The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Carl Van Vechten, 1913-1946
Page 81
Baby Woojums.
I haven’t a big enough envelope to put in the photo, will send it next Tuesday, Always
B. W.
1. The typescript of Stein’s “To Do: A Book of Alphabets and Birthdays."
2. Stein is referring to the co-owners of the Washington Square Gallery, Robert J. Coady (d. 1921) and Michael Brenner (d. 1969). They had planned to issue a signed edition of Stein’s “Letters and Parcels and Wool,” as well as other works by Stein. See Van Vechten to Stein, 4 March 1946, note 3.
3. Barney and Brooks had spent the war years in the Villa Sant’Agnese on the outskirts of Florence, Italy.
To Gertrude Stein
15 March 1946
Income Tax Day! [101 Central Park West
New York]
Beautiful Baby Woojums,
I’d like to be able to give you the exact table of contents or the name of the Omnibus we are preparing, but for the last week we have been struggling with the number of words and copyrights involved and until these matters are settled I see no sense in writing you something that would have to be changed later. At the moment I don’t know whether we shall have to indulge in adding or subtracting but I will KNOW SOON and I will let you know. Rest assured that the score is practically what we began with, MAYBE a little more! This morning the following came by wire from Lamont Johnson: “Your wire and four harps saw us through to eight curtain calls and mixed reviews come on out the water is boiling.” That is all I know about YES so far. Paul Feigay (curses!) still has my manuscript of this masterpiece.1 Yesterday Captain [Edward] Geisler called and this morning Norma Chambers. She has been sick, she says, and in Virginia. I hope to see them both prochainement. About the opera, Virgil [Thomson] is coming to Paris the end of April but if you can get it over here before then he would be delighted as he could think it over on the journey. Of course, too I am dying to see it. So I hope it comes THIS way, as you promise in TWO WEEKS. I am working very hard on the Introduction. Is there anything special you want said. . ? If there is, please speak up. Ann Watkins saying she lost the manuscripts is something, really something, in fact four and six and a buggy full, n’est-ce pas? I am sending you and Alice more towels with blue leaves by Edward Waterman who goes over in April. He has a brown caniche named Christopher, I am impatient to see Marie Laurencin’s idea of Basket. In this letter of yours which has just come you have answered every questions, yes you have, every one, and am I delighted and pleased and enchanted. Here is another question, perhaps not very important. In looking over your letters for the past few years before I wrote my introduction, to see if I wanted to use something (and I did) I ran across five references (in five different letters) to the dedication of the First Reader.2 You said it was to be dedicated to ME? Did you mean spiritually or did the printer at Algier leave it out or did you change your mind? So I am sending you a color photograph I made of ME so you can see what they are like. They are better projected LIFE SIZE on a screen, but they are pretty good this way and I am dying to immortalize you and Alice in Color and as Mae West says so feelingly (or was it Bert Savoy?) you MUST come over. . The world is in a turmoil and most everybody is pretty neurotic but YOU and Mama Woojums and Papa W. So I’ll write you more any minute and YOU write ME and Fania and I send love to you both!
P. W!
F[ania] M[arinoff] is playing The Empress of Austria (Franz Joseph’s Frau) in a piece on the Radio Sunday night.3
Ο yes. Richard Wright was here the other night and he said he had sent you Black Metropolis & you had never got it and I said send another through Joe Barry. Is this wrong? and won’t you get this?4
1. In 1946 Paul Feigay (d. 1983) was beginning his career as a producer of Broadway plays, television, ballet, and sports events.
2. See Stein to Van Vechten, 15 October 1942, note 3.
3. Marinoff played the role of Elizabeth, Empress of Austria, in Maxwell Anderson’s play The Masque of Kings. The play, part of a series, Theatre Guild on the Air, was broadcast on station WJZ, New York, from 10 to 11 P.M., Sunday, 17 March 1946.
4. Wright’s Introduction in Horace R. Clayton and St. Clair Drake’s Black Metropolis (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., Inc., 1945), pp. xvii–xxxiv. The book is a study of Chicago’s South-Side black ghetto.
To Carl Van Vechten
18 March [19]46 [5 rue Christine,
Paris]
Dearest Papa Woojums
Here is the opera,1 will you read it and then pass it on to Virgil [Thomson], I guess the play went well, have just had some xcited cables,2 I am so happy about your doing the Omnibus so happy lots of love
Baby Woojums.
