No Modernism Without Lesbians

by Diana Souhami

  She said the book was simply written ‘in Miss St- that is to say, Miss Toklas’s first, or easiest literary manner’.

  The book was reprinted four times in four years. Bernard Faÿ translated the French edition published by Gallimard, Cesare Pavese the Italian edition. Here for Gertrude, at the age of sixty, was popular success.

  Many of those written about took offence. Hemingway seethed. Gertrude had said he learned the art of writing from proofreading her Making of Americans, that she and Sherwood Anderson created him and ‘were both a little proud and a little ashamed of the work of their minds’. She said he was ‘yellow’, meaning cowardly, ‘just like the flat-boat men on the Mississippi river as described by Mark Twain’, that he ‘looks like a modern and he smells of the museums’, that ‘whenever he does anything sporting something breaks, his arm, his leg, or his head’. Hemingway felt publicly humiliated by her and thought she had exacted revenge because of the fracas over the serializing of The Making of Americans in the Transatlantic Review a decade previously.

  He publicly called her a bitch. Criticized by his editor, Maxwell Perkins, for this, Hemingway responded in a letter to him on 7 September 1935:

  Gertrude? What would you like me to put in place of bitch? Fat bitch? Lousy bitch? Old Bitch? Lesbian Bitch? What is the modifying adjective that would improve it? I don’t know what word to replace bitch with. Certainly not whore. If anyone was ever a bitch that woman was a bitch. I’ll see if I can change it. … For Christ’s sake Max don’t you see that they have to attack me to believe in themselves…. Would you prefer fat female? That is possible. I’ll change it to fat female or just female. That’s better. That will make her angrier than bitch, will please you by not calling a lady a bitch, will make it seem that I care less about her lying about me, and will please everyone but me who cares only about honesty.

  Gertrude, he said, was menopausal and all her former talent had degenerated to ‘malice and self-praise… Homme des lettres, woman of letters, salon woman. What a lousy stinking life.’ He said she and her feathered friends had decided nobody was any good creatively unless they were queer, that she thought all queer people talented and that anyone who was any good must be queer. When he heard her voice on the radio in 1934, he described it as like a distant echo from the tomb of a dead friendship.

  In cold revenge, he later retaliated in his own memoir, A Moveable Feast, published posthumously in 1964. In his account of how their friendship ended, he said he called one morning at 27 rue de Fleurus, the maid gave him a glass of Alice’s eau de vie and told him Gertrude would soon be down; he then heard Alice speaking to Gertrude as he had never heard one person speak to another:

  never, anywhere, ever. Miss Stein’s voice came pleading and begging, saying Don’t pussy. Don’t. Don’t Please don’t. I’ll do anything pussy but please don’t do it. Please don’t. Please don’t pussy.

  Hemingway said he slipped away, unable to listen to more.

  The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas caused sufficient offence for transition to publish a supplement in February 1935 with the title ‘Testimony Against Gertrude Stein’. Among those retaliating were the magazine’s editor, Eugène Jolas, Georges Braque and Henri Matisse. In a foreword, Jolas wrote that Gertrude had no real understanding of what was happening with her contemporaries and was never ideologically intimate with such movements as Fauvism, Cubism, Dadaism, Surrealism and that:

  The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas in its hollow tinsel bohemianism and egocentric deformations may very well become one day the symbol of the decadence that hovers over contemporary literature.

  Braque, in his testimony, said Gertrude never knew French well, entirely misunderstood cubism because she saw it simply in terms of personalities and that he had felt most uncomfortable when he met her and Alice at Avignon during the war and they were wearing boy-scout uniforms and pith helmets.

  Matisse was offended by Gertrude’s description of his wife as ‘a very straight dark woman with a long face and a firm large loosely hung mouth like a horse’. His wife, he said, was ‘a very lovely Toulousaine’ with beautiful dark hair.

  Leo’s scorn matched Hemingway’s: he called the Autobiography a farrago of clever anecdote, stupid brag and general bosh. ‘God what a liar she is’, he wrote to Mabel Weeks.

