At lunch, Gertrude, sitting in Edwin Dodge’s chair, sent Mabel
such a strong look over the table that it seemed to cut across the air to me in a band of electrified steel – a smile travelling across on it – powerful – Heavens! I remember it now so keenly!
Alice hurried from the room to the terrace. Gertrude gave ‘a surprised noticing glance after her and when Alice did not return, followed her’. She came back alone and said ‘She doesn’t want to come to lunch. She feels the heat today… From that time on’, Mabel wrote, ‘Alice began to separate Gertrude and me poco poco.’
Alice sent Gertrude’s portraits and manuscripts of The Making of Americans and of Three Lives to publishers. A cupboard at rue de Fleurus filled with their return. Some rejection letters were caustic. Mr Arthur C. Fifield, Publisher, of Clifford’s Inn, London, E.C., wrote:
19 April 1912
Dear Madam
I am only one, only one, only one. Only one being, one at the same time. Not two, not three, only one. Only one life to live, only sixty minutes in one hour. Only one pair of eyes. Only one brain. Only one being. Being only one, having only one pair of eyes, having only one time, having only one life, I cannot read your M.S. three or four times. Not even one time. Only one look, only one look is enough. Hardly one copy would sell here. Hardly one. Hardly one. Hardly one.
Many thanks. I am returning the M.S. by registered post. Only one M.S. by one post.
Sincerely yours.
Mabel Dodge loved her own portrait, personally paid for 300 copies to be printed and bound in Florentine floral wallpaper, and wrote a eulogistic article about Gertrude, which was published in March 1913 in the New York magazine Arts & Decoration:
Gertrude Stein is doing with words what Picasso is doing with paint. She is impelling language to induce new states of consciousness, and in doing so language becomes with her a creative art rather than a mirror of history.
In her impressionistic writing she uses familiar words to create perceptions, conditions and states of being never before quite consciously experienced. She does this by using words that appeal to her as having the meaning that they seem to have.
In Gertrude Stein’s writing every word lives and apart from concept it is so exquisitely rhythmical and cadenced that if we read it aloud and receive it as pure sound, it is like a kind of sensuous music.
Just as one may stop for once, in a way, before a canvas of Picasso and letting one’s reason sleep for an instant may exclaim ‘it is a fine pattern’, so, listening to Gertrude Stein’s words and forgetting to understand what they mean, one submits to their gradual charm.
Mabel praised ‘Gertrude’s Revolution’, hypnotic effect and magical evocation and said ‘out of the shattering and petrification of today, up from the cleavage and disintegration, we will see order emerging tomorrow’.
Gertrude was ‘as proud as punch’ with Mabel’s generous praise. She confided how, with disappointing regularity, her work
came back quite promptly and with very polite handwriting and sometimes regretful refusals… You can understand how much I appreciate your letter.
But their friendship did not survive. The end was, Mabel felt sure, Alice’s doing:
Alice’s final and successful effort in turning Gertrude from me – her influencing and her wish and I missed my jolly fat friend very much.
monogamy
With 27 rue de Fleurus to themselves, Gertrude and Alice had a covered hallway built between the studio and living area, the cast-iron stove taken from the studio and a fireplace installed, gas lamps removed and the place wired for electricity, and rooms repapered and redecorated.
From their first meeting on, they were never apart for more than a few hours. They never travelled independently, or had separate friends. To escape Paris in the summer months, they rented a large house in the village of Bilignin, near Belley, east of Lyons. The poet Bravig Imbs, who visited them there, described a night when Gertrude took him to see the ancient landscape high up near Saint Germain les Paroisses. There were poplar trees and a ruined tower and the valley was suffused with moonlight. ‘We must be getting back to Alice,’ Gertrude said. ‘If I’m away from her for long I get low in my mind.’
