by Edward Burns
3. Both signatures are Stein’s.
To Gertrude Stein
23 December 1937 101 Central Park West New York City
Dearest Baby Woojums,
Thanks so much for sending me your paper on Edgar Wallace which I enjoyed hugely, just as I enjoy detective stories too.1 And I guess by now you have appeared in every kind of magazine in every possible country. Your bibliography will be an eye-opener to that small part of the public that is yet unaware of your writing. I guess it will even surprise your admirers. To revert to detective stories, have you read The Moonstone, by Wilkie Collins because maybe this is the best one.
love and merry christmas to you both
Carlo Papa Woojums!
1. Stein’s “Why I Like Detective Stories,” in Harpers Bazaar (London) (November 1937), 17(2):70, 104, 106.
To Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas
[Telegram]
[postmark: 25 December 1937] New York
LOVE AND MERRY CHRISTMAS TO BABY AND MAMA WOOJUMS
PAPA AND FANIA
To Carl Van Vechten
[1937]1 27 rue de Fleurus [Paris]
My dear Carl,
This is to introduce Francis Rose but you know all about him so there is only to say that I know you will like him.
Always
Gtrde.
1. This letter was hand delivered by Rose to Van Vechten.
To Gertrude Stein
[Postcard: Photograph by Nicholas Muray] Carl Van Vechten Fania Marinoff—July 5, 1923.
29 December [1937] [101 Central Park West New York]
Here you are, Saint Baby Woojums! Is this the one you mean? Sir Francis Rose is here & has been photographed, but they are not ready yet. E[dward] W[asserman] wrote me a long letter about Daisy Fellowes’ dinner & said it was the most brilliant fiesta he had ever attended!1 Dying to see the FRENCH BOOK2 and the English E[verybody’s]. A[utobiography].! Did you get a cable on Xmas? Pretty soon I’ll be writing to 5 rue Christine!
l[ove] & k[isses] from Papa W.
1. See Stein to Van Vechten [20 December 1937], note 1.
2. The French edition of Stein’s Picasso.
To Carl Van Vechten
[Rose motto]
[postmark: 7 January 1938] 27 rue de Fleurus [Paris]
Dearest Papa Woojums,
You and Fania are so young and tender on the card, thanks so much, some time I would like a big one, of it, would you give it to us for the rue Christine, and Lady Diana Abdy is leaving Wednesday for America, for a fortnight only, she is charming and very lovely and an awfully good friend, it was she who arranged the Oxford lectures and arranged everything with Gerald Berners and I have told her to call you up as soon as she gets there and that you will be sweet to her and you will be, and she ought to make a lovely photograph, I once saw her kneeling on the eye of a white horse and she made the loveliest angel imaginable,1 and we did get the cable and it pleased us and heartened us all through the cold and the carpenters and the painters and the plumbers, I guess we are very happy but just now we are right in the midst of the push, getting them to get out so that we can get in, and deciding about curtains and what we are to put on the bathroom floor, and oh my, but they all say the worst is when the actual moving commences, well any way you will come and see it and that will be lovely, and everything and all and lots and lots of love
Gtrde.
1. The exact circumstances surrounding Lady Diana Abdy’s “kneeling on the eye of a white horse” cannot be determined. Stein recounts the story in Everybody’s Autobiography, p. 300, but there is little further information to clarify the incident.
To Carl Van Vechten
[postmark: 20 January 1938] 27 Rue de Fleurus 5 rue Christine [Paris]
My dearest Carl,
A wonderful country our native land, we are not yet in the rue Christine xpect to by the first of February but to-day a lot of fan mail came straight from Virginia and West Virginia and other places straight unresisted by anybody to 5 rue Christine, now how do they do it, we are not there yet but they are here and here is a letter that will amuse you this is the address
M. Julien Green1
Paris
France
and then at the bottom is written
Care of Gertrude Stein if absolutely necessary (and the postoffice sent it here[)].
