Gertrude Stein (Critical Lives) (19 page)

The attendance of Anderson and Hemingway meant the years between 1918 and 1925 were something of a boom; suddenly her work was being published. The new atmosphere in Paris gave her new opportunities as well as new competition for her status as the chronicler of ‘the relationship of consciousness to language’.
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Obviously trying to keep up to date, in 1920 she wrote something called ‘A Movie’; in 1929 she also wrote a film scenario called ‘Film Deux Soeurs Qui Ne Sont Pas Soeurs’ — the first thing written in French she had ever published. In a piece called ‘I feel a really anxious moment coming’ she wrote about X-rays.
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New technologies had entered her line of consciousness. In the mid-1920s she turned to America again as subject matter, and became preoccupied again with the idea of a novel, which she had veered from in the previous decade. Examples of her later novels range from
Lucy Church
Amiably
(a ‘pastoral’ novel) to ‘a short novel’. What is more, she began for the first time to explain herself, which she had never done before in her writing. Later in her lectures she would become practically a full-time explainer of her own work.

In 1922
Geography and Plays
(a luminous compilation of some of her unpublished experimental works) was published with Anderson’s introduction. Hemingway persuaded an unsuspecting Ford Madox Ford to begin serial publication of
The Making of Americans
in
The Transatlantic Review
. Now her short pieces were appearing with some regularity in
The Little Review
,
Vanity Fair
and
Transition
. It was also Hemingway who secured the long hoped-for publication of
The Making of Americans
; his friend Robert McAlmon finally published it in his imprint Contact Editions in 1925. The spectacle of Anita Loos and Gertrude Stein signing
Gentleman Prefer Blondes
and
The Making of Americans
together in a Paris bookshop must have been something to behold.

When McAlmon fell out with Stein over getting her book into print, he wrote an anonymous parody — which he cuttingly called a ‘portrait’ — of Stein. Here he reported her as saying: ‘the Jews have produced only three originative geniuses: Christ, Spinoza, and myself.’
⁵⁵
Behind her back, many people were fed up with the atmosphere of hero-worship surrounding Stein. Pound later published the parody in
Exile
in 1938 and the words went down as if they were really hers. Many were beginning to see her as a false idol — and a very demanding one. It was perhaps a natural reaction to mistrust someone so ostentatiously charming.

However celebrated it made her, and however great the company, seeing herself as a salonière, a nurturer of male authors and artists, detracted from her serious reputation. But this also made her a creator of culture. This was a double bind of her own making. She publicized herself, and for that she was admonished by contemporaries. Many had a false impression of her as a mere socialite. Michael Gold, the mouthpiece of proletarian literature, weighed into her in a piece called ‘Gertrude Stein: A Literary Idiot’ in
The New Masses
. His was a false image of her as an idle, wealthy dilettante, whose writing resembled ‘the monotonous gibberings of paranoiacs in the private wards of asylums’.
⁵⁶
Stein, seen as the fat, moneyed decadent, the irresponsible bourgeois artist lazily perverting the common language, wasn’t popular with the radical political writers of the 1930s. Ironically, a more right-wing critical reaction would also see her as a symbol of cultural degeneration. In the 1950s B. L. Reid epitomized that tradition when he spat out his now well-known final judgement: ‘Later ages will gather about the corpus of her work like a cluster of horrified medical students around a biological sport.’
⁵⁷

Many contemporary discussions and parodies of her work mix up judgements about Stein’s body with imputations of mental illness or insanity, and babyishness, all adding up to the sort of degeneracy that she was seen to represent, the degenerate and hedonistic life of Americans in Paris. She got people’s backs up; many readers actually found her writing offensive, although — and because — as they invariably stated, they couldn’t understand it. Lampooning reviews appeared with titles such as ‘Officer, she’s writing again’ (a review of
Tender Buttons
); ‘Incitement to Riot’ (a 1923 review of
Geography and Plays
); and ‘Miss Stein Applies Cubism to Defenceless Prose’ (also 1923, in which the writer suggests that Stein is ‘ready for occupational therapy’).
⁵⁸
Her writing genuinely upset people. They called her insane, indolent, infantile, fat, Jewish, female. And they directly transposed these judgements to her writing.
⁵⁹
Even Edmund Wilson, at one point an admirer, referred to the ‘fatty degeneration of her imagination and style’ and to some of her prose as ‘echolaliac incantations ... half-witted-sounding catalogues’.
⁶⁰

