Gertrude Stein (Critical Lives) (22 page)

When their ship got to New York on 24 October 1934 there was a boatful of reporters and photographers waiting to greet them. The journalists bombarded her with questions. When they asked her ‘why don’t you write the way you talk?’ she shot back: ‘why don’t you read the way I write?’ They delighted in branding her ‘The Sibyl of Montparnasse’. The lights in Times Square announced: ‘Gertrude Stein has arrived in New York’; ‘As if we did not know it’, said Alice. The next week in
The New Yorker
there was a cartoon of a customs inspector saying: ‘Gertrude says four hats is a hat is a hat.’
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A Pathé newsreel was made of Stein being interviewed. Van Vechten organized a party for Stein and Toklas in New York, at which George Gershwin played. Stein was everywhere: on the radio, in the papers, and making personal appearances on a whistle-stop, sell-out lecture tour of the country, from New York and Chicago first, to Yale, Bryn Mawr and Harvard, then to Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, Ohio, Indiana and on to Virginia, Louisiana and Texas, lecturing, taking classes at universities and meeting fans: all orchestrated by Alice, who, as they toured the country, was referred to as Stein’s ‘secretary’ or ‘travelling companion’. (Even in most personal memoirs written about the period in which the couple appear, she was simply Stein’s ‘friend’.) Stein was front-page news wherever she went. Alice was oddly unobtrusive. The media hardly noticed this ever-present alter ego walking in Miss Stein’s shadow, even though the book had been written in her name.

The window of Gimbel Brothers’ department store, New York, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1934.

Stein understood the importance of becoming a personality in order to make money from her work, having seen her friends and protégés do the same. So she agreed to being carted around on a precursor of the modern celebrity book tour: in style — she was a national heroine. She was startled by the advances of the machine age in America, particularly the amount of electric light, but told Natalie Barney that she was able to cross the street in New York with impunity because even the taxi drivers ‘recognise me and are careful of me’
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— a sign of her unshakeable faith in the power of her own image. She was received at the White House and met Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, neither of whom impressed her. She visited Hollywood, where she had a natural affinity for the Californian stars, and for the literary celebrities of her home country, some of whom she already knew from Paris. At one dinner party Anita Loos, Charlie Chaplin, Dashiell Hammett and Lillian Hellman were all in attendance. She had chosen the guests herself, and had been particularly keen to meet Hammett, with whom she spoke about her love of detective novels, and what she saw as the unimaginative way in which male writers wrote about men, which she put down to a crisis in masculine confidence.
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On a live prime-time radio interview for NBC, Bennett Cerf, the president of Random House, said: ‘I’m very proud to be your publisher, Miss Stein, but as I’ve always told you, I don’t understand very much of what you’re saying.’ To which she replied: ‘Well, I’ve always told you, Bennett, you’re a very nice boy but you’re rather stupid.’
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Stein was never afraid to mix her love of the lowbrow with her high modernism. She upbraided Sylvia Beach for not stocking certain pulp writers in her very high-minded bookshop, and claimed to read one detective novel a day. In the USA she became obsessively interested in the language of advertisements, particularly the Burma-Shave commercials with their punning billboard rhymes. By this stage of her life Stein wore her learning lightly, and she sometimes succeeded in deceiving people into thinking that she was something of an idiot savant. She had spent a lifetime being mocked, and she had her own vindication. But it was a dangerous game which impaired her reputation.

Her reaction to celebrity was to take it on as a sort of role play, a game. Even down to publicizing her insistence that she would ‘only’ lecture to 500 people at a time, which supposed exclusivity made her lectures more popular and ensured they were over-subscribed. Bennett Cerf later eulogized her as ‘the publicity hound of the world — simply great; she could have been a tremendous hit in show business’.
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But she dumped her agent, William Aspenwall Bradley, because he was too commercial, explaining to Carl Van Vechten (who was busy delightedly organizing parties to receive her everywhere she went): ‘There are some things a girl cannot do.’
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Although it clearly pandered to her megalomaniac tendencies, fame also disturbed her. Having a readership was a more difficult and painful thing than Stein could have imagined. In
The Making of
Americans
she had expressed her doubts that she would ever even have a reader, but now it had made her doubt herself.

Gertrude and Alice on the radio, 1934.

Stein was one of the first subjects of the burgeoning phenomenon of literary celebrity at a time when modern celebrity in general was changing. Fame no longer had the same value or meant the same that it had, and pop culture was on the horizon. The ability to drive the publicity machine was now becoming the most important factor in achieving celebrity.
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Stein’s connection with this false celebrity did her as much harm as good. That her image actually detracted from her writing made her telling of her own life more problematic. It has made criticism of her work and speculation about her life eternally intertwined; she herself was presented with these problems and confronted them in her writing. In her lectures she addressed in detail the differences publicity, broadcasting and what she saw as the newspaper mentality were making to literary expression — not just her own — in America.

