Gertrude Stein (Critical Lives)

by Lucy Daniel

  43 Quoted in Wineapple, Sister Brother, p. 235.

  44 Stein, Fernhurst, QED, and Other Early Writings, p. 57.

  45 There is also the sense of Pound’s ‘tale of the tribe’, the phrase used in Guide to Kulchur to describe the Cantos.

  46 For example, these were terms Robert McAlmon used in a contemporary review of her work, ‘The Legend of Gertrude Stein’, which appeared in Outlook and was reproduced in McAlmon and Boyle, Being Geniuses Together, p. 207.

  47 Michael North, The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language and Twentieth-Century Literature (New York, 1994), pp. 59–76.

  48 See Janice L. Doane, Silence and Narrative: The Early Novels of Gertrude Stein (Westport, CT, 1986), p. 138.

  49 See Gertrude Stein, ‘Lecture II — Narration’ [1935], in The Poetics of the New American Poetry, ed. Donald Allen and Warren Tallman (New York, 1973), pp. 106–13.

  50 Gertrude Stein, Three Lives (London, 1990), p. 62.

  51 Peter Keating, The Haunted Study: A Social History of the English Novel, 1875–1914 (London, 1991), p. 234.

  52 Donald Gallup, ed., The Flowers of Friendship: Letters Written to Gertrude Stein (New York, 1953), p. 47. Galsworthy was an unenthusiastic recipient; Wells, after initial bewilderment, professed to admire the work and made repeated plans to meet up with Stein, but never did. There is no record of what either Bennett or Shaw made of the book.

  53 Ibid., p. 50.

  54 Stein told Carl Van Vechten that reality, rather than realism, was ‘what interests me most in the world’, in a letter of 5 October 1929. Edward Burns, ed., The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Carl Van Vechten, 1913 –1946, vol. I (1913–1935) (New York, 1986), p. 203.

  Four

  1 Gertrude Stein, autobiographical notes for Geography and Plays, 1922, Yale Collection of American Literature.

  2 Anonymous, ‘Gertrude Stein in Critical French Eyes’, The Literary Digest, 6 February 1926. Reproduced in Kirk Curnutt, ed., The Critical Response to Gertrude Stein (Westport, CT, 2000), p. 32.

  3 William Carlos Williams, Autobiography (New York, 1951), p. 237.

  4 See, for example, Charles W. Chessnut on ‘the formation of a future American race’, in ‘The Future American’ (1900), in Theories of Ethnicity, ed. Werner Sollors (New York, 1989), p. 17, or Theodore Roosevelt’s 1888 study of Governor Morris in Theodore Roosevelt: An American Mind (New York, 1994), p. 95.

  5 Anonymous review, Daily Oklahoman, 25 February 1934.

  6 One reviewer compared it to Buddenbrooks and The Forsyte Saga; anonymous review, New York Nation, 11 April 1934.

  7 Suzanne Clark’s idea of an attempt to ‘restore the sentimental within modernism, and the sense of great struggle over subjectivity that the resulting contradictions precipitated’ is relevant here; see Suzanne Clark, Sentimental Modernism: Women Writers and the Revolution of the Word (Bloomington, IN, 1991), p. 4.

  8 Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans (Normal, IL, 1995), p. 283.

  9 Letter from Gertrude Stein to Rousseau Voorhies, Chicago Daily News, 14 March 1934.

  10 Stein, The Making of Americans, p. 574.

  11 Gertrude Stein, ‘The Gradual Making of The Making of Americans’, in Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein (New York, 1972), p. 246.

  12 Richard Bridgman, Gertrude Stein in Pieces (New York, 1970), p. 73.

  13 See Otto Weininger, Sex and Character (London, 1906). This is the first English translation, which Stein would have read.

  14 For discussion of Stein’s reading of Lombroso and Weininger see Ulla Dydo, ‘To Have the Winning Language’, in Coming to Light, ed. Diane Wood Middlebrook and Marilyn Yalom (Ann Arbor, MI, 1985), pp. 58–73.

