No Modernism Without Lesbians

by Diana Souhami

  He was an ever-increasing problem as Gertrude and Leo grew up. They were ashamed of him because he was so peculiar, and frightened of his unpredictability. He was eccentric and even a little mad:

  His children never could lose, until they grew up to be queer themselves, each one inside him, the uncomfortable feeling his queer ways gave them.

  Leo in particular disliked and resented him. He described him as stocky, dominant, aggressive and ill-educated and felt afflicted by him with a deep neurosis. When adult, in an autobiographical book Journey Into the Self, Leo tried to make sense of what he saw as his father’s malign influence.

  Gertrude conceded her father encouraged a sense of freedom in his children, but she had no love for him, though she looked like him and felt there were similarities in their temperaments. He was not appreciative of her. Like Sir John Ellerman and Albert Barney, he let his daughter know she was not the kind of daughter she ought to be. ‘She was not very interesting ever to her father,’ Gertrude wrote of herself. He criticized how she looked and said she was never thorough in anything. He wanted her to do housekeeping, dressmaking and cooking. Nothing Gertrude cooked turned out right.

  And then he would be full up with impatient feeling that she could not do that thing, that always she was not, as he put it, ever thorough in anything.

  Mostly he took no notice of her and she did what she liked. But then capriciously he would say she must not go out that evening, she must stay in the house with her mother. Gertrude, he told Leo, was his responsibility:

  You have to take care of her sometime and you might as well begin, the sooner the better. You will have to do it sooner or later I tell you.

  Gertrude, though uninteresting to her father, chose to become interesting to herself. And she was the centre of Alice B. Toklas’s universe.

  Daniel Stein married Amelia Keyser, ‘a sweet gentle little woman’, in 1864 soon after their first meeting. She was twenty-one, he was ten years older. One of his brothers arranged the marriage. Sometimes, said Gertrude, her father thought his wife was a flower; usually he forgot she existed. She called him Darling Dan or Dear Dan in her diaries and worried about his moods, his travels away from home and his health.

  In her turn, Gertrude dedicated her books to DD, her Darling Darling, her Alice B. Toklas, her spouse in all ways but the law of any land.

  Amelia was a good wife, an efficient housekeeper and the mother of nice children. She sewed, cooked and polished. Leo said she only read two books in her life: Home Influence: A Tale for Mothers and Daughters and The Mother’s Recompense, both by a Sephardic Jewish novelist, Grace Aguilar, who settled in Hackney in London. He never saw his father read a book of any sort.

  Gertrude thought her mother oblivious to the individual characters of her children: she treated them fairly, bought presents for their birthdays, thanked God when Bertha’s sore foot got better, Leo recovered from the measles or Gertrude from diarrhoea, but she did not relate to them as individuals:

  She was never important to her children excepting to begin them. She was a sweet contented little woman who lived in her husband and children, who could only know well to do middle class living, who never knew what it was her husband and her children were working out inside them and around them.

  Gertrude in her own way championed her mother’s bourgeois values and love of daily living, an orderly home, good food and comfort.

  Gertrude and Leo’s childhood

  Amelia Stein became ill with bowel cancer in 1884 when Gertrude was ten. Daily, she wrote in her diary ‘not quite well’. She chronicled doctors’ appointments, salt baths and radiation treatments. Mothering became too much for her.

  Unsupervised, Gertrude and Leo disappeared for days at a time, camping alone in the hills. They ‘dragged a little wagon and slept closely huddled together’. They had a gun, and shot birds and rabbits. Nights were beautiful. ‘In other lands the heavens appear as a surface; here every star shines down out of the blue behind it.’ They spent their pocket money on books and read widely and unselectively – Wordsworth, Scott, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Shakespeare’s plays, Congressional Records, science and history books. Gertrude read the Bible to find out about eternity: ‘There was nothing there. There was God of course and he spoke, but there was nothing about eternity.’

