No Modernism Without Lesbians

by Diana Souhami

  ‘I’ve thought a lot about the things you said about working’, Hemingway wrote to her from Rapallo on 18 February 1923. When he got a block about writing, she told him to try free association and automatic writing, and let things flow and leap onto the page without critical censor. Hemingway came up with:

  Hadley and I are happy sometimes. Her friends call her Hadley. We are happiest in bed. In bed we are well fed. There are no problems in bed. Now I lay me down to sleep in bed. There are no prayers in bed. Beds only need be wide enough.

  That summer, before he and Hadley left for Canada, Gertrude wrote one of her special portraits for him:

  Among and then young.

  Not ninety-three.

  Not Lucretia Borgia.

  Not in or on a building.

  Not a crime not in the time.

  Not by this time.

  Not in the way.

  On their way and to head away. A head any way. What is a head. A head is what every one not in the north of Australia returns for that. In English we know. And is it to their credit that they have nearly finished and claimed, is there any memorial of the failure of civilization to cope with extreme and extremely well begun, to cope with extreme and extremely well begun, to cope with extreme savagedom.

  There and we know.

  Hemingway.

  How do you do and good-bye. Good-bye and how do you do. Well and how do you do.

  Hemingway wanted to reciprocate her kindness. In 1924 he was guest editor for a month of Ford Madox Ford’s literary magazine Transatlantic Review. He showed Ford pages of The Making of Americans, then wrote to Gertrude about serializing it:

  Ford alleges he is delighted with the stuff and he is going to call on you. He is going to publish the 1st instalment in the April No. going to press the 1st part of March. He wondered if you would accept 30 francs a page and I said I thought I could get you to (Be haughty but not too haughty) I made it clear it was a remarkable scoop obtained only through my obtaining genius. He is under the impression that you get big prices when you consent to publish… Treat him high wide and handsome…

  They are going to have Joyce in the same number.

  After four instalments, Ford complained to Gertrude that he had not known her book had 565,000 words – Hemingway had inferred it was a ‘long short story which might run for about three numbers’. Ford and Hemingway fell out, Gertrude blamed Hemingway, John Quinn, who financed Transatlantic Review, died suddenly in July 1924 aged fifty-four, the magazine foundered after a year of life and Gertrude did not get paid.

  Hemingway marked the souring point in his and Gertrude’s relationship from when, in 1926, Alice cut Gertrude’s hair very short with the kitchen scissors. He thought this made her look like a Roman emperor, whereas before she had seemed to him like an earth mother, a northern Italian peasant woman with ‘lovely, thick alive immigrant hair’. After he and Gertrude quarrelled, their interaction became as bitter as if they had been lovers.

  Like his father, and in the same manner, in 1961 Hemingway ended his own life. On Sunday 2 July, before seven in the morning, three weeks short of his sixty-second birthday, at his home in Ketchum, Idaho, near the Wood River, with a view of the Sawtooth Mountains, he took a double-barrelled Boss shotgun from his storeroom and blew his brains out. His wife Mary – Kitten Pickle, he called her, she was his fourth wife, he was her third husband – found him. They had been married since 1946. She claimed his death was an accident and that he shot himself while cleaning his gun.

  Gertrude and F. Scott Fitzgerald

  F. Scott Fitzgerald first met Hemingway in a bar in Paris in May 1925. He, his wife, Zelda, and their daughter, Scottie, had moved to Paris the previous month and were living at 14 rue de Tilsitt near the Arc de Triomphe. He was twenty-eight, three years older than Hemingway, and had just published The Great Gatsby. His first novel, This Side of Paradise, sold 40,000 copies in 1920, the year it was published, and he followed this with The Beautiful and Damned in 1922. Gatsby did not sell particularly well but he was proud of the book: ‘it is something really NEW in form, idea structure – the model for the age that Joyce and Stien [sic] are searching for, that Conrad didn’t find.’