1. Stein’s The Mother of Us All.
2. Yes Is For a Very Young Man was given its first performance at the Pasadena Playhouse, Pasadena, California, on 13 March 1946. It ran until 24 March. Lamont Johnson and his wife had been writing Stein regularly to give reports on the progress of the play.
To Gertrude Stein
26 March 1946 101 Central Park West
New York City 23
Dearest Baby Woojums,
I think we are now fairly certain what we are going to print in the Collected Gertrude Stein (or whatever it will be called) and so I am sending you the table of contents in the proper order with the advice that you never can tell what publishers will do and that still more may be cut out, but I don’t think so, I really don’t think so.1
The Autobiography of Alice by Toklas (complete)
The Gradual Making of the Making of Americans (Lectures in America)
The Making of Americans (selected passages)
Three portraits of painters (Portraits and Prayers)
Cezanne
Matisse
Picasso
Melanctha (complete)
Tender Buttons (complete)
Composition as Explanation (complete)
Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia
Have They Attacked Mary. He Giggled.
As a Wife has a Cow.
Two Poems:
Susie Asado
Preciosilla
Two Plays:
Ladies’ Voices
What Happened
Miss Furr and Miss Ske[e]ne
A Sweet Tail (Gypsies)
Four Saints in Three Acts (complete)
The Winner Loses (complete)
The Coming of the Americans (from Wars I Have Seen, beginning with “Well that was yesterday,” on page 194 to the end of the book, p. 259)
The World Is Round was ruled out before we began as it is too long complete and it cannot easily be cut. Only yesterday I learned that we would be obliged to take out Lend a Hand or Four Religions (Useful Knowledge). I hope you won’t feel too badly about these omissions. There are lots of other things I wanted, Ο so badly, to include too, but as it is it runs to nearly 300,000 words which seems to be about all we can include at a popular price. Besides an introduction, I am writing short notes to go before each piece and a photograph by me will be used as a frontispiece.
Directly everything was settled, I wrote Bobby Haas immediately and told him I had been invited to edit such a Collection but did not see how it would interfere with HIS plans, but he has not replied. Maybe he is MAD. Personally I think there is room for more than one Gertrude Stein Anthology and if this one is a success, probably Bennett [Cerf] himself will issue another of entirely different material later.
You have still left unanswered the question about Paul Genin’s manuscript Mon Livre du Pourquoi which came to me, directed from Bilignin (YEARS ago) in Alice Toklas’s hand, only recently released by the British censor. What is this and what do you want me to do with it?
I don’t think I told you Mrs [Frank] Case died and that I was one of the ushers at her funeral. She had cancer of the lungs and has suffered needless torture for over two years. We hadn’t seen her for a year and a half before she died. Frank is in a very bad way about this because he depended on her for everything.
It is marvellous in
Brewsie and Willie how you have got the ATMOSPHERE and the VERNACULAR. Everybody is patting you on the back even before the book is out. And there is a very nice review of YES est pour un très jeun homme in Time.2 “Montie” Johnson says he is sending you everything and you will find a photograph by me on the cover. Of the program . . Some of the Western reviews were good, some just plain silly. Montie (I do wish this nice boy would change his name!) telephoned and telegraphed and wrote me all the time it was going on and I was very unhappy I couldn’t go out, but the Gertrude Stein Omnibus and other duties kept me HERE.
So I send love to you and Mama Woojums and so does Fania and I HOPE to hear from you pronto that everything is okay and the Omnibus is already on its way to the PRINTER. Quelle chance, Baby Woojums, and Glory Glory Hallelujah!
Papa Woojums
HIMSELF!3
1. This list became the contents of the volume Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein.
2. “Yes and No,” Time, 25 March 1946, p. 67.
3. In Stein’s hand at the bottom of page 2 of Van Vechten’s letter: “110 lines by the author if can manage."
To Carl Wan Vechten
1 April [1946] [5 rue Christine,
Paris]
Dearest Papa Woojums,
So pleased with all Papa Woojums himself has done, so pleased, we are all pleased, a tear for Four Religions but I know in this world you can’t have everything and what you do have is pretty dam good bless you Papa Woojums bless you. About the Paul Genin ms. no that’s nothing, it was something then but nothing now, all that is over, we have even lost sight of each other, he was a neighbor and a nice neighbor down there then, but since then, well there is nothing now.1 I am glad you like Brewsie and Willie, I think it kind of handsome myself, I think I really got them as they were, it was pretty wonderful and I got them, lots and lots of love to you and Fania, dear ones, bless you