We we are xhausted not in yet but xhausted, did I tell you that we have the blue pigeon in the grass wall paper in the bed room & the boudoir, do you remember who did it, and it is most xciting,2 and the piano score of the ballet A Wedding Bouquet is out very well done, printed by J. & W. Chester Ltd. 11 Great Marlborough Street London W. 1, and the synopsis is funny, and Marie Murat now Mme de Chambrun has written a book about Queen Christine and she is sending it to us, and I imagine it is amusing, she is,3 and I guess that is all just now xcept xhaustion and a cold in the head but we will get in, sure she will and we love Papa Woojums so wonderfully much always
Baby Woojums.
I got a lot of Wilkie Collins out of the Church Library at Aix[-les-Bains], of course the Moon Stone when I was young a little frightening, I remember a large fat man who moved easily4 lots of love
Gtrde.
1. Julien Green (b. 1900), the French novelist, born in Paris of American parents.
2. Note by Van Vechten, 24 January 1941: ‘The ‘pigeons on the grass’ wallpaper is the background for several of the photographs I have made of GS. and presented to Yale.” Stein first saw and bought a sample of the wallpaper at the shop of the decorator Nancy McClelland on East Fifty-seventh Street, New York.
3. Princess Lucien Murat (Comtesse Marie de Chambrun), La Reine Christine de Suede (Paris: Flammarion, 1930).
4. Note by Van Vechten, 24 January 1941: “The Woman in White. [Count] Fosco?”
To Gertrude Stein
[Postcard: Portrait of Cecil Beaton. Photograph by Carl Van Vechten]
[postmark: 26 January 1938] [101 Central Park West New York]
Dear Gertrude & Baby Woojums
This will be the first card addressed to 5 rue Christine! Doesn’t it seem strange? I’m very excited & wish I could photograph it at once!
I do hope Lady [Diana] Abdy will call up. I would love to photograph her. And I will send you a big one of the picture of me & F[ania] M[arinoff] if you will send it back to me. Otherwise I don’t know whatever it is at all! Cecil Beaton got into lots of trouble. Did you hear about it?1
Well love & kisses to Mama W and Baby W!
from Fania & Papa W
Dec. ‘37
1. For Frank Crowninshield’s essay, “The New Left Wing of New York Society,” American Vogue, 1 February 1938, p. 73, Cecil Beaton had provided drawings as a decorative border. Beaton had added tiny written details such as newspaper headlines and book titles to the illustrations. These were written so small as to be almost indecipherable. In two places his drawings used the word “kikes” referring to Jews. On the page of an illustrated journal that he had drawn Beaton wrote, “M. R. Andre ball at the El Morocco brought out all the damn Kikes in town.” Someone alerted the columnist Walter Winchell about the illustrations and he broke the story in his column in the New York Daily Mirror on 24 January 1938. Winchell’s quotes from Beaton’s microscopically written sentences created an uproar and many of Vogue’s advertisers threatened a boycott. Beaton was forced to resign as a contributing photographer and artist on the staff of Vogue. See Caroline Seebohm, The Man Who Was Vogue: The Life and Times of Condé Nast (New York: The Viking Press, 1982), pp. 209–15.
To Gertrude Stein
[Telegram]
[postmark: 3 February 1938] New York
LOVE AND SIXTYFOUR KISSES
FANIA CARLO
To Carl Van Vechten
[Rose motto]
[postmark: 4 February 1938] 5 rue [Christine Paris]
My dearest Papa Woojums,
It is wonderful and yet natural that No nobody else will do should be you. It just would be dearest papa Woojums and our
home oh papa papa Woojums it is so lovely and we are so pleased we just can’t believe it, sunshine and curtains woodwork and wall paper a terrace and the littlest of little new moons it is lovely, you know Papa Woojums it is funny Everybody’s Autobiography has produced the most completely satisfying fan letters I have ever had, and none of them from women all of them from men who apparently never felt that way before but were just moved I am keeping them all for you for some time when you get here and the English edition is to be out the 18th I will send you a copy with the Picasso book which will be out about the same time, and I am doing an opera about Doctor Faustus for Gerald Berners,1 and I can’t settle down to anything because we love the house so, and sometimes we will love it and papa Woojums together and all our love always
Baby W.
