by Edward Burns
To Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas
[Postcard: Ntra. Sa. De La Esperanza]
[? 1940–45]1 [101 Central Park West New York]
Our love always and every blessing [f]or you both this coming year.
Carl and Fania
1. A comparison of the handwriting places this letter in the 1940–45 time period. The card was written and signed by Van Vechten.
Appendix A:
The First Meeting of Gertrude Stein and Carl Van Vechten
Carl Van Vechten and Gertrude Stein have given similar accounts of how they first unknowingly and then knowingly met.1 The story of their meeting contains, as John Malcolm Brinnin says, “a series of scenes that Henry James would have been intrigued to elaborate.”2
Briefly stated, the story goes that Stein attended the second performance in Paris of Le Sacre du Printemps. She and Alice Toklas, with their friend Florence Bradley and her sister, shared their box with Van Vechten, whom they did not know at that time. Stein was so impressed by the tall, well-built young man with an elegant, pleated evening shirt that she returned home that evening and composed “One,” a word portrait of Van Vechten.3 When Van Vechten arrived for dinner the following Saturday night, an invitation that followed Stein’s receipt of Mabel Dodge’s letter of introduction, Stein immediately recognized Van Vechten as the man who had shared her box.
If the account of these two meetings is correct, then Stein and Van Vechten first met without being introduced on Monday, 2 June 1913, at the second performance of Le Sacre du Printemps. The dinner party at Stein’s residence, 27 rue de Fleurus, would then have occurred on Saturday 7 June.
The correspondence between Stein and Van Vechten makes clear that they did not first meet on the date or under the circumstances that they both described in their writings. The conclusion is supported by Van Vechten’s letters to his future wife, Fania Marinoff, by Florence Bradley’s letters to Stein, and by the dates of the performances of Le Sacre du Printemps.
In New York in the spring of 1913 Mabel Dodge invited Van Vechten, John Reed, and Robert Edmond Jones to motor with her from Paris to Florence. They were to spend the summer at her renaissance Villa Curonia in Arcetri. Van Vechten sailed from New York on the R. M. S. Mauretania on 20 May 1913. He arrived in Liverpool on 27 May and spent the night in London. The following day he took the night ferry and arrived in Paris on the morning of Thursday 29 May, the day of the premiere of Le Sacre du Printemps.4
Mabel Dodge had delayed her departure for Europe in order to help John Reed and Big Bill Haywood organize a pageant to benefit the striking Paterson silk workers on Saturday, 7 June, at Madison Square Garden. Dodge had given Van Vechten letters of introduction to a number of friends, including the one to Gertrude Stein, which Van Vechten sent to Stein the day he arrived in Paris.5 Stein responded with a letter the next day.
My dear Van Vechten
Will you dine with us to-morrow Saturday evening at 7.30. Let me know immediately.6
The letter, postmarked 31 May 1913, 7 A.M., arrived at the post office closest to the American Express Company office, rue Gluck, at 7:55 A.M. Van Vechten replied immediately: “I’ll dine with you with pleasure this evening.7
That Van Vechten was at Stein’s house on Saturday 31 May is confirmed by a letter he wrote to Fania Marinoff on Sunday, 1 June (postmarked 2 June 1913).
Last night [i.e., Saturday 31 May] I had dinner at Gertrude Stein’s. She is a wonderful personality. I wish you could meet her. You will sometime. … She lives in a place hung with Picassos and she showed me some more sketches of his. …8
Van Vechter’s correspondence also confirms that they did not meet on Saturday, 7 June, the date on which, according to their chronology, Stein and Van Vechten said they had their first dinner at 27 rue de Fleurus. Van Vechten’s second letter to Stein is not dated, nor has an envelope with a postmark survived. From internal evidence, however, it is possible to date this letter as having been written between 1 and 4 June. The first Paris performance of Mussorgsky’s opera Khovanshchina was on Thursday, 5 June.
Dear Miss Stein,
I’ve just been invited to the premiere of Kovanchina on Thursday night. Can we change our rendez-vous to another day? [Pitts] Sanborn is going away on Friday for the day and as I want to bring him over perhaps we had better not name a day until later. I’ll send you a petit bleu and if you are not free you can let me know.
