Gertrude Stein (Critical Lives) (7 page)

Loosening her stays in the most literal as well as metaphorical of ways, de-corseting herself long before it was the fashion, soon after she arrived in Paris Stein slung out the tightly buttoned dresses she had compressed herself into at Radcliffe, and adopted another ‘costume’, as she called it. The originality of her dress — her loose-fitting, brown corduroy robes and voluminous kaftans; a lapis lazuli pendant round her neck and sandals on her feet — contained a large element of performance. On the streets of Montparnasse she became a recognizable eccentric; the Stein persona was being born. She began marketing herself even before she had written any writing to market. Over the years she would veer between dressing like a monk and dressing like a Roman emperor, both of which were images she actively cultivated. In 1928 when she made a triumphal entrance at the party held by Eugene and Maria Jolas for the contributors to
Transition
, she managed to combine both pomp and asceticism. She appeared, as Kay Boyle described her in
Being Geniuses Together
, ‘in a severe and nunlike dress of purple silk’,
¹
while the throng cleared a passage for her procession to an awaiting chair, around which kneeled a half-circle of her acolytes. James and Nora Joyce were apparently the only people in the room oblivious to her splendid presence, and they made a great point of showing it.

Outside 27 rue de Fleurus,
c
. 1907.

When she first arrived in Paris, this icon of the Left Bank wasn’t even sure about whether to stay. Her first love was gone by; in her compositions she still laboured under a very conventional style, and she was dogged by depression and indecision.
²
QED
, as much as it had helped her clarify her own sensual desires, had also been a laying out of all her vacillations and weaknesses of character. She had confronted her own sexual cowardice while admitting ‘a passionate desire for worldly experience’.
³
In the previous three years she had made the long journey between the USA and Europe four times, and in the struggle over whether to stay or go, Paris finally won by default: it took her far enough away from the scene of her lost love. Her love for Paris, though not immediate, was deep and lasting.

Hers was a self-imposed exile that led to an intellectual rebirth. In Paris Stein was free to make herself anew as a worldly individual, and her decision to throw off the traditional cultural garb of femininity coincided with her decision to innovate in her writing:
⁴
the persona and the writing seem inextricably linked. All the same, it was not an immediate transformation. As Adele, her protagonist in
QED
, says: ‘All I want to do is to meditate endlessly and think and talk’,
⁵
a prophetic vision of Stein’s role in the ‘Paris experiment’.
⁶

The place Leo had found at 27 rue de Fleurus was a four-room, two-storey apartment with an atelier attached, in a neighbourhood near the Luxembourg Gardens that was then not very fashionable, but popular with artists because the rent was cheap. The square drawing room with its high ceilings and whitewashed walls was filled with dark oak Renaissance furniture that Leo had picked up for a song in Italy, and at first with Leo’s Japanese prints. In a matter of months these gave way to the most illustrious collection of modern art then in existence. In 1904 the Steins saw their first Cézannes, and started buying. Soon their walls would also be graced by Toulouse-Lautrec, Gauguin, Manet and Renoir, as well as Vallotton and Bonnard, all unframed and jostling for position in a place that was never meant as a gallery but had become, by dint of Leo’s perspicacity, the world’s first museum of modern art.
⁷
(When Leo moved out, Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas would irreverently fill the place with kitsch knick-knacks, ‘polychrome saints’ and alabaster doves.
⁸
)

Lonely, embittered and dependent in those early Paris years, Stein was recalled by early visitors to the rue de Fleurus as an imposing but quiet figure, taking everything in, but not advancing her own ideas, content to let Leo rule the roost. Stein’s directness, her daunt, was already there — her petulance, her formidable conversation and her imperious self-confidence were things of the future.