1. Stein’s Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights, published in her Last Operas and Plays, pp. 89–118. Berners was very anxious to do the music for this play, but in December 1939 he confessed to Stein that “all inspirational sources seem to have dried up: I can’t write a note of music or do any kind of creative work whatever and it’s not for want of trying and I don’t believe I shall be able to as long as this war lasts” (See Gallup, The Flowers of Friendship, p. 346). Berners never wrote a score for this play.
To Gertrude Stein
[Postcard: Unidentified Mask. Photograph by Carl Van Vechten]
20 February 1938 [101 Central Park West New York]
Dearest Baby Woojums!
So excited about your moving. No, I can’t remember who did the pigeon wall paper. Maybe I never did know. Here is a fetishe for you. The large fat man in Wilkie Collins is Count Fosco, no doubt, in The Woman in White. I love Collins. . I haven’t met Thornton Wilder yet. I don’t see how he keeps out of my way because he knows everybody I know, anyway he has written a beautiful play called Our Town and it is a tremendous success.1 We loved it, and LOVE to Baby & Mama Woojums! Is the English Everybody’s Autobiography out yet?
Papa W!
Saw Virgil [Thomson]’s ballet “Filling Station” & it is awfully good. He also has done the music for a film called “The River” which is a sensation!2
1. Wilder’s play Our Town, produced by Jed Harris, opened at the Henry Miller Theatre, New York, on 4 February 1938 and ran for 159 performances. In the spring of 1938 Wilder was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for this play.
2. The River, 1937, was written and directed by Pare Lorentz; it is a film about the Mississippi River Valley. In 1936, Thomson had done the music for another Lorentz film, The Plow That Broke the Plains.
To Carl Van Vechten
[postmark: 21 February 1938] 5 rue Christine [Paris]
My dearest Papa Woojums
Here we are really and truly here, pretty dead but, and at that moment the hot water did not hot and for a few days since we were deader and we finally concluded that Queen Christine had a jinks against hot water but we finally got the best even of that and so I am going on telling you how pleased we are with the valentine,1 it gave us a great delight and how delighted I am at the prospect of Four Saints being done again, I do hope it will become a popular opera like Gilbert and Sullivan and then we could do Daniel Webster by the way did Jay Laughlin send you a copy of the New Directions with it in it if not I will send you mine and we are so tired and so happy and so loving P[apa] W[oojums]., Mama and Baby Woojums, and love to Fania and she will love this too both of you will we do.
G[ertrude].
1. Van Vechten had sent Stein a Valentine’s Day card (YCAL) inscribed “for Baby and Mama Woojums February 14, 1938” and signed “Papa Woojums!”
To Gertrude Stein
[Postcard: Detail of fountain at entrance of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Photograph by Carl Van Vechten]1
1 March [1938] [101 Central Park West New York]
Yes dear Baby Woojums—
[James] Laughlin (or somebody) sent me New Direction[s] with the lovely Daniel Webster. Ο that we could see this masterpiece played! I’m glad you got your hot water and I’m dying to see Two on the Rue Christine, which maybe is a good title for you next time!—Fania and I send love & kisses to both!
Carlo
1. This detail is part of the Washington Monument of 1895 by the German sculptor Rudolph Siemering. It is a bronze and granite fountain located at the end of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
To Carl Van Vechten
[Postcard: Salon de Madame de Maintenon, Palais de Fontainebleau]
[postmark: 12 March 1938] [Fontainebleau, France]
We think our wood work is a[s] good it isn’t of course but we think it is1
B. W.
1. The image on the postcard is of a wood-paneled room in the Palais de Fontainebleau. There was wood paneling in some of the rooms at 5 rue Christine.
To Gertrude Stein
[Postcard: Detail of fountain at entrance of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Photograph by Carl Van Vechten]1
[postmark: 13 March 1938] [101 Central Park West New York]
Dearest Baby Woojums!
