Gertrude Stein (Critical Lives) (20 page)

As her renown spread she began to write about fame itself. She wrote numerous plays, one of which was
Four Saints in Three
Acts
, a piece commissioned by the composer Virgil Thomson, who would write an opera score for it. (He said that when they met they immediately got on, ‘like Harvard men’.
⁵
The opera was produced in 1934 at the height of her American celebrity.) She had an interest in saints as figures whose legends stood above time, rather like geniuses. She was interested in the idea of how a life became legendary; she herself ‘always wanted to be historical’
⁶
— and she chose as the two main characters Spanish saints Ignatius and Teresa, because they were her ‘favourites’, rather as if the lives of saints she had been reading were a fun indulgence, like celebrity biographies.
⁷
She teasingly thought the libretto might get her on the radio and receiving royalties. She was right about her imminent success.

Advised by Jo Davidson, who sculpted the statue of her that now stands in Bryant Park, that she should try to sell her personality, she told him that she thought the public only had a right to be interested in her personality ‘in so far as it is expressed in the work’.
⁸
She was desperately concerned that her work should not be seen as a curiosity. But Stein needed money — in the early 1930s she was forced to sell some of her paintings simply to get money to publish her own work. Gertrude and Alice decided to sell Picasso’s
Girl with a Fan
to start their own edition of Stein’s work, to be called Plain Edition. (
Lucy Church Amiably
was the first book to be published under this imprint, in 1930.) Stein and Toklas were nothing if not entrepreneurs.

So she decided to write her autobiography, with the deliberate intention of making it a bestseller. She said she wrote
The
Autobiography
between October and November 1932, apparently dashing it off in six weeks. (It probably took longer, but she was also writing
Stanzas in Meditation
and other shorter works during the same period.) The publication of this highly readable and entertaining memoir made her famous after a lifetime of being called unreadable. Its deceptively straightforward style floored everyone, fans and critics alike.
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
was a conscious piece of myth- and image-making.

The timing was perfect.
The Autobiography
was the first and most hotly anticipated in a string of revelations of ‘legendary women’ — to quote Hemingway, who wasn’t quite prepared for the stinging treatment he would receive in its pages. Edith Wharton and Mabel Dodge, for example, both published their autobiographies within a year or two of Stein’s. In
The Autobiography
, in which Stein got in on the rising tide of celebrity culture, her talents as a raconteuse were made available to all the world; you no longer had to visit her salon to be party to the bitchy, clever, piquant wit.

Stein was a connoisseur of autobiographies and biographies, and had always teased Alice that she should write hers. The device of doing it for her, and using Alice’s gossipy voice to do so, was indeed a stroke of genius. Friends had begun to urge Gertrude to write her own autobiography. The reason she kept telling Alice to do it was that she was reluctant to enter into so blatantly commercial an exercise. The apparent
jeu d’esprit
that resulted wrong-foots and good-humouredly disconcerts the reader. When it was first published Stein’s name did not appear on the cover; the true identity of the author did not appear until the last, seven-word sentence of the last paragraph:

About six weeks ago Gertrude Stein said, it does not look to me as if you were ever going to write that autobiography. You know what I am going to do. I am going to write it for you. I am going to write it as simply as Defoe wrote the autobiography of Robinson Crusoe. And she has and this is it.

That the ending was a punchline turned the whole book into an elegant joke. But it was also one of its many punchlines, this ‘autobiography’ being a comic blend of non-fiction and fiction which artfully uses anecdote, irony, aphorism and paradox to achieve its effects.

It was completely different from anything Stein had ever written before, and this was the book that fixed her legend and her image in the popular imagination. The image of the imperious and daunting Stein is really created, by herself, in the 1930s, with humorous panache. If she had never written
The Autobiography
the glimpses of her that her other writing shows would give a far different impression, and the world would have had a far different idea of Stein. When it became a Book-of-the-Month Club selection in 1933, it was an instant smash hit.

