No Modernism Without Lesbians

by Diana Souhami

  The typewriter had a rhythm, made a music of its own… In those complicated sentences I rarely left anything out. And I got up a tremendous speed. Of course my love of Henry James was a good preparation for the long sentences.

  She developed what she called a ‘Gertrude Stein technique – like playing Bach’. She was one of the few able to decipher Gertrude’s handwriting – Gertrude could not always do that. It was, Alice said, a very happy time in her life – ‘like living history… I hoped it would go on for ever’.

  Gertrude began The Making of Americans in 1903 and finished it in 1908. It started as a chronicle of a family rather like her own, of German-Jewish immigrant stock. Any discernible narrative quickly became subsumed by Gertrude’s musings on the ‘fundamental natures’ of the mother and father and their relationships with their three children and everyone else. She pondered human nature and the relation of all kinds of personality one to the other and lamented her authorial struggle with the task undertaken. She perhaps knew she might scare away readers and was not giving them a racy read:

  Bear it in your mind my reader, but truly I never feel it that there ever can be for me any such creature, no it is this scribbled and dirty and lined paper that is really to be to me always my receiver, but anyhow reader, bear it in your mind – will there be for me ever any such creature – what I have said always before to you, that this that I write down a little each day on my scraps of paper for you is not just a conversation to amuse you, but a record of a decent family’s progress respectably lived by us and our fathers and our mothers and our grandfathers and grandmothers and this by me carefully a little each day to be written down here…

  Her novel was certainly modern, then and whenever. Reading it required existential surrender and compassion for the author’s struggle:

  I mean, I mean and that is not what I mean, I mean that not anyone is saying what they are meaning, I mean that I am feeling something, I mean that I mean something and I mean that not any one is thinking is feeling, is saying, is certain of that thing, I mean that not anyone can be saying, thinking, feeling, not any one can be certain of that thing, I am not ever saying, thinking, feeling, being certain of this thing, I mean, I mean, I know what I mean.

  Alice typed away.

  fried chicken and apple pie

  Gertrude pined for American food so Alice cooked fried chicken and apple pie, roast turkey with stuffing of mushrooms, chestnuts and oysters. Often Alice did not leave the rue de Fleurus until midnight.

  In the summer of 1908, Michael Stein rented the Villa Bardi in Florence for the summer months for his wife and son and Gertrude and Leo. Gertrude suggested Alice and Harriet Levy rent the Casa Ricci nearby. She introduced Alice to the Berensons, to Claribel and Etta Cone and to Mabel Dodge Luhan, adventurer, diarist, writer, who lived at the Villa Curonia. On that holiday, Gertrude formally declared her love to Alice and invited her to come and live with her and Leo at 27 rue de Fleurus. Alice wept with happiness. Harriet Levy said she counted thirty sodden handkerchiefs a day. ‘Day after day she wept because of the new love that had come into her life,’ Harriet wrote.

  So Alice entrenched as Gertrude’s lover, friend, housekeeper, amanuensis, cook, wife, everything. ‘She is very necessary to me, my Baby…’ Gertrude wrote. They started calling each other Lovey and Pussy. Alice was Pussy.

  Leo, agreeable at first to Alice’s arrival at rue de Fleurus, gave up his study so she could have a room of her own and was discreet about leaving the house so she and Gertrude could be alone together. ‘It was very considerate of him,’ Gertrude said. In 1909 he began a relationship of his own with Nina Auzias, a twenty-six-year-old artists’ model. She was involved in affairs with three other men too. Leo was preoccupied with dietary matters, had gone deaf and stopped going to the Saturday salons: ‘I would rather harbour three devils in my insides than talk about art,’ he wrote to Mabel Weeks in February 1913. He genuinely hated Picasso’s cubism and Gertrude’s word portraits, but his greater pain was that Gertrude turned from him, stopped being his disciple, and thought her own worth greater than his. The more she withdrew, the more he lost his self-esteem and lashed out. He felt he had no metier and had been broken by his childhood.