  15 For a varied and informative overview of Weininger criticism, see Nancy A. Harrowitz and Barbara Hyams, eds, Jews and Gender: Responses to Otto Weininger (Philadelphia, PA, 1995).

  16 See Rosalind Miller, Gertrude Stein: Form and Intelligibility (New York, 1949 ), p. 128.

  17 Gertrude Stein, Painted Lace and Other Pieces: 1914–1937 (New Haven, CT, 1955), p. 94.

  18 Maria Damon discusses this extract in ‘Gertrude Stein’s Jewishness, Jewish Social Scientists, and the “Jewish Question”’, Modern Fiction Studies, XLII/3 (1996), p. 503.

  19 See Linda Wagner-Martin, ‘Favored Strangers’: Gertrude Stein and Her Family (New Brunswick, NJ, 1995), p. 185.

  20 Stein, Selected Writings, p. 11.

  21 Horace Kallen, ‘Democracy versus the Melting-Pot’ [1915], in Theories of Ethnicity: A Classical Reader, ed. Werner Sollors (New York, 1996), p. 91.

  22 Stein, The Making of Americans, p. 3.

  23 Ibid., p. 459.

  24 Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (Oxford, 1990 ), p. 14.

  25 Gertrude Stein, Narration (Chicago, IL, 1935), p. 52.

  26 Stein, The Making of Americans, p. 227. See Jayne L. Walker, ‘History as Repetition’, in Modern Critical Views: Gertrude Stein, ed. Harold Bloom (New York, 1986), p. 178.

  27 Stein, The Making of Americans, p. 593.

  28 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. 20.

  29 Stein, The Making of Americans, p. 33.

  30 Donald Gallup, ed., The Flowers of Friendship: Letters Written to Gertrude Stein (New York, 1953). Michael Gold similarly stated that Stein’s ‘art became a personal pleasure, a private hobby, a vice’, in ‘Gertrude Stein: A Literary Idiot’, Change the World! (London, 1937), p. 25.

  31 Stein’s response is quoted by Brenda Wineapple, Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein (London, 1997), p. 335.

  32 Gertrude Stein, Catalogue, Riba-Rovira Exhibition, Galerie Roquepine (Paris, 1945), reproduced in Pictures for a Picture of Gertrude Stein, ed. Lamont Moore (New Haven, CT, 1951), p. 18.

  33 See Steven Meyer, Irresistible Dictation: Gertrude Stein and the Correlations of Writing and Science (Stanford, CA, 2001), p. 295.

  34 Gertrude Stein, Two: Gertrude Stein and Her Brother, and Other Early Portraits (New Haven, CT, 1951), introduction by Janet Flanner, p. xiii.

  35 James R. Mellow, Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company (New York, 1974), p. 181.

  36 Gertrude Stein, ‘Farragut or A Husband’s Recompense’, in Useful Knowledge (New York, 1929), p. 13.

  37 See Lucia Re, ‘The Salon and Literary Modernism’, in Jewish Women and their Salons: The Power of Conversation, ed. Emily D. Bilski and Emily Braun (New Haven, CT, 2005), p. 190.

  38 Mellow, Charmed Circle, p. 192.

  39 Gertrude Stein, Geography and Plays (Boston, MA, 1922), p. 192.

  40 See Bilski and Braun, Jewish Women and their Salons, p. 237.

  Five

  1 See Sharon Marcus, Between Women: Friendship, Desire and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton, NJ, 2007), pp. 193–255.

  2 Mabel Dodge Luhan, European Experiences (New York, 1935), p. 325.

  3 See Linda Simon, The Biography of Alice B. Toklas (London, 1991).

  4 Terry Castle, ed., The Literature of Lesbianism: A Historical Anthology from Ariosto to Stonewall (New York, 2003), p. 32.