Stein had often used a voice that sounded like Alice’s in earlier works, but never to the extent of a full-blown impersonation. Alice B. Toklas’s ‘autobiography’ is written in character. While in other works there was often a clash between Stein’s narrator and non-narrator selves, the one continually subverting the other, by using Alice’s voice in the
Autobiography
she pulled off the one thing she had always avoided writing — a story — with fantastic comic aplomb. It is one of the most successful comic voices of the era. When Alice says for example that, after Stein’s Oxford lecture, one young man ‘was so moved that he confided to me as we went out that the lecture had been his greatest experience since he had read Kant’s
Critique of Pure Reason
’,
⁹
the elaborately guileless voice of Alice B. Toklas becomes part of a humorous tradition that stretches from Huck Finn to Lorelei Lee.
¹⁰
The put-downs and pointed asides have the feel of being well-handled, and indeed they were stories that had been honed over the years; they were what Janet Flanner, the
New Yorker
’s resident Parisian, referred to as its ‘respoken conversations’.
¹¹
(This also made it quick to write.)

The Autobiography
is a commercial book. The story it tells is also a deliberately constructed success story. Stein’s cheerful persona probably makes her unique among modernist writers, and like most of Stein’s work the autobiography is indefatigably upbeat. Within its pages she stages the moment when her friend H. P. Roché commented that a chance remark of hers would be good for the biography — at which point she records a sudden, romantic, Hollywood-style realization that one day she, Gertrude Stein from Allegheny Pennsylvania, would have a biography. And it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, for here it is: Stein’s fairytale of success, the ‘biography’ Stein was looking for, though she cannily avoids mentioning that she has penned it herself.
¹²
This rags-to-riches story is slightly preposterous, but that is part of its appeal; it tapped into a myth of Parisian bohemia that many American readers wanted to believe in and vicariously enjoy, now that the Depression had curtailed the easy flow of tourists to the city.

Using her Parisian contemporaries as walk-on characters, its subject was, as ‘Alice’ herself put it, ‘the vie de Bohème just as one had seen it in the opera’.
¹³
By calling it bohemia, as by calling herself a genius, Stein gave herself and everyone else in the book an out of the ordinary licence to behave outrageously, but she tamed it all, brought the misrule into check in the end, by making all her characters middle-class success stories.
¹⁴
What Stein managed to do through her perfectly finished anecdotes (none of them too risqué or revealing) was to turn individuals into embodiments of culture — into celebrities — and in fact transformed culture itself into celebrity-watching. After her autobiography America wanted more ‘lives of legendary women’; she epitomized a trend that was continued by people like Margherita Sarfatti (the Italian salonière and Benito Mussolini’s lover), who wrote their stories in deliberate imitation of Stein’s mother of all Paris memoirs. Others, like Robert McAlmon and Ernest Hemingway, wrote in retaliation.

Critics have pointed out the selfishness of making Alice the mouthpiece for Stein’s unmitigated self-congratulation and then calling it her ‘autobiography’. Though on one level it is a supremely solipsistic device, in reality Alice (who had often acted as a double and an answering voice in the writings) was in on the act from the beginning, helping with drafts and making numerous corrections, perhaps suggesting more serendipitous, or more Alice-like, phrasing. By writing what is essentially her own memoir through the point of view of another, someone who, though she could not have been closer to Stein, only met her when she was already the adult ‘Gertrude Stein’, Stein avoids having to write about her own childhood. She allows ‘Alice’ to gloss over this period of her life happily. Toklas was cast as the innocent abroad, which allowed Stein a faux-naif voice that not only recast all the unpleasant details in a happier light, but gave all her bitchiest observations even more impact for their fragile pretence of wide-eyed innocence.