I want so much to read the plays and Sanborn wants to see those extraordinary Picasso drawings.9
On Saturday, 7 June, Van Vechten wrote to Stein asking if he could bring his friend Pitts Sanborn the next day. Stein replied immediately that she was free on Sunday and would expect them in the afternoon.10
In a letter written to Fania Marinoff on Sunday, 8 June, Van Vechten wrote:
Last night we [Van Vechten and Sanborn] saw “Julien” at the Opera Comique. It is the successor to “Louise” but it is a colossal bore. This afternoon I am taking John [Pitts Sanborn] to meet Gertrude and see Picasso’s extraordinary drawings. …11
Having established that Stein and Van Vechten met first on Saturday 31 May 1913, it is important to determine which performance of Le Sacre du Printemps they attended.12
In late March 1916 Van Vechten sent Stein a copy of his new book of essays, Music After the Great War and Other Studies. In the essay “Igor Strawinsky: A New Composer” Van Vechten wrote of his experiences at a performance of Le Sacre du Printemps.
I attended the first performance in Paris of Strawinsky’s anarchistic (against the canons of academic art) ballet, The Sacrifice to the Spring, in which primitive emotions are both depicted and aroused by a dependence on barbarous rhythm, in which melody and harmony, as even so late a composer as Richard Strauss understands them, do not enter. A certain part of the audience, thrilled by what it considered a blasphemous attempt to destroy music as an art, and swept away with wrath, began very soon after the rise of the curtain to whistle, to make cat-calls, and to offer audible suggestions as to how the performance should proceed. Others of us, who liked the music and felt that the principles of free speech were at stake, bellowed defiance. It was war over art for the rest of the evening. ... I was sitting in a box in which I had rented one seat. Three ladies sat in front of me and a young man occupied the place behind me. He stood up during the course of the ballet to enable himself to see more clearly. The intense excitement under which he was laboring, thanks to the potent force of the music, betrayed itself presently when he began to beat rhythmically on the top of my head with his fists.13
From Mallorca Stein wrote to thank Van Vechten for his book.
My dear Van,
Thanks so much for the book. I have been reading it and find you have a charming enthusiasm and know so much and are so conscientious xcept when you say there were three of us in that box instead of four. Now the great question is which one did you leave out.14
Van Vechten replied to Stein on 17 May 1916.
Dear Gertrude Stein,
It’s so amusing of you to notice that I wrote there were Three in the box. As a matter of fact I left out more than that—a German and his wife—for instance, entirely. Four seemed too many somehow. No-one would ever believe so many sat in a box and I think I decided to leave out Florence Bradley’s sister… and it wasn’t the first night of Sacre either, it was the second night. But one must only be accurate about such details in a work of fiction. The real point is that in my own consciousness I am not a bit muddled about the facts.15
That Van Vechten is accurate in this letter about the facts surrounding which performance of Le Sacre du Printemps he attended can be confirmed by a letter he sent to Fania Marinoff from Paris postmarked 30 May 1913.
Mike [i.e., Mabel Dodge] gave me several letters—one to Jacques Blanche the painter. I went there yesterday and found his place wonderful. He has asked me to lunch on Sunday with George Moore. I tried to get in to see the Russian dances last night but couldn’t so I went to see Polaire at the Folies Bergere
. She played “Le Visiteur” which she did in New York last year.16
Van Vechten does not mention Le Sacre du Printemps to Fania Marinoff until a letter postmarked 4 June 1913.
The other night I saw the Russian ballet and the newest one “Sacre du Printemps” it [i.e., is] the most extraordinary thing I’ve ever seen on the stage. Both the music and the dancing were of an originality [appealing?]. My darling the French were so startled and offended by this novelty that they hissed it almost without succession. It was impossible to hear the last fifteen minutes of music at all. And how wildly beautiful it was.17
There can be little doubt that Van Vechten attended the second performance of Le Sacre du Printemps on Monday, 2 June. Stein and Toklas, with Florence Bradley and her sister, also attended that performance, as Stein wrote in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.