  5 See Shari Benstock, Women of the Left Bank: Paris 1900–1940 (London, 1987 ), p. 175.

  6 See George Wickes, ‘A Natalie Barney Garland’, The Paris Review (Spring 1975), pp. 115–16.

  7 Gertrude Stein, Selected Writings (New York, 1972), p. 109.

  8 Gertrude Stein, Fernhurst, QED, and Other Early Writings by Gertrude Stein, ed. Leon Katz (New York, 1971), p. 118.

  9 See Richard Bridgman, Gertrude Stein in Pieces (New York, 1970), p. 46.

  10 Ibid., p. 119.

  11 Gertrude Stein, Matisse Picasso and Gertrude Stein with Two Shorter Stories (Paris, 1933), p. 266.

  12 ‘A Transatlantic Interview 1946’, in A Primer for the Gradual Understanding of Gertrude Stein, ed. Robert Bartlett Haas (Los Angeles, ca, 1973), p. 17.

  13 Benstock, Women of the Left Bank, p. 157.

  14
Neil Schmitz, Of Huck and Alice: Humorous Writing in American Literature (Minneapolis, MN, 1983), p. 194. As Schmitz says, it ‘splinters’ from the ‘methodical’ prose of The Making of Americans to the poetry of Tender Buttons.

  15 Stein, Matisse Picasso and Gertrude Stein, p. 115.

  16 Ibid., p. 116.

  17 Ibid., p. 17.

  18 Ibid., p. 115.

  19 Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons (New York, 1914), p. 58.

  20 Ibid., p. 70.

  21 ‘New Outbreaks of Futurism: “Tender Buttons,” Curious Experiment of Gertrude Stein in Literary Anarchy’, in The Critical Response to Gertrude Stein, ed. Kirk Curnutt (Westport, CT, 2000), p. 18.

  22 Quoted in James R. Mellow, Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company (New York, 1974), p. 258.

  23 Stein, Selected Writings, pp. 147–8.

  24 Brenda Wineapple has drawn attention to this process in Stein’s ‘Possessive Case’, for example. See Wineapple, Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein (London, 1997), p. 387.

  25 Gertrude Stein, Bee Time Vine (New Haven, CT, 1953), p. 80.

  26 Gertrude Stein, Geography and Plays (Boston, MA, 1922), p. 302.

  27 Cynthia Secor wrote that Stein ‘was truly radical in her belief that gender is meaningless’; see Cynthia Secor, ‘Gertrude Stein: The Complex Force of Her Femininity’, in Women, the Arts, and the 1920s in Paris and New York, ed. Kenneth W. Wheeler and Virginia Lee Lussier (New Brunswick, NJ, 1982), pp. 27–35.

  28 Stein, Geography and Plays, p. 18.

  29 Gertrude Stein, ‘This is the Dress, Aider’, in Tender Buttons, p. 29.

  30 Stein, Bee Time Vine, p. 91.

  31 Stein, Selected Writings, p. 134.

  32 Quoted in Mabel Dodge Luhan, Movers and Shakers (New York, 1936), p. 33.

  33 Quoted in Mellow, Charmed Circle, p. 171.

  34 Quoted in Luhan, Movers and Shakers, p. 35.

  35 Stein, Selected Writings, p. 150.

  36 Janet Hobhouse, Everybody Who Was Anybody: A Biography of Gertrude Stein (London, 1975), p. 110.

  37 Quoted in Wineapple, Sister Brother, p. 2.

  38 The title of a critical piece published by Robert McAlmon in Outlook was ‘The Legend of Gertrude Stein’.

  39 Alice B. Toklas, What Is Remembered (London, 1963), p. 127.

  Six

  1 Gertrude Stein, Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein (New York, 1972), p. 84.

  2 ‘Medals for Miss Stein’, New York Tribune, 13 May 1923, in Kirk Curnutt, ed., The Critical Response to Gertrude Stein (Westport, CT, 2000 ), p. 23.

  3 In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein mentions proudly that Madame Récamier came from Belley, the region of France where she and Toklas had their country home; Stein, Selected Writings, p. 210.

