Gertrude Stein (Critical Lives) (6 page)

In 1900 Gertrude and Leo sailed again to Europe, this time taking in Italy and Paris, where they attended the Grand Exposition. This was the very time and place at which Henry Adams’s mind was famously boggled by new technologies, leading him to define the spirit of the modern, mechanistic age in ‘The Dynamo and the Virgin’. The young Stein left no such prescient record of her visit, and it would be another few years before she had her own Parisian epiphany.

In Stein’s final year at Johns Hopkins, she failed her course in obstetrics. It was to prove the stumbling block that meant she was never awarded her medical degree. On her return from the European trip, all Stein’s experience in obstetrics and with nervous and reproductive diseases, as well as her peculiar animus against the American college woman, came together in a remarkable and perplexing essay she wrote on ‘Degeneration in American Women’.
⁴⁹
Here Stein addressed the problem of the declining birth rate in America with nationalistic zeal, as if the progress of America were literally a race against the old world. She placed the onus of responsibility with women, particularly educated women, who, she suggested, were neglecting their womanly duties and unpatriotically contributing to the downfall of American civilization by pursuing education instead of following their duty to reproduce.
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In a remarkably reactionary declamation for someone in her position, it was as if she felt women’s education were somehow a decadent pursuit. She employed threatening language about the weakness and degeneration of the individual bodies of such educated women, threatening in turn the constitution of America, as she saw it. Her argument was that women should stop attending to their own education and attend to the future of America. Anything else was ‘degenerate’.

It can’t have been straightforward for Stein to make these claims, given the struggles she herself had faced to reach the stage she was now at. Classes at the medical school were mixed, though the majority of students were male. The recollections of her male classmates tend towards unflattering accounts of her physical appearance. Stein, they also remembered with some disbelief, stood up to one of her professors, who enjoyed telling lewd stories and upsetting the female students. She also insisted that if she was being considered on an equal footing with her male colleagues, she had the right to examine men with venereal disease, something usually denied the female students.
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She always enjoyed a fight.

She was in a position of conflict. Stein wanted to be a genius. She seemed to think that she could become one by an act of will. But all the evidence around her convinced her that genius was the province of maleness. Rather than pressing on with female solidarity, she found a convoluted and idiosyncratic way of solving the problem for herself, by setting herself apart, and at the same time justifying her own lack of a maternal instinct. Femininity, she baldly stated, was to concern itself with increasing the birthrate. (She made a point of noting that there would, of course, be a handful of women in each generation who proved the exception to the rule.
⁵²
) Other college women, those whose ‘natural’ destiny was to reproduce, were by definition not capable of genius. But Gertrude already knew that she was not destined to be a mother. She had begun mixing with sophisticated women from Bryn Mawr College, women who could show her aspects of her own personality, and sexuality, that she had not confronted before. This seems to be the time when Stein first became sexually active in her affairs with other women, though there is no record of individual early dalliances.
⁵³
As a lesbian, she was implicitly raising her own status, making way for her own exceptionality. Just as she saw herself as both bourgeois and outré, normal and unique, she was the exception that proved the rule: a woman and a genius. A woman, as she characterized herself, with the attributes of maleness. Among these strained contortions of logic, this was hardly a very assertive attitude to her own lesbian identity, but it is the one that suited her for the time being. This was a time when the woman suffrage debate was at its most heated, and Stein was, essentially, expressing a wish to be like a man,
⁵⁴
rebuilding herself in a more ideal version as she would throughout her life.

But she was scared of her own morbidity and the hysterical sort of distractedness that had infused the autobiographical characters in her college themes. She had also had a glimpse of the world of art that was luring her towards another future. Leo, the family’s artist manqué, was by this time planning on settling in Europe. Gertrude’s work began to suffer. For whatever reason, Stein did not complete her medical degree. Her planned internship at the Massachusetts State Hospital for the Insane was not to be. Apparently she told friends at the time she didn’t care about the degree, but these other women students felt badly for her and for feminism.
⁵⁵
Nearly forty years after the event, in
The Autobiography
she tells the story of quitting medical school. When the more progressive of her friends upbraid her in the name of ‘the cause of women’, she languidly retorts: ‘you don’t know what it is to be bored’.
⁵⁶
Here Stein painted herself once again as above her peers, the egregious, somewhat supercilious possessor of a manifest destiny. In reality she was far less certain that such a destiny awaited her. She had, purely and simply, failed to get her medical degree; eight years of training at Radcliffe and Johns Hopkins had been for nothing. Her fear of future failure was understandably vivid and intense.