  Her favourite things were books and food:

  Evolution was all over my childhood… with music as a background for emotion and books as a reality and a great deal of eating as an excitement and as an orgy… Most of all there were books and food, food and books, both excellent things.

  Books and food were abiding passions for Gertrude. Most of the Steins were very large and keen on food. Simon, Gertrude said, would eat a family-sized rice pudding at one sitting. A problematic relationship to food affected many of her relatives. Grandma Stein was a mountain of a woman and one of her sons died from obesity. Leo, when adult, was anxious and fetishistic about his diet, had digestion problems, went on punishing fasts and regimes of raw vegetables and nuts and said he did not know when he was hungry. He blamed their father’s weird control about what could or could not be eaten. Gertrude said of her father and food:

  He always liked to think about what was good for him in eating. He liked to think about what was good for everyone around him in their eating eating. He liked to buy all kinds of eating, he liked all kinds of thinking about eating, eating was living to him.

  Alice more than attended to Gertrude’s kinds of eating eating, as her recipes, published after Gertrude’s death in The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, testified.

  Gertrude was the youngest of the five Stein children; Leo was two years older:

  It is better if you are the youngest in a family to have a brother two years older, because that makes everything a pleasure to you, you go everywhere and do everything while he does it all for you and with you which is a pleasant way to have everything happen to you.

  As a child, Gertrude was emotionally dependent on Leo. With little parental support or guidance, they turned to each other for comfort and safety. Neither felt close to their brothers and sister. They respected Michael but he was older, with the demeanour of the responsible eldest son. Bertha ‘was not a pleasant person’, Gertrude said. She shared a bedroom with her. ‘It is natural not to care about a sister, certainly not when she is four years older and grinds her teeth at night.’ She ‘married a man who well they married’. Leo’s only adult recollection of Bertha was a little girl on a chamber pot. In October 1941, aged nearly seventy, he dreamed he was married to her, which he found intolerable. In his dream she wanted to sleep with him but he insisted on going to another bed. Possibly when young and motherless there was some kind of sexual exchange between Leo and Gertrude. She was the sister he loved.

  Her younger brother, Simon, had, she said, ‘a very good nose and foolish but not silly eyes and he loved eating and fishing’. She tried, when she was eleven, to teach him that Columbus discovered America in 1492. She asked him each morning and evening, but he could never remember. He achieved little at school and when he left had difficulty in getting or keeping a job.

  death of mother and father

  In 1888, when Gertrude was fourteen, her mother, Amelia, died. ‘We had already had the habit of doing without her,’ Gertrude wrote, but after her death any semblance of family life disintegrated. Michael was a student at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Bertha could not manage the housekeeping, the dining table was no longer laid and they all ate what and when they pleased. Gertrude and Leo sometimes talked and walked all night and slept all day.

  And Father ‘was more a bother than he had been’. He shut himself away for days at a time, was irritable and anxious, took out his frustrations on his children and his business affairs became erratic. He speculated with money and lost it. Leo and Gertrude bought books in the hope of them being an investment when financial ruin came: Shelley in green Moroccan leather binding, an illustrated set of Thackeray’s novels.


  This chaotic home life caused Gertrude what she called an ‘agony of adolescence’. She had panic attacks and thought she was breaking down. She described her early childhood as a civilized time of evolution and order and her adolescence as medieval:

  Medieval means that life and place and the crops you plant and your wife and children are all uncertain. They can be driven away or taken away, or burned away, or left behind…

  Fifteen is really medieval and pioneer and nothing is clear and nothing is safe and nothing is come and nothing is gone. But all might be.

  She dropped out of Oakland High School and did not know where to go or what to do. Leo did a year as a ‘student at large’ at the University of California at Berkeley, and father

  naturally was not satisfied with anything. That was natural enough… Then one morning we could not wake up our father. Leo climbed in by the window and called out to us that he was dead in his bed and he was… Then our life without a father began. A very pleasant one.

