Gertrude Stein (Critical Lives) (12 page)

Writing was something Stein did at night-time and in the early hours, going to bed as it got light. She called it ‘the daily miracle’; it became almost a spiritual act, involving meditation and lifting herself out of the world of passing time. Memory was not to be trusted. The future was unimaginable. ‘The continuous present’, which was to become a major stylistic implement, was her only refuge. Many years later she would say that as a writer ‘you have to denude yourself of time ... if time exists, your writing is ephemeral.’
²⁸
All her changeability of mood is recorded in this novel, which was not written as an amusement, but as a painful necessity. In later years immediate description would be possible, but here she was still preoccupied with the problem of narrative, memory and the past and what it had to do with a person’s character and how to represent it, and edging, despite the many false starts, towards a kind of clarity.

The Making of Americans
is the work of solitude, addressed to ‘this scribbled and lined and dirty paper that is really to be to me always my receiver’.
²⁹
This egoistic interest in the workings of her own pen, her own mind, led her to stumble on a meta-fiction before any other writer was doing anything remotely as daring or strange. Aloneness and self-reliance, in the absence of secure knowledge, became for her a vital part of the author’s state of mind. The cocoon in which she wrote gave her both the safety to experiment at will and the freedom from criticism that would have prevented the grandness of the failure of those experiments (if she had ever been one to take criticism on board).

Her refusal to revise her work had many of her friends tearing their hair out. H. P. Roché, one of the subjects Stein had used in the book (who Stein somewhat patronizingly labeled a ‘general introducer’ in
The Autobiography
, and who was later the author of that other iconic tale of Parisian bohemia,
Jules et Jim
), wrote to her in 1912: ‘I start reading your style only when I feel very strong and want in a way to suffer.’ His main problem was the bulk of the repetition: ‘Why don’t you finish, correct rewrite ten times the same chaotic material[?]’ He was concerned for her:

More and more your style gets solitary — the vision remains great, and the glory of some occasional pages. — Rhythm? Oh yes. But that sort of rhythm is intoxicating for you — it is something like masturbation ... Quantity! Quantity! Is thy name woman?
³⁰

Stein imperiously told him he wouldn’t have written such a letter to a man, and he was cowed. She was, she wrote to him, a true artist, and as such he ought to respect the inevitability of her art, determined as it was by her personality, just as any male artist’s was.
³¹
Her reply was pertinent to much of the criticism her work received long after 1912. What was for a long time denied Stein was an awareness of her own effects, that hers were willed departures from ‘normal’ literature, that there was method in her ‘madness’. She would be dismissed as a sort of one-woman lunatic fringe. Both intensely theoretical and intensely personal,
The
Making of Americans
is a record of her own failures, but nevertheless a breathtaking departure for any writer, even for the writer of
Three Lives
. It is on the whole a very hopeful book, although a doomed one. It is a tremendous feat of stamina. As Stein remarked of Cézanne:

When he could not make a thing, he turned aside from it and left it alone. He insisted on showing his inability; he exposed his failure to succeed; to show what he could not do, became an obsession with him.
³²

The final way in which this novel establishes itself as part of the new ‘American’ literature, in the sense of the ‘pure’ literature of which William Carlos Williams would write, is its gradual recognition of the fact that the only thing it embodies is itself. After it she made the writer’s necessary alienation from her own words a deliberate part of her style. Writing was not simply the expression of one’s thoughts but a way of understanding one’s own thoughts and how they work, how oneself works.
³³
From here she needed to move to a style that could better help her marshal the erratic, disparate perceptions of consciousness.

One day in 1911, Stein apparently came downstairs and said: ‘I’ve killed him.’
³⁴
By this melodramatic announcement she meant that she had put an end to the ‘hero’ of
The Making of
Americans
, David Hersland. (The self-willed, autonomous, American character, who represents her own artistic development, is masculine.) Killing the hero was a significant moment in her steady move into abstraction.

