Gertrude Stein (Critical Lives) (17 page)

In the early days there was the core of regulars, with a changing group of guests, as in a traditional salon. Stein has given us some of the most vivid tableaux of the era; in the legend, she created comedic gems such as 1908’s ‘Rousseau banquet’, a real event which was recorded in the memoirs of various participants; in her version this dinner held to celebrate the Douanier Rousseau (Henri Rousseau the painter) became a comic burlesque of the times, an absurd and joyful excrescence of the moment, at which poets and painters joined in a drunken revel, and somebody ate Alice’s hat — the main suspect being the poet André Salmon, although in real life it was probably a donkey called Lolo from the Lapin Agile. When she made a party into a symbol of an entire epoch, one of the legends she was helping to create was that this was a time and a place not just of bacchanalian abandon, but of self-conscious myth-making. The idea that her telling of these ‘charming stories’ relied on was that here self-invention was not only possible but necessary; one remade one’s own life story, one told it over and over again until it seemed truer than the real one. She gave herself that licence, and made it part of her myth of bohemia. The French concept of
redoublement
would be precious to Stein, whose work often repeats itself in leitmotifs, refrains, and repetitive scenarios.

A bastion of oral culture before the dawn of the television age, the salon was a place for talking, for friendship, and giving and receiving confidences, all seen as feminine skills. Stein was a great listener as well as a talker. Later her salon became a place where younger writers were brought to pay homage to Stein, purely because of the legend that had sprung up around her, hoping for intimate individual chats. Many commented on the beauty of Stein’s voice, which is preserved in recordings she made of such works as ‘A Valentine to Sherwood Anderson’ (the very title of which draws attention to Stein’s use of charm and favour in her work and in the marketing of her work).

Stein’s work is far more oral than other modernisms, and perhaps that is related to her skill in the ‘feminine’ art of conversation. She invested the spoken word with authority. Conversation has, indeed, been seen as ‘one of Stein’s great forms’.
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When she addresses the reader it is also as a listener, ‘my receiver’ — like a telephone receiver. Her work is often more intelligible when off the page: when it was converted into operas and ballets, when she herself delivered lectures, when it is read aloud (take the annual marathon New Year readings of
The Making of Americans
that took place in New York until recently, for example). Her plays, she insisted, must be performed before they were published. Her work also recognizes the value of ephemeral talk.
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It benefits from being read, its rhythms are those of speech. Stein revived the nineteenth-century idea of conversation as an art-form. Sometimes she would read aloud from her own work to her devotees, or get them to read it to her, as Paul Bowles remembered; she would listen appreciatively to the sentences she herself had constructed, and applaud the bits that struck her as particularly good. The salon was after all Stein’s audience — and for a long time she had more of an audience than she did a readership — and also replaced a family home.

Her sociability had an artistic function.
The Making of Americans
came directly from the character studies that derived from her hours of listening, and from that came the portraits and the rest of her mature output. There were several different languages in use at the salon, and it was all grist to Stein’s mill. Conversation propelled her prose, and the salon gave her countless subjects for her portraits and novels. The literary portrait itself was traditionally a genteel art form practised by the salonière, while
The Autobiography
of Alice B. Toklas
is both about the salon and influenced by the voice of the salon. It reproduces the salon world in its idiom as much as its subject matter.

After the First World War Paris filled with Americans fleeing prohibition and taking advantage of the exchange rate, and Gertrude Stein was surrounded by her countrymen again for the first time since she had left America. The new generation flocked to visit the now-renowned Miss Stein — she had always promoted the arts, not just art, but now there was a new incarnation of Stein’s salon that became more literary and more American. By the 1920s the salon was no longer based around the Saturdays; Stein would be in every afternoon from five o’clock onwards, and people dropped in as they pleased. Throughout the 1920s and ’30s young men made their pilgrimages to the shrine of Gertrude Stein and she coined the term ‘lost generation’ in description of them, while for them she was the embodiment of Left Bank bohemia come to life. She had become a mythical personage.