Florence Bradley, an American actress, had met Stein and Toklas in Florence in the fall of 1912 when they all visited Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia. In 1913 Florence Bradley and her sister were living in Paris in an apartment on the rue Humboldt. Although Bradley had seen Stein only a few times during the fall and winter of 1912–13, when she learned that Stein had written some plays she asked to come and read them. Her letter is dated only “Friday,” but it was clearly written on Friday, 30 May 1913.
Dear Miss Stein,
We shall be delighted to come on Sunday—am most anxious to read the play! Saw “Le Sacre du Printemps” last night. Great enthusiasm. It’s quite the most interesting thing I have seen them do. And you—or are you no longer interested.
Yours sincerely
Florence Bradley18
Florence Bradley’s next letter to Stein is a carte pneumatique postmarked 2 June 1913, 14:55.
It is tonight—could get no tickets for Wednesday or Friday, They are in loge [word?] it—We will go early and do our best for you. So come along at your ease—to comfort you—we are en face.
In haste
Florence E. Bradley
Monday
Tickets enclosed19
This letter leaves little doubt that the invitation was for the performance of Le Sacre du Printemps and that Stein and Toklas went to the second performance of the ballet. There they met Van Vechten, whom they already knew. Whether Bradley also secured tickets for him or whether his ticket in the same loge was purely coincidental cannot be ascertained. But it is clear from these letters that their meeting did not happen as Stein had written in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.
In Everybody’s Autobiography Gertrude Stein said that she wrote The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas during “a beautiful and unusually dry October at Bilignin in France in nineteen thirty-two followed by an unusually dry and beautiful first two weeks in November.”20 From various materials in the Yale archives, it is clear that Stein actually began The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas in the early summer. Her reference to those six weeks in the fall is a smooth concealing maneuver. Anyone who has read the book with a certain amount of care realizes that it was not meant to be read as history. Stein did not attempt to narrate a carefully documented account of her life. The writing of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas represents, like all of Stein’s writing, a truth stemming more from the pattern that she weaves out of the facts than from an exact narration of the facts themselves. Out of the various facts of their meetings that are given here, and as they are certain to have taken place, Stein and Van Vechten wove a Jamesian web that served to confirm the importance of their friendship.
As their friendship deepened, the facts surrounding their first two meetings gradually became less important to Stein and Van Vechten. Van Vechten, writing his Fragments from an Unwritten Autobiography, did not wish to contradict the legend Stein had created. Perhaps, too, by that time Stein’s pattern of the truth had also become part of his own remembrance. As Van Vechten wrote to Stein on 17 May 1916, “one must only be accurate about such details in a work of fiction. The real point is that in my own consciousness I am not a bit muddled about the facts. “
1. See Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1933), pp. 167–68, and Carl Van Vechten, “Some ‘Literary Ladies’ I Have Known,” in his Fragments from an Unwritten Autobiography (New Haven: Yale University Library, 1955), II, 19–20.
2. The Third Rose: Gertrude Stein and Her World (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., Inc., 1959), p. 190.
3. Stein’s ‘One (Van Vechten),” in her Geography and Plays (Boston: The Four Seas Co., 1923), pp. 199–200.
4. Carl Van Vechten, letter to Fania Marinoff, postmarked 29 May 1913, New York Public Library, Rare Books and Manuscripts Division; hereafter cited at NYPL-MD. The transcription of all letters quoted here has been exact; no changes have been made in spelling, punctuation, or capitalization. Editorial additions have been enclosed in brackets.
5. Mabel Dodge’s letter of introduction is printed in The Flowers of Friendship: Letters Written to Gertrude Stein, ed. Donald Gallup (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1953), p. 79.
6. Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University; hereafter cited as YCAL.