  4 See Robert A. Martin and Linda Wagner-Martin, ‘The Salons of Wharton’s Fiction’, in Wretched Exotic: Essays on Edith Wharton in Europe, ed. Katherine Joslin and Alan Price (New York, 1993), pp. 105 –6; and Shari Benstock, Women of the Left Bank: Paris 1900–1940 (London, 1987), pp. 34–45.

  5 Stein, Selected Writings, p. 12.

  6 Ibid.

  7 Donald Gallup, ed., The Flowers of Friendship: Letters Written to Gertrude Stein (New York, 1953), p. 48.

  8 Stein, Selected Writings, p. 116.

  9 Frederick A. Sweet, Miss Mary Cassatt: Impressionist from Pennsylvania (Norman, OK, 1966), p. 196.

  10 James R. Mellow, Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company (New York, 1974), p. 178.

  11 Ibid., p. 180.

  12 Quoted in Brenda Wineapple, Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein (London, 1997), p. 397.

  13 For a discussion of Jewish salons, see Emily D. Bilski and Emily Braun, eds, Jewish Women and their Salons: The Power of Conversation (New Haven, CT, 2005).

  14 Stein, Selected Writings, p. 46.

  15 See Bilski and Braun, Jewish Women and their Salons, p. 115.

  16 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 ), foreword by Natalie Barney, p. xii.

  17 Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (London, 1964), p. 18.

  18 Robert McAlmon and Kay Boyle, Being Geniuses Together (London, 1970 ), p. 204.

  19 Robert Bartlett Haas, A Primer for the Gradual Understanding of Gertrude Stein (Los Angeles, CA, 1973), p. 13.

  20 For an interesting reading of Stein’s orality, see Lucia Re, ‘The Salon and Literary Modernism’, in Jewish Women and their Salons, ed. Bilski and Braun, pp. 188–93.

  21 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.

  22 See Emily D. Bilski and Emily Braun, ‘Expatriates and Avant-Gardes’, in Jewish Women and their Salons, ed. Bilski and Braun, p. 125.

  23 Ibid., pp. 10; 117.

  24 To appreciate the malicious element to this type of criticism one only need look at Wyndham Lewis’s Time and Western Man, wherein he described Stein’s writing as ‘a cold suet-roll of fabulously reptilian length. Cut it at any point, it is the same thing; the same heavy, sticky, opaque mass all through … all fat without nerve … the life is a low-grade, if tenacious one.’ Time and Western Man (London, 1927), p. 77.

  25 Gertrude Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography (New York, 1937).

  26 Lewis, Time and Western Man, p. 78.

  27 Sylvia Beach, Shakespeare and Company (New York, 1959), p. 29.

  28 Stein, Selected Writings, p. 203.

  29 Quoted in Janet Hobhouse, Everybody Who Was Anybody: A Biography of Gertrude Stein (London, 1975), p. 185.

  30 See Mellow, Charmed Circle, p. 252.

  31 Stein, Selected Writings, p. 190.

  32 Quoted in Simon, The Biography of Alice B. Toklas, pp. 157–8.

  33 The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Carl Van Vechten 1913–1946, ed. Edward Burns, vol. I (1913–1935) (New York, 1986), p. 236.

  34 Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, p. 30.

  35 Alice B. Toklas, What Is Remembered (London, 1963), p. 117.

  36 Beach, Shakespeare and Company, p. 32.

  37 Paul Bowles, Without Stopping (London, 1972), pp. 120–21.

  38 Gertrude Stein, Wars I Have Seen (London, 1945), p. 3.

  39 Quoted in Simon, The Biography of Alice B. Toklas, p. 158.

  40 Françoise Gilot and Carlton Lake, Life with Picasso (Harmondsworth, 1964 ), p. 62.

  41 Ernest Hemingway, ‘The True Story of My Break with Gertrude Stein’, in The Critical Response, ed. Curnutt, p. 254.

  42 See Linda Wagner-Martin, ‘Favored Strangers’: Gertrude Stein and Her Family (New Brunswick, NJ, 1995), p. 201.

  43 Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, p. 22.