In 1908 Stein had written the first of her abstract portraits in words. The idea appealed to her because it did not require the pretence of a story. A portrait is only a snapshot, only concerned with the moment it describes — not a narrative, a story or a history. Later Stein would talk about trying to capture ‘a space in time filled with moving’ in her work. Portraiture would remain a major concept in her writing right up until and including the
Autobiography
. Between 1908 and 1912 she wrote 25 portraits. The first one of an individual was ‘Ada’, which was about Alice Toklas, and the portrait ‘Sacred Emily’ is the first appearance of Stein’s famous catchphrase: ‘Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose’.

While she made her friends and acquaintances the objects of her study, she was herself a popular subject for portraits; as well as Picasso’s, there was, in 1907, the portrait of Stein by Félix Vallotton, and in the same year she was sculpted by Elie Nadelman. Later she was also pleased when Alvin Langdon Coburn, a prominent American photographer, took her photograph for a collection on remarkable women. It was the first time a professional photographer had asked her to pose for him.
³⁵
And she very much enjoyed posing.

Stein claimed to have an artist’s eye but not his hand.
³⁶
In summer 1909 she first saw a Cubist painting, and returned Picasso’s compliment by writing a word portrait of him. She was seeing things in the same simultaneous, dynamic and contradictory way that she described as Picasso’s vision in this portrait. Stein’s word portraits of Matisse, Picasso and Isadora Duncan, among others, were attempts to render a subject while allowing the play of ideas and sensations around the writer also to enter the composition. The thing that remains constant is Stein’s — the artist’s — vision (this was an idea Matisse had expounded).

Félix Vallotton,
Gertrude Stein
, 1907, oil on canvas.

This was the beginning of what is commonly seen as Stein’s ‘difficult’ work. The short, assertive sentences Stein used here were incontrovertible, and therefore a form of defence against criticism, of which she was by this stage getting plenty from her brother Leo. There was a further rejection of emotion. Her practice is all about control, not lack of control, although fragmentation has replaced narrative. She was making her writing more and more precise by depriving things of their historical, literary or even syntactical context.

A writer surrounded by painters, it was easy for Stein to draw parallels between the two disciplines, and the ‘scribbled and lined and dirty paper’ that was a common medium. Picasso liked using paper in his collages, such as
Au Bon Marché
(1913), which coincided with Stein’s portrait ‘Flirting at the Bon Marché’ (the Bon Marché was the department store where she loved to window-shop); he also used calligraphy. Seeing her writing as an object, like a painting, was an appealing idea; the surface of the words was becoming more important than their meaning. This technique was interestingly connected to but divergent from that used by Apollinaire and what would later be called ‘concrete poetry’. Although she was using painterly metaphors and discussing the graphic elements of her work, her interest was in language and words, not in, for example, the visual impact of their arrangement on the page.
³⁷
Her work received important recognition when Alfred Stieglitz, the young leading light of photography and rue de Fleurus regular, published her portraits side by side with Picasso’s in his magazine
Camera Work
in 1912. Stieglitz also pollinated the flowers of New York society with news of Stein and her work.

As well as taking her cues from artistic methods, Stein’s work in turn influenced the way painters thought about their work. There was a profusion of ‘object portraits’ in the art of the Stieglitz crowd who visited Stein’s atelier in the 1910s and ’20s, including Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp, in the form of collages of found objects, pieces of sculpture and portraits made up of typographic elements.
³⁸
Marsden Hartley wrote about the influence she had on him, and Charles Demuth, the American painter, was inspired by Stein’s word portraits to create a series of eight ‘poster portraits’ of his friends, based not on physical likenesses but images with which the painter associated them, including an homage to Stein entitled ‘Love, Love, Love’. Stein wrote about Marsden Hartley in her play
IIIIIIIIII
, which was circulated at Stieglitz’s 291 gallery in New York when Hartley exhibited there in 1914. (One of the miniature ‘portraits’ of Hartley which the play contains reads, for example: ‘Point, face, canvas, toy, struck off, sense or, weighcoach, soon beak on, so suck in, and an iron.’
³⁹
) In 1916 Hartley produced
One
Portrait of One Woman
, in which Stein is represented by a large flame or halo; several lesser halos or candles cluster around her hearth.
⁴⁰
The young painters were fond of laying their tributes at Stein’s feet (or in Picasso’s case the reverse, as his
Homage to
Gertrude
was intended for the ceiling above her bed).

