Gertrude Stein (Critical Lives) (23 page)

In May 1935 Stein and Toklas set sail again for France. The story of what had happened on her triumphant return to America, during the Depression, is told in the second of her autobiographies,
Everybody’s Autobiography
. It is both a sequel and a response to her first autobiography, and a full reading of it is somewhat dependent on having read
Alice B. Toklas
.
Everybody’s Autobiography
could be seen as even more a commercial stunt; it clearly traded on the first autobiography’s popularity; the name-dropping was still there — but there was a change. It is a fascinating book: a serious writer writing about fame from her own point of view as a personality, having gained a celebrity completely unrelated to her serious writing, her life’s work — perhaps a paradox unrepeated anywhere else in literary history. In
Everybody’s Autobiography
Stein reclaimed her indirect style. There is an undermining, puzzling technique at work as she redoes scenes from
The Autobiography
in a voice that felt truer to herself: more sceptical. It was a continuation of the story in Hollywood and the reception of the former autobiography, and how it affected her. Calling it
Everybody’s Autobiography
was a stretch, but it was a nod to her identity being in the public domain.

Stein had deliberately put autobiography to the same purpose as publicity, without compunction or false feelings about authorial truth. She had a disdain for pretending it was ‘true’. In
Everybody’s
Autobiography
she said it was impossible to ‘remember right’; her whole writing career had been about a similar inability, so she was hardly likely to pretend otherwise now. But after celebrity, she had to become a new kind of autobiographer. In the introduction she wrote that ‘anything is an autobiography’. ‘Alice B. Toklas did hers and now anybody will do theirs’, and Stein, wresting back her story from ‘Alice’s’ clutches, becomes a sort of everyman.
⁵⁹
Her first autobiography had been emptied of her own discourse.
Alice B. Toklas
was self-advertisement. Now she would begin to address once again how to really write about herself. This included oppressive thoughts about death, and connectedly, the book records her displeasure at being told (very early on, by her brother Leo) that it was her personality people were interested in, not her work. ‘Identity always worries me and memory and eternity.’
⁶⁰

She had been in 1937 to London, where she had been snapped by Cecil Beaton, and had more parties thrown for her, pursuing her fame in British literary circles, in a watered-down version of her American success. Just as she had found seeing her name in lights ‘upsetting’, she found the triumphant London staging of
A Wedding
Bouquet
, a ballet based on one of her plays, disconcerting; she felt, staring out into the darkness of the auditorium taking her bows, that it had nothing to do with her. Stein’s anxiety stemmed from the separation of her public image from her work. In her treatment of time in
Everybody’s Autobiography
once again she was at home with her insistence on the present moment, as a way of overcoming that distance and despair. Rather than optimism, this was what Bridgman calls her ‘pessimistic stoicism’.
⁶¹

Partly because of the smokescreen of self-conscious naivety in
The Autobiography
, and partly because of her instinctive reaction that if a readership was not available the next best thing was a public, Stein’s work and her image got horribly interlocked. Stein’s image was about the whole product, the display, the element of performance. Whereas once writing had been a private act, now she made a pose of writing in public places;
Lucy Church Amiably
was composed outdoors; she wanted it to be like a landscape, so, like a painter, she went and sat in the landscape in order to absorb it. She listened to acoustic patterns to get the thread of a piece. She wrote to the noise of a tap dripping; she wrote in the car (for example, she wrote ‘Composition as Explanation’, her complex exegesis of her own style, in a garage while someone was fixing her car). The car itself, the source of much hilarity and hi-jinks, was like the poodle, another prop. When she stood and took her bows on the London stage she realized that the writer had become the image, the act, and it upset her, because it seemed to foretell how literary history was already summing her up. That she wrote about these issues and made them the focus of her art made the boundaries even less clear. This confusion of subject matter is also one of the things that has made Stein criticism so bound up with biography.

Gertrude Stein as a puppet in
Identity
by Donald Vestal, Detroit Institute of Arts, 1936.

Evidently concerned about her own misrepresentation, she entered her period of explaining her own work. In
Lectures in America
and
Narration
(the published title of four more lectures delivered in 1935 in Chicago) she began explaining how she wrote in such deceptively simple-sounding titles as ‘How Writing is Written’, or ‘Poetry and Grammar’, where she invented a comic snobbery about punctuation: ‘I could never bring myself to use a question mark’; commas were servile and the use of them was ‘positively degrading’.
⁶²
In
The
Autobiography
itself she had defensively written: ‘Gertrude Stein, in her writing, has always been possessed by the intellectual passion for exactitude in the description of inner and outer reality.’
⁶³
Her writing had become full of defences of her style, and herself.