I can’t wait to see 5 rue Christine! It must be wonderful. I must make photographs. And I can’t wait to see the English Everybody’s Autobiography & Picasso & Dr. Faustus is a wonderful idea for a modern opera. . And I am jealous of all the men who are writing you fan letters & l[ove] & k[isses] to both from2
Papa Woojums!
1. This is a photograph of a different part of the fountain described in Van Vechten to Stein, 1 March [1938], note 1.
2. Stein mentions fan letters in her letter to Van Vechten [4 February 1938].
To Gertrude Stein
[Postcard: Bryant’s Show Boat]
[postmark: 22 March 1938] [101 Central Park West New York]
Dearest Baby Woojums
Of course 5 rue Christine is better than anything Madame de Maintenon ever had!1 Much better! I can’t wait to see this.
Love to Mama & Baby Papa Woojums!
1. A reference to the image on the postcard of Stein to Van Vechten [12 March 1938] (see note 1).
To Gertrude Stein
12 April 1938 101 Central Park West New York City
Dear Gertrude,
I am absolutely fou about the Picasso book and I have read it twice already. I like everything you say and you very cleverly and clearly separate the periods of his painting, and I guess you write in French as if to the château born! What you say about Spanish painting on the first page and elsewhere, especially about cubism and Spain, is nothing you can argue with and yet nobody has ever said it before and I guess nobody has ever said before that Picasso is not interested in “insides” and “souls”, although lots of people complain because they don’t find these things in his pictures. . The portrait of GS, dear Baby Woojums, seems to be reproduced better than I have ever seen it before and THAT has a soul and INSIDES TOO and looks more and More like you. . And I loved what you said about creators liking their backgrounds to be Louis XV or whatever and I guess I loved it all.
The moment the book arrived I called up Bennett [Cerf] to ask him if he knew about it and he said very proudly that he held the English version in his hands and had sent a query to Paris about the illustrations.
ONLY in your latest letter you say the English edition of the Everybody’s Autobiography is out and you will send that with the Picasso and it didn’t come, but I am not worried because obviously it didn’t get lost out of the parcel and I guess it will come later.
There is not a lick of news. If you go on the street everybody talks about Austria or China or Spain. I do wish America would get self-centered again. It was nicer then. At that period, also, I think it was considered very bad form to be interested in politics of any kind. Now look at us!
A thousand kisses and four thousand red roses to Mama and Baby W
Papa W!
Enclosed is a photograph of an Eilshemius I recently acquired. Do you like it? The title is: The Demon of the Rocks.1 And here is a photograph of a small bronze Ric
hmond Barthé did of Fania as Ariel in The Tempest.2
1. Louis Michel Eilshemius, the American painter.
2. Marinoff had played Ariel in a 1916 production of Shakepeare’s The Tempest. Also in the cast were Louis Calvert as Prospero and Walter Hampden as Caliban. Barthé’s sculpture was done after a photograph of Marinoff as Ariel. The sculpture is now in the collection of the American Shakespeare Festival, Stratford, Connecticut.
To Gertrude Stein
[Postcard: Wooden Horse from a Merry-Go-Round. Photograph by Carl Van Vechten]
15 April [19]38 Friday [101 Central Park West] New York City
Dearest Baby Woojums
Everybody’s Autobiography in England has just arrived and is pretty exciting, tho’ not as attractive as the American! I am very very glad to have this. I wrote you about the Picasso which is truly marvellous. Happy Easter to Baby & Mama W from
Fania and Papa W!
To Gertrude Stein
[Postcard: Portrait of Ram Gopal. Photograph by Carl Van Vechten]
5 May [1938] [101 Central Park West New York]
Dearest Baby Woojums
I was THRILLED by the Italian Autobiography What next! . .1 On this card is RAM GOPAL, a most beautiful Hindu boy and a Marvellous dancer. . He is coming to Paris soon & I am giving him a letter to you. You will, I think, find him enchanting. I haven’t sent any one to you & Mama Woojums for months or even years but this is one of the Best ever!
l[ove]. & K[isses].
Papa W!
1. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Autobiografia di Alice Toklas, trans. Cesare Pavese (Torino, Italy: Giulio Einaudi, 1938).