In July 1901 Gertrude was again in Europe. Joyfully reunited with Leo, she travelled with him to Spain and North Africa, and then again to Paris in August. By autumn she was back in Baltimore. Leo stayed on in Florence, where he planned to live. Gertrude, his little sister, had been his avid companion through childhood, adolescence and adulthood. He had once led Gertrude to Harvard; he would now lead her, through various stops and starts before a permanent rooting took place, to Europe and to their mutual discovery of modern art.

When one of her professors offered her the chance of a retake, this is how she claimed to have snubbed it:

You have no idea how grateful I am to you. I have so much inertia and so little initiative that very possibly if you had not kept me from taking my degree I would have, well, not taken to the practice of medicine, but at any rate to pathological psychology, and you don’t know how little I like pathological psychology, and how all medicine bores me.
⁵⁷

But this was another retrospective fantasy; in reality she did want her degree enough to return to Johns Hopkins and attempt to complete some extra research so that it could be awarded. But feeling the pull of other influences, eventually she presented a model of a brain that was so intricate and bizarre in its wrongness that it seemed a deliberate, final throwing over of her medical career. On seeing it, the world’s greatest anatomist of the time, Dr Franklin Mall, remarked: ‘Either I am crazy or Miss Stein is.’
⁵⁸

As this was also the time when Stein was experiencing her first sexual relationships with other women, and developing confidence in her own sexuality, this multitude of new excitements and anxieties found a way into her fiction. For this was also the period when she began to write in earnest. She dashed off a final article on the brain stem which was sent to the
American Journal of Anatomy
, and then abandoned her scientific career forever, in the same fell swoop that she abandoned America itself. The crossover with her literary career would be evident in the analytical title of her first sustained piece of fiction,
Quod Erat Demonstrandum
(
QED
).

Because for now, Gertrude had a more pressing concern. What she was discovering among these transatlantic sojourns was first love. Unwittingly she had become involved in a love triangle when she fell for May Bookstaver, a feminist and a femme fatale of Bryn Mawr. May was already entangled in an unspecific way with another young woman of Stein’s acquaintance, Mabel Haynes. Gertrude was infatuated with May and suspicious of Mabel. Mabel was wary of Gertrude, and knew something was going on with May. May seemed to want to have her cake and eat it too. It was hopeless and passionate, and fraught with regret almost from the start. In
QED
, the
roman-à-clef
Stein wrote about the affair, there is a rapturous record of a kiss that ‘seemed to scale the very walls of chastity’.
⁵⁹
Stein was due to be disappointed in May’s unwillingness to show her the same devotion.

Safe to say Stein’s infatuation caused a rift with another friend, Emma Lootz, who heartily disapproved of the relationship and chastised Gertrude for it, though whether on grounds of its lesbian nature or on the grounds of a personal dislike of May is unclear. In Lootz’s mind, as in the minds of many at the time, there was a confusion between the terms of a passionate friendship or unconsummated crush, and recognition of love between women as a serious thing deserving of respect. It was a confusion that was widespread, and such confusion partly allowed lesbian relationships to go unremarked upon, taken, at least on the surface, by the world at large as close friendships, if perhaps tacitly acknowledged as sexual relationships. But such confusion also makes Stein’s attempt to describe it more complex and tortuous.

