Gertrude Stein (Critical Lives) (18 page)

Other American visitors in the 1920s included Hart Crane and Thornton Wilder; the latter became one of Stein’s closest friends who, in 1974, remembered that ‘she was
the
great influence on my life.’
²⁹
By the early twenties Cubism was ‘dead’; and Dada had been born (in its literary incarnation nothing much to do with Stein, although newspapers facetiously labelled her ‘the mama of Dada’ because of her association with visual artists like Picabia and Duchamp) and Surrealism was the latest thing (Stein thought it essentially old-fashioned, unchallenging). She took up with Jean Cocteau and Erik Satie, Picasso’s new friends. Stein said that Cocteau had been the ‘first French writer to speak of her work’; he liked her work and claimed that it influenced him, though in effect their relationship went very little further than mutual flattery.
³⁰
Each saw the usefulness of being associated with the other.

The rue de Fleurus became a meeting place of egos partly by serendipity and partly because Stein was a networker extraordinaire. Her fairly mercenary attitude to acquaintances, her indisputable careerism and her egotism were all defining factors. And she was, after all, blindly ambitious, although she presented a magnanimous, serene face to the world. Equally, the people who came were sometimes more interested in themselves and what kudos she could offer them than in her or her writing. It was known that she could make literary reputations. She wielded her power judiciously, and was careful not to invite people who might undermine, embarrass, or doubt her, or anyone who might usurp her — like Pound or Joyce. (When Pound asked to come and see her again, having recently broken one of her chairs, she claimed to have dismissed him with the words: ‘I am so sorry ... but Miss Toklas has a bad tooth and besides we are busy picking wild flowers.’
³¹
) She gradually filtered out anyone who wasn’t an absolute believer in her. T. S. Eliot objected to her on the grounds that she only expected ‘devotion and faith’. Any other attitude was, he thought, intolerable to her.
³²
The salon was an important social network that involved a great deal of mutual stoking of one another’s egos: which also led to back-stabbing. Stein by this time was also stocking up well on ex-friends. ‘How did you quarrel with so many all at once?!!!’ Carl Van Vechten asked her incredulously.
³³

She inspired rivalries among her followers, such as that between Van Vechten and Wilder. Hemingway said she never spoke well of any other writers unless they could advance her cause in some way. The only exceptions, he claimed, were Scott Fitzgerald and Ronald Firbank.
³⁴
There is no record of any meeting with Firbank. Fitzgerald held her in the high, affectionate and slightly daunted regard of an apostle; he sent her a copy of
Tender Is the Night
when it was published, with the inscription: ‘Is this the book you asked for?’
³⁵

This was her dream: to find herself among male artists and intellectuals — and conquer them. It was a reversal of the salon hostess’s traditional role, to enhance the men’s conversation and advertise their achievements. Stein’s work was on a separate tack from male modernism, and above it, in her own mind. She set herself up as a ‘teacher’, a charming pedagogue, more a mentor than a traditional society hostess. Her favourites, in the courtly sense, were mainly men. She loved being loved. She enjoyed most people’s images, interpretations, and constructions of her, even when they were slightly derogatory (like Skinner, Sitwell, Zangwill) — because she was so interested in herself, she revelled in other people’s interest in her. But to be fair to Stein, she also had an enormous, insatiable interest in other people.

She threw parties at which people kowtowed to her primadonnaish behaviour. She was famous for teasing her male guests, her delight in making others squirm. She would ask people if they had read
The Making of Americans
(not the most commonly achieved of feats even in her circle), and when they said yes, she would ask them their opinion of a particular passage on a particular page, knowing full well that they would be unable to answer. Her baiting of the young men around her was like an intellectual parlour game. Sylvia Beach claimed that ‘Gertrude Stein had so much charm that she could often, though not always, get away with the most monstrous absurdities.’
³⁶
Paul Bowles remembered being chased round the garden of Stein’s country house in Bilignin by Basket the famous poodle (the ostensible reason was to dry out the wet poodle after his bath), dressed in a pair of lederhosen, known as his ‘Faunties’, that Stein had made him wear, as she shouted at him ‘Faster, Freddy, faster!’ (she insisted on calling him Freddy), and when he asked if he could stop: ‘No! Keep going!’ Bowles: ‘There was no way of doubting that she enjoyed my discomfort. But ... I was flattered by the degree of her interest.’
³⁷
They all endured it. Partly because of the ‘cajoling ways’ she had learnt in childhood — a charm she ascribed to being the youngest child, that never left her
³⁸
— and partly because to hang out with Gertrude and Alice was to have arrived on the Paris scene.