  Alice affirmed Picasso’s genius too. On meeting him, she again heard bells in her head, for only the second time in her life. And by her unqualified devotion to Gertrude, she contributed to splitting her from Leo.

  Three Lives

  Gertrude discussed her analyses of character with Alice and walked round Paris meditating and observing incidents, which she then used in her writing of the day. When she wrote, Alice said, ‘there was no hesitation, she worked as quickly as her hand would move and there were no corrections in the manuscript’. Alice, as scribe, got to know all about Gertrude’s bottom nature and the continuous present. Alice, as housekeeper, got to know all about the paintings by dusting them.

  I always say that you cannot tell what a picture really is or what an object really is until you dust it every day and you cannot tell what a book is until you type or proof read it. It then does something to you that only reading can never do.

  No commercial publisher wanted Three Lives, Gertrude’s stories of working-class women in Baltimore. They thought the writing too peculiar. May Bookstaver, as Mrs Knoblauch, arranged in 1908 for Grafton Press, an American vanity publisher, to bring out 500 copies at a cost to Gertrude of $660. The director, Mr F.H. Hitchcock, sent Gertrude the galleys in January 1909. ‘My proofreaders report there are some pretty bad slips in grammar, probably caused in the typewriting,’ he wrote. He thought Gertrude might have an imperfect knowledge of English and he offered to correct these assumed slips for an additional fee. Alice checked that every repetition and grammatical peculiarity was there, as written by Gertrude. On publication, Hitchcock, worried in case Gertrude’s stylistic oddities would be construed as his firm’s incompetence, sent another letter:

  I want to say frankly that I think you have written a very peculiar book and it will be a hard thing to make people take it seriously.

  Alice supervised distribution, sent out seventy-eight free copies, and pasted all reviews into an album. William James at the Johns Hopkins called it ‘a fine new kind of realism’, the Boston Morning Herald described it as extraordinary, the Kansas City Star called Gertrude ‘a literary artist of such originality’, Sarah Stein liked it a lot, H.G. Wells said at first he was repelled by her strange style but then read with ‘deepening admiration and pleasure and would watch for her name curiously and eagerly’, and Leo said it was not art it was rot.

  Gertrude brooked the disappointment of only seventy-three copies sold a year after publication. With Alice there for her, her self-conviction grew. In style, subject matter and in her life, she pushed at the presumptions of the past. A heroine could be a black working-class woman, a marriage could be between two women, a book need not necessarily have consecutive chapters and a beginning, a middle and an end.

  Boundaries between Gertrude and Alice blurred. They became a unit. For Gertrude, here was the partner with whom she could fulfil her ‘theory of obligation’ – who placed her centre stage, adored and desired her, would do everything for her, never be unfaithful, validate her in a manner denied her by her father and her brother. For Alice, here was deliverance from ruined San Francisco, financial hardship, the tedium of housewifery for unloved male relatives. She never visited any of them again. Annette Rosenshine said Alice had ‘found the brilliant personality worthy of her talents’. Alice’s devotion and managerial talent shaped Gertrude’s fame.

  the ousting of Leo

  At rue de Fleurus, the atmosphere became tense. An irritable note to Gertrude from Leo read:

  I told you one time since that I found it very disagreeable to come downstairs or into the house in the morning and find the light burning in the front hall. You said then that it was accidental. Now if you leave it on on purpose because you don’t like to go upstairs in the dark or what not I’ll try and get
used to it, but if it’s only carelessness I wish you’d jog your memory a little.

  They bickered about gas and laundry bills, postage, a painting Leo took from Gertrude’s bedroom, the division of money for the sale of prints. Their complete rift took time. Alice’s adamantine support fed Gertrude’s resolve. Leo would have liked rapprochement, but his insults continued. He called Gertrude a barbarian in her use of language, said she could not write plain English effectively, that her writing was all to do with her and nothing to do with literature. ‘He said it was not it it was I. If I was not there… what I did would not be what it was.’

  The more Leo criticized Gertrude, the more she turned away, and the more she turned away, the more critical he became. He said he could not understand her writing and she could not think consecutively for ten seconds.

