Gertrude Stein (Critical Lives) (3 page)

Stein always professed not to like highbrows and intellectuals. She celebrated ordinary people and aligned herself with the middle class. Belonging to the middle class, being normal, was a kind of lifelong disguise for someone as obviously eccentric and unusual as Stein; despite its implicit threat to her individuality, it was a label she could take refuge behind. She liked to make friends with anyone she came across, or perhaps it was that she liked to flaunt her friendships with mechanics, farmers and soldiers just as much as she name-dropped the aristocracy of the European avant garde. One rather smug, comic definition of democracy she later spun was that if you treat everyone equally anyone will do anything for you. Perhaps it was that Stein genuinely craved the freedom of classlessness. Brought up by governesses and always waited on by maids and cooks, Stein set many of her stories among the servant population, in whose environment patterns of thought and speech seemed more open to experimentation. The debate surrounding the influence of immigrant servants who lived within the families of mainstream America, ‘the servant girl question’, was a heated one during Stein’s girlhood. Many of her fictional servant girls are immigrants, or ‘foreign’, as she calls them. These foreign women’s marginality seemed to imply to her a certain freedom from conventional lexical, and moral, codes of decorum.

From the start hers was a life of privilege, and in all her accounts of it she is careful to present herself as extraordinary, an incipient genius. As Martha Hersland, her alter-ego, grows older she is separated from the children around her by a kind of natural selection. Although her father has no regard for social distinctions based on wealth or class, her ‘natural future’ separates Martha from her poorer friends.

In
The Making of Americans
her description of her childhood home was a lyrical love poem, a bucolic paradise; it was also an image of wildness and entangled nature held within limits. Around the house was a hedge of roses — ‘not wild, they had been planted’; there is an interest in breeding that links the exquisite roses with the rich people inside the fence.
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The poor people pick the roses and the family set their dogs on them, but they return. This theft signifies a larger social tension; here is middle-class America assailed by the people on its margins. Artificial selection cannot entirely contain or suppress the growth in the garden; the roses continue to grow beyond the fence; the deviations and mutations, the pressing on boundaries are what constitute life itself. The traditional walled garden of the family is invaded by societal pressures.

The walled garden of Stein’s childhood was, she always maintained, a happy place, and she would always stress the grand normality of her upbringing, but in 1885, aged ten, Gertrude began to realize that her mother’s health was in decline; frail and gentle Milly had become an invalid. In 1888, when Milly finally succumbed to cancer, Gertrude was fourteen. In
The Making of Americans
Stein characterized her mother as a weak little thing, amenable but detached. Fifty years later in
Everybody’s Autobiography
Gertrude’s own willed detachment from the emotions of that period had gone so far that she was able to dismiss her mother’s death, saying that the family ‘all already had the habit of doing without her’;
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and in
The Making of Americans
she was able, chillingly, to claim that after her death the family ‘soon forgot’ her.
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In her work she would only ever allow herself to overcome that forgetting of being mothered in momentary glimpses, such as this scene of confusion from ‘Possessive Case’ (1915): ‘I was trembling because my mother had never loved me and I circled about and I made a promise and I did lessen birds I showed the whole perturbation and believe me ...’;
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such glimpses are torn apart and scattered and impossible to piece together.

When her mother died, Stein was going through what she called the ‘agony’ of adolescence; she later alluded to her fear of death, loneliness and a ‘rather desperate inner life’ at this time.
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After Milly’s death, in 1889 Daniel Stein became vice-president of a cable car line, the Omnibus Cable Company in San Francisco, and the business prospered. His sisters conspired to find him a new wife, but none of them were suitable. Did the family mourn her? Gertrude left no record of it, other than a lifelong hostility to what she saw as weak women.

The first story Stein ever wrote, as a sophomore at college, was called ‘In the Red Deeps’, evidently written at the time when she was ‘still under the influence of George Eliot’.
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(It was an influence, along with that of Henry James, under which she would labour, never achieving a successful voice until she completely broke free of her two literary heroes.) In her story, Stein offered a fairly frank description of her feelings of sexual frustration at this time. She describes lying in bed next to her sister, listening to her breathing, overwhelmed by urges about ‘dreadful possibilities of dark deeds’, with sadomasochistic hints, and a powerful ‘fear of loss of self-control’.
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Stein remembered this story as one of her few expressions of the torment of her adolescence. Her mother’s death could not have come at a more crucial moment in her own development. But her response was to ignore or bury it. In her autobiographies she looked on the age of fourteen as a turning point, but was never explicit about why. She also implied that this was the time when she began to write, as a way of consoling herself for her ‘disappointment and sorrow’.
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What is striking is that there was disappointment before there was anything else. Her writing life was a way of trying to overcome a disappointment that had already engulfed her before she even began. Gertrude’s relationship with Leo was, however, fortified by motherlessness. Leo was her only ally, their books her only source of external comfort. ‘My mind from childhood was one which constantly fed on itself’, she later wrote.
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In 1890 she listlessly dropped out of the high school she had been attending for a year or so. Her formal education, at least until college, was patchy and subject to her father’s whims.

The following year, Leo went to wake his father, and found him lying dead in bed, and as Gertrude matter-of-factly put it: ‘Then our life without a father began, a very pleasant one.’
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If her response to her mother’s death had been muted and internalized, her response to her father’s could hardly have been less sentimental. The abrupt end of childhood was a serendipitous way out of a life she had been longing to escape. On Daniel Stein’s death each of the five children got $60,000 in property, stocks and cash. Thanks to big brother Michael’s prowess at managing these investments and his franchise of the cable car company, Gertrude and the others would be financially independent for the rest of their lives, and none of them would ever have to work for a living: a situation that could indeed be described as ‘pleasant’.

