Gertrude Stein

An American childhood in three countries

Gertrude Stein was born on 3 February 1874 in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, now part of Pittsburgh, the youngest of the five surviving children of Daniel and Amelia Stein. The family was Jewish, German-speaking and wealthy; her father made money in railways and property.

When she was an infant the family moved to Europe and lived in Vienna and Paris. They returned to America in 1878 and settled in Oakland, California, where her father became a director of the Market Street Railway in San Francisco. Stein grew up speaking English and German, and had lived in both Europe and the United States before she was ten.