  If I were not something of a psychopathologist I should be very much mystified. Some of her chronology is too wonderful… Practically everything that she says of our activities before 1911 is false both in fact and implication but one of her radical complexes, of which I believe you knew something, made it necessary practically to eliminate me.

  Most readers found Gertrude’s Autobiography light-hearted, humorous and refreshingly easy to read. But she had angered many men. And for herself she was equivocal about the success that followed publication. This popular, easy-to-read style was not how she wanted to be represented:

  So many people knowing me I was I no longer and for the first time since I had begun to write I could not write and what was also worse I began to think about how my writing would sound to others…

  She wanted to earn a lot of money but did not want to do what she had to do to achieve that. ‘There are some things a girl cannot do,’ she said. She reasoned, quite rightly, it was the work of her true self that had made people interested in her in the first place. But following the success of the Autobiography, Bennett Cerf, founding editor of Random House, gave her contracts for what she regarded as her real work and published her much rejected The Making of Americans and Three Lives, and a collection of her portraits and essays called Portraits and Prayers.

  The success of the Autobiography brought money, fame and invitations to lecture in the States. ‘There is no doubt about it there is no pleasure like it, the sudden splendid spending of money and we spent it,’ Gertrude wrote. They bought an eight-cylinder Ford, had running water installed in the country house in Bilignin and a telephone put in there. ‘Now that I was going to be an author whose agent could place something I had of course to have a telephone,’ she wrote. And Basket got two new collars with studs and a new coat from Hermès, purveyor of coats for racehorses.

  Gertrude and Virgil Thomson

  One popular success led to another. In the 1920s, Gertrude had begun a playful collaboration with the composer and pianist Virgil Thomson. He was part of the modernist music scene in Paris with Francis Poulenc and Nadia Boulanger. His partner was the painter and writer Maurice Grosser. Thomson set some of Gertrude’s poems, such as ‘Susie Asado’, to music:

  What is a nail. A nail is unison.

  Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea.

  Or from ‘Preciosilla’:

  …allmost, a best, willow, vest, a green guest, guest, go go go go go go, go. Go go. Not guessed. Go go.

  Toasted susie is my ice-cream

  He played the piano and sang the words and found in doing so he revolutionized English musical declamation. He thought if a text was set judiciously, just for the sound of it, meaning would take care of itself.

  And the Stein texts, for prosodizing in this way, were manna. With meanings already abstracted, or absent, or so multiplied that choice among them was impossible, there was no temptation toward tonal illustration, say, of birdie babbling in the brook or heavy heavy hangs my heart. You could make a setting for sound and syntax only, then add, if needed, an accompaniment equally functional. I had no sooner put to music after this recipe one short Stein text than I knew I had opened a door.

  Thomson saw that a true creative union for Gertrude’s words was not with modern painting but with modern music. In 1927 he set to music a 3,000-word piece of Gertrude’s ‘Capital Capitals’. It evoked, he wrote:

  Provence, its landscape, food and people, as a conversation among the cities Aix, Arles, Avignon and Les Baux which are called Capitals One, Two, Three and Four. It also reflects the poet’s attachment to that sunny region which she had first known as an ambulance driver in World War One.

  He took Gertrude
’s words

  If in regard to climates if we regard the climates, if we are acclimated to the climate of the third capital…

  The first capital is one in which there are many more earrings.

  The third capital. They have read about the third capital. It has in it many distinguished inventors of electrical conveniences.

  and set them to music for four male voices with him at the piano. This music went through many styles, none of which related to the words: Spanish rhythms, lyrical flights, church harmonies, fanfares, lines intoned on one note, chants… He described the piece as a cantata and it lasted eighteen minutes.

  ‘Capital Capitals’ had a one-off performance as a midnight entertainment at a costume ball given by Gertrude’s friend and Natalie Barney’s lover, Lily de Gramont, duchesse de Clermont-Tonnerre, at her eighteenth-century house in rue Raynouard. At the last minute, one of the singers got ill, so Virgil Thomson sang his part as well as playing the piano.

