Gertrude Stein (Critical Lives) (13 page)

Female marriage was not unheard of. There was a nineteenth-century precedent, particularly in ‘bohemian’ circles, which could sometimes also be recognized and accepted by wider society, and involved cohabitation, legal arrangements and one partner referring to the other as her wife.
¹
By 1910 Toklas had moved in to 27 rue de Fleurus as Stein’s wife. This turn of events probably led, indirectly, to the eventual departure of Leo from both the flat and the affections of his sister. But Stein’s melancholy years were over. Her dependence on Alice in her life and work had begun. They would be together for another 36 years, until Stein’s death. After that, Toklas devoted the rest of her life to polishing the public memory of Stein.

Mabel Dodge, the socialite, memoirist and early rival for Gertrude’s affections, called Alice a ‘hand-maiden’,
²
but she was far more than that, and formidable. For Stein, Toklas was both an exotic and a familiar presence. In San Francisco Toklas had met, somewhat incongruously, Jack London, and been a sometime frequenter of the city’s ‘Bohemian Club’. She had an inner grit and a determination to liberate herself.
³
Her acerbic wit was well known, and of the pair she was often regarded as the better raconteuse.

Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein, 1922.

The iconic pairing of Stein and Toklas as one of the twentieth century’s most famous gay couples has meant a huge amount of discussion of the dynamics of Gertrude and Alice’s relationship. Following Ernest Hemingway’s sneaky revelations about the supposed overheard altercation between ‘lovey’ (Stein) and ‘pussy’ (Toklas), and its sadomasochistic hint (in his memoir
A Moveable
Feast
), critics have speculated somewhat pruriently about the role of each woman in the relationship. Alice has been characterized as everything from a shrew to a doormat. Despite the inevitable unearthings of evidence of rows and bickering, misunderstandings, jealousies and possible infidelities over the years, Alice’s devotion to Gertrude was profound. Alice gave Gertrude every home comfort she needed and performed the roles of muse and amanuensis, lover, cook, editor and housekeeper. Gertrude’s luxury depended on Alice’s domestic devotion to her. They joked that Alice had to get everything ready before Stein emerged for the day because she couldn’t stand to see work being done. There had to be someone to do the housework in order for Stein to get on with the job of ‘being a genius’. Perhaps it is only the fact that Alice and Gertrude were both women that makes this seem remarkable. In some respects she carried out the duties of a servant; in others the discreet actions of a loving wife; sometimes she was Stein’s agent. She was content to be named in public as her ‘friend’, or her ‘secretary’. Many have suggested that Alice was the one who wielded power over Gertrude, who scolded and censured her, and chose with whom she could and could not be friends — that Alice, once crossed, was the real reason for magnanimous Gertrude’s many fallings-out. In a suggestive example, when Annette Rosenshine came back to Paris and the rue de Fleurus in 1928 to proudly show Gertrude her sculptures (twenty years after they had been intimate), Alice steered her away, abruptly and silently turning out the lights, so that Gertrude could not even see them.

A large part of Stein’s cultural significance as a gay icon is due to her 40-year monogamous relationship with Toklas, because it was both so groundbreaking and so obvious and unembarrassed. As Terry Castle has written:

Stein and Toklas got people used to them and to the style of human intimacy they so vividly embodied. For half a century they acted as if nothing strange had happened and everyone who met them agreed that nothing had.
⁴

(Although in the Paris they inhabited, behind their backs the details of everyone’s sex lives were talking points for everyone else.) It is a glossy image of an idyll which may not quite do justice to some of the prejudice the couple faced, and faced down, but there is a truth to it. They had a lot of front, but also a lot of optimism. More often than the occasional sniping, they were respected and loved, as a couple, by an extraordinarily diverse group of friends. The fact was that their relationship was more secure than those of most of Stein’s heterosexual Left Bank friends and contemporaries. Gertrude and Alice avoided being part of any lesbian clique in Paris; they did not cross-dress, nor were they melancholy misfits, nor did they fall in with the type of free-spirited Sapphic idealists epitomized by Natalie Clifford Barney and the frequenters of her ‘temple of friendship’.
⁵
Although they were friends with Barney, and with Romaine Brooks and Radclyffe Hall, they had no interest in being part of a lesbian scene, and indeed were shocked by the behaviour of some of these groups of women.

Virgil Thomson recounted a catty story about Stein’s lesbian ‘credentials’ within the Paris milieu. He once asked Stein and Toklas where Natalie Barney got her lovers from. Alice, who was ‘always thinking the worst’, said: ‘I think from the toilets of the Louvre Department Store.’ Gertrude was unconvinced, but her interest was piqued about who Natalie slept with. Out for a walk shortly afterwards, she bumped into a houseguest of Barney’s, who she proceeded to grill about her hostess’s sexual habits, in front of a crowd of people seated at the café Les Deux Magots. The guest went home and told Natalie about Gertrude’s ‘
colossal
indiscretion’. Later, at a dinner party where various renowned lesbians were being discussed, when Gertrude and Alice were mentioned, Barney announced: ‘Oh, nothing like that there at all. It’s entirely innocent.’ According to Virgil Thomson, this was Natalie’s revenge: to make Stein seem like an ingénue, and make ‘a fool of her in front of the lesbians’.
⁶
Unlike Natalie Barney, Stein would never rely on any scandalous image of herself as lesbian, or capitalize on it in any way. In the daily narrative that she wrote of their life, Alice is her wife, and she is Alice’s husband, and that is how she saw herself.