Stein was no hedonist. She lived a temperate life, though she enjoyed good food and accepted good things when they came to her. She had wild dreams of making money from her work, but by the 1920s she didn’t really expect to. Her art was the thing which made her herself, it was the axis of her life. In fact, very far from one image of her as a fat, pampered baby or indolent socialite, one of the most striking things about her writing life is its extraordinary energy. (An energy that makes it nigh on impossible to briefly sum up her style, because she had so many of them.) She was no sphinx without a secret, she was an extraordinarily gifted communicator, which is what, for a contemporary public, made it so very alarming and intriguing that she chose to write in a way that often could not be understood. She had an artistic mission to fulfil that went beyond being an instructor or a facilitator for others — she wanted to lead the way. Her reservations about the cynical exercise of writing a bestseller in the 1930s were heartfelt soul-searching, and as such are touching. Her joyful appreciation of the money she earned was tempered with reservations about putting herself on the market and a distrust of writing for what she called ‘the buyer’.

The salon was certainly the forum for her to hone her biting wit, but separating the louche diction of the salonière — the epigrammatic backbone of the autobiography’s humour — from the self-questioning of the experimental writer is important. Her work (the novels, portraits, plays and poetry she was writing throughout the 1920s) was moving on apace, ever more outlandish and idiosyncratic, hermetic, while her life became more and more sociable. It was no act of wilfulness for one so patently able to express herself with formidable clarity to choose such obscure routes to making herself understood. She felt compelled to do so. It was only possible to explain her work by using the method of expression in which it was written. (That said, calling a piece as difficult as it is ‘An Elucidation’ is clearly perverse.)

Those who saw her as an infantile writer, or a degenerate one, unwittingly laid bare the ultimate discrepancy in Stein’s public image, between the naive writer and the effete ‘genius’. The toughness of much of Stein’s work is sometimes hard to triangulate with the almost giddy persona she sometimes gave the world. That she was naturally funny, outgoing and eccentric did not prevent her from turning aside to create works of intimidating austerity. In later works she used her natural humour to good effect and played up that amenable voice. Seldom did she combine the two. But the one impinged on the other in terms of her reception. That other voice plagued her. Stein was the victim of harsh and hostile criticism for many years, while celebrated and cosseted by those who loved her. But the lifestyle, the milieu and the fact that she was a well-known face made it impossible to separate the two Steins. This was confusing; her humour was distracting, and detracted from the seriousness with which her literary experiments were received.

Although Stein’s work was becoming more widely circulated, critics and reviewers were not debating her writing, but rather whether or not she was serious. In 1924–5 Edith Sitwell became part of the Gertrude Stein fan club. She came to Paris to interview Stein for
Vogue
, and while she was there she tried to persuade Stein to embark on a publicity campaign. Stein at first balked at the unsubtlety of the idea, but finally it was agreed that she would travel to England. She called the lecture ‘Composition as Explanation’ and delivered it in Cambridge and then in Oxford, in 1926. Harold Acton wrote an entertaining account of its reception, contrasting what the young men of Oxford expected of Stein — an exotic decadent — and the shock of the reality of the figure that greeted them. (Stein had in fact gone all out, as usual, to cut a dashing first impression, delivering the lecture in another of her costumes, a robe of blue brocade designed for her by a Parisian couturière.)
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The lecture audience was also struck by the difference between what she said and the way she said it: her easy, engaging manner, and her difficult prose; the voice that made you feel at home, and the words that made you feel at sea. ‘Nobody had heard anything like this before’, Acton wrote. Some members of the audience were offended by her words, and verbally attacked her in the two hours of questions and answers that followed. She dealt with them beautifully, attended by ‘her tall bodyguard of Sitwells and the gypsy acolyte’ (Alice).
⁶²
She was a hit. She felt ‘just like a prima donna’.
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Her own amusement and bafflement at her new-found status was telling. Her reputation was not coldly engineered; it was against her nature to be so gauche as to go all out for publicity, and yet she did have a way of winning people over that was one of her greatest talents.