This new kind of portraiture was the context in which Stein’s ‘portraits’ existed — although she had begun writing them over a decade earlier. The words she used were also ‘found objects’, often obscure impressions of everyday life or snippets of conversation, taken from their ordinary surroundings or functions in order to create another reality. There are also collages and found objects in the work of Picasso, Juan Gris and Braque, all of whose work the Steins collected; for example, Picasso’s
Still Life with Calling Card
and
The Architect’s Table
, in which Picasso painted Stein’s calling card into the composition.

By 1908 Stein had been at the point of rejecting realism. In 1912, still trying to expunge emotion and the problem of memory and association from her work, she moved from portraiture into still life, in
Tender Buttons
. She started writing ‘plays’. (For her, calling something a ‘play’ was less to be constrained within the limits of genre suggested by that word than to suggest that she herself was at play when she wrote it.) Dialogue then began entering other pieces, not just the plays. She started incorporating overheard speech, and began using columns in her work. She wrote a piece called ‘One Sentence’, a misleading title for a piece that was thirty pages long (and not a sentence), and ‘Storyette’, a one-paragraph story. These were endlessly experimental years, and each new composition seemed to yield new methods. This was the most concentrated period of creativity in her life. It was a casting aside of literary decorum that coincided with her discovery of a new domestic arrangement.

She was becoming estranged from Leo. By the 1930s, offended by the offence he took at her work, Gertrude would deny his existence. When once she happened to see him in the street, she merely nodded, then went directly home and wrote a piece called ‘She Bowed to Her Brother’. Already in 1910 another person had taken his place as the main influence in Stein’s life. When she started writing she claimed that it was for ‘myself and strangers’; now she was writing for somebody else, her perfect reader, Alice Toklas.

Gertrude Stein and Alice Babette Toklas, the authors of their own great twentieth-century love story, found each other through an unwitting go-between. During the writing of
The Making of
Americans
, while Stein was filling piles of notebooks with her analyses of friends and acquaintances, she pounced on Annette Rosenshine, a young woman with a hare lip, a cleft palate and a lack of social skills, who had travelled to Paris with Stein’s brother Michael and his wife Sarah. Stein used Annette as a typist and errand-runner, but also as a guinea pig for her theories on character. Every afternoon at four o’clock the girl would submit to intrusive enquiries about all aspects of her personality out of devotion and a faith in Stein’s ability somehow to cure her of her malaise, and the neuroses Stein had invented for her. She became one of her early disciples. She also let Stein peruse her personal correspondence. The letters from Annette’s San Francisco friend Alice Toklas piqued Gertrude’s interest. They told of Toklas’s flirtations with other women, her bohemian life in San Francisco, her artistic interests, her sophistication and her certainty that coming to Europe would be the break for freedom that she needed. For nigh on a year Annette showed Alice’s letters to Gertrude. So when, Alice barely having stepped off the boat, Stein and Toklas met in 1907 Stein already knew this strange fellow Californian who seemed half-bluestocking, half-gypsy. Stein, perhaps calculating the demeanour which would most attract Toklas, was immediately stern with her; Alice seemed to fall instantly for Gertrude. Annette fell out of favour, and Toklas replaced her as secretary. Soon she became a regular at the Saturday nights. They took long walks together in the Bois du Boulogne. Then when they took a holiday together in Fiesole in the summer of 1908, Gertrude made Alice a proposal, and Alice accepted.