The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Carl Van Vechten, 1913-1946
Page 36
Gertrude.
1. Stein’s birthplace.
2. Note by Van Vechten, 22 January 1941:
Avery Hopwood left the bulk of his fortune to his Alma Mater, the University of Michigan, where the interest is used yearly as prizes for writing. I suggested to Florine she give the portrait of Avery to this room at the University of Michigan and at first she favored the idea but later was never able to make up her mind what to do.
In reply to an inquiry about the Stettheimer portrait, Jane G. Flener, Associate Director for Public Services, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, University Library, The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, wrote that Professor Roy William Cowden (1883-1961), assistant director and later, in 1934, director of the Hopwood Awards, had been seeking a photograph of Hopwood from which a painting could be made.
In a letter to Carl Van Vechten on December 19, 1934, [Cowden] reports that Gertrude Stein had lectured here on December 14, and in his discussion of his plans with her, she had mentioned the one “made by a friend of his whom you know.” Carl Van Vechten replied on December 25, 1934, that he had already heard from Miss Stein and had then talked to Florine Stettheimer. It was first proposed that the portrait be loaned with further arrangements to be made later, but it lacked its frame and Miss Stettheimer wished to delay until her return from a trip to California. A letter from Florine Stettheimer to Professor Cowden on January 13, 1935, promised to send it in the spring. She did not send the portrait, however, perhaps because of the frame. Then on July 3, 1944, Carl Van Vechten wrote that Florine Stettheimer had died very recently and that Ettie Stettheimer offered to give the portrait to the University of Michigan provided it should hang in the room devoted to the Hopwood Awards. A letter from Ettie Stettheimer on July 14, 1944, states that the portrait is a gift. … The portrait shows Hopwood standing before a Fair and Warmer poster; and Ettie Stettheimer on February 26, 1945, surmised that it was probably painted shortly after or during the run of Fair and Warmer. (Fair and Warmer was first produced at the Eltinge Theatre in New York on November 6, 1915.) Carl Van Vechten, on March 22, 1945, guessed it would have been painted between 1915 and 1918, but probably 1917. (Letter received from Jane G. Flener, 19 March 1981.)
To Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas
[“A Little Too Much” motto]1
[17 December 1934]
Monday [150 West Fifty-fifth Street New York]
Dear dear DEAR Woojumses! (pronounced Woo-Jums-Ez, pelase!)
You seem to be having all the excitements what with blizzards and squad cars and marathons. Have you ever seen a wrestling match? It is the only thing I can think of to compete with your excitements. If you haven’t I’ll see that you do when you return. Such a tour! No one except Sarah Bernhardt and William Jennings Bryan has ever seen so much of our country. You will have fabulous stories to tell for years and when some one mentions Blue Bell City, Maine, or Sight Unseen, Idaho, you will pipe up and say I spent several weeks there during the Great Freeze of 1934. It’s too wonderful. The only thing I don’t know is whether you are getting any of my letters, because you don’t tell me that. Anyway you’ll soon be East again and that will be nice for the East and Carlo. I can’t wait until I photograph the Woojumses, after their Marcopoloesque journey. They will surely have new glints in their eyes, new smiles around their dimples. I’d like to see you both this minute! But please tell me if you are getting my letters.
178,968 yellow ir[i]ses, singing Hallelujah to you!
Carlo!!!
1. For the source of this motto see Stein to Van Vechten [26 December 1926], note 2.
To Gertrude Stein
[20 December 1934]
Thursday 150 West Fifty-fifth Street
[New York]
Dearest Gertrude,
When you talk about getting a plane, I think it would be wonderful and then we could ride right on through the blizzard and not have to get out in Milwaukee. Did you get to Iowa City at all? I am wondering. My nephew expected to walk in on you there. You would know him because he looks rather like me, so maybe you didn’t get in. . I went to [Pavel] Tchelicheff’s show yesterday1 and there were THREE portraits of Charles Ford and Alan [i.e., Allen] Tanner was wandering about looking very gloomy because there were not pictures of him. .2 Pavel’s new pictures are mostly Spanish and bull-fighting and full of color and very pleasant indeed. . And I saw the Sir Francis Rose show and what a pretty picture of Bilignin! And I like the one of Alice in the Garden.3 You are all over the catalogue, all over the show. Maybe you painted these pictures. . And you are in the new [Alfred] Stieglitz4 book and Sherwood Anderson has written a book called No Swank and he has such a pretty paper about you,5 and did you get my letter in Detroit, you didn’t say. . Sugar statues, sugar babies, airplanes, flamingos, poinsettas, and all other creature comforts to you both, DIVINE Woojums!