Setting up home again with Leo was partly a necessity, and may have seemed the only viable financial option. Despite their later reputation as wealthy American collectors, neither of them was hugely well off; they merely bought judiciously. In that she remained dependent on her family’s stipend, Stein was not really a woman of independent means. That she was not making her own way in life meant perhaps that her adult responsibilities were postponed. But as a result of this expedient co-habitation with her brother, what she found in Paris, almost by chance, was freedom from the anxiety of influence that might have stifled her at home.
⁹
Away from America, there was also nobody to expect her to get married and have children, the fate that had befallen May Bookstaver and Mabel Haynes and other women like them. Paris was already known by reputation as the international capital of lesbian love.
¹⁰
The city that had drawn Leo, and that Gertrude found when she joined him, was still draped, at least in the imagination of those who went there, in the vestiges of fin-de-siècle decadence, while parts of it were very slowly being colonized by monied bourgeois Americans. The artistic and social elitism of the old salons of the Faubourg St-Germain was being challenged by a new generation of creative minds. Belle Epoque Paris represented, and truly offered, freedoms — sexual, social, artistic — that were still hard-won back home in America. That was at the root of Stein’s conviction, after thirty years of living there, that ‘America is my country, but Paris is my hometown.’ It was a new kind of home.

Later she would use the city itself as a part of her public image, when going to Paris — for a certain breed of young American — would mean a trip to visit Gertrude Stein. Many of the most memorable images of Stein show her on the streets of Paris. She seems to have been on the lookout for networking opportunities as soon as she arrived. She was drawn to those who could enliven her drawing room, and in this respect was a natural salonière. She wanted at first to listen to them talk. Afterwards she would write it all down. Her work is full of conversation, not just the tittle-tattle of memoir, but as the basis of her style: in ‘Melanctha’’s speech rhythms, in the snippets of conversation that flood through the portraits, right up until the dialogic structure of her last book,
Brewsie and Willie
. Everybody was a subject. As Paul Bowles commented some 30 years later on being taken under her broad wing: ‘It did not take me long to realise that while I undoubtedly had her personal sympathy, I existed primarily for Gertrude Stein as a sociological exhibit.’
¹¹
Since the days with her Baltimore aunts, she was capable of strenuous sociability, and found solitude almost unbearable. A living arrangement that allowed continual flow of guests, where her home became a social space, meant Stein had found her ideal environment, and made Paris her perfect backdrop.

Living with Leo was a domestic arrangement that diverted questions about her sexuality, and allowed her to do as she pleased behind a thin veil of conventionality. They were known, cattily, as ‘the happiest couple on the Left Bank’, and some visitors actually left with the impression that Gertrude was Leo’s wife. It was a halfway house; a blueprint of an alternative lifestyle, the ‘bohemian’ lifestyle she would come to symbolize. Her mutually dependent relationship with him was a step towards the unconventional home life she would continue with Alice Toklas. At the rue de Fleurus Stein converted her anxiety about her own strangeness into a realignment of her own ‘respectability’. It wasn’t only an outward transformation: she ditched her past enthusiasms, and latched onto Leo’s new ones, filtering everything to see how it might have a bearing on her new chosen path to greatness, as a writer.

Like his father, Leo was a talker and an espouser of theories — his nervous character, erratic enthusiasms and pedagogical leanings often made him difficult company. He offended dinner guests by belittling their opinions. He riled Matisse by trying to teach him about art. He was obsessed with his own nervous disorders and dysfunctional digestive system. He fancied himself as a great painter, which he was not, so he turned to art criticism, at which he excelled. Before Gertrude Stein found her voice, it was his talk that drew visitors to the rue de Fleurus; Leo’s artistic perception was profound and influential. It is a reminder of the importance of oral culture and social interaction in the period that although his only two books of art appreciation were not published until 1927 and then 1947 (just before he died), his practically unrivalled insight made him one of modern art’s most important early patrons and impresarios. He was also for 35 years Gertrude Stein’s greatest companion, and the person to whom she still looked for guidance in everything.

