Biography of Gertrude Stein (London, 1975), p. 49.
24 Quoted in Mellow, Charmed Circle, p. 97.
25 Mabel Dodge Luhan, European Experiences (New York, 1935), p. 324.
26 Stein, Selected Writings, p. 66.
27 Ibid., p. 49.
28 Richardson, A Life of Picasso, vol. I, p. 455.
29 Stein, Selected Writings, p. 12.
30 Stein, Picasso, p. 8.
31 Stein, Selected Writings, p. 43.
32 Janet Flanner, ‘Memory Is All: Alice B. Toklas’, in The Literature of Lesbianism: A Historical Anthology from Ariosto to Stonewall, ed. Terry Castle (New York, 2003), p. 1073.
33 Richardson, A Life of Picasso, vol. I, p. 409.
34 Stein, Selected Writings, p. 22.
35 Richardson, A Life of Picasso, vol. II, p. 223.
36 Stein, Selected Writings, p. 31.
37 Mabel Dodge Luhan reproduced a letter from Stein in which she tells this story in the third volume of her memoirs, Movers and Shakers (New York, 1936), p. 33.
38 Edmund Wilson, ‘Nonsense’, The New Republic, 20 February 1929. Reproduced in Kirk Curnutt, ed., The Critical Response to Gertrude Stein (Westport, CT, 2000), p. 46.
39 See Richard Bridgman, Gertrude Stein in Pieces (New York, 1970), pp. 47–52.
40 Richard Wright, ‘Gertrude Stein’s Story Is Drenched in Hitler’s Horrors’, PM, 11 March 1945, p. 15.
41 Claude McKay, A Long Way from Home (New York, 1970), p. 248.
42 Stein, Selected Writings, pp. 63; 46.