Alice, on meeting Gertrude, had arrived at her destination. Gertrude liked to write, talk to people, walk Basket the dog, drive the car, look at paintings and meditate about life and art. Alice did the rest. She was secretary, cook, agent and housekeeper. When they went on holiday, which was often, Alice did the packing. And she supervised the cooking: ‘In the menu there should be a climax and a culmination’, she wrote. ‘Come to it gently. One will suffice.’ Throughout her life she collected recipes: Polish dumplings made with sour cream, cottage cheese, butter, eggs and flour; hardboiled eggs served with whipped cream truffles and Madeira wine; hare cooked in dry champagne, cognac, fat salt pork, truffles, cream and butter; omelettes with six eggs, chicken livers and cognac; bananas flamed in kirsch; chocolate whip made of eggs, bitter chocolate, icing sugar, cream and cognac.
Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas at home in the rue de Fleurus © Fotosearch / Stringer / Getty Images
‘She is very necessary to me. My sweetie. She is all to me,’ wrote Gertrude, who was freed from all chores and could concentrate on being a genius. Gertrude said Alice was always ‘forethoughtful, which is what is pleasant for me’. Others besides Leo and Mabel Dodge suffered the strength of Alice’s claim. Mabel Weeks, Gertrude’s friend from their student days, wrote to Gertrude of their correspondence: ‘Don’t read this to Alice. Unless I feel that sometimes I can write just to you it’s no fun to write.’
Visitors commented on Gertrude’s sense of repose. Alice had none. She got up at six in Bilignin to pick wild strawberries for Gertrude’s breakfast, and in Paris to do cleaning because she did not trust hired staff. She said she could contemplate violence towards a maid who broke anything and her relationships were bad with a succession of cooks and maids.
Gertrude did not resist being infantilized. She lived in the cocoon of her own intelligence and meandering imagination. ‘It’s hard work being a genius’, she said. ‘You have to sit around so much doing nothing.’ Alice nicknamed her Baby as well as Lovey.
love letters for Alice
They wrote notes to each other, inscribed DD and YD (Darling Darling and Your Darling). ‘Our pleasure is to do every day the work of that day’, Gertrude wrote, ‘to cut our hair and not want blue eyes, to be reasonable and obedient. To obey and not split hairs.’
She penned her love for Alice in a piece called Bonne Année:
I marvel at my baby I marvel at her beauty I marvel at her perfection I marvel at her purity I marvel at her tenderness. I marvel at her charm I marvel at her vanity I marvel at her industry I marvel at her humor I marvel at her intelligence I marvel at her rapidity I marvel at her brilliance I marvel at her sweetness I marvel at her delicacy, I marvel at her generosity, I marvel at her cow.
Cows, Steinian scholars advise, are orgasms. Gertrude, in her bedroom pieces, made many a reference to them. She described her piece A Book Concluding With As A Wife Has A Cow: A Love Story as her Tristan and Isolde:
Having it as having having it as happening, happening to have it as happening. Happening and have it as happening and having to have it happen as happening, and my wife has a cow as now, my wife having a cow as now, my wife having a cow as now, my wife having a cow as now and having a cow as now and having a cow and having a cow now, my wife has a cow and now. My wife has a cow.
They took holidays in Italy and Spain. Alice particularly liked Ávila. Her Spanish look was a long black dress, black gloves and a feather hat with flowers. Neither of them ever wore trousers. Gertrude’s sartorial choice for summer was ecumenical and on one occasion she was mistaken for a bishop.
the history of anything
After writing the history of everyone in The Making of Americans and the history of anyone in her portraits, in Tender Buttons Gertrude wanted to write the his
tory of anything. She gave as her objective the need ‘to completely face the difficulty of how to include what is seen with hearing and listening’. Tender Buttons was her ‘first conscious struggle with the problem of correlating sight, sound and sense and eliminating rhythm’. She was:
trying to live in looking and not mix it up with remembering and to reduce to its minimum listening and talking and to include colour and movement:
ORANGE
A type oh oh new new not knealer knealer of old show beef-steak, neither neither.
RHUBARB
Rhubarb is Susan not Susan not seat in bunch toys not wild and laughable not in little places not in neglect and vegetable not in fold coal age not please.
Gertrude said what excited her was:
that the words that made what she looked at be itself were words that, to her, exactly related themselves to the thing at which she was looking, but as often as not had nothing to do with what any words would do that described that thing.