Carlo
Fania telegraphs that Bermuda is BLEAK—all rains & colds—and she is coming back tomorrow!
You are both being very “correct” & I am so proud of you!
1. An exhibition of drawings and paintings by Tchelitchew was held at the Julien Levy Gallery, New York, from 12 to 21 December 1934.
2. Charles Henri Ford, the writer, and Allen Tanner, the composer, were both friends of Tchelitchew’s.
3. This picture is now in YCAL.
4. Stein’s portrait “Stieglitz,” in America and Alfred Stieglitz: A Collective Portrait, ed. Waldo Frank, Lewis Mumford, Dorothy Norman, Paul Rosenfeld, and Harold Rugg (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1934), p. 280.
5. Sherwood Anderson’s No Swank (Philadelphia: The Centaur Press, 1934), pp. 81-85, discusses Stein.
To Carl Van Vechten
[postmark: 20 December 1934] The Commodore Perry [Hotel]
Toledo, Ohio
My dearest Carl,
What do you mean by saying that I don’t tell you about your letters why we are being most dreadfully spoiled the most spoiled Woojumses in history but the thing that spoils us the most and the sweetest is the finding a letter from Carl whenever we get here if we did not have that we will be lost in this large sized America but we do have that we always do and that makes us all not lost, we passed Marion Ohio, yesterday and were so xcited the home of [Warren G.] Harding and the home of the mother of Harding’s child and the home of Mrs. Harding and the home of the sister of Harding who was the school-teacher the high school teacher of the mother of Harding’s child, could anything be more historical1 and then we were right near Dayton Ohio, where Wilbur Wright was2 and now we are in Toledo where poor dear Max Ewing was,3 Europe nothing in Europe was ever anything to this,
We have just been taken out to drive up the river where Tecumseh fought and bled,4 and on the way in a magnificent house I heard lived the man and his wife who gave the Champion spark plugs to the world, and to us, to our little Fords we drove so long, so I said I must see them so the procession stopped and we were taken in to see them and they were so nice and they are sending me glass souvenir champion spark plugs, it’s a wonderful world, lots of nice stories, and we are remembering them, in the back parts of Columbus two perfectly nice citizens stopped me and said solemnly we just wanted to say that if there was anything that we needed to be done that was not being done for us they would be most glad to do it, anything connected with the police or anything as they were old Columbus families and here were their names, and a reporter girl, told me and she swears she did not make it up here in Toledo that she went to the station to meet us on a train we did not come on and she asked the gate man if we had come through and he looked blank and a shabby citizen leaning on the wall said no she did not come through and the ticket man said who and the shabby man said sure I know her I never saw her but she would not get by here without my knowing her and then he said to the porter, you know her the one who said a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose you know her.
Do you believe that can be true.
Now we go to Cleveland and then all aboard the airplane to B
altimore, and when and where and how do we see you, we are in Washington the 29-30-31, I wish we would be seeing you somewhere your dear envelopes and letters are a comfort but your darling large sizedness would be more even more of a comfort because the Woojums love you with all their hearts and they always tell you so every way
Always
Gertrude
1. Warren Gamaliel Harding (1865-1923) was the twenty-ninth President of the United States (1920-23). Nan Britton became Harding’s mistress in 1917, when she was twenty years old. She claimed that the child she bore him was conceived in the Senate Office Building. See Francis Russell, “A Naughty President,” The New York Review of Books, 24 June 1982, pp. 30–34, for a summary of Harding’s sexual adventures.
2. Wilbur Wright (1867-1912) and his brother Orville (1871-1948) were pioneers in avaition. Wilbur was born in Millville, Indiana, and Orville was born in Dayton, Ohio. It was in Dayton that the brothers formed the Wright Cycle Company in 1892. Stein was fascinated by Wilbur Wright, and in the “Wilbur Wright” section of her Four in America, she speculated on what would have happened had Wilbur become a painter.