Stein and Toklas’s techniques included snobbery and favouritism — for example Alice Toklas called the Russian painter Pavel Tchelitchew ‘a dreadful little arriviste’ (after he had done portraits of both of them and the dog).
³⁹
Alice’s hostility to some could be intimidating. Picasso’s mistress Françoise Gilot said her voice was like ‘the sharpening of a scythe’.
⁴⁰
She was also the preserver of the salon’s good manners. Hemingway satirized this as being struck over the head with a bicycle pump by the maid in order to get him to leave. ‘Miss Stein was always charming’, he adds, and in this context the word ‘charming’ becomes as catty a veiled insult as she ever dealt him.
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‘Charming’ is even more obviously a pejorative term in his spoof ‘Autobiography of Alice B. Hemingway’,
⁴²
‘charm’ being a feminine skill equated with dissimulation. Hemingway said that Stein ‘had such a personality that when she wished to win anyone over to her side she could not be resisted.’
⁴³
She could deliver stinging judgements to people’s faces and they wouldn’t mind, if she was smiling — as Bowles recalled. That was partly because her relationships were self-serving on both sides. In this way she kept up the role of motherly, teasing, flirtatious mistress of ceremonies, as well as the main attraction. Those she kept around her were eager to please. The main criterion for being asked back was an ability to scintillate, not necessarily any talent.

Stein and Picasso in Stein’s garden at Bilignin,
c
. 1930.

There was a certain flippancy and fleetingness to the culture which she encouraged. ‘Give me new faces new faces new faces I have seen the old ones’, she wrote, quoting a favourite song of Alice’s, in
Everybody’s Autobiography
.
⁴⁴
Stein and her salon could be seen as a step along literature’s way to becoming a commodity, a tributary of show business.
⁴⁵
Carl Van Vechten, one of her most loyal subjects, who she named as her literary executor in her will, wrote without embarrassment after her death about their relationship: ‘We talked little of her work, although we often read it.’
⁴⁶
(This probably says more about Van Vechten, a promoter, publicist and party animal, than it does about Stein.) Such frivolity, typical as it was of salon discourse, was also implicitly a feminine attribute. Being a ‘liar’ as Leo, the ‘Testimony Against Gertrude Stein’ which appeared in
Transition
, and, in a sidelong way, Hemingway, accused her of being, was almost part of the trade. There was a slippery and somewhat untrustworthy quality that belonged to charm. Stein’s word experiments were another facet of this. Her playfulness and her relativism — the fact that her work is not about truth, just about process — also make them untrustworthy. But shallowness and surface were not the values she deliberately fostered. When she wrote
The Autobiography
she could hardly forgive herself for the gossip it seemed to glorify. Nevertheless the book, the salon and the image of Stein herself fed into the growing consumer culture surrounding the arts in general. As she magisterially pronounced in
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
, ‘everybody came and no one made any difference.’
⁴⁷

By now there were other rival expatriate salons, and the old private cliques that prospered in the drawing rooms of the Faubourg mansions were no longer relevant to a dynamic, democratic café society that relished publicity and wanted as big an audience as possible. In the expat community everyone knew what everyone else was doing. Stein did not frequent the café scene, which was where much of Parisian society had moved; she let it come to her. There were other contemporary women who filled the role of salonière at one time or other — Bloomsbury hostesses including Lady Ottoline Morell, ambitious writers and social butterflies such as Violet Hunt, society ladies like Nancy Cunard. These three themselves each paid visits to Stein’s atelier. Following Stein’s lead, Mabel Dodge initiated her fairly short-lived Wednesday evenings in Greenwich Village in 1913. In the 1920s Sylvia Beach’s bookshop also functioned as a salon of sorts.