Florine Stettheimer’s invitation to hear her fellow hostess speak.

She wrote that it was ‘upsetting’ to see her name in lights; when she saw herself on the newsreel she was unnerved; and the night before her first lecture she had to call a doctor because her throat was so constricted she couldn’t speak.
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It was a combination of being stagestruck and a deeper anxiety, a vacancy that she had discovered in the midst of adulation. And it made her lose her voice in another important way too. In 1933–4 she stopped writing for the first time in thirty years. Stein was a strenuous writer, a writer of enormous stamina — but she was brought to wordlessness by fame, by suddenly having a readership, a ‘buyer’.
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She admitted that it made her ‘nervous’. It becomes clear, from reading the subversions of her own straightforwardness in
Stanzas in Meditation
and
Everybody’s Autobiography
, that
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
was practically a piece of self-exploitation, so traumatic was it in the writing and its repercussions, for Stein.

But her lectures and university appearances were a great success. Back in Boston, they called her ‘Radcliffe’s most famous daughter’.
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In these lectures, later published as
Lectures in America
, she addressed her audience as the genius she had proclaimed herself to be, and rather than capitalizing on
The Autobiography
, took it as an opportunity to deliver her thoughts on serious questions such as ‘What Are Masterpieces and Why Are There so Few of Them?’, and ‘What is English Literature?’, which she went at in her usual sidelong manner. Often it was as though she had to plead with or cajole her audience into understanding her: ‘Oh yes you do see./ You do see that.’
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It is uncertain whether this was down to self-doubt — doubt about her own ability to make herself understood — or doubt of her audience’s capacity for understanding her. (In Radcliffe, faced with the po-faced women she had distrusted since her time there, she changed her pleas for her audience to understand to a curt: ‘Maybe you will, but I doubt it.’
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) She wrote her lectures in one of her ‘difficult’ styles, and in fact offered few concessions to ease understanding. Nevertheless there was a similar sense of demystification to that she had engendered in Oxford in 1926, because of the informal question and answer sessions that invariably followed them. In Chicago, she gave her famous explanation of the rose line:

I notice that you all know it: you make fun of it, but you know it. Now listen! I’m no fool. I know that in daily life we don’t go round saying ‘is a ... is a ... is a ...’. Yes, I’m no fool, but I think that in that line the rose is red for the first time in English poetry for a hundred years.
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When she talked off the cuff, as Bennett Cerf put it: ‘she talked as plain as a banker’.
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This was the Depression, and having written a gloriously upbeat memoir about a community of mischievous artists that seemed to celebrate frivolity, for the newspapers Stein was the light relief. Her own life, and the lives she wrote about that intersected her own in
The Autobiography
, were the celebrity lives that represented a distraction from the grinding hardships being faced by many of her readers. Inevitably there were those who found her distasteful. Isaac Goldberg wrote admonishingly of her in 1934: ‘an expatriate American, writing a language all but hermetic, poles removed from the common people and from their problems and interests, addicted to snobbery (the
Alice B. Toklas
is one of the most snobbish documents printed in this century, and perhaps in any other), suddenly is catapulted into the democracy of popularity. And she loves it.’
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This was strong criticism, but also epitomized critical bafflement about where to place Stein. That licence that Stein had given to those who populated her microcosm of bohemia, her flagrantly apolitical stories of artists doing as they pleased, for many did not sit well with the times. Her own seriousness, in fact, sits uneasily with the figure she had become. By 1933 she had already nurtured two generations of writers, but in October 1934 she was the laughing stock of
The New Yorker
’s Talk of the Town column — even down to her underwear.

After the American lecture tour Random House had offered to publish one book of hers a year, to which she responded with eager incredulity. Despite the enterprise of Plain Edition, Stein had never gone solo in her publishing efforts by choice, or to strike out as an avant-garde, but only by necessity —
Tender Buttons
was the first thing of hers anyone else agreed to publish, and that was ten years after she had started writing. Then it wasn’t until
Useful Knowledge
in 1928 — another fourteen years — that any mainstream publisher would touch her work, or want to pay for it.
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In
The Autobiography
she complained about how unadventurous the large publishing houses were — but she desperately wanted the money and acclaim that she thought they could bring her. Small print runs and inadequate distribution dogged her print career. She was hoping, as she had with her lectures, to use her celebrity as a way of getting people to read her other work. It did help her to achieve a wider circulation, but she also shot herself in the foot. She riled people into making more and more ridiculous parodies. The other stuff was not easy enough — it wasn’t what people wanted. Later Alice recounted the story of how James Branch Cabell, sitting next to her at a dinner party, leant over conspiratorially and asked: ‘Is Gertrude Stein serious?’ Alice’s answer was concise: ‘Desperately’, she replied. ‘That puts a different light on it’, said the writer.
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