  F. Scott Fitzgerald © Hulton Archive / Stringer / Getty Images

  T.S. Eliot read it three times and thought it the first step forward for American fiction since Henry James. Hemingway, full of admiration, took Fitzgerald to meet Gertrude. She told him This Side of Paradise ‘really created for the public the new generation’. He wrote to her that she was very handsome, acutely sensitive, gallant and kind:

  I am a very second rate person compared to first rate people… and it honestly makes me shiver to know that such a writer as you attributes such a significance to my factitious, meritricious (metricious?) This Side of Paradise.

  He called often at rue de Fleurus and they discussed his drinking problem. Gertrude’s way of dealing with drunk people was to treat them as if they were sober. ‘It is funny,’ she said,

  the two things most men are proudest of is the thing that any man can do and doing does in the same way, that is being drunk and being the father of their son… If anybody thinks about that they will see how interesting it is that it is that.

  Hemingway said of Fitzgerald:

  If he was not an alcoholic I never saw one nor met one, nor knew one well in my life… Every time I would get him to stop drinking or drink only wine Zelda would get jealous and get him off of it.

  Hemingway downed liquor without apparent mood change, Fitzgerald got drunk very quickly.

  Gertrude praised and encouraged them both and they treated her like an oracle. There was passing paranoia when she said Fitzgerald had a ‘stronger flame’ than Hemingway. Fitzgerald thought she was somehow belittling one or other of them. Hemingway wrote a four-page letter to reassure him:

  I cross myself and swear to God that Gertrude Stein has never last night or any other time said anything to me about you but the highest praise. […] As for comparison of our writings she was doing nothing of the kind – only saying that you had a hell of a roaring furnace of talent […] If you had pressed her she would have told you to a direct question that she believes yours a better quality than mine. Naturally I do not agree with that – anymore than you would…

  Thus they deferred to Gertrude’s judgement and revealed to her their insecurity and need.

  In June 1925, Fitzgerald told Gertrude he was anxious to read The Making of Americans, learn from it and imitate things out of it. Six months later he said he was in ‘“the geographical center” of it, and fascinated by it’. He made no written reference to ever finishing or making sense of it.

  Gertrude told him he would write an even greater novel than Gatsby. When Tender is the Night was published in April 1934, he sent her a copy inscribed ‘Is this the book you asked for?’

  Gertrude and T.S. Eliot

  T.S. Eliot went to tea at the rue de Fleurus on 15 November 1924. He sat holding his umbrella, asked Gertrude why she so frequently used the split infinitive and said he would print a new piece by her in The Criterion, the London magazine he edited. Gertrude sent him ‘the fifteenth of November’ so he would know it was written uniquely for him and not plucked from the cupboard. It was all about wool is wool and silk is silk or wool is woollen or silk is silken. Eliot published it two years later. The literary editor of the New York Evening Post, Henry Seidel Canby, wrote of it:

  If this is literature or anything other than stupidity worse than madness then has all the criticism since the beginning of letters been mere idle theorizing.

  publication of The Making of Americans

  Lesbians saw Gertrude into print. Mabel Dodge privately published Gertrude’s portrait of her at the Villa Curonia, and Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap included pieces by her in The Little Review. Then in 1925, seventeen years after Gertrude finished writing it and commercial publishers had rejected it, a short run of The Making of Americans was at last published by Contact Editions, which was
financed by Bryher, with her husband of convenience Robert McAlmon as editor.

  Bryher described her first meeting with Gertrude in her memoir, The Heart to Artemis. She was walking with McAlmon in Paris. Gertrude stopped her car and ‘lumbered down’.

  Two penetrating eyes in a square impassive face seemed to be absorbing every detail of my appearance. ‘Why McAlmon’ a puzzled voice remarked, ‘you did not tell me that you had married an ethical Jewess. It’s rather a rare type.’

  Bryher was not remotely Jewish, though she was ethical. But, she said, ‘you did not argue with Gertrude Stein. You acquiesced.’

