Gertrude Stein (Critical Lives) (30 page)

¹³
For a discussion of Jewish salons, see Emily D. Bilski and Emily Braun, eds,
Jewish Women and their Salons: The Power of Conversation
(New Haven, CT, 2005).

¹⁴
Stein,
Selected Writings
, p. 46.

¹⁵
See Bilski and Braun,
Jewish Women and their Salons
, p. 115.

¹⁶
Gertrude Stein,
As Fine as Melanctha
(1914–1930), vol. IV of
The Yale
Edition of the Unpublished Writings of Gertrude Stein
(New Haven, CT, 1954 ), foreword by Natalie Barney, p. xii.

¹⁷
Ernest Hemingway,
A Moveable Feast
(London, 1964), p. 18.

¹⁸
Robert McAlmon and Kay Boyle,
Being Geniuses Together
(London, 1970 ), p. 204.

¹⁹
Robert Bartlett Haas,
A Primer for the Gradual Understanding of
Gertrude Stein
(Los Angeles, CA, 1973), p. 13.

²⁰
For an interesting reading of Stein’s orality, see Lucia Re, ‘The Salon and Literary Modernism’, in
Jewish Women and their Salons
, ed. Bilski and Braun, pp. 188–93.

²¹
Maurice Grosser, ‘Maurice Grosser on Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas’, in
The Company They Kept: Writers on Unforgettable
Friendships
, ed. Robert B. Silvers and Barbara Epstein (New York, 2006 ), p. 154.

²²
See Emily D. Bilski and Emily Braun, ‘Expatriates and Avant-Gardes’, in
Jewish Women and their Salons
, ed. Bilski and Braun, p. 125.

²³
Ibid., pp. 10; 117.

²⁴
To appreciate the malicious element to this type of criticism one only need look at Wyndham Lewis’s
Time and Western Man
, wherein he described Stein’s writing as ‘a cold suet-roll of fabulously reptilian length. Cut it at any point, it is the same thing; the same heavy, sticky, opaque mass all through ... all fat without nerve ... the life is a low-grade, if tenacious one.’
Time and Western Man
(London, 1927), p. 77.

²⁵
Gertrude Stein,
Everybody’s Autobiography
(New York, 1937).

²⁶
Lewis,
Time and Western Man
, p. 78.

²⁷
Sylvia Beach,
Shakespeare and Company
(New York, 1959), p. 29.

²⁸
Stein,
Selected Writings
, p. 203.

²⁹
Quoted in Janet Hobhouse,
Everybody Who Was Anybody: A Biography
of Gertrude Stein
(London, 1975), p. 185.

³⁰
See Mellow,
Charmed Circle
, p. 252.

³¹
Stein,
Selected Writings
, p. 190.

³²
Quoted in Simon,
The Biography of Alice B. Toklas
, pp. 157–8.

³³
The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Carl Van Vechten 1913
–
1946
, ed. Edward Burns, vol. I (1913–1935) (New York, 1986), p. 236.

³⁴
Hemingway,
A Moveable Feast
, p. 30.

³⁵
Alice B. Toklas,
What Is Remembered
(London, 1963), p. 117.

³⁶
Beach,
Shakespeare and Company
, p. 32.

³⁷
Paul Bowles,
Without Stopping
(London, 1972), pp. 120–21.

³⁸
Gertrude Stein,
Wars I Have Seen
(London, 1945), p. 3.

³⁹
Quoted in Simon,
The Biography of Alice B. Toklas
, p. 158.

⁴⁰
Françoise Gilot and Carlton Lake,
Life with Picasso
(Harmondsworth, 1964 ), p. 62.

⁴¹
Ernest Hemingway, ‘The True Story of My Break with Gertrude Stein’, in
The Critical Response
, ed. Curnutt, p. 254.

⁴²
See Linda Wagner-Martin,
‘Favored Strangers’: Gertrude Stein and Her
Family
(New Brunswick, NJ, 1995), p. 201.

⁴³
Hemingway,
A Moveable Feast
, p. 22.

⁴⁴
Stein,
Everybody’s Autobiography
, p. 119.

