Gertrude Stein (Critical Lives) (15 page)

Tender Buttons
(1912, published 1914) gave rise to a slew of other works including ‘No, One Sentence’ (1914), ‘Possessive Case’ (1915), and ‘Lifting Belly’ (1915–17), in which snippets of domestic conversation, endearments and chastisements showed that her works were no longer soliloquies, but addressed to Alice. From this point on Stein begins to speak to a lover in her writing, and there are often two voices to be heard in her work now — one pleading, one commanding, though the conversation (as Richard Bridgman pointed out in his seminal study
Gertrude Stein in Pieces
, the work begins to sound like a secret recording of a conversation) stops short of being sadomasochistic, as it has sometimes been called. The colloquies with Alice sometimes appeared in Alice’s own hand, and there is some question about whether the two women were carrying on a real conversation, or a sort of collaboration.
²⁴
Later, in 1932, Alice began writing more extensively in the manuscripts.

Throughout these works Stein was investigating, still, the gap between consciousness and writing. The decade between 1912 and 1922 was the period in which she gave fullest expression to her theory of the ‘continuous present’, in works such as ‘Bee Time Vine’, ‘Pink Melon Joy’, ‘Possessive Case’ and ‘Lifting Belly’. Many of these works were not published in her lifetime. They are erotic pieces. Still more extreme in their dissociations than
Tender
Buttons
, they are filled with private jokes, baby-talk, and pillow-talk. ‘Kiss my lips. She did./ Kiss my lips again she did. / Kiss my lips over and over and over again she did.’
²⁵
Echoing through the words are the moments of their life together: personal references that would not and could not be intelligible to others, which is what gave her work its famed sibylline quality. Stein brings the detail of Alice’s life — cooking and cleaning — from insignificance into significance by enshrining it as literature, by calling it that. Unlike her masculine modernist contemporaries, Stein gave domestic themes a central place in the vast majority of her writing, up until and including her war writing.

Questions of self-censorship arise in relation to Stein’s erotic work, which is the most stylized of all her work. When the sentence ‘This must not be put in a book’
²⁶
occurs in ‘Bonne Annee’, it seems to be a plea from Alice about leaving some parts of their private life beyond the putting of them into words. Stein was always courting Alice’s approval in her work, and
Many Many Women
, for example, is stunning in its resistance to readability. Is the opacity related to hiding her relationship with Alice? Was her obscurity part of a disguise? Or was the erotic element of her work simply one strand of her enjoyment of a secret richness in words? The old idea that Stein disguised her lesbianism with linguistic play has given way to the idea that she was revelling in it.

In some ways Stein was surprisingly open about her sexuality, and some of the work is a celebration of gayness. In much of Stein’s work gender is often random, ambiguous or interchangeable,
²⁷
and her use of the word ‘queer’ or ‘queerness’ in
The
Making of Americans
, as well as her use of the word ‘gay’ in
A
Long Gay Book
and ‘Miss Furr and Miss Skeene’ (1911, a portrait of two American painters of her acquaintance who were lesbian lovers) was provocative:

To be regularly gay was to do every day the gay thing that they did every day. To be regularly gay was to end every day at the same time after they had been regularly gay. They were regularly gay. They were gay every day. They ended every day in the same way, at the same time, and they had been every day regularly gay.
²⁸

The word ‘gay’ in 1911 was not yet generally familiar as a synonym for ‘homosexual’. However, by the time the piece was published in
Vanity Fair
in 1923, after which it became famous, Stein’s insistence on the ‘regularity’ of the couple’s ‘gayness’ could be said to be even more explosively loaded. But then again she could also be surprisingly coy. In
The Making of Americans
intimate or sexual details are skewed, hidden, locked away. While some women of her era were coming out in print, Stein trod a thin line of discretion.

Surely these new techniques were more than strategies of concealment. When she fell in love with Alice she had found an exciting new subject but she knew she couldn’t really write about it —
QED
had been unpublishable,
inaccrochable
. But
QED
had also been an artistic failure —
Tender Buttons
was a crucial work because it released her into another world where she could write about these experiences, lovingly, poetically, philosophically, sophisticatedly. And in works like ‘Lifting Belly’ she was anything but coy.

Stein’s sexuality was connected to her developing style in a complicated way. While not as simple as a lesbian code, Stein used certain words (such as ‘Caesar’, with its implied homonym ‘seize her’) in order to broach erotic subjects. ‘Ada’ was Stein’s name for Toklas in her writing. She uses rhythm and acoustic effects like this: ‘Aider, why aider why whow, whow stop touch, aider whow, aider stop ...’.
²⁹
In so doing she connects verbal trickiness, puns and euphemisms, the illicit or deceptive side of grammar, with the erotic life itself. That was partly because these were love offerings, and perhaps being ‘put in a book’ was never of paramount or primary importance. In ‘Lifting Belly’ she asks ‘Can you read my print[?]’.
³⁰
Though apparently intended for publication (Stein considered everything she wrote important enough for publication — and even wanted her receipts and shopping lists to be hoarded by the archive at Yale when she deposited her papers there), they were sufficiently obscure not to arouse unwelcome intrusion into the details of their life. Or so she thought. Since her death, critics have seized on them precisely because they do seem to offer a cipher that, if only it could be broken, would provide a way of probing and interpreting the true dynamics of the Stein/Toklas relationship. By 1925 the erotic strain in her writing would run its course, and so too would this element of her style.

Stein’s ‘double life’ was more pronounced than others because she was ‘toiling in obscurity’ at the same time as basking in (minor) celebrity. Her work had so far gained little purchase on literary markets or the literary mainstream; she had miscellaneous pieces published in little magazines; people knew she was writing, but true champions of her writing were few, and those she had were ineffectual; publishers gulped at the unmarketable prospect her work represented. Leo was famously dismissive, which added to the developing rift between them.