Always
Baby Woojums and Mama Woojums.2
1. The Genins remained in their home near Belley after the war. They made only occasional trips to Paris in 1945-46.
2. Both names signed by Stein.
To Gertrude Stein
6 April 1946 [101 Central Park West
New York]
Chere and Beautiful Baby Woojums,
Yesterday The Mother of Us All arrived and this morning your letter.1 I read the former and sent it on to Virgil [Thomson]. It seems I never get really time to read your manuscriptsx before somebody screams for them, but I am sure The Mother of Us All is perfectly delightful and in a new manner or at least a new combination of manners. Virgil will like those silencesx(2) and his own part (I wonder if he will sing it?) . . My favorite part, after Susan B, is Jo the Loiterer! What a character! Will the Captain sing this luimême? Well, I can’t wait for Virgil to set this and I can’t wait to hear and see it on the stage. I don’t think this one can be done with Negroes and of course Florine [Stettheimer] is no longer with us; so there will be an entirely new setup. I wonder if Mary Garden still has voice enough to sing Susan B? She would be magnificent in it! … . Now I am worried because you don’t mention the Color Picture of Papa Woojums I sent you air-mail way back. Did you get this? Anyway here is one of Fania and I can’t wait till I take you and Mama W in COLOR. The other one should have reached you as I put about forty dollars worth of stamps on it, so many indeed, there was scarcely room for the address. But you will let me know. I’m glad I don’t have to worry about the Paul Genin mss. .2 Have you heard from Bennett [Cerf]? The book is to be called COLLECTED WRITINGS OF Gertrude Stein. This is Bennett’s title and I think it is a good one, dignified and completely explanatory. I am calling my introduction A Stein Song, principally because it seems intended to be sung. Like an ODE, perhaps. I hope you will like it and the notes with which I have prefaced each piece. I am delighted you are pleased with the contents. . I wanted to put much more in but we already have nearly 300,000 words which is out of this world. . Let’s have another omnibus in a year or two with MORE GS… The NOTES have gone to the printer together with YOUR copy, and I shall finish the Introduction in a few days. It is all done now except making the FOURTH draft with a few final changes. . It is expected to appear (COLLECTED WRITINGS) early in September. Brewsie and Willie will be out any minute. So you will have to take a lot of boys [i.e., bows] this year, both in the Spring and the Fall. … The Metropolitan is having a retrospective show of the taste of 1870:3 Rosa Bonheur and Cabanel and Bouguereau. I haven’t been yet but I’m sure I’ll love it. I haven’t seen Cabanel’s Birth of Venus in fifty years but I shall always remember it as one of my first [SLI?]DES. As for Rosa’s Horse Fair! . . Knoedler’s is doing something of the sort4 [word?]5 Have you heard about Peggy Guggenheim’s book in which she sets off torpedoes under all the beds she has slept in?6 The Ballet comes back tomorrow7 and we are going to a party for [Alicia] Markova and [An ton] Dolin. We expect to give a dinner with the Pearl Bucks, the Lin Yutangs, and the Richard Wrights before Dick sails to Paris. Tomorrow it is also Somerset Maugham. Dish towels I repeat go to you by Edward (I) Waterman. … The weather is warm as warm and spring is here. The park in front of us blooms. I HOPE YOU WILL LIKE what I have written for YOUR book. YOUR OWN BOOK, with as many of my favorites as we could get in. We must have another, later, Baby Woojums, WE MUST. Lots of love to you both
Papa Woojums!
xas many times as I like to
x(2)They are terrific
Ο yes, Montie Johnson has written me several times, but I suppose he writes you whatever he has to write. I wish I might have seen YES. My scouts (of which I have many) report the acting was none too hot, especially Mrs. [Jane] Claborne.8 But TIME came across with a very good review.
1. In The Mother of Us All it is Susan B. Anthony’s fight for women’s suffrage that provides a connective tissue to Stein’s panoramic overview of nineteenth-century America. Maurice Gros ser, as he had done for Four Saints in Three Acts, developed a scenario for The Mother of Us All.
The opera is a pageant that presents the interaction of people, both historical and fictitious characters taken from many walks of life: Daniel Webster, Lillian Russell, Ulysses S. Grant, John Quincy Adams, and Anthony Comstock mingle with Susan B. Anthony and her companion Anne as well as with the Narrators, Virgil T. and Gertrude S., and two Civil War veterans, Chris the Citizen and Jo the Loiterer (based on Joseph Barry).
2. Van Vechten gave the typescript of Genin’s book to YCAL.
3. The Taste of the Seventies was an exhibition celebrating the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The exhibition included Alexandre Cabanel’s The Birth of Venus, Marie Rosa Bonheur’s The Horse Fair, and William Adolphe Bougereau’s The Two Sisters. The exhibition ran from 2 April to 3 Steptember 1946.