⁴⁵
See Emily D. Bilski and Emily Braun, ‘Expatriates and Avant-Gardes’, in
Jewish Women and their Salons
, ed. Bilski and Braun, p. 125: ‘Speaking in earnest gave way to the importance of seeing and being seen. Stein helped turn literature into sound bites and salons into show business.’

⁴⁶
Carl Van Vechten, ‘How to Read Gertrude Stein’, in
Gertrude Stein
Remembered
, ed. Linda Simon (Lincoln, NE, 1994), p. 44.

⁴⁷
Stein,
Selected Writings
, p. 116.

⁴⁸
Benstock,
Women of the Left Bank
, p. 47.

⁴⁹
Benstock draws attention to the different values of Barney’s and Stein’s salons, ibid., p. 15; p. 86.

⁵⁰
Beach,
Shakespeare and Company
, p. 31.

⁵¹
Bravig Imbs,
Confessions of Another Young Man
(New York, 1936), p. 116.

⁵²
Grosser, ‘Maurice Grosser on Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas’, p. 159.

⁵³
Richard Bridgman,
Gertrude Stein in Pieces
(New York, 1970), p. 162.

⁵⁴
Ibid., p. 164.

⁵⁵
McAlmon and Boyle,
Being Geniuses Together
, p. 228.

⁵⁶
Michael Gold,
Change the World!
(London, 1937), p. 25.

⁵⁷
B. L. Reid,
Art by Subtraction
(Norman, OK, 1958), p. 207.

⁵⁸
Quoted in Curnutt,
The Critical Response
, p. 28.

⁵⁹
Robert McAlmon managed to use just about all of them in his ‘Portrait’ of Stein, written in the form of a parody of her writing; he calls her ‘a Sumerian monument’ possessing a ‘jungle-muddy forestial mind naively intellectualizing’; associates her thought processes with ‘biblical slime’ and ‘oracular proclamations ... mediumistic deliverances’; calls her an ‘aged elephant’ ... ‘heaving from the slime’ ... ‘a slow child’ (McAlmon and Boyle,
Being Geniuses Together
, pp. 228–30).

⁶⁰
Edmund Wilson,
Axel’s Castle
(New York, 1931), p. 239; 252.

⁶¹
Mellow,
Charmed Circle
, p. 294.

⁶²
Harold Acton,
Memoirs of an Aesthete
(London, 1948), pp. 161–2.

⁶³
Stein,
Selected Writings
, p. 221.

⁶⁴
Ibid., p. 66.

¹
Gertrude Stein,
The Making of Americans
(Normal, IL, 1995), p. 573.

²
On Stein and Whitman see Joseph Fichtelberg,
The Complex Image:
Faith and Method in American Autobiography
(Philadelphia, PA, 1989), pp. 170–71; G. Thomas Couser, ‘Of Time and Identity: Walt Whitman and Gertrude Stein as Autobiographers’,
Texas Studies in Literature
and Language
, XVII/4 (1976), pp. 787–804.

³
Quoted in Janet Hobhouse,
Everybody Who Was Anybody: A Biography
of Gertrude Stein
(London, 1975), p. 157.

⁴
Gertrude Stein,
How to Write
(Los Angeles, CA, 1995), p. 420.

⁵
Quoted in Hobhouse,
Everybody Who Was Anybody
, p. 141.

⁶
Gertrude Stein,
Selected Writings
(New York, 1972), p. vii.

⁷
See Hobhouse,
Everybody Who Was Anybody
, p. 142.

⁸
Gertrude Stein,
Everybody’s Autobiography
(New York, 1937), p. 50.

⁹
Stein,
Selected Writings
, pp. 118; 222.

¹⁰
Stein’s role in the American humorous tradition was imaginatively expounded by Neil Schmitz,
Of Huck and Alice: Humorous Writing in
American Literature
(Minneapolis, MN, 1983).

¹¹
Janet Flanner, introduction to Gertrude Stein,
Two: Gertrude Stein and
Her Brother, and Other Early Portraits
(New Haven, CT, 1951), p. ix.

¹²
This is a point recently made by Noel Sloboda in his work on the autobiographies of Stein and Edith Wharton, a fascinating and fruitful comparison if only for their many divergences. See Noel Sloboda,
The Making of Americans in Paris: The Autobiographies of Edith Wharton
and Gertrude Stein
(New York, 2008).