By Spring 1913 ‘the old life was over’.
³¹
Leo moved out, taking half the collection with him, but leaving the Picassos. When Leo left Gertrude had been living with him on and off for the best part of 40 years. The break-up, and the break-up of the gallery, made the
New
York Sun
. As Leo moved to Florence, Picasso and others of the old crowd moved to the suburbs. By 1913 the salon no longer existed in the same way as it had in those first extraordinary years. By 1910 Leo had stopped coming and Gertrude had taken the helm. Society hostesses such as Lady Ottoline Morrell now came to see her in Paris, along with artists such as Augustus John, Jacob Epstein, Marcel Duchamp and American painters Max Weber, Joseph Stella and Charles Demuth. Wyndham Lewis came, and
blast
solicited a contribution from her. ‘The futurists are in town’, she wrote excitedly in 1913, as if the circus had arrived.
³²
‘They have a catalogue that has a fiery introduction demolishing the old salons.’ Theirs was an iconoclasm of which she approved (though she would later denounce the Futurist worldview). ‘After all we are all modern’, she concluded her letter — there is a palpable sense of her delight at being part of a movement, the movement that would become known as modernism.

Leo’s departure coincided with the first flowering of her international fame. It was in 1913 that US interest in Stein was roused by the ministrations of her well-connected socialite friend Mabel Dodge, whom she had met in Italy and about whom she had written ‘The Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia’. Dodge was as much of an instinctive self-publicist as Stein was, and saw to it that the portrait bearing her name was distributed during the hugely publicized event that was the Armory Show, a month-long exhibition of modern art in New York, including Duchamp’s
Nude
Descending a Staircase
. The Steins had lent Matisse’s
Blue Nude
to the show, which became a
succès de scandale
; a copy of it was burnt along with an effigy of Matisse. Gertrude Stein was associated with this scandal, when the reprinted ‘Portrait of Mabel Dodge’, along with an essay on Stein by Dodge, hit the headlines. The papers were agog with the outlandishness of both the words and the images associated with Stein. This was her first big publicity coup. The
Chicago Tribune
poked fun at the Stein mystique:

I called the Canvas Cow with Cud
And hung it on the line,
Altho’ to me ’twas vague as mud,
’Twas clear to Gertrude Stein.
³³

‘Hurrah for gloire’, cried Stein.
³⁴
There was something innocent about Stein’s instinct for fame. There was nothing cynical about it. Throughout her life she would rely on various unpaid propagandists (Dodge, Van Vechten, Sitwell, Hemingway, Alice) who were willing to put themselves out in her service, out of personal loyalty. The ‘Portrait of Mabel Dodge’ was also circulating in London. Throughout 1913, Stein was to be fêted as one of the most important exponents of the international avant garde.

More and more Stein was dependent on Alice’s approval, and bowed to her in all questions of how to proceed with her work and her life. In 1913, at Alice’s instigation, she went to London to find a publisher for
Tender Buttons
. There she met up with Roger Fry and other members of the Bloomsbury set including Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey. Her international fame was growing, but the international situation was to curtail its flowering at just that point.
Tender Buttons
was published in 1914, and war broke out while Gertrude and Alice were in London. ‘It was a strange winter ... nothing and everything happened.’
³⁵
In March 1915 Gertrude and Alice went to Mallorca, fleeing the war and their fearfulness. They were to stay there for a year. During this year in Mallorca Gertrude continued to write her love epistles to Alice, as a sort of staving off of the horror. And it proved a year of bonding, and settling into the roles that each would live in for the rest of their life together. A year later, in March 1917 they set off in the Ford car they had shipped in from the US, in service of the American Fund for French Wounded, delivering supplies to hospitals. They had sold their last Matisse — the famous
Femme au Chapeau
— to fund their war work.
³⁶
After the war, in 1922, they were both awarded the Reconnaissance Française.

Working for the American Fund for French Wounded.

Post-war Paris would never be the same, and the world of their salon was gone as they knew it. Apollinaire, the poet raconteur, would die in the 1918 flu epidemic; Leo had left and they would hardly speak again. After the war Paris would be filled with expats; their little world was broken, their golden age gone. This golden age seems in the collective memory to have lasted for a generation, but in fact the events that made her a symbol of bohemia, and that were characterized and embellished in
The Autobiography of Alice B.
Toklas
, the salon itself in this first incarnation, existed only between 1906 and 1913. In 1913 Marsden Hartley was writing to Gertrude somewhat obsequiously, as young men tended to write to her, that 27 rue de Fleurus was ‘a place where genuine ideas thrive and mediocrity walks away with discretion’.
³⁷
Here were the seeds of myth, the making of legendary stories. It was what brought American visitors of literary and artistic ambition in their droves after the war: the ‘heroic age of Cubism’ and of ‘The Legend of Gertrude Stein’.
³⁸
Yet it only lasted for a few short, resourceful years. Was it her, or her satellites; her, or her position of being able to comment on those around her that made this reputation? This was a question she would torment herself with: was it me or was it my work?

Stein would not be back permanently at the rue de Fleurus until 1919 . Then it would be a different kind of salon, and she would be considered the old guard. Stein was nearing forty, and she had thousands upon thousands of pages of work that was still unpublished. She was ‘dead broke’.
³⁹
But during the war years Stein had been strengthened in all her artistic convictions, as well as in her personal life. She had been published sporadically and occasionally in
Life
,
Vanity Fair
and a number of little magazines. She had finally come into her own, away from Leo, and with Alice at her side. After the First World War, Stein was already a cult figure, and her star was once again rising, though in a different orbit.