At this stage of her career Stein was better known for the parodies of her work that appeared in
Life
and
Vanity Fair
than for her work itself. She was a sitting duck. Lord Berners, who became a friend, did clever pastiches of Stein for the London papers. (He also later wrote the score for Stein’s ballet,
A Wedding Bouquet
, which was produced at Sadlers Wells with Margot Fonteyn and Ninette de Valois.) At least, she ruefully retorted, ‘my sentences do get under their skin’.
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Back in Paris, James Joyce’s
Ulysses
was now taking centre stage. Although she and Joyce were the two great literary personalities in Paris at the time, they didn’t meet until 1930, when Sylvia Beach introduced them. They shook hands, exchanged stilted pleasantries, and went their separate ways. Stein was jealous of Joyce, and disapproved of
Ulysses
for her usually idiosyncratic reasons, but partly because she saw it as usurping the glory of
The Making of
Americans
. Stein’s
A Book Concluding with As a Wife Has a Cow: A
Love Story
was published in 1926, another vanity arrangement, illustrated with Juan Gris’ lithographs. Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press published
Composition as Explanation
. She wrote a ‘translation’ of Georges Hugnet’s ‘Enfances’ that was in fact a separate work, which cut out all the distastefulness in Hugnet’s poem (though it was about sex and death), and which led to one of those unbreachable sorts of rifts in which Stein’s friendships so often terminated. The cause of the disagreement, interestingly, was Stein’s insistence that she should get ‘top billing’ on the book’s cover. She still craved acceptance. By the example of those she had nurtured, from Picasso to Hemingway, Stein was beginning to grasp the way to disseminate herself to an even wider public.

It is a great paradox that the woman known as one of the most hermetic writers of the twentieth century also became a media figure and a celebrity author. In 1932, aged 58, she wrote
The Autobiography
of Alice B. Toklas
, and late in life Gertrude Stein experienced the most intriguing twist in her career: her book was a bestseller and made her a star. Her stardom came at a time when the nature of fame was changing, through the intervention of Hollywood and newsreels, radio and magazines. In turn it brought the theme of celebrity into her writing. That such an experimental writer should have experienced these changes first hand, so that she was then able to make them the subject of her experimental writing, is one more of the felicitous quirks of fortune in a life filled with them.

Some of Stein’s most innovative work in her long writing life was in the realm of autobiography, and even her most experimental poems, fictions and dramas were often autobiographical in genesis. Often, too, they related everyday events and feelings, as if she were using them as an encoded diary. Later she wrote what were officially announced as autobiographical works. Not only
The
Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
, but
Everybody’s Autobiography
,
Paris
France
, and
Wars I Have Seen
— all were experiments in the art of autobiography and memoir, and played with the generic limits of life writing. Her war memoirs are different again from the rest of her work: another new strand to her Protean style, although she was by then in her seventies.

In a sense all Stein’s writing is autobiography — to a far greater extent than can be said for most authors. Because most of her writing is about the nature of identity and how it might adequately be expressed through words, hers is the most self-referential
oeuvre
imaginable: her theme was herself and the workings of her mind. She is her own subject, in the scientific as well as the literary sense. Although in
The Making of Americans
Stein had rejected the possibility of a selective autobiography, most of the material is autobiographical; it is a ‘history of me and the kind of suffering I can have in me’.
¹
Critics have struggled with a conception that Stein’s ‘I’ must be somehow democratic, like Whitman’s, for example.
²

By the early 1930s she still held to the doctrine that one should write without a readership in mind. Her work was finally gaining a serious critical foothold.
The Dial
had published Marianne Moore’s review of
The Making of Americans
, and in 1930 William Carlos Williams wrote a review of ‘The Work of Gertrude Stein’, published in
Pagany
. The most important step came in 1931 with Edmund Wilson’s
Axel’s Castle
, a breakthrough because it took her seriously (mentioning her alongside Joyce, Proust and Eliot), and he was a major critic. Sherwood Anderson wrote to her — sycophantically, but with an element of truth: ‘anyone who follows writing sees your influence everywhere.’
³
And yet Stein’s writing was not going well, she had become unconnected from it, dissatisfied. She was taking stock of her achievements. In ‘Forensics’ in
How to Write
she claimed, somewhat optimistically: ‘At last I am writing a popular novel.’ But then added a typically undermining question: ‘Popular with whom[?]’
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