¹³
Stein,
Selected Writings
, p. 17.

¹⁴
Catharine R. Stimpson, ‘Gertrude Stein and the Lesbian Lie’, in Margo Culley, ed.,
American Women’s Autobiography: Fea(s)ts of
Memory
(Madison, WI, 1992), pp. 156; 161.

¹⁵
Ibid., p. 153.

¹⁶
Ibid., p. 153.

¹⁷
Stein,
Selected Writings
, p. 189.

¹⁸
Ibid., pp. 203–4.

¹⁹
Hapgood to Hemingway, 27 May 1937, quoted in Hutchins Hapgood,
A Victorian in the Modern World
(New York, 1939), p. 535. Hapgood remembers how Stein ‘talked to me for a long time about how impossible it was for a Jewish woman to marry a Gentile’, remarking on what he saw as Stein’s intense Jewishness.

²⁰
Quoted in Linda Simon,
The Biography of Alice B. Toklas
(London, 1991 ), p. 152.

²¹
Quoted in Hobhouse,
Everybody Who Was Anybody
, p. 167.

²²
James R. Mellow,
Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company
(New York, 1974), p. 356.

²³
Donald Sutherland, ‘The Pleasures of Gertrude Stein’,
The New York
Review of Books
, XXI/9 (30 May 1974), pp. 28–9.

²⁴
Georges Braque, Eugene Jolas, Maria Jolas, Henri Matisse, Andre Salmon, Tristan Tzara,
Testimony Against Gertrude Stein
(The Hague, 1935 ), p. 2.

²⁵
Stein,
Everybody’s Autobiography
, p. 68.

²⁶
Stein,
Selected Writings
, p. 83.

²⁷
Stein,
Everybody’s Autobiography
, p. 116.

²⁸
Schmitz,
Of Huck and Alice
, p. 204.

²⁹
See Mellow,
Charmed Circle
, p. 371.

³⁰
‘I lost my personality’, she said in ‘And Now’ [1934], in
How Writing Is
Written,
vol. II of the
Previously Uncollected Writings of Gertrude Stein
(Los Angeles, CA, 1974), p. 63.

³¹
Flanner, introduction to Stein,
Two
, p. xvi.

³²
Gertrude Stein, ‘A Transatlantic Interview’, in
A Primer for the Gradual
Understanding of Gertrude Stein
, ed. Robert Bartlett Haas (Los Angeles, ca, 1971), p. 19.

³³
Ibid., p. xvii.

³⁴
Hobhouse,
Everybody Who Was Anybody
, p. 163.

³⁵
See Richard Bridgman,
Gertrude Stein in Pieces
(New York, 1970), pp. 213–17.

³⁶
Gertrude Stein,
Stanzas in Meditation
(New Haven, CT, 1956), p. 92.

³⁷
Ibid., p. 283.

³⁸
Stein,
Everybody’s Autobiography
, p. 68.

³⁹
Stimpson discusses this doubleness in ‘Gertrude Stein and the Lesbian Lie’, p. 152. As Stimpson notes, it depends on the predisposition of the reader which of these Steins is seen as the ‘good’ Stein and which is seen as the ‘bad’ Stein.

⁴⁰
Mellow,
Charmed Circle
, p. 369.

⁴¹
Linda Wagner-Martin,
‘Favored Strangers’: Gertrude Stein and Her
Family
(New Brunswick, NJ, 1995), p. 209.

⁴²
Alice B. Toklas,
What is Remembered
(London, 1989), p. 154.

⁴³
Quoted in Wagner-Martin,
‘Favored Strangers’
, p. 209.

⁴⁴
Mellow,
Charmed Circle
, p. 407.

⁴⁵
Bennett Cerf,
At Random
(New York, 1977), p. 103.

⁴⁶
Ibid, p. 102.

⁴⁷
Stein,
Everybody’s Autobiography
, p. 129.

⁴⁸
Kirk Curnutt, ed.,
The Critical Response to Gertrude Stein
(Westport, CT, 2000), p. 4.