3. See Van Vechten to Stein, 3 July 1934, note 4.
4. Tecumseh (1768?-1813), American Indian chief of the Shawnee tribe. He was killed in action at the battle of the Thames on 5 October 1813.
To Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas
22 December 1934 150 West Fifty-fifth Street
[New York]
Dearest Woojumses!
Merry Christmas or whatever else you want from Fania and me. You are a little dim about your address but I guess this is the right one. . I have such a gadget for you as will knock crystal spark plugs out of your mind, but I won’t send it to you. Wait till I walk in with it. You will EXPIRE. . Florine [Stettheimer] is going to send her picture to Anna Arbor (that is a missprint but I shall always call it Anna Arbor after this). She was much touched when I told her you had suggested it and wondered how you had heard of the picture. I told her you knew everything and much more than that. . Did you see how Henry [McBride] wrote about the shows of Sir Francis Rose and [Pavel] Tchelicheff, who one knew you and the other used to know you, and how hard it was to paint unless one knew you? Well, the town is buzzing about this and poor Pavel is in despair. .1 Mahala [Douglas] wrote that you had called me the Patriarch. Well, it makes me feel like Moses or Abraham, but I guess I did lead you into the Promised Land (Les Belles Woojumses, if I ever did see any!). Mahala is still thrilled and loves you both. Yes, you must go back to Iowa. My nephew had put Clean Sheets on the Beds. . Bill Bullitt is here from Russia;2 so there will be news of Muriel [Draper], and Bobsy Goodspeed has done the cutest Christmas trick anybody has thought of FOR YEARS.3 And really it all sounds as if you had written it to be done that way, like a really and truly rosier book. Well, I just love it. And [Miguel] Covarrubias in Vanity Fair is pretty cute too although the text underneath has nothing of your delicate and peculiar savor.4 Hundreds and Holiday Hugs from Fania and me, and please come back intact save for the places Love of the Country has bitten into you!
178 pots of jam and 189 (best buttered) water spaniels, who can cry Mama and Papa, to you!
Carlo!
1. McBride’s review, “Two More Parisian Painters,” in the New York Sun, 15 December 1934, p. 15.
2. William C. Bullitt, the American diplomat, was ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1933 to 1936.
3. Mrs. Goodspeed published as a Christmas card in 1934 a limited number of copies of a pamphlet, Chicago Inscriptions. The text consisted of the inscriptions written by Stein in the copies of her books that she gave to Mrs. Goodspeed. On the cover of the pamphlet was a sketch of Stein done by Mrs. Goodspeed.
4. Vanity Fair, January 1935, p. 25, had a portrit of Stein by Covarrubias. In the portrait Stein is seated at a writing table, her right hand in an oath-taking position, and has finished the line “Toasted Susie is my ice cream.” The illustration is captioned, “Impossible interview: Gracie Allen vs. Gertrude Stein.”
To Gertrude Stein
[Telegram]
24 December 1934 New York
FANIA AND I SEND LOVE AND LOVE AND ROSES AND ROSES TO BOTH LES BELLES WOOJUMSES ON CHRISTMAS DAY AND ALWAYS1
CARLO.
1. Stein was staying with her cousins Mr. and Mrs. Julian Stein at Rose Hill, near Pikesville, Maryland.
To Carl Van Vechten and Fania Marinoff
[1 January] 1935
New Year’s Morning Westover, Virginia
The very happiest of New Year’s to Fania and to Carl the dearest of dearests and many many more happier and happier new years.