  44 Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography, p. 119.

  45 See Emily D. Bilski and Emily Braun, ‘Expatriates and Avant-Gardes’, in Jewish Women and their Salons, ed. Bilski and Braun, p. 125: ‘Speaking in earnest gave way to the importance of seeing and being seen. Stein helped turn literature into sound bites and salons into show business.’

  46 Carl Van Vechten, ‘How to Read Gertrude Stein’, in Gertrude Stein Remembered, ed. Linda Simon (Lincoln, NE, 1994), p. 44.

  47 Stein, Selected Writings, p. 116.

  48 Benstock, Women of the Left Bank, p. 47.

  49 Benstock draws attention to the different values of Barney’s and Stein’s salons, ibid., p. 15; p. 86.

  50 Beach, Shakespeare and Company, p. 31.

  51 Bravig Imbs, Confessions of Another Young Man (New York, 1936), p. 116.

  52 Grosser, ‘Maurice Grosser on Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas’, p. 159.

  53 Richard Bridgman, Gertrude Stein in Pieces (New York, 1970), p. 162.

  54 Ibid., p. 164.

  55 McAlmon and Boyle, Being Geniuses Together, p. 228.

  56 Michael Gold, Change the World! (London, 1937), p. 25.

  57 B. L. Reid, Art by Subtraction (Norman
, OK, 1958), p. 207.

  58 Quoted in Curnutt, The Critical Response, p. 28.

  59 Robert McAlmon managed to use just about all of them in his ‘Portrait’ of Stein, written in the form of a parody of her writing; he calls her ‘a Sumerian monument’ possessing a ‘jungle-muddy forestial mind naively intellectualizing’; associates her thought processes with ‘biblical slime’ and ‘oracular proclamations … mediumistic deliverances’; calls her an ‘aged elephant’ … ‘heaving from the slime’ … ‘a slow child’ (McAlmon and Boyle, Being Geniuses Together, pp. 228–30).

  60 Edmund Wilson, Axel’s Castle (New York, 1931), p. 239; 252.

  61 Mellow, Charmed Circle, p. 294.

  62 Harold Acton, Memoirs of an Aesthete (London, 1948), pp. 161–2.

  63 Stein, Selected Writings, p. 221.

  64 Ibid., p. 66.

  Seven

  1 Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans (Normal, IL, 1995), p. 573.

  2 On Stein and Whitman see Joseph Fichtelberg, The Complex Image: Faith and Method in American Autobiography (Philadelphia, PA, 1989), pp. 170–71; G. Thomas Couser, ‘Of Time and Identity: Walt Whitman and Gertrude Stein as Autobiographers’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, XVII/4 (1976), pp. 787–804.

  3 Quoted in Janet Hobhouse, Everybody Who Was Anybody: A Biography of Gertrude Stein (London, 1975), p. 157.

  4 Gertrude Stein, How to Write (Los Angeles, CA, 1995), p. 420.

  5 Quoted in Hobhouse, Everybody Who Was Anybody, p. 141.

  6 Gertrude Stein, Selected Writings (New York, 1972), p. vii.

  7 See Hobhouse, Everybody Who Was Anybody, p. 142.

  8 Gertrude Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography (New York, 1937), p. 50.

  9 Stein, Selected Writings, pp. 118; 222.

  10 Stein’s role in the American humorous tradition was imaginatively expounded by Neil Schmitz, Of Huck and Alice: Humorous Writing in American Literature (Minneapolis, MN, 1983).

  11 Janet Flanner, introduction to Gertrude Stein, Two: Gertrude Stein and Her Brother, and Other Early Portraits (New Haven, CT, 1951), p. ix.

  12 This is a point recently made by Noel Sloboda in his work on the autobiographies of Stein and Edith Wharton, a fascinating and fruitful comparison if only for their many divergences. See Noel Sloboda, The Making of Americans in Paris: The Autobiographies of Edith Wharton and Gertrude Stein (New York, 2008).