In
Lectures in America
she now called Wells, Galsworthy, Bennett — the very men to whom she had hopefully sent
Three Lives
a quarter of a century earlier — the ‘second-class’ writers. She claimed that literature had needed to move out of the nineteenth century, and it was the USA that had taken it into the twentieth century. It was she, an American woman, who had naturally been at the forefront of such a mission.
⁶⁴
The freedom to use words as she liked; she saw this as an American condition. The America she had seen left a lasting impression on her, and on her return to Paris she turned once again to patriotic themes, in ‘What America Means to Me’,
The Geographical History of America
, and
Four in
America
. In these pieces she also continued to write about the problem of identity, and reputation.
Four in America
imagines — erratically — what would have happened if George Washington had been a novelist, Henry James a general, Wilbur Wright a painter and Ulysses S. Grant a religious leader. And in
Four in America
she decided that ‘I am I because my little dog knows me’ (which had been one of her repetitive slogans) is a false proposition; she could no longer believe that her existence or identity depended on the world’s view of her.

During her 1937 visit to London for the opening of
A Wedding
Bouquet
she had been startled by the publicity surrounding Wallis Simpson. When Stein had lived in Baltimore at 215 East Biddle Street forty years earlier, Wallis Warfield, later Simpson, lived opposite at number 212. Struck by the coincidence of the fame each of them had recently achieved, as much as their enormous differences, Stein decided to write a novel on the subject of her former neighbour.
Ida, a Novel
would be published in 1940. It was about identity, and had a central character, Ida, who was both idle and an idol, and who was mainly interested in shopping. It was a droll book, and had its moments of black humour. She sent a copy to Mrs Simpson, who thanked her and hoped one day to be able to understand it.

Endlessly inventive in her prose and in her life she moved seamlessly into new incarnations. She drifted away from influence over modern painters — all that had faded. But her writing was at least now more read. And still the younger writers kept coming; Henry Miller, for example, sent her
Tropic of Cancer
asking for advice. Apart from the continuing adventures in autobiography, the experiment did not ease up. Having overcome her writer’s block, Stein was becoming as prolific as she had ever been. Between 1936 and 1940 she wrote several children’s stories, in which familiar themes were apparent: ‘Once upon a time I met myself and ran’ is a startling refrain from
The World is Round
. She wrote another libretto,
Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights
in 1938 (first produced 1951), her enigmatic version of the Faust legend.

All these writings are full of ‘pessimistic stoicism’; there was undoubtedly a darkness creeping into her work. Perhaps it was the sobering threat of impending war that made Stein also start to see the value of revision at this stage, an idea of final versions, final days, final statements. There was a Laurence Sternian ending to her philosophical meditation on the relation of human nature to the human mind,
The Geographical History of America
: ‘I am not sure that is not the end.’
⁶⁵
It was very far from being the end.

Stein appears to have been completely unsentimental about having to relinquish the scene of her decades of glory. In 1938 she was forced to leave 27 rue de Fleurus, as the landlord needed the apartment for his son. Stein and Toklas moved to the rue Christine, a street with its own illustrious ghosts; their new flat was in the building where Queen Christina of Sweden had once lived, and which their old friend Apollinaire had written about in ‘Lundi, rue Christine’. While Stein and Toklas were moving house, others were fleeing Paris, and France. By December 1939 her American friends were warning her to leave. They encouraged her to come back to the USA, where she was now famous, and had many friends, but she decided to stay put. She and Toklas put their papers in order, then went back to their country house at Bilignin in southeastern France, taking the Picasso
Portrait of
Gertrude Stein
with them. (They had already sent many of Stein’s papers to Yale for safe-keeping.) They would not return to Paris until December 1944.

When the Second World War arrived Stein was in her sixties. Stein and Toklas, both Jewish, lived in rural France under German occupation, where Stein continued to write, and produced several books about the war. German soldiers were even billeted in their house during August and September 1943, and again in July 1944 German soldiers came and stayed for the night. The pair kept out of the way and allowed the servants to see to the soldiers’ needs. Theirs was a precarious situation. To what they owed their miraculous survival has been a point of contention.

They had repeatedly been told by the American consul in Lyon to leave while they could. In early June 1940 they were packed and ready to go; but then they made the decision not to leave. Stein explained it with her ordinary, somewhat bombastic good cheer: ‘it would be awfully uncomfortable and I am fussy about my food.’
¹
When she retold the story in
Wars I Have Seen
, she made it into a reassuring tale of neighborly solidarity; the villagers had promised that they would look after them, ‘
en famille
’,
²
so that they felt happier staying where they were, rather than going to live among strangers, even when Paris fell to the Germans.

The region where they lived became part of the Vichy government, and at first German troops were removed from the area. In ‘The Winner Loses’ (August 1940) Stein hoped that, staying where they were, they would be ‘tremendously occupied with the business of daily living, and that will be enough.’
³
Stein read the classics, and books of astrological predictions and prophecies. They did everything to supplement their meagre supplies, from fishing for crayfish with an umbrella to working the black market, and Gertrude would go out foraging, walking miles every day for a few eggs, some milk. While Gertrude’s famous charm came in very useful, her international renown also naturally made them extremely conspicuous. In 1943, their money running out, they made the journey to Switzerland in order to sell Cézanne’s
Portrait of Madame Cézanne
, and the perilous return journey back into France; after which Stein commented: ‘we are eating the Cézanne’.
⁴
Her instinct was to turn everything into anecdote, even if it was a lugubrious one. Her friends asked why they had come back.

Stein’s identity papers.