7. YCAL.
8. NYPL-MD.
9. YCAL.
10. Van Vechten to Stein, [7 June] 1913; Stein to Van Vechten [postmark 7 June 1913], YCAL.
11. NYPL-MD.
12. Le Sacre du Printemps had its premiere as part of the Saison Russe presented by Serge Diaghilev at the newly opened Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris. The ballet was first performed on Thursday 29 May 1913. There were four subsequent performances: Monday, 2 June; Wednesday, 4 June; Friday, 6 June; and Friday, 13 June. The traditional répétition générale, a dress rehearsal before an invited audience, was held on Wednesday, 28 May. The fullest discussion and documentation of the first performance of the ballet, together with an anthology of the criticism it provoked, can be found in Truman C. Bullard, “The First Performance of Igor Stravinsky’s Sacre du Printemps,” 3 vols. (diss., Eastman School of Music of the University of Rochester, 1971). Bullard also cites critics who reveal that the second performance was marked with incidents similar to those mentioned in the accounts given by Stein and Van Vechten (see note 1). See Bullard, II, 84, 91–92.
13. “Igor Strawinsky: A New Composer,” rpt. in The Dance Writings of Carl Van Vechten, ed. and intro. by Paul Padgette (New York: Dance Horizons, 1980), pp. 108–9.
14. YCAL.
15. YCAL.
16. NYPL-MD.
17. NYPL-MD.
18. YCAL.
19. YCAL.
20. Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography (New York: Random House, 1937), p. 9.
Appendix B:
An Unpublished Portrait of Carl Van Vechten by Gertrude Stein
Introductory Note
Carl Van Vechten, as part of his efforts to publish Gertrude Stein’s works in America, sent a copy of her play A Lisi to Edmund Wilson for Vanity Fair. Wilson, who had reviewed Stein’s Geography and Plays in Vanity Fair,1 was enthusiastic but felt that he did not have the space to publish the play in its entirety. He proposed to publish on facing pages an abridged version of Stein’s play and excerpts from Avery Hopwood’s play, Our Little Wife, which had inspired Stein.2 Stein refused to cut her play, and Wilson wrote to Van Vechten on 6 July 1923, expressing his regret at Stein’s decision. When he returned the typescript to Stein on 23 July 1923, Van Vechten also reported that he was having little success in his efforts to convince Alfred Knopf, his friend and publisher, to publish Stein’s The Making of Americans. The one good piece of news that Van Vechten could report was that his new novel, The Blind Bow-Boy, whose publication date was early August, had already sold out its first printing.
Van Vechten’s satiric bildungsroman begins as a conventional story of a young man, Harold Prewett, who has led a quiet, uneventful life until he is brought to New York by the wealthy father whom he has never met. The father, who wants to counter his son’s cloistered education, has provi
ded him with a tutor, Paul Moody. Moody’s responsibility is to introduce Harold to New York’s most sophisticated and uninhibited society. George Prewett, Harold’s father, wants his son exposed to totally free love, sex, and capriciousness. He hopes that after a time in such surroundings Harold will permanently reject the temptations of high living. When Harold finds out his father’s true purpose in bringing him to New York, he reacts to his father’s duplicity by opting for the uninhibited set that has provided him with his real education.
Although she had not yet received her copy of the novel, Stein replied to Van Vechten with enthusiasm: “Bully for the boy, I am awfully pleased in your success. It’s just the age it should come. I am looking forward to seeing it. I’ll have to do another portrait of you, the twenty years after effect. “3 This is the first time a second portrait of Van Vechten is mentioned by Stein.
Van Vechten’s reply to Stein of 3 September 1923 expressed his delight at the idea of a second portrait, “twenty years after.” Although he had known her for only ten years, Van Vechten must have realized that she was using the term as a literary device. Stein would have been familiar with Alexandre Dumas’ novel Vingt Ans Apres (“Van” may be a pun on vingt); she may also have recalled the chapter “Twenty Years After (1892)” in Adams’ The Education of Henry Adams. In her reply to Van Vechten (postmark 26 September 1923), written from Nice, where she and Toklas had gone to see Picasso and Juan Gris, Stein included a typescript of “Van or Twenty Years After. A Second Portrait of Carl Van Vechten.” It is this portrait that Van Vechten arranged to have printed in The Reviewer and which Stein later included in her Useful Knowledge, a collection of compositions about American subjects, just as she had included “One. Carl Van Vechten” in her preceding book, Geography and Plays.4
