Gertrude Stein (Critical Lives) (9 page)

There is no doubt that during the painting of this portrait, particularly in the solution to the problem of her face, Picasso resolved issues that would lead him to the transition to Cubism. Perhaps talking to her also helped clarify his ideas, but her image certainly inspired him. Richardson reproduces a series of Gertrude Stein ‘look-alikes’ in Picasso’s work from around this time, 1906.
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No doubt intrigued by her lesbianism, he was depicting pairs of women who shared her robust frame. The nudes seem to be modelled on Stein, and the new kind of femininity which she seemed to represent. In 1906–7 Picasso was working on
Les Demoiselles
d’Avignon
, which could be seen as the first Cubist painting, and the studies for which were acquired by Stein. His portrait of Gertrude Stein, a kind of rejoinder to Matisse’s portrait of Madame Matisse (also on the Steins’ walls), enabled a breakthrough in his style, which was one of the paths by which he recreated twentieth-century art. Indeed, her claims in
The Autobiography
were not so exaggerated after all.

Pablo Picasso,
Gertrude Stein
, 1906, oil on canvas.

Nevertheless Stein did not buy a Cubist painting until 1911, and it was according to Leo the first painting at the rue de Fleurus that she had been solely responsible for purchasing. Stein was not a connoisseur in the same way that her brother was. She liked things she could relate to herself and her work. She immediately grasped the ways in which Cubism unlocked the possibilities of expression and description that could also be applied to literature; she too was moving away from realistic copying from life and beginning to appreciate the interception of the artist’s consciousness as the thing of major interest. From Picasso she said that she also learnt that true artistic creation was necessarily ugly.
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It was up to the followers of greatness to make art beautiful. Like Picasso she became, according to her own natural leanings, an iconoclast. In the late 1930s, when she wrote
Picasso
, she saw him as an inventor, and by extension herself also, in the tradition of Edison and Ford. She linked herself with Picasso because his work was ugly but maybe he was a genius — and maybe she was too. Leo’s adverse reaction to Cubism also spurred her into liking it; it was her reaction against him and his intellectual dominance. Also, Picasso appealed to her vanity. In 1912 he painted her calling card into
The Architect’s Table
— a canny move in order to get her to buy it, at a time when her financial interest in his work was flagging. She then started buying more of his Cubist works, as well as those of Juan Gris, although it cannot be denied that the earlier Picassos, the Cézannes and the Matisses that Leo had first fostered and gone out of his way to get hold of were better works of art.
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Gertrude’s art appreciation was more limited than her brother’s, though she did make her own independent purchases as well as choosing them with him. It was not surprising that the first painting Marie Laurencin ever sold was to Gertrude Stein, considering that it was a portrait of the habitués of the Stein salon, which was why Stein wanted it: another prop for the reputation. Like salon ladies of old, who commissioned portraits of themselves by the members of their own circle, Stein gathered laurels and homages from all the young and talented people around her. But she was happy to leave the role of art critic to Leo, for the while to be touched with genius by association, spurred on by an image of herself eventually basking in the limelight of literary creation. The Picasso portrait was her talisman.

The salon at 27 rue de Fleurus,
c
. 1912.

In
Picasso
Stein writes that everyone was ‘disconcerted’ by the things Picasso was creating; it was her ambition that she too would disconcert with what she had come up with during their months together. In 1906, after sitting for Picasso, Stein completed the stories she had been working on the previous winter, eventually published as
Three Lives
. These ‘three lives’ are three portraits, written while sitting underneath Cézanne’s
Madame Cézanne with a
Fan
, so the legend has it.
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The three stories of black and immigrant working women were to be the making of Stein’s genuine reputation as a writer, and remained at its heart for many years. They are still the most widely taught of her works.
Three Lives
differs from what came after it in the Stein
oeuvre
because it is still fairly easy to gather its meaning in a traditional way; in other words, the story is still fairly straightforward. Nevertheless at the time it was seen as a bewildering breakthrough in style. It caused Israel Zangwill to lament: ‘And I always thought she was such a healthy minded young woman, what a terrible blow this must be for her poor dear brother.’
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He would not be the last to mourn for her sanity. Stein reported this story with relish, but throughout her career, while her experiments and involutions, repetitions and departures became ever more radical and braver, she remained adamant that the language she was using was transparent and easily understood.

Three Lives
was really the last point at which Stein’s writing touched the ground, or rather the moment it took flight. The use of immigrant speech patterns in the two flanking stories ‘The Good Anna’ and ‘The Gentle Lena’ made them remarkable, but ‘Melanctha’ was the story that broke the mould. This was the beginning of her lifelong struggle to represent consciousness in words, ‘the problem’, as Edmund Wilson put it in a 1929 review of Stein’s
Useful Knowledge
, ‘of language itself’.
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The book began as ‘Three Histories’, written at the instigation of Leo, who thought Stein might try her hand at translating Flaubert’s
Trois Contes
to improve her French. Both this book and Cézanne’s paintings used working-class subjects. In her notebooks, Stein admired Flaubert and Cézanne both for their emotional attachment to their means of expression rather than emotional investment in their characters or subjects. In looking at Cézanne’s painting she understood that her version of realism need not be about verisimilitude, and that — although on the surface the subject of
Three Lives
seems to coincide with that of American literary naturalists such as Stephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser, or even that of Israel Zangwill — in fact she was not very interested in being a realistic novelist. She was more interested in revealing the way the mind worked.