The other main Parisian salon was Natalie Clifford Barney’s. Barney arrived in Paris in 1902, a year before Stein. Her regular meetings were held on Fridays. Barney’s salon was a meeting place for lesbians, but she also held another version at which everyone was welcome. Sapphic parties were held in the back garden, and a literary salon in the drawing room, and she held formal evenings at which writers were inducted into her ‘academy of women’.

Stein’s finances were not in the same league as those of the heiresses Barney and Cunard. One of the things she counselled Hemingway about was financial prudence, although she didn’t need a job, so there was financial freedom of a sort — more than Hemingway had. Stein’s salon was a middle-class salon. Neither was hers a lesbian salon, a community of women writers in the manner of Barney and Renée Vivien, or Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier. In
The Autobiography
Stein mentions Barney, as well as her friend the Duchess of Clairmont Tonnerre, one of the sights of ‘Paris-Lesbos’.
⁴⁸
But Stein’s was, in fact, a remarkably heterosexual salon.

Barney promoted other Left Bank writers, and women writers in particular, giving them opportunities to circulate their work. Stein, in contrast, preferred male writers, and her salon was more concerned with self-promotion.
⁴⁹
Gertrude Stein was not a promoter of others, but of herself, and she didn’t see the salon as a forum for women’s rights, just her own. (There is also the fact that biographers have preferred to dwell on her relationships with male contemporaries rather than her relationships with women.) Barney’s was probably more magnanimous and less self-serving. Though the two were friends who enjoyed a walk in the park together, Stein did not as a rule venture to Barney’s evenings, though she made an exception in order to attend an evening celebrating herself in 1927, featuring Mina Loy and Ford Madox Ford, and 200-odd assorted admirers.

Stein was not a fan of chivalry — mainly because she wanted to be treated as a man — or etiquette — she made up her own rules. One of these was the seemingly bizarre habit of having Alice usher the wives out of earshot so she could convene with the great men alone. Alice would preside over the tea table and talk about hats and perfume with the women. This vetting process was one traditional piece of salon culture that Stein preserved, and was quite the opposite of Barney’s lesbian get-togethers. Djuna Barnes’s hostile reaction to Stein was partly due to this chauvinism, as she saw it. Sylvia Beach thought the ‘cruelty to wives’
⁵⁰
was odd on the grounds that it only applied to wives, rather than girlfriends, mistresses or other female companions. Perhaps the reason was simply that most of writers who came were male, and Stein was naturally interested in speaking to them rather than anyone else they had brought along. Banishing the wives allowed her to promote herself more persuasively among influential men, without the possibility of contradiction from a rival female. They joked that Alice’s autobiography should be called ‘Wives of Geniuses I Have Sat With’. Stein categorically wanted to guard her own place among the geniuses. Bravig Imbs, the writer and devotee of the Stein salon, explained that Alice acted as a ‘sieve and buckler. She defended Gertrude from the bores and most of the new people were strained through her before Gertrude had any prolonged conversation with them.’
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Alice also (according to Maurice Grosser), if she got very bored of the wife or girlfriend, would ‘enlist Gertrude’s help to try to make the pair break up’.
⁵²

Stein’s salon was of course flourishing at a time when new liberties were flourishing for women. It was a feminine calling, but it was also the perfect role for her, she who had seen herself as an anomaly, a masculine woman, one who preferred the company of men to women. She could be of them and above them. The traditional salon had always been an area where women could have an influence, albeit surreptitious. Everything rotated around the salonière. Without a voice in print, she could dish out criticism at will. Stein too was very patchily published, and her print voice was nothing like as well known as it is now, thanks to the posthumous publication of her uncollected writing. But her role as a hostess allowed her to become a senior figure in the Paris literary scene, dispensing her judgements on a world that was still failing to take her work seriously. It made her, eventually, part of the establishment.