By this time Stein had apparently already had romantic relations with other women, and there was a relative openness about homosexuality within her circle. But the enforced secrecy (because of Mabel, the third member of the triangle, as well as May’s parents) and the fervour of Gertrude’s attachment to May, despite the cruelties that the latter seemed able to inflict, found its way into furious love letters, fragments of which survive in the original, and some of which were transcribed directly into
QED
. The plot of
QED
is melodramatic, and its style discursive, faux-Jamesian; much of it consists of painful, convoluted, self-justifying conversations between Adele (Gertrude) and Helen (May). Stein/Adele operates under a rather melancholy lesbian persona, aware of the hopelessness of the situation but unable to stop herself from feeling the way she does.

Loving May had driven her to despair, and plunged her back into the depression she had seemed to have overcome. Writing it was a catharsis. Shortly after she completed the novella, both May and Mabel married themselves into conventional respectability. The manuscript then sat in Stein’s cupboard for nearly 30 years. Just as a work like Hilda Doolittle’s
HERmione
could not be published during her lifetime, and other lesbian coming of age stories also failed to see the light of day at the time of their composition,
QED
is a record of lesbian love at a time when such records, and such feelings, could not be made public. Even when, in 1930 or 1931, Stein ‘found’ it (claiming she had completely forgotten ever having written it), she shyly presented it to a friend to be read, and shyly asked if it might be publishable.
QED
looks tame now, but the answer was probably not — because of its subject matter, a lesbian romance — and in fact the book was not published until another twenty years had passed, in 1950, four years after Stein’s death.

QED
also offers evidence of Stein’s self-perception as a young adult. ‘I always did thank God I wasn’t born a woman’; this is more masculine posturing, although also a reference to Jewish prayer.
⁶⁰
The adversarial nature of the triangular relationship in
QED
would be repeated over and over again in Stein’s early fiction. But never again would she write in such a straightforward, open and representational way about her own lesbian experiences. Later, perhaps with a savvier eye to publication, a more worldly-wise understanding of how the public viewed female homosexuality, and a happier sex life, she would make her lesbian content far more oblique, and express distaste for any writing that was overtly sexual. She had, however, established a pattern of discerning personality based on the way that people reacted with one another, and specifically based on sexual relationships.

In 1902, at the tail end of Gertrude’s ill-fated romance, the Steins were once more in Europe, moving from Italy to England, and getting further depressed by the weather and the ‘drunken women and children’ in London. A highlight of their six-month stay in Bloomsbury was a meeting with Israel Zangwill. Stein’s main impression of London was a nightmarish vision of gloomy streets and pimply-faced women, all in all an ‘ugly surface’.
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She spent most of her time at the library of the British Museum, reading copiously. It was at this time that she embarked on her ambitious project of reading her way ‘through English narrative writing from the sixteenth century to the present’.
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As she did so she copied down the names of these books, and her favourite passages, into notebooks kept over the next few years; hundreds of titles appear in them, including diaries, biographies and autobiographies. Indeed, although she stripped her experimental work of referentiality and context, and although she sometimes liked to claim that her genius was
sui generis
, it is worth remembering that she did herself a kind of disservice in making that claim; she was, in fact, extremely well read. After Gertrude took a trip back to New York, in June 1903 she was back in Paris, and it seemed like a breath of fresh aesthetic air. It was in Paris, at 27 rue de Fleurus in October 1903, that Gertrude finished
QED
, and put a definitive ending to her love affair, even if the book itself ended on an equivocal and mournful note. She made another brief visit back to the USA in Spring 1904, and then Gertrude joined Leo in Paris. She protested that she would be going back to America every year. But in fact she was in Paris for good. It would be 30 years before she made it back to America.

When she put aside
QED
, Stein was already at work on another composition; beginning to take form was a story about American character, ‘The Making of Americans’, which would after years of work become the novel of the same name. Early notes for the book, jotted down in 1903, deal with Stein’s conflict between her attachment to America and the appeal of the old world. In the end she would conclude that ‘Your parents’ home is never a place to work.’
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In this early version of her epic modernist saga, Stein wrote: ‘we fly to the kindly comfort of an older world accustomed to take all manner of strange forms into its bosom’.
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Paris would become just that comforting alma mater for a heartbroken eccentric on the cusp of thirty who had, as yet, failed to come up with any proof of her genius.