  Gertrude signed a contract with Contact. There was to be an initial print run of 500 copies plus five deluxe versions printed on vellum. Gertrude said she would personally shift fifty copies. Darantiere, as ever, was the printer. Carl Van Vechten, who despite great efforts had failed to find an American publisher, was delighted; he viewed Gertrude’s book as ‘big as, perhaps bigger than James Joyce, Marcel Proust or Dorothy Richardson’. He compared it to the Book of Genesis: ‘There is something Biblical about you Gertrude. Certainly there is something Biblical about you.’

  Publication was tortuous. Alice accused McAlmon of being irresponsibly drunk throughout the whole process. Gertrude said McAlmon forgot from one letter to the next what he had or had not agreed. She wanted her book ‘to go big and I want to get my royalties’. Spurred by Alice, and without consulting McAlmon, in the middle of production she asked Jane Heap, of The Little Review, to find a different American publisher. Jane Heap approached Benjamin Huebsch, publisher of D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, James Joyce’s Dubliners and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. She did not know he had turned down Gertrude’s book thirteen years previously. Then Gertrude told McAlmon that Boni & Liveright were interested in bringing out all her work. She wrote to him on 16 September:

  It is for me an important opportunity. Their proposal is to buy The Making of Americans from you that is the 500 copies minus the 40 copies already ordered, for a thousand dollars… They would pay for the unbound sheets and covers upon delivery… Will you wire me your answer within 24 hours. You will realise how much this opportunity means to me.

  McAlmon sent his wire, ‘Book bound offer too low and vague.’ He followed up with an irritated letter: it was unbusinesslike for Boni & Liveright not to deal with him, the printing costs had been $3,000, he did not feel like making a gift of his work to any publisher. Nonetheless, Gertrude phoned Darantiere and asked him to send the plates to Boni & Liveright. Darantiere checked with McAlmon, who told him not to take any orders except from Contact. On 8 October McAlmon again wrote to Gertrude:

  Had you wished to give arbitrary orders on the book you could have years back had it printed yourself… the book is now complete, stitched, and will be bound. You will get your ten copies which will be sufficient for your friendly gifts and at least more than commercial publishers give authors. Whatever others you want you can have at the usual author’s rate of 50% on the sale price of eight dollars. We will send out review copies to some special reviewers if you choose to send us a list of names and addresses. Further panic and insistence and ‘helping us’ will not delight me.

  Three months after publication in December, only 103 copies had been sold. Reviews were thin and poor. Edmund Wilson in The New Republic said he could not read it through:

  with sentences so regularly rhythmical, so needlessly prolix, so many times repeated and ending so often with present participles, the reader is all too soon in a state not to follow the slow becoming of life, but simply to fall asleep.

  The Irish Statesman said it must be among the seven longest books in the world. The Saturday Review of Literature wrote: ‘Miss Stein has exhibited the most complete befuddlement of the human mind.’ The reviewer expressed concern for the well-being of the compositors and said they deserved sixteen bucks a day for the rest of their natural lives.

  Six months later, McAlmon wrote a scornful letter to Gertrude about the book’s lack of sales:

  You knew it was a philanthropic exercise as the MS had been some twenty years on your hands. There is no evidence of any order having come through your offices except from your immediate family. If you wish the books retained you may bid for them. Otherwise, by Sept – one year after publication – I shall simply get rid myself of them en masse by the pulping proposition.

  At the age of fifty-two, Gertrude was a well-known literary figure but with a dismal publishing record and viewed by many to be unreadable. She was a modernist, an innovator, though few seemed quite sure what she was on about. She did not buy the copies from McAlmon, nor did he pulp them. The book’s reputation grew. But Gertrude and McAlmon were through with each other and theirs became another relationship beyond repair.

  In 1931, Edmund Wilson published Axel’s Castle, critical essays subtitled ‘A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870–1930’. In it, he put Gertrude in the same company as acknowledged great modernists: Proust, Joyce, Yeats, Eliot, Paul Valéry – all men, of course. She was the only woman included. Wilson wrote that although Gertrude wrote nonsense,

  One should not talk about ‘nonsense’ until one has decided what sense consists of… Most of us balk at her soporific rigmaroles, her echolalic incantations, her half-witted sounding catalogues of numbers. Most of us read her less and less. Yet… we are still always aware of her presence in the background of contemporary literature. And whenever we pick up her writings, however unintelligible we may find them, we are aware of a literary personality of unmistakeable originality and distinction.