It also allowed her to enact a simultaneous display and concealment of her lesbian life, to parade and disguise their love. Catharine R. Stimpson, one of Stein’s pioneering commentators of the 1980s, questioned the ‘decorum’ of this strategy — the ‘tactfulness’ of hovering between letting readers know about their relationship and not letting them know — suggesting it is a kind of ‘repression’.
¹⁵
It is possible to see Stein’s attitude to her own sexuality, as she expressed it in her work, as full of half confessions and deliberate obscuring; if it was so, it was as a product of the culture in which it existed. She flouted convention to the utmost, but she wanted recognition, and she wrote
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
for the mainstream. She gave dainty morsels of their domestic life together, as would a celebrity interview, but never gave away so much that could be completely pieced together. She acted as if she was being completely transparent, all the better to cover up her homosexuality. But at the time Stein’s lesbianism was both there for all to see and, because not commented on, almost see-through — and accepted. In illustrating the book, the couple chose impressive images of themselves together and of Stein alone, and interspersed them with images by Picasso and others, packaging themselves as the domestic nurturers of genius, both down to earth and brilliant. The glimpse into their home life satisfied a similar need as a magazine spread or a documentary; it was an early celebrity biography, except that it was written by a serious writer.

Stimpson commented on ‘the packaging of homosexuality’ in
The Autobiography
, how Stein changed her own ‘subversion’ into ‘entertainment’. As Stimpson argues, calling herself a ‘genius’ as Stein did neutralizes her other abnormalities (namely her lesbianism), makes them non-threatening, because a genius is not expected to fit in with ‘normal’ life; it exempts her from ‘normal’ behaviour without making her ‘abnormal’ in an unpresentable way.
¹⁶
Stein does not include any details of her life in Paris that might be considered shocking — with a mercenary eye on the bestseller market, but it wasn’t in her to do so anyway. Because it could not state the actual relationship between the two women, the book could not be ‘true’, even if any life writing could. It is about her life with Alice Toklas, but it could not talk about the way they lived together. So it is instead a version of their life together. Stein is exceptionally self-reflexive and knowing about the limits of the real in the written word.

The book’s comic buoyancy, its relentless way of ignoring anything negative — related to Stein’s ‘charm’ — is in fact an outcome of Stein’s search for approval and acceptance: not self-confidence at all, but its opposite. She clearly did feel stifled at the same time as trumpeting her achievements, because her anxiety flowed out into
Stanzas in Meditation
. Early on in the autobiography Stein pointedly confesses to being ‘a little bitter’ at the fact of all her unpublished manuscripts. She had always wanted to create something ‘everlasting’, and now she was beginning to worry that publication and recognition had not come to her, had passed her by, while those she had encouraged were garnering laurels and becoming public figures. Stein hated solitude. She needed to express herself continually, to communicate herself to others. She was forever building a splendid image of herself and the
Autobiography
is the apogee of that determination. It can be seen as another portrait, or series of portraits — think of the chapter headings such as ‘Gertrude Stein in Paris’; they merge with the photo captions. This self-portrait became, once again, more famous than the real Stein. Here she became a character, living inside an eminently readable book.

In
The Autobiography
she carefully disparaged other writers who might threaten her throne, or to dislodge her crown — Marinetti (‘very dull’), Pound (‘a village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not’
¹⁷
), and, most treacherously, Hemingway. Veiling all with a veneer of politeness, Stein allowed ‘Alice’ a fugue of barbed observations: Hemingway is ‘yellow’; ‘he looks like a modern and smells of the museums’; he was created by Gertrude Stein and Sherwood Anderson, ‘and they were both a little proud and a little ashamed of the work of their minds’.
¹⁸
A mutual friend, Hutchins Hapgood, attributed Stein’s bad treatment of Hemingway in
The Autobiography
to the latter’s anti-Semitic portrayal of Robert Cohn in
The Sun Also Rises
.
¹⁹
Another reason was Hemingway’s vicious Sherwood Anderson spoof in
The Torrents
of Spring
, which Stein must have seen as ungrateful and disloyal. But even Anderson himself was slightly appalled ‘when you took such big patches of skin off Hemmy with your delicately held knife’.
²⁰
The cloaked venom Stein had used against Hemingway also worked for others.
The Autobiography
is full of the most intricate and ladylike put-downs.