When Stein wrote
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
, in recreating the character of Alice, she seamlessly glossed over their living situation with the ladylike manners of Toklas herself; but simultaneously put it proudly on display for all to see, if they chose to look. The strategy has been alternately praised for its candour and noted for its ‘deceitfulness’. But truth and deceit were uncommonly problematic concepts for Stein in the telling of her life, mainly because she was such a great manipulator of her own public image. Having created her persona, in the 1930s she made one for Alice, too. In the telling of the Rousseau banquet, for example, the detail of their hats was paramount — it was part of the joke, the character of Alice that she was interested in hats and food, like any good wife. In most of the photography they used to illustrate
The
Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
, they were conspicuously together, a couple. It was a normalization of their relationship that was unblinking and blatant, which makes it even more curious that it was bypassed by most people who read the book. The possibility that Stein and Toklas were lovers was apparently not even something to be considered by the American public when it was published in 1933; it simply fell beneath the radar of the vast majority of readers. And yet it was there, silently proffered without embarrassment, in photographic evidence. Stein would allow no intrusion beyond what she was willing to offer in this straightforward and unexplaining way. Offering this was in fact a way of saying that there was to be no further access. She repeatedly said that people could get any answers about her life from her work; she would have been appalled at the speculation about her private life which has flooded Stein criticism.

Although she saw herself as masculine, Stein did not cross-dress in the manner of such flamboyant Left Bank lesbians as Radclyffe Hall or the Marquise de Belboeuf. She did adopt a ‘costume’,
⁷
but her dress did not particularly mark out her sexual preference, as Ernest Hemingway’s apparent innocence on that point during the early stages of their friendship would seem to illustrate. Despite her fairly masculine clothes Stein was not androgynous, and she never wore trousers. Her own idealized image of herself, in the character Adele in
QED
, was: ‘large, abundant, full-busted and joyous’.
⁸
Although that largeness was a conspicuous element of her public image, she was actually quite small: five foot two inches in height. There were rumours (completely unfounded) of sexual liaisons with Picasso, and Alice was very jealous of her relationship with Hemingway. For him and for other male friends, Stein was confusing, in her kaftans and waistcoats, her monk-like robes. Stein sported a combination of brown velvet and corduroy suits and skirts, brocaded waistcoats, tweeds and a succession of roguish hats that was hard to locate culturally and worn with a style that would have been hard to emulate. (Later Stein and Toklas were dressed by Pierre Balmain, that byword for French sophistication in fashion, having befriended the young man. Attending the opening of his collection with Cecil Beaton after the Second World War, they agreed not to tell people they were wearing his clothes, in case they did the up-and-coming designer a disservice.)

Stein was charming and flirtatious, and enjoyed male attention. She liked being looked at, and relished clothes and accessories, hats and brooches in particular. What should she claim to have bought when her autobiography became a bestseller but ‘the finest coat made to order by Hermès’ — and a new collar for Basket, the poodle which was photographed almost as often as Alice, and a vital part of the Stein ménage in the public perception. (The Dutch painter Kristians Tonny even painted Basket’s portrait. Basket was succeeded by another poodle called Basket II. They also had an incestuously minded dog which they named Byron, given to them by Francis Picabia. Stein cast the light of celebrity even on the dogs around her — in one of her repetitive slogans: ‘I am I because my little dog knows me’, and in the statement that she liked to listen to her dog’s lapping of his water to find the rhythm of a sentence.) Most male accounts of Stein see her as a comforting, motherly figure. It wasn’t until 1927 that she cut her hair into the close crop that had by then become the fashion — unlike many of her contemporaries, until then she wore it long and lustrous, but usually piled up on top of her head as in Picasso’s portrait. When she finally cut her hair, Picasso chastized her for ruining his portrait of her (one wonders if she felt a certain satisfaction in doing so), and Sherwood Anderson said it made her look like a monk — a remark which pleased her.

Stein with dogs.

Beyond their public image, Stein’s sexuality and her relationship with Alice had a profound effect on her work. In the early 1910s Stein was still practically unpublished, aside from the self-published
Three Lives
. This, however, is one of Stein’s most prolific and innovative periods. She produced her long novel,
The Making
of Americans
(finished in 1911), numerous portraits and plays and her celebrated collection of poetry,
Tender Buttons
(1912, published 1914), among a host of other titles. In fact Stein was at the centre of the making of what we now see as the tradition of the avant garde. Much of this work pre-empts various aspects of literary modernism and postmodernism. It was as if her alternative lifestyle had freed her up to create alternative art. The two are intimately connected. The fact that she so ostentatiously proclaimed herself an artist and an avant-gardist — in her dress, her talk, her writing — also gave her the licence to live that alternative life without censure, exempted her from ordinary rules. This included producing an alternative to the masculine literary culture within which she worked, which became more deliberate and self-conscious as time went on, and her writing about women became more elaborate. Though she was capable of misogyny, Stein wrote about women all her life, and found them more interesting as subjects than men.

As she finished
The Making of Americans
, Stein was occupied with a number of other splinter projects. The titles of Stein’s works of the period — as well as the portraits, between 1909 and 1912 she wrote
A Long Gay Book
,
Many Many Women
and
Two
(a portrait of herself and her brother) — suggest that she was considering her own individuality and uniqueness, her difference and abnormality, and her relation to others. ‘The Making of an Author being a History of one woman and many others’ was one proposed title for
Three Lives
.
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During this period Stein was also at work on the long, experimental and radical
GMP
(Gertrude Matisse Picasso), designed as a sort of triptych linking herself, Matisse and Picasso.