At seventeen, the orphaned Gertrude left California and moved to Baltimore, to live with her mother’s family among ‘a large number of those cheerful pleasant little people’, her aunts and uncles, as she remembered them from the height of her 1930s grandeur and acclaim.
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She later saw this as a humanizing experience. Meanwhile Leo had enrolled at Harvard, and it was not long before Gertrude joined him in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at first as a visitor. Then, a year later in 1893, she herself enrolled as a special student at Radcliffe, at that time known as the Harvard Annex, apparently by sending a single, persuasive letter in application to the Academic Board, and despite her desultory formal education. Being without parents, and without a proper education to speak of, without a home, would be the starting point of her proud claims to being a self-made genius. This was where most of her recollections about being Gertrude Stein began.

Stein was one of about 250 girls to enrol that year at Harvard’s younger sister institution (founded in 1879). By the time she arrived, she was immediately able to identify an ‘Annex Girl’ type; these were some of the first of what would become known as New Women. To these proper, earnest Eastern ladies, in pursuit of high ideals, Gertrude was so Californian that she seemed almost a foreigner.
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Living in a boarding house and billing herself as a David Copperfield figure, the orphaned Stein was confronted with new standards of behaviour in this province of Eastern learning. The West had meant to her ‘freedom, imagination and unconventionality’.
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Here the New Women of the East saw her as rough, eccentric and uncivilized. They commented on her fatness, her uncouthness and her uninhibited sweating. She in turn found them repressed and emotionally dishonest. There was a muted undertone of anti-Semitism in the atmosphere of Harvard, and most of Stein’s close friends were Jewish. Although in truth she learned to love Cambridge and became a popular student, her disdain for the American, ‘Anglo-Saxon’ college girl type — she saw them as a uniform, conformist type — would last her whole life. She immediately set about rising above them.

From the 1970s onwards a steady onslaught of feminist readings of Stein’s work (involving a brand of post-war feminism entirely alien to Stein herself ) ensured that her avant-gardism became overly connected with an explicitly feminist doctrine, without recourse to feminism’s historical meanings for Stein. (Of course, her complete refutation of gender as an issue in her work has made it all the more enticing as a field of study.) At the end of the nineteenth century, feminism was far from homogeneous, and becoming ever less so, and Stein’s involvement with the feminism of the turn of the century was engaged, but problematic to say the least.

Gertrude’s daily ‘themes’ for her English composition class were the testing ground for her first attempts at fiction. William Vaughn Moody, the poet and dramatist, was her tutor for English 22; a previous graduate of the class was Frank Norris. In these, her first completed compositions, she gave vent to adolescent anxieties and frustrations in a conventional, naturalistic style. ‘Books, books ... Nothing given me but musty books’, exclaims one autobiographical protagonist.
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Another enjoys a secret moment of sensual pleasure as a strange man presses up against her in church. It’s a muted scene of sexual rebellion, testing the constraints on feminine sexuality, of the kind that crops up in much New Woman fiction of the time.

Aside from offering insights into Stein’s adolescent psychology, these early college pieces are not of much literary value, and are not particularly well written. She had a lackadaisical attitude to revisions, informing her tutor at the end of one piece that she would rather be at the opera. But they do express her doubts and dissatisfactions about the education system for women. In ‘An Annex Girl’ (12 December 1894), a brief, rather forlorn fragment, an Annex girl with an enormous head perched on a frail body collapses on top of a ‘miserable little heap’ of books. (In the light of Stein’s subsequent career her tutor’s comment in the margin seems prophetic: ‘your vehemence runs away with your syntax.’)
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Taking a similar theme to somewhat more intemperate lengths, one of the most striking pieces is simply called ‘Woman’ (20 November 1894), in which the speaker offers an unfavourable definition of womankind: ‘Never again will I (ever) try to reason with a woman’, she announces melodramatically. ‘The eternal feminine is nice to be sure but it’s painfully illogical.’
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Stein, the medical student, late 1890s.

Unreasonable, hysterical, repetitive, pigheaded, and above all illogical. When Stein wrote this she was twenty years old, studying at Radcliffe and living off family money after the death of both her parents. She had not yet read Otto Weininger’s
Sex and Character
, which would further testify against this feminine illogicality by categorically equating it with immorality (and which would also rely on Nietzsche’s idea of the ‘eternal feminine’), but she had already decided that she did not want to be classed as a woman — just at the moment when technically she had become one. Her tutor’s wry comment at the end of this piece — ‘point of view nobly remote’ — perhaps reveals an awareness of Stein’s need to overcome her own illogical thinking. This was a time when she was struggling to make herself intelligible through the written word, in these daily ‘themes’.
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And this was the first appearance of what would become a persistent masculine authorial pose. By describing what a woman is, she automatically placed herself at a remove; in 1894 maturity, logical thinking, and the possibility of greatness meant masculinity for Stein. After this point she abandoned the creative writing course and her university career took a scientific turn; her scientific compositions would no longer require her to describe her own emotions, but would allow her free rein to dissect and evaluate the emotional lives of others.
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It suited her to believe the scientific gaze was implicitly masculine, free of feminine emotion.