You’ll have had Mark [Lutz]’s wire so that you know we are here—where I am sure you too have been. It was all quite unexpected we came down from Wash[ington], yesterday and go back as soon as G[ertrude]. wakes & is ready.1
That they should have known Mark was of course natural but that we should see him here was a lovely surpirse. Mark is sweeter and gentler and nicer even than I remembered. He made my hideous incorrectitude so easy but that is caused from his nature and his feeling for you and G. At any rate it is understood that we—G. & you and I come to Richmond etcetera the first week in Feb[ruary], and G. & I are so happy about it. G. adores the landscape in Vir[ginia]. Tonight we stay with Mrs. A[nn Archibald], in Washington—2 tomorrow we lunch with Prin[cess]. Cantacuzene to see her [U. S.] Grant souvenirs and then early take the train for N. Y. and at once teleph[one], you.3 If you are not home I ring you up at 9 a.m. Thurs. And oh then the Woojums will meet—that will be better than the trip which has been perfect. All my love to both of you, you dearest dears—
Alice
1. Stein had been visiting her cousins Mr. and Mrs. Julian Stein in Maryland during the Christmas holidays. For New Year’s Eve she and Toklas accepted the invitation of Emily Chadbourne and Ellen LaMotte to join them in visiting Chadbourne’s brother, Richard Crane, of Westover, Virginia. By coincidence Mark Lutz, who knew the Cranes, had also been invited.
2. Stein’s Washington, D.C., lecture in December 1934 had been organized by Ann Archibald, a friend of Ellen LaMotte’s. Mrs. Archibald had arranged for Stein to lecture before the Women’s University Club and had sent Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt an invitation to the lecture. Although she could not attend, Mrs. Roosevelt invited Stein and Toklas to tea at the White House on 30 December 1934 (see LaMotte to Stein, 20 December 1934, YCAL).
3. Julia Grant Cantacuzene (1876-1975) was the granddaughter of President Ulysses S. Grant. She had married, in 1898, the Russian Prince Michael Cantacuzene. At their lunch, on 2 January 1935, the Princess Cantacuzene gave Stein an inscribed copy of her autobiography, My Life Here and There (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930). The inscription reads: “To a Lion from a Mouse! Souvenir of a visit to my home with appreciation. 1935 Jan. 2nd. Julia Cantacuzene Grant” (YCAL).
To Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas
[Postcard] Carl Van Vechten—Bronze by Gaston—1931. Collection of Carl Van Vechten
[postmark: 5 January 1935]
Saturday Night [150 West Fifty-fifth Street New York]
Dear les Belles Woojums!
The name of the place I want you to see in Boston, please, is Lewisburg Square, and I am wondering if Alice got her hat with the pigeons, but I don’t dare telephone because I’m afraid we would talk for HOURS!
Love
Carlo
To Gertrude Stein
[8 January 1935]
Tuesday 150 West Fifty-fifth Street
[New York]
Dear Baby Woojums,
My idea for the Jaegers is something like the enclosed,x1 plus a tub of champagne and perhaps underneath: We do what we do which is a pleasure! … Most of the photographs are going off today, but I don’t seem to have cardboard enough to pack them all. This lack will be remedied by tomorrow. Tell Mama Woojums to wear her rubbers and believe me always
Papa Woojums, and howl
xwithout a mask!
1. Van Vechten an
d Stein had discussed a crest for the Woojums family. The crest would contain, among other elements, a pair of jaegers, or undergarments. Two postcards in YCAL, one enclosed with this letter and the other with Van Vechten’s letter to Stein of [9 January 1935], illustrated Van Vechten’s idea for the crest. One card, with a printed marking, “Y. R. 51,” is a photograph of a seated black-masked woman who is wearing gloves, a black corset (known as a merry widow), black stockings, and black high-heeled shoes. The second card, marked “Y. R. 103,” shows the same woman in the same outfit, although in this card she is standing.
To Gertrude Stein
[9 January 1935]
Wednesday 150 West Fifty-fifth Street
New York City
Dear Baby Woojums,
Maybe you would like something like this? … (I mean when we take the Jaegers). No letters from you yet. I wonder if you are sending ’em to Detroit? … All the photographs have gone now and your friends will be happy. … They asked about you in the bank yesterday. The cashier said, “How’s Miss Stein? I haven’t seen her lately.” … And what about wrestling? I asked you this before. Did you ever see a wrestling [match]? If you haven’t, you must. They happen in N[ew] Y[ork] on Monday nights and we must arrange it when you come back if you haven’t. . I hope Mama Woojums is wearing her rubbers and both Woojumses are carrying their rabbits. . That Michigan man wrote to Florine [Stettheimer]: so that’s all right.1
Love to you both,
Carlo! (Papa Woojums)