As compulsively and impertinently as Leo talked, Gertrude wrote. As she settled into her new life Stein diverted herself by categorizing her friends, old and new, in terms of their romantic leanings. The first piece of writing she turned to after
QED
was another mannered novella, this time distilling her ideas about the American college woman, and recounting the complicated love life of her glamorous New York acquaintance Alfred Hodder, ‘the Byron of Bryn Mawr’.
¹²
Hodder, who also visited the Steins in Paris, was involved in a scandal over an extramarital affair with Mamie Gwinn, an ethereal English lecturer. Unfortunately Gwinn was already involved with Martha Carey Thomas, the first Dean of Bryn Mawr. This story fascinated Stein, partly because of its echoes of the love triangle she had found herself stuck in. She turned it into
Fernhurst
, a story about a man on the brink of thirty who was already a failure. It was a story, Stein wrote (with very modern frankness), about ‘the deepening knowledge of life and love and sex’.
¹³
Stein was fascinated by Hodder and his sexual ethics, doomed as he was, in her opinion, by an uneasy coupling of the chivalry of the old world and the liberties of the new. Hoping to avoid the weaknesses of character with which Hodder had scuppered himself, in her twenty-ninth year, she defined the aging process as the exchange of ‘a great dim possibility for a small hard reality’.
¹⁴
It was a combination of pessimism and stoicism that would characterize the work of her belated maturity, but it seems ironic now that on the verge of her own ‘golden age’ she should have felt so forlorn. She could not have foreseen the embarrassment of intellectual riches that was about to come her way.

If any one event in Stein’s new Parisian life represents a genuine turning point, it must be the 1905 vernissage of the autumn salon, at which she first saw the group of painters who would become known as ‘les Fauves’ (the wild beasts), in a term coined after this show. In her own story of her life she heralded this as her Henry Adams moment. Matisse’s
Femme au Chapeau
was on exhibit at the autumn salon. It now seems an unlikely cause for scandal — a portrait of a woman wearing an enormous hat — but this great sprawl of green, red and violet paint was so radical, so shocking, and to some so ridiculous, that the
Woman with the Hat
was to become a potent symbol of the modern movement. In her account Stein writes that people were so offended by it that they tried to scrape the paint off with their fingernails, while she stood calmly by; the only thing that troubled her was that she was unable to see why other people were so angered by this painting, as to her it seemed so natural. By 1932, when she was recounting the event for mass consumption as part of the curious myth of her own rise to glory, Matisse was acknowledged as a modern master. She assumed a connection between the unintelligent, barbarian clawing at his painting and people’s uncomprehending reaction to her own writing, thus firming up her allegiances with the great, and most importantly with the egregiously modern. Throughout her life Stein would dwell upon the destructive energy of the twentieth century, its need to ‘kill’ the nineteenth century; it was her calmly patricidal refrain.

The violence of the public reaction to
Woman with the Hat
was a shock for the penniless Matisse family; when the Steins made their momentous purchase of the painting it was nothing short of a lifeline. From then on the Steins made rapid acquisitions and the works amassed prodigiously. Simultaneous with their purchase of their first Matisse was their first Picasso,
Jeune Fille aux Fleurs
; they bought several more Matisses including his
Blue Nude
, and a flush of paintings from Picasso’s Blue and Rose periods, the latter including
Young Acrobat on a Ball
and
Boy Leading a Horse
, which took pride of place in the atelier, along with Cézanne watercolours and several modern nudes including those by Renoir, Bonnard and Manguin, and pictures by Gauguin, Degas, Delacroix and Toulouse-Lautrec. The quantity of flesh on display did as much to create the outrageous reputation the Stein collection was gaining as did the way in which it was painted. By 1906 anyone who wanted to see the best and most sensational in modern art was obliged to visit the rue de Fleurus. Paintings were lit by gaslight and so squashed onto every available inch of the walls that those high up could hardly be seen, and sometimes those beneath had to be scrutinized with the aid of a lighted match held up to the canvas. As quickly as the paintings amassed, so did the people. At first those who came were a small coterie — the Matisses and a few other artist and writer friends. Later they had to move the collection into the pavilion next door; although the atelier was fairly large it was not designed to be a meeting place for all of avant-garde Paris. Gertrude Stein wrote nonchalantly about how the Steins’ ‘Saturday evenings’ began. Bothered by the constant interruption of people clamouring at their door to be shocked by the new, or to be part of it, Gertrude and Leo decided it would be a good idea to invite visitors to attend at a set time. This would become the most famous artistic salon in Paris.