  She doesn’t know what words mean. She hasn’t much intuition but thickly she has sensations and of course her mania, herself. Her idea of herself as a genius.

  Being a genius was a point of contention. Gertrude said, ‘It was I who was the genius, there was no reason for it but I was, and he was not.’ Leo said, ‘Gertrude and I are just the contrary. She’s basically stupid and I’m basically intelligent.’ Gertrude said his discouragement of her writing was ‘the beginning of the ending and we always had been together and now we were never at all together. Little by little we never met again.’

  Gertrude’s word portraits

  In 1908, Gertrude began writing what she called ‘word portraits’, which she viewed as the verbal equivalent of cubist paintings. Ada was the first. It was of Alice. Gertrude came in waving a notebook one evening as Alice was about to serve supper. Her portrait, she said, must be read immediately. Alice liked her food hot, Gertrude liked hers tepid. Alice began reading.

  I thought she was making fun of me and I protested… Finally I read it all and was terribly pleased with it. And then we ate our supper.

  The portrait began with an account of what a good daughter Alice had been, how she looked after her mother, then when her mother died she kept home for her father and took care of her brother. ‘There were many relations who lived with them. The daughter did not like them to live with them and she did not like them to die with them.’

  Ada went away. Her father wanted her to return. She wrote him ‘tender letters’ but she never went back because she met ‘some one’ who loved her.

  She came to be happier than anybody else who was living then. It is easy to believe this thing… Trembling was all living, living was all loving, some one was then the other one. Certainly this one was loving this Ada then. And certainly Ada all her living then was happier in living than any one else who ever could, who was, who is, who ever will be living.

  So there it was. Perfect love and perfect bliss. Just like in the songs ‘There Never Was a Girl Like You’ and ‘There’s No Moon Like the Honeymoon’ – except the love was between two women and the prose style distinctly unfamiliar.

  In her second word portrait, Gertrude Stein and Her Brother, Gertrude wrote of her disaffection with Leo and her fracture from him:

  She was thinking of being one who was a different one in being one than he was in being one. Sound was coming out of her and she was knowing this thing. Sound had been coming out of him and she had been knowing this thing. She was thinking in being a different one than he was in having sound come out of her than came out of him. She was thinking in being a different one. She was thinking about being a different one. She was thinking about that thing. She had sound coming out of her …

  Each one of the two was different from the other of them. Each one of them was knowing that thing. She was different from him in having sound coming out of her. She was thinking this thing. She was thinking in this thing. She had sound coming out of her. She was different in being one being one. She was knowing that thing.

  She was different in being one having sound coming out of her she was different in being that one from any other one. She was one having had sound come out of her she was different in being that one from any one. She had sound coming out of her. This was a thing she was being. Sound was coming out of her, sound had come out of her, perhaps sound would come out of her.

  It continued for 147 pages.

  rue de Fleurus to themselves

  Gertrude and Alice looked for another apartment. They found one overlooking the Palais-Royal gardens, but Leo settled the matter by moving to the Villa di Doccia in Settignano near Florence. ‘It will take days to have the floor fixed and the closets constructed,’ he wrote to Nina Auzias. In a rough division of spoils, he took most of the Renoirs and Matisses, Gertrude kept the Cézannes and Picassos.

  Leo said Alice’s arrival was a ‘godsend’ that allowed separation between him and Gertrude to happen without ‘an explosion’. ‘I hope that we will all live happily ever after and continue to suck our respective oranges,’ he wrote to Gertrude. But he went on calling her writing ‘silly twaddle’, ‘sub-intelligent gabble’ and ‘utter bosh’. ‘Like all children and madmen she adequately communicates only to herself.’

  Gertrude and Alice decided never to see him again:

  Do you remember how we decided that indeed if he came we would have it said that there would be no admittance. Do you remember that we decided that we had entertained him as frequently as we would and that now when he came we would have him told that we would not receive him. Do you remember that?