Her ‘realism’, then, in
Three Lives
, was an attempt to get at an inner value, an inner reality. The spatial relationships between objects or people, as Leo had taught her, were paramount in Cézanne. The painting became a separate object, rather than a pretence to exact representation. So, ‘Melanctha’ is ‘about’ the way the characters move in relation to each other.
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This painterly metaphor allowed her to step back and look at the language itself and make of it an object seen from various angles, allowed her to be analytical of language and description and dialogue as parts of a composition. Her implicit notion of making demands on the reader is partly down to Cézanne, as is her idea that each element of the composition is as important as the next.

The book’s epigraph was a ‘quotation’ from the symbolist poet Jules Laforgue: ‘donc je suis un malheureux et ce n’est ni ma faute ni celle de la vie’ (‘therefore, I am unhappy and this is neither my fault nor that of my life’), and it is infused with the melancholy that still possessed the young Stein. It is obsessed with failure, as all her writing was at the time. Its heroines — servants, downtrodden people — are all doomed not by great or tragic events, but by a sort of recognition of their own unimportance, a tacit fading away. ‘Melanctha’, though a particularly powerful tale of a strong, plucky, daring character weakened by life’s ordinary attrition, is another melancholy story which ends in its heroine’s abrupt death.

In Stein’s own terms, ‘Melanctha’ challenged the ‘nineteenth-century idea’ of a beginning, a middle and an end, because the way of reading it must be different, must take in a different idea of time. It exists in a sort of suspended moment of perception, brought about by involution, stasis and reiteration; progress itself is challenged by her plotlessness. All Stein’s work would be characterized by reflection, rather than action, by her brand of twentieth-century scepticism.

Richard Wright, author of the books
Native Son
and
Black Boy
, praised for their realistic telling of black life, later said that when he read ‘Melanctha’ he ‘began to hear the speech of [his] grandmother, who spoke a deep, pure Negro dialect’.
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The African American poet Claude McKay perceptively disagreed: ‘I found nothing striking and informative about Negro life. Melanctha, the mulatress, might have been a Jewess.’
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Though it was seemingly a portrait of black life in America, Stein herself declared that
Three Lives
was not an American book, and that incidents in ‘Melanctha’ were based on Parisian scenes.
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In fact this was another dissimulation. ‘Melanctha’ is partly a recasting of the lesbian story
QED
. Those elements of it that were ‘inaccrochable’ (‘un-hangable’ — like a risqué painting) — to use the word Stein used when criticizing one of Hemingway’s sexually explicit early stories — could be hidden behind a black, heterosexual mask. ‘Melanctha’ contains a self-portrait; Gertrude Stein is the male character, Melanctha’s lover, Jeff Campbell, the doctor.

Stein, the woman who would have numerous portraits made of her by some of the century’s most illustrious artists, was in 1904 or 1905 the subject of a sketch by her brother Leo. Perhaps this was the first portrait ever made of her. Stein’s comment when trying to decide if the picture that Leo had done looked like her or ‘like a nigger’, was that ‘it certainly comes to the same thing’.
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However racist the assumptions that went along with it, it was her identification with another culture that stood behind the displacement of the roles of Jewish middle-class lesbians onto the African American characters of ‘Melanctha.’ There was never any great understanding of African America on Stein’s part, but there was an interest and attraction.

If in ‘Melanctha’ Stein is substituting ‘negroes’ for women, as might be inferred from the displacement of middle-class women’s roles in
QED
onto the black characters of ‘Melanctha’, this suggests an interchangeableness in her concepts of ethnic and feminine roles that was common in the early works of psychology and characterology that she was reading. There is a connection between Stein’s interest in the voices of the servant, the ethnic outsider and the woman, each of which could be seen by psychoanalytic theory of the time as interacting with the ‘primitive’; they are also supposedly prone to styles of speech which encourage play of language. (Harking back to the primitive and the indulgence of childish play are two of the key terms of Freud’s concept of creativity.)

Stein was capable of sweeping statements about her own Jewish race as well as others. One well-known autobiographical moment from
QED
is Stein’s insistence on her own linguistic exuberance: ‘I have the failing of my tribe. I believe in the sacred rites of conversation even when it is a monologue.’
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Stein’s use of the word ‘tribe’ here draws a fairly explicit link between the primitive and the creative, the same link found in contemporary psychoanalysis.
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The Italian psychologist Cesare Lombroso, whose work Stein had been reading, specifically located a link between stereotypical ideas of Jews and women as excessively loquacious. Stein proudly owns up to this, though the compulsion to tell one’s experiences is a common trait linking neurosis with creativity in psychoanalytical theory. Her conversational skill and her wordiness would be her ticket to genius, as she saw it. (Later, Stein would be lampooned for being both ‘primitive’ and ‘childish’.)
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Taking on the voice of the immigrant, in
Three Lives
and later in
The Making of Americans
, reinforced her own position as ‘racial outsider’. To some extent it was her intention, in the manner of a sociologist, to study something strange to her — African America — in order to uncover her own strangeness. But as Michael North has argued, Stein’s use of ‘racial masquerade’ was a way of extricating herself from the traditional bonds of language and syntax, of placing herself in a strange relation to their rules.
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She needed to speak a language that was deliberately removed from, at odds with, the ordinary. She wrote of her own feeling of being ‘misplaced’, of being a ‘stranger’. Gertrude Stein has been called the first important American Jewish writer. The ways in which this affected her use of language, the intelligibility of her ‘dialect’, as well as how she saw herself and wanted to present herself as an artist, are complex.