  The Autobiography of Alice. B. Toklas

  In person, Gertrude was commonsensical and wise. She was respected, sought after, quoted, interviewed and lampooned, but except for contributions to the short-lived literary magazines she was seldom published. The world knew of Gertrude Stein but less than a few read her and appreciated her for the genius she considered herself to be. Alice did not swerve from doing all she could to promote her, but she let her know she would like her to be rich and successful in a popular way. The reputations of many of the young men whose careers Gertrude had helped forge were secured. Alice urged her to write a memoir. She felt sure it would be a financial success. Gertrude feared compromising her art. ‘Remarks are not literature,’ she said. She suggested Alice write her memoirs and call them My Life with the Great, or My Twenty Five Years with Gertrude Stein. Alice responded that she did everything else but could not be an author too.

  So Gertrude, prompted by Alice, in the autumn of 1932 wrote The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. It took her six weeks. Familiarity with their merged personalities was all too real. Gertrude knew Alice through and through, and with the alter ego device Alice could be responsible for snide remarks and equivocal opinions about friends and contemporaries.

  The Autobiography was a light-hearted mix of fact, fiction, opinion, insult and anecdote. The American publisher Harcourt Brace snapped it up. Atlantic Monthly serialized it. The opening section ‘Before I came to Paris’ established Alice’s character: ‘a gently bred’ intelligent young Californian woman, a moderately contented housekeeper for her father and brother, for whom life was reasonably full: ‘I enjoyed it but I was not very ardent in it.’

  Then came the San Francisco earthquake, an apocalyptic event equalled only by its sequel: Alice travelled to Paris and met Gertrude Stein. Gertrude was at the centre of ‘the heroic age of cubism’. She familiarized Alice with the world of modern art, took her to the cutting-edge art shows, introduced her to everyone of consequence and allowed her to serve the person at the vanguard of modern taste, modern literature and American cultural identity.

  The narrative moved quickly to the main subject of concern – Gertrude. ‘In English literature in her time she is the only one. She has always known it and now she says it.’ Gertrude was good-humoured, unpretentious, well-educated, widely travelled and there was only one language for her: English. She did not like the theatre, she could not draw
and ‘Gertrude Stein never had subconscious reactions’. She was an ordinary, middle-class American woman, educated in Massachusetts and Maryland, who just happened to be a genius.

  The Autobiography, with Gertrude and Alice at its centre, chronicled a quarter of a century of Paris life. Picasso, Matisse, Apollinaire, Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald were there, so was the cook Hélène, Mabel Weeks, Basket the dog and Auntie the car. It covered the revolutionary exhibitions of the Fauves and Cubists, the struggles of the little magazines in the twenties, the aspirations of the expatriate writers after the 1914–18 war. And because six years after its publication Europe was wrecked by a war that ended a civilization, it came to be seen as an exemplar, a model of its kind. Nowhere was the word lesbian used. Sylvia Beach, Adrienne Monnier, Janet Flanner, Jane Heap, Margaret Anderson, Natalie Barney made guest appearances but not as women who loved women. Nor were Gertrude and Alice lesbian partners. They were indivisible, a unique entity.

  Reviews were good. Edmund Wilson in the New Republic praised the book’s wisdom, distinction and charm and said it showed Gertrude’s influence at the source of modern literature and art. Cyril Connolly in the Sunday Times called it a model of its kind that stood up to any amount of rereading. And Janet Flanner, Genêt, in her ‘Letter from Paris’ called it:

  a complete memoir of that exciting period when Cubism was being invented in paint and a new manner of writing being patented in words, an epoch when not everyone had too much to eat but everyone had lots to say, when everything we now breathe was already in the air and only a few had the nose for news to smell it – and with most of the odors of discovery right under the Toklas-Stein roof.