  Natalie Barney had a similar response when her father died: she observed his corpse but felt no grief. Daniel Stein died in 1891, three years after his wife. He was fifty-seven. Michael, who was twenty-six, said he died from overeating. He took over as head of the family. Gertrude was seventeen, Leo nineteen. Michael became their legal guardian. ‘I remember’, Gertrude wrote, ‘going to court for the only time I was ever in one to say that we would have him.’

  Michael took his responsibilities towards his brothers and sisters to heart. As Alice B. Toklas put it:

  He saw not any one of them would ever earn any money. None of them were made for a business career. And he didn’t think of any profession in which they would succeed.

  Daniel Stein’s financial affairs were in a mess. ‘There were so many debts it was frightening’, Gertrude wrote, ‘and then I found out that profit and loss is always loss… and it was discouraging…’

  Despite debts, her father’s will revealed his ownership of 480 acres of land, property in Baltimore and California, shares in cable, railroad and mining companies and, most lucrative of all, the franchise for an undeveloped project to consolidate the various street railroad systems in San Francisco. Michael Stein sold this franchise to the railroad magnate Collis P. Huntington and became supervisor of the newly formed Market Street Railway Company. His acumen in dealing with their father’s affairs secured for Gertrude and her siblings an income for life. Gertrude described their inherited income as enough to keep them ‘reasonably poor’. Others might think it was enough to keep them reasonably rich. It allowed them to travel, buy books and paintings and be free from the need to work for a living.

  student days

  For a year after their father’s death, the four children lived together in San Francisco with Michael as head of the household. ‘Then we all went somewhere,’ Gertrude wrote. She and Bertha spent time in Baltimore with their maternal aunt, Fannie Bachrach. Leo went to Harvard to study law, Michael stayed on in San Francisco for a few years with the Railway Company and married a strong-willed, assertive woman, Sarah Samuels, quite unlike his meek mother, Amelia. Simon was the only one to spend the rest of his life in California. Michael found him a job as a part-time gripman – a cable car operator. He died in the city in middle age, ‘still fat and fishing’.

  Gertrude chose to study medicine at the Johns Hopkins Medical School with a view to becoming a psychologist. She planned to specialize in nervous diseases in women and needed a degree in medicine for this. Her tutor, William James, ‘the father of American psychology’,1 had published The Principles of Psychology in 1890 and was the first academic to offer a psychology course in the United States. Theodore Roosevelt and George Santayana were among his pupils. Gertrude was impressed by him and he with her, and they became friends.

  Gertrude was taken with William James’s idea that automatic writing was a pathway to reveal aspects of personality beyond consciousness. ‘Automatic’, not edited or honed, became the methodology of her prose style: the suspension of critical intervention, words allowed to spin out like a spider’s web from what was hidden within her. She thought her automatic writing had an integrity beyond that of reasoned linear narrative.

  For the first two years of studying medicine, Gertrude’s grades were good: 1 for anatomy, 1.5 for normal histology, pathology and bacteriology, 2 for physiology, pharmacology and toxicology. She was a star pupil, though a fellow student, Arthur Lachman, who described her as big, floppy and besandalled and with a laugh like a beefsteak, said she got into a muddle when told to make a model of a human embryo. She produced a fantastic construction with its spinal cord wrapped around its head.

  But in her third year Gertrude both lost and found her way. She fell in love with a Bryn Mawr graduate, May Bookstaver, ‘a tall American version of the handsome English girl – upright and a trifle brutal’.

  passionate yearnings

  Gertrude spoke of ‘passionate yearnings’, longings and desires. Her academic ambitions ended. ‘Books, books, books’, she wrote in one of her essays, ‘is there no end to it. […] Nothing given me but musty books.’ May Bookstaver was already in a relationship with another graduate, Mabel Haynes, and from the start, Gertrude knew this might doom the love she felt. She explained to May that:

  the middle class ideal which demands that people be affectionate, respectable, honest and content, that they avoid excitements and cultivate serenity is the ideal that appeals to me.