Her excitement did not help comprehension. Some thought tender buttons were clitorises, others thought they were marinated mushrooms. But while Three Lives and The Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia had been privately printed, Tender Buttons found a publisher, although of an unorthodox sort.
Mabel Dodge again was the instigator. She gave a copy of Gertrude’s portrait of her to her friend Carl Van Vechten – photographer and writer. He wrote more than twenty books – among his novels were The Tattooed Countess and Nigger Heaven, and he promoted all forms of African art. Many of his photographic portraits were of homosexual men and lesbian women: Pierre Balmain, Christopher Isherwood and W.H. Auden, Tallulah Bankhead, James Baldwin, Truman Capote, Elsa Maxwell, Virgil Thomson, Gore Vidal.
Mabel Dodge said he was ‘really queer looking’ and ‘when he laughed little shrieks flew out between the slits in his big teeth’. They spoke on the phone each day and he called her Mike. He had a large private income, was married but homosexual and he supported new writers and modern art. Gertrude, Alice and he became firm friends. and formed what they called the Woojums family. He was Papa Woojums. Alice was Mama Woojums, who did all the tedious work. Gertrude was Baby Woojums. Van Vechten championed Gertrude and did all he could to see her work published, publicized and performed. Donald Evans, the publisher he found for Tender Buttons, was an American friend who wrote strange imagist poetry and had started Claire Marie, which promised ‘New Books for Exotic Tastes’:
Claire Marie believes there are in America seven hundred civilized people only. Claire Marie publishes books for civilized people only. Claire Marie’s aim it follows from the premises is not even secondarily commercial.
Mabel Dodge said Donald Evans was pale and thin with dark brooding eyes that seemed dead but saw everything. Claire Marie Press, she told Gertrude, was absolutely third rate. She advised her against publishing with him and said to do so ‘would signal to the world that there was something degenerate, effete and decadent about the whole Cubist movement which they all connect with you’.
But Gertrude went ahead, and in June 1914 a thousand copies of Tender Buttons were printed and bound in canary yellow covers. To promote the book, Evans wrote:
The last shackle is struck from context and collocation, each unit of the sentence stands independent and has no commerce with its fellows. The effect produced on the first reading is something like terror.
Such publicity did little to entice readers. Reviewers voiced confusion. The Chicago Tribune pondered whether the ‘Tender’ of the title was a rowboat, a fuel car attached to a locomotive or a human emotion. The Detroit News wrote that after reading bits of it, ‘a person feels like going out and pulling the Dime Bank building over on to himself’. The New York Post reviewer wondered if Gertrude had been smoking hashish and the Commercial Advertiser wrote:
The new Stein manner is founded on what the Germans call ‘wort salad’, a style particularly cultivated by crazy people… The way to make a wort salad is to sit in a dark room, preferably between the silent and mystic hours of midnight and dawn, and let the moving fingers write whatever comes…
No reviewer claimed to understand Tender Buttons, though all agreed it was a departure from the past and unlike anything else.
In the August edition of Trend, Carl Van Vechten described Gertrude as ‘massive in physique, a Rabelaisian woman with a splendid thoughtful face, mind dominating her matter’. He said words ‘surged through her brain and flowed out of her pen’, and Tender Buttons was irresistible, sensuous, fresh and with majestic rhythm. And Janet Flanner in a ‘Letter from Paris’ wrote: ‘No American writer is taken more seriously than Miss Stein by the Paris modernists.’
So, despite her unpublished, largely unread oeuvre, Gertrude Stein became famous, a woman staunchly married, but to a woman, a writer if not one to be read. And Alice, the shrewd publicist, holding bags and brollies in the shadows, wearing gypsy frocks and with dark Hebraic hair, dangling earrings and proud moustache, was half of the picture of a sight to be remembered.
Tender Buttons did not sell well, Claire Marie Press folded and Donald Evans killed himself. But the literary world, even while it mocked Gertrude Stein, reckoned with her and the questions she asked about life and art.
the First World War
The Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, were assassinated in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914, but that was the Balkans and distant from lesbians in Paris experimenting with the English language. John Lane, founder in London with Charles Elkin Mathews of The Bodley Head and publisher of Oscar Wilde and the literary periodical The Yellow Book, had told Gertrude his wife had enjoyed Three Lives and if she came to his office in July, a contract to publish would await her.