4. To mark their one hundredth anniversary, M. Knoedler and Company, a firm of art dealers, mounted an exhibition of paintings that had been purchased by New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art through Knoedler.
5. A cigarette burn in the paper makes it impossible to read this word.
6. Peggy Guggenheim’s Out of This Century: The Informal Memories of Peggy Guggenheim (New York: The Dial Press, 1946).
7. Ballet Theatre (American Ballet Theatre) opened a season at the Metropolitan Opera House, New York, 7 to 13 and then 21 April to 4 May 1946.
8. Jane Claborne played the role of Denise in Yes Is For a Very Young Man at the Pasadena Playhouse.
To Carl Van Vechten
9 April [19]46 5 rue Christine
[Paris]
My dearest Papa Woojums,
I am so pleased that you liked the Mother of us all. I was pretty pleased with it myself, and Papa Woojums are you sure I did not tell you about your colored photo, there it has been on the mantel-piece side by side with the cover of Brewsie and Willie1 and admired by all beholders and now Fania has joined too and they do look handsome, we would love to be photoed the same way and also, it is very handsome, do send me the introduction as soon as it is done we are lo
oking forward tremendously to seeing it, yes I think the title is very satisfactory, and everything, I am sorry that they didn’t act better in Yes, but then they were the only ones who would act at all, and I did want it acted, they were nice kids, I hope they can go on, so much love. Now they will all be coming I wish it were you,
Always
B. W.
1. The jacket for Brewsie and Willie had been designed by E. McKnight Kauffer. The book was designed by Ernest Reichl, who had also designed Stein’s Lectures In America and Portraits and Prayers.
To Gertrude Stein
17 April 1946 101 Central Park West
New York City 23
Dearest Baby Woojums,
I turned the Introduction in yesterday to Bennett [Cerf] and we also settled on the photographs we are using. For a frontispiece: You and Mama Woojums in the garden at Bilignin (XXXII F 29) and for the jacket head of GS in the garden (XXXII F 12). I cannot send you the Introduction NOWx because I haven’t a fair copy. Besides I always make corrections in proof and I wouldn’t want you to see one thing now and another in print. SO as soon as the proofs are ready, I’ll send you the “Stein Song” transferring any changes I make to your set. So far Bennett seems enormously pleased with everything I have done. He was most enthusiastic about the “notes” and now I hope that you will be pleased. Bobby Haas turned up yesterday and I was amazed to find him a pretty young boy with a great deal of charm. He doesn’t seem mad either. He showed me his plan for HIS anthology of GS and I like it enormously, but it is scarcely a commercial anthology and he may have to wait for a time to see it in print. Personally I’d like to see all these handsome books ABOUT you in print, Julian Sawyer and the others, whatever their quality, as that would add to the discussion, but nothing could add to your éclat, your superb eminence, or your literary distinction, to say nothing of your charm! Bobby Haas says he is coming back in June and I hope he does because I like him and he adores and worships you. He sighed as he cried “I was born in the wrong time!” He meant he hadn’t met you yet. This surprised me considerably because I had always taken it for granted that you knew him… I talked with Virgil [Thomson] AT LENGTH about The Mother of Us All, over the telephone, and “sensational” was the word he used… He is enchanted with it and I’ve no doubt it will inspire him to terrific efforts of creation. The BEST part, of course, is Joe the Loiterer and Captain [Joseph] Barry is to be congratulated. That is almost sure to run away with the opera! I mean of course the best part for men. Susan Β is a good enough rôle for any star. Virgil thinks Mary [Garden] hasn’t voice enough any more for this and at the same time he finds her too sexy. But he’ll dig up something tremendous, I predict.1 This all adds up to a newer and BETTER Four Saints. I haven’t yet received a photograph of [Marie] Laurencin’s Basket. Has this been sent yet? … The color pictures I have sent you are originally films to be projected on a screen, life size or bigger. The reproduction processes are still in their infancy and will be improved. The colors on the screen are astonishingly accurate and the portraits appear to be three dimensional . . I have long series of some people and events. Tomorrow night, for instance, I am showing my pictures of [Alicia] Markova (some 361 in the series) in all her dancing roles. Brewsie and Willie apparently will be out in June and Collected Writings of GS in October, but paper, printing, binding, etc. are SLOW nowadays and unpredictable. You never KNOW. So love to you both from Fania and