  She believed physical passion, to be worth anything, must involve idealizing another. May told her, ‘You are so afraid of losing your moral sense that you are not willing to take it through anything more dangerous than a mud puddle.’

  Gertrude told her she ‘feared passion in its many disguised forms’, that she did not understand it, it had no reality for her. ‘That is what makes it possible for a face as thoughtful and strongly built as yours to be almost annoyingly unlived,’ May told her. Gertrude declared herself ‘a hopeless coward. I hate to risk hurting myself or anybody else. All I want to do is meditate endlessly and think and talk.’ But then May ‘let her fingers flutter vaguely’ near Gertrude’s lips. Gertrude looked at the sky, talked of honesty, then found herself ‘intensely kissed on the eyes and lips’. She was unresponsive. ‘I was just thinking…’ she said. ‘Haven’t you ever stopped thinking long enough to feel?’ May replied.

  From then on, Gertrude could not extricate herself from what became a clichéd triangular affair, albeit between three women. Mabel Haynes had the stronger position, the prior claim and a financial hold over May Bookstaver. Gertrude, the usurper, the affair, the mistress, the infidelity, was expected to hide her involvement, be discreet and self-effacing. She and May met secretly in restaurants and museums, for walks in the park, at the apartments of friends who were away.

  As the affair wore on, Gertrude felt herself trapped in ‘unillumined immorality’. ‘I never wanted to be a hero, but on the other hand I am not anxious to cultivate cowardice,’ she wrote. She hoped some day to find a morality ‘that can stand the wear and tear of real desire’. There were no helpful models in her family. Leo wrote to her in Baltimore, from Paris, of nights that ‘cost me a hundred and fifty francs for champagne, eats, and the lady between midnight and six o’clock’. Michael’s wife, Sarah, who had given birth to a son, wrote to her of the wonders of motherhood and of her doctor, whom Gertrude would ‘adore meeting’, who treated girls for ‘self-abuse’ by giving them ‘very strong medicine to dissipate their sensations’. He said in cases of long practice the only recourse was to remove the ovaries. Sarah hoped Gertrude would marry this doctor, ‘were you willing and if you have not formed any prior attachment’.

  Gertrude grew to hate the ‘turgid and complex world of divided emotions’. She longed for

  obvious, superficial, clean simplicity… no amount of reasoning will help in deciding what is right and possible for one to do. If you don’t begin with some theory of obligation, anything is possible and no rule of right and wrong holds. On
e must either accept some theory, or else believe one’s instinct or follow the world’s opinion.

  She favoured a theory of obligation, of fidelity to commitment made. Natalie Barney believed in her own instinct, which led her to many a bedroom and grassy glade. Gertrude hated the jealousy and complexity of a triangular affair, found the feelings it provoked destructive and hurtful and wanted commitment and trust. It was not a question of rules of right or wrong. She did not like provocation and insecurity. She did not care about the ‘world’s opinion’, which was antipathetic to same-sex relationship, but she did not want to be hurt, nor did she have Natalie’s polyamorous appetite. She wanted to replicate the safety she only fleetingly enjoyed before her mother became mortally ill.

  In summer 1901, Mabel and May went on holiday together to Europe, leaving Gertrude waiting for infrequent letters. ‘The pain of passionate longing was very hard to bear.’ She wrote to May: ‘I am now convinced my feeling for you is genuine and loyal. I dread you giving me up. I dread more being the cause of serious annoyance to you.’

  May replied:

  Oh you stupid child, don’t you realise that you are the only thing in the world that makes anything seem real or worthwhile to me. I have had a dreadful time this summer.

  There were jealous scenes, painful separations and intermittent ecstasy. Mabel read a letter May was writing to Gertrude:

  She said she found it but I can hardly believe that. She asked me if you care for me and I told her that I didn’t know and I really don’t dearest… The thing upset her completely and she was jealous of my every thought and I could not find a moment even to feel alone with you. But don’t, please don’t, say any more about giving you up. You are not any trouble to me if you will only not leave me.