Gertrude and Alice duly went to London, met with John Lane, secured publication agreement and chose a three-piece suite to replace the chairs Leo had taken with him to Florence.2 On 4 August, Britain declared war on Germany. Travel restrictions meant they could not get visas and permits to return to France. Their intended brief visit lasted eleven weeks. Gertrude’s Baltimore cousins wired them money and John Lane put publication on hold. ‘Do you remember it was the 5th of September we heard of asphyxiating gases?’ Gertrude wrote. ‘Do you remember that on the same day we heard that permission had been withheld? Do you remember that we couldn’t know how many h’s in withheld?’
It was 17 October when they got home. Paris was ‘beautiful and unviolated’, Gertrude said. But there were blackouts, fuel and food shortages, Zeppelin alarms and fears of invasion. Friends scattered. Derain and Braque had been conscripted. Picasso said, ‘On August 2 1914 I took Braque and Derain to the Gare d’Avignon. I never saw them again.’ Braque suffered a head injury in the Second Battle of Artois in June 1915, and had to be trepanned to save his eyesight. Matisse moved to Nice with his family. Apollinaire served as a brigadier with an artillery regiment; he died aged thirty-eight in the flu pandemic of 1918. Marie Laurencin had married a German and was living in Spain. Leo went back to New York and had intensive psychoanalysis. Carl Van Vechten told Gertrude he met him occasionally, ‘scowling in galleries at manifestations of modern artists and talking but never to me. He seems to be quite certain that he doesn’t like me.’ Michael and Sarah Stein moved to the French Riviera; they loaned nineteen paintings by Matisse to an art exhibition in Berlin and never got them back. Claribel Cone was stuck in the Regina Palace Hotel in Munich for the duration of the war.
Paris was too dangerous and deserted for Gertrude and Alice to stay. They rented a villa in Majorca and to finance the additional expenditure Gertrude sold Matisse’s Woman with a Hat for $4,000 dollars to Sarah and Michael Stein.3
On Majorca, Gertrude and Alice kept to their roles of writer and acolyte, husband and wife, but were cut off from home and friends. Gertrude wrote plays and poems. One play, Turkey and Bones and Eating and We Liked It, was twelve pages long, had seventeen scenes and such lines as �
�I do not like cotton drawers. I prefer wool or linen. I admit that linen is damp. Wool is warm. I think I prefer wool.’ Scene VI was ‘A water faucet’. She also wrote more poems about her love for Alice. One called ‘Lifting Belly’, which was fifty pages long, Virgil Thomson described as ‘concerning the domestic affections’:
I say lifting belly and then I say lifting belly and Caesars. I say lifting belly gently and Caesars gently. I say lifting belly again and Caesars again. I say lifting belly and I say Caesars and I say lifting belly Caesars and cow come out. I say lifting belly and cow come out… Lifting belly high
That is what I adore always more and more.
Come out cow.
They stayed on the island until December 1916. After the death of about a million fighting men, French victory at the Battle of Verdun stopped Germany’s advance towards Paris. Gertrude and Alice felt safe to return to rue de Fleurus.
war work
In Paris, out of a wish to contribute to the war effort, Gertrude and Alice, under the auspices of the American Fund for French Wounded, volunteered to distribute hospital supplies. Gertrude ordered a model-T Ford from America and had it converted into a supply truck. They called the Ford Auntie. It had wooden wheels and bicycle-thin tyres and required a great deal of cranking. For their first assignment, in March 1917, they drove to Perpignan to organize a distribution depot there.
Gertrude drove. Alice map-read. They set off armed with a Michelin Guide to hotels and restaurants. Alice planned the route according to the Guide’s gastronomic promise. The car’s maximum speed was thirty miles an hour. It kept breaking down and Gertrude dragooned passing men to help. She had ‘a scary habit of talking and forgetting about driving’ and was not good at following directions. When Alice told her they were on the wrong road, Gertrude responded, ‘wrong or right, this is the road and we are on it’.
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