  For Gertrude, the split was as radical as that of Sylvia Beach from James Joyce. Most of the lesbians of the era, to flourish in their self-styled lives, needed to free themselves from domination by men, be they brothers, fathers, husbands, legislators. It was as if men could not accept being other than the dominant force. Or worse, they expected women to be in service to them in order to merit an identity.

  Leo made reparative overtures, which Gertrude rebuffed. She did not reply to his peace offerings and letters. For her, the rift was absolute. Once, in Paris, they passed each other in the street on opposite sides of the road. Leo raised his hat and that was all, a sad end to a sibling love affair, a childhood romance.

  Mabel Dodge

  Mabel Dodge, at her Villa Curonia near Florence, blamed Alice for the break between Gertrude and Leo:

  Alice Toklas entered the Stein ménage and became a handmaiden. She was always serving someone, and especially Gertrude and Gertrude’s friends. She was perfect for doing errands and was willing to run all over Paris to get one a special perfume or any little thing one wanted… But lo and behold she pushed Leo out quite soon. No one knew how exactly and he went off to Florence and from that time I date his extreme neuroticism… Before that he had a human contact through his sister.

  Mabel Dodge Luhan © Donaldson Collection / Getty Images

  When Leo moved to Florence, he often visited Mabel Dodge and spoke of his hurt and contempt. She said:

  He had always had an especial disgust at seeing how the weaker can enslave the stronger… Alice did everything to save Gertrude a movement – all the housekeeping, the typing, seeing people who called and getting rid of the undesirables, answering letters – really providing all the motor force of the ménage and Gertrude was growing helpless and foolish from it and less inclined to do anything herself.

  Leo told her he had seen trees strangled by vines in the same way.

  Mabel’s villa was a fifteenth-century Medici palace, which she restored to its Renaissance opulence. Surrounded by olive groves, it looked out towards Florence and the Apennine mountains. Her ‘Gran Salone’ (she pronounced it with an American drawl) was 90 feet long with high windows, a fourteenth-century stone fireplace with sun symbols, Florentine paintings, a Chinese terracotta statue of Guan Yin, the Goddess of Mercy… The salon opened to a loggia with views of a fifteenth-century Carthusian monastery.

  ‘Please come down here soon,’ Mabel wrote when Gertrude was in Italy with Alice in the summer of 1912, ‘the house is full of pianists, painters, pederasts, prostitutes and peasants.’ Mabel’
s unsatisfactory husband, Edwin Dodge, was in America. She said she most associated him with motoring around Italy and looking at churches. ‘Eating alone with Edwin was sad,’ she said. Over time Mabel had four husbands and became known as Mabel Evans Dodge Sterne Luhan.

  During her stay, Gertrude wrote – between midnight and dawn, in a room next to Mabel’s bedroom – another word portrait: Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia. Mabel was having an affair with the twenty-two-year-old tutor of her son, and she described one night in her Intimate Memories, volume 1:

  white moonlight – white linen, and the blond white boy I found sweet like fresh hay and honey and milk… my natural desire for him was so strong, like light shaking out of clouds… and so we remained for heaven knows how long while Gertrude wrote on the other side of the wall, sitting in candlelight like a great Sybil, dim against the red and gold damask that hung loosely on the walls.

  At dawn, Alice, in a small room next to Gertrude’s, typed up the work of the night. Each day, both she and Gertrude were equally delighted by what Gertrude had written, though Gertrude could not always recall what that was. Her portrait of Mabel Dodge began cheerily enough: ‘The days are wonderful and the nights are wonderful and the life is pleasant’, but quickly became cubist:

  Bargaining is something and there is not that success. The interior is what if application has that accident results are appearing. They did not darken. That was not an adulteration. So much breathing has not the same place when the end is lessening. So much breathing has the same place and there might not be so much suggestion. There can be the habit that there is if there is no need of resting.

  Mabel called the portrait ‘a masterpiece of success’ and said even if she did not altogether understand it, ‘sometimes I don’t understand things in myself, past or about to come’. She thought that while Gertrude was writing the portrait, through her ‘unconscious lines she seemed to grow warmer to me’.