After the war social nicety, punctilio and protocol no longer had the same meanings, and traditional salon culture disappeared. Stein, in any case, had never been one for
politesse
(although she still had her rules). While a stereotypical hostess would be keen to engage and please her guests, Stein did not pander to anyone else’s idea of how she should behave. The painter Maurice Grosser wrote: ‘She was not at all the gracious and ingratiating hostess she is usually pictured to be. To the contrary, she was brusque, self-assured, and jolly.’
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(Alice, on the other hand, was most certainly a born hostess.) She spoke her down-to-earth American English; she dressed bizarrely; if she didn’t like you, you knew it immediately. One reading of the partnership sees Alice as the salonière, who orchestrated everything for Stein as her main literary lion, taking on the role of a Marcel Proust or an Anatole France. Stein had no patronage to offer, except the cachet of being with her. She created her own mystique and became her own salon’s greatest draw. Gertrude Stein helped turn the cultural work of the nineteenth-century salon, which had always been a private institution, into part of the twentieth-century publicity machine. Self-interest guided her own flair for self-publicizing, but in promoting herself through her salon she also contributed to a new era of image management and marketing of personalities. The new mass media made the old networks the salons encouraged into a forum for a new kind of celebrity.
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Stein was a canny manipulator of her own public image, at a time when these things were not ruled over by publishing companies and marketing strategists. She paid close attention to the way her work was printed and packaged, insisting on fine paper and bindings, so that the finished product was a beautiful object. She fetishized her own self-published work, according to Toklas’s expensive tastes. She used her famous contacts when for example Man Ray’s photography graced
The Autobiography
of Alice B. Toklas
, or Cecil Beaton provided the dust-jacket image for
Wars I Have Seen
. Just as an earlier salon hostess would often have a portrait of herself as the ‘
belle savante
’, done by one of the frequenters of the salon,
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Stein was seen to best effect in front of Picasso’s portrait of her. Early on Stein had bought Marie Laurencin’s portrait of the habitués of the salon — Apollinaire, Picasso, Fernande Olivier and Laurencin herself. She made no disguise of her attachment to the outward accoutrements of fame, and before mass media her paintings were the most appropriate signs of her status. They, like the salon itself, were her marketing tools.

Marie Laurencin,
Group of Artists
, 1908, oil on canvas.

There were sculptures by Lipchitz (1920) and Davidson (1922). There were busts by various young American sculptors, and photographs by Man Ray, later a portrait by Picabia. Recent critics have objected to the way in which Stein’s physical characteristics — her weight, her supposed androgyny — infiltrated the early discussions of her work.
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But Stein herself encouraged the dissemination of her own image as part of her literary persona. When she wrote
Everybody’s Autobiography
, she used as the frontispiece a photograph with the caption: ‘Gertrude Stein, wearing the dress in which she delivered her lectures in America.’
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She also changed the face of female ‘genius’, by moving away from norms of femininity both in her person and in her work. Wyndham Lewis’s memorable description of Stein as ‘a monument sitting on patience’
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owes its aptness to the fact that through her physical presence she had become an idol, an icon.

She was, in the time-honoured role of the salonière, a creator of other people’s literary reputations. She was part of the tourist trail, particularly for any young man wanting to make it as a writer. In November 1919 the American Sylvia Beach opened her bookshop Shakespeare and Company in the nearby rue de l’Odéon. Stein was the first to subscribe to its lending library (although according to Beach this was just a goodwill gesture, and she didn’t take an interest in the books). Sylvia Beach would act as an introducer of Stein’s fans to her (there was still enough sense of protocol to require that somebody did the introducing): ‘the poor things would come to me, exactly as if I were a guide from one of the tourist agencies, and beg me to take them to see Gertrude Stein.’
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Stein was as well-visited as a monument or a museum.

Sitting for Jo Davidson, photographed by Man Ray, 1922.

Francis Picabia,
Gertrude Stein
, 1933.

It was a performance, and was not entirely healthy for Stein as a writer. Although the central pillar of her reputation was her innovation (‘the “innovator” legend’ she had thrust upon her, Robert McAlmon carped) she was now seen as the older generation. Sherwood Anderson was one of the young men who now claimed her as an influence. He had discovered her in 1914 before writing his
Winesburg, Ohio
, which was a bestseller in 1919, and in Paris in 1921 he was determined to meet the writer who he already saw as a mentor. She would continue to act as his instructor, and the following year he wrote a rapturous introduction to her
Geography
and Plays
. He became one of her most loyal friends and facilitators. He had imagined her reclining on a chaise longue, sipping absinthe and surveying the world through jaded eyes; the woman he met could not have been more different from the image that had been contrived of her in America.

The young men Sylvia Beach brought along were invariably scared of Stein’s formidable reputation. In March 1922 the same was true of Ernest Hemingway, who had arrived in Paris the previous December. He was to become the new doyen of her court. Young Hemingway’s demure, grateful letters to her are a surprise. She wrote about their master/student relationship in ‘Objects Lie on a Table’. He was never reticent about stating how she had helped create the Hemingway style, partly through her advice — both literary and personal, partly as he emulated her written work (for example in ‘Mr and Mrs Elliot’, quite a close relative of Stein’s ‘Miss Furr and Miss Skeene’) and partly because she opened his eyes to various aspects of bohemian living (most obviously played out in his story ‘The Sea Change’, about a young man’s sudden, jealous contact with lesbianism). In 1923 she wrote a portrait of Hemingway called ‘He and They, Hemingway’. She encouraged him and gave him practical advice, as well as lecturing him on principles of composition, on rhythm and repetition. In 1923 she and Alice became godmothers to Hemingway’s first baby. According to Stein, Hemingway listened to and looked at her, and handed over all his work for her appraisal. ‘I have a weakness for Hemingway’, she said.
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