  The partygoers read into it what they would. Lily de Gramont lined her garden paths with blue candles. Concealed in the bushes was a quartet with hunting horns. The Polish-born opera singer Ganna Walska arrived in a six-foot-wide white satin decolleté dress with a ten-foot train. Lily met her at the door, said ‘you know the size of my rooms’ and sent her into the garden, ‘and there all evening she paraded like a petulant peacock’.

  Gertrude adored the ‘Capital Capitals’ evening, as seemingly did everyone there. It was extravagant, stylized, theatrical, entertaining. Eighteen minutes of shared entertainment was different from 900 mystifying pages to read all on your own.

  Four Saints in Three Acts

  Gertrude and Virgil Thomson discussed producing a whole opera with her libretto and his music. Gertrude gave the ground plan:

  I think it should be late eighteenth-century or early nineteenth-century saints. Four saints in three acts. And others. Make it pastoral. In hills and gardens. All four and then additions. We must invent them. Next time you come I will show you a little bit and we will talk some scenes over.

  She wanted the saints to be Spanish. St Teresa of Ávila and St Ignatius Loyola were the main ones. She did not stick at four; she included at least twenty others, including a St Answers and a St Martyr, a St Plan and a St Settlement. And there were two Saints Teresa – a contralto and a soprano.

  There were one-line scenes and Gertrude’s usual subversions: in one of the more than two scene twos of Act Three, ‘Pigeons on the grass alas’, became an aria for Saint Ignatius.

  Pigeons on the grass alas.

  Pigeons on the grass alas.

  Short longer grass short longer longer shorter yellow grass.

  Pigeons large pigeons on the shorter longer yellow grass alas pigeons on the grass.

  If they were not pigeons what were they.

  Virgil Thomson made ‘If they were not pigeons on the grass alas what were they…’ break into a chorus with the next lines ‘They might be very well, very well…’, while offstage was a celestial harmony, ‘Let Lucy Lily Lily Lucy Lucy let.’

  As ever, Gertrude sent verbs, nouns and adjectives to the wind. Stage directions were fleeting and not easy to follow: ‘Saint Teresa half in and half out of doors.’ ‘Saint Teresa preparing in as you might say.’ There were mundane asides: ‘How do you do.’ ‘Very well thank you.’ ‘And when do you go.’ ‘I am staying on quite continuously.’ There were Gertrudian incantations:

  How many saints can be and land be and sand be and on a high plateau there is no sand there is snow and there is made to be so and very much can be what there is to see when there is a wind to have it dry.

  Gertrude finished the libretto in 1927. She then tried to find money for Thomson to live on while he worked on the music. He performed for the Cone sisters ‘to no great cash result’. Elsa Maxwell invited him to lunch at the Paris Ritz and seemed to promise a commission from the Princesse de Polignac, but that did not happen.

  Thomson composed the opera sitting at his piano and chanting until something happened. ‘Speech alone lacks music’s forward thrust,’ he said. He wanted to carry listeners along on a magic carpet. His music infused an emotional logic into the script and made sense of what was certainly not nonsense. It became a piece of moods rather than literary meaning, humorous in the sense of joyful, a kaleidoscope of an opera with allusion to time, place, narrative but nothing specific.

  He wrote for a flute, a piccolo, an oboe, two saxophones, a clarinet, a bassoon, a trumpet, trombone, accordion, celesta, glockenspiel ‘and lots of other battery’, four violins, a viola, a cello and a double bass. He had been a church organist so there were church-style cadences and hymn-style tunes for Gertrude’s words such as: ‘There can be no peace on earth with calm.’ While composition was in progress, Gertrude went with Jean Cocteau to Thomson’s ‘narrow room in the hotel Jacob’ to hear him accompany himself on the piano and sing the opera in different voices. Cocteau described the work as solid, ‘like a table that stands on its legs, a door one can open and close’.

  By 25 August 1933, Virgil Thomson had finished two acts of Four Saints in Three Acts. He wrote to the composer Aaron Copland that in three more weeks he would have it finished. The time for production seemed right because of the popularity of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. He asked the English impresario C.B. Cochran to consider staging it. Cochran declined.

  ‘Chick’ Austin – Arthur Everett Austin, director of the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut – agreed to produce it under the auspices of the Friends and Enemies of Modern Music and to raise all necessary funds. He planned to stage it at the Atheneum to coincide with the opening there of Picasso’s first solo exhibition in America. Art prices had rocketed. In 1929 a group of collectors opened the Museum of Modern Art. As the Depression set in, stocks and bonds declined and the buying of Picasso, Braque and Matisse became investments of rising profit.

  Virgil Thomson chose a friend, Frederick Ashton, as the choreographer. Ashton was thirty and had worked with Marie Rambert and C.B. Cochran. John Houseman was the producer. Though a playwright, he had not then had a play staged. Later he ran the Mercury Theatre with Orson Welles. Abe Feder, just out of college, was lighting designer; Alexander Smallens, Leopold Stokowski’s assistant, was the conductor. Thomson asked the artist Florine Stettheimer to design the sets and costumes. She wrote in her diary:

  He makes the words by Gertrude Stein come alive and flutter and in sound have a meaning. He wants me to do the visual part of the opera.

  This commission was her sole stage endeavour. She oversaw the execution of her designs. She lived with her invalid mother and two sisters in an apartment in the Alwyn Court Building on West 58th Street and 7th Avenue. Like the Steins, the Stettheimers were German-American Jews. Florine Stettheimer’s work was admired by the photographer Alfred Stieglitz and the artists Marcel Duchamp and Pavel Tchelitchew, but she seldom showed her bright figurative paintings outside of her home. Thomson described her apartment as ‘very high camp’. It was itself like a set design with gold and marble, red velvet curtains, plumes and lace.

  She made detailed maquettes for Four Saints. She used cellophane, beads, gilt and drapes. There was a proscenium arch fashioned of lace, a cellophane backdrop and cyclorama, which created ‘waves of light’ and ‘a great curtain of jewels’, a sea wall of shells, palm trees with fronds of white tarlatan, an arch threaded with crystal beads, a stone lion, costumes of black chiffon with black ostrich plumes. St Teresa was to go on a picnic in the second act in a cart drawn by a live white donkey, taking with her a tent of white gauze with a gold fringe. It was Florine’s idea to have a maypole dance in one of the Act Twos.

  She did a painting, now in the Chicago Art Institute, of Thomson singing and playing Four Saints on a piano surrounded by birds, bright palms and banners of St Virgil, St Gertrude, St Teresa, St Ignatius. And she added a Florine St.

  She designed 200 costumes. The opera ran for 100 minutes.

  an African-American cast
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br />   Virgil Thomson decided on an all-black cast. He praised the dignity, poise, diction and articulation of black performers and thought they were less likely to be fazed by the apparent senselessness of Gertrude’s script than white singers inured to traditional operatic form.

  So his buoyant music was sung by an all African-American cast, brought together by Eva Jessye, the first African-American woman to gain international recognition as a professional choral conductor. She described Four Saints as a musical breakthrough for African-American singers:

  quite a departure, because up to that time the only opportunities involved things like ‘Swanee River,’ or ‘That’s Why Darkies Are Born,’ or ‘Old Black Joe.’ They called that ‘our music,’ and thought we could sing those things only by the gift of God… With this opera we had to step on fresh ground, something foreign to our nature completely.

  A performance of Virgil Thomson’s opera, Four Saints in Three Acts © Lebrecht Music & Arts / Alamy

  The Harlem cast liked the opera. Rehearsals in the basement at St Philip’s Church on Harlem’s 137th Street were fun. Ashton was popular. He helped performers learn music and movement simultaneously. He found the whole process ‘frightfully exhausting’ because they were not professional dancers, so it was hard for any scene to be the same twice running. He had difficulty finding six black dancers with ballet training, so a swimmer and a basketball player made up the numbers. He described his choreography as a ‘mix of snake hips and Gothic’. Singers were each paid $15 a week. One chorister, Tony Anderson, said that was fine: ‘I could get five pounds of apples, three pork chops, five big rolls, a stick of butter and some jam for a dollar.’

  For weeks prior to the opening night, curiosity about the opera built up. A reporter from the New York Herald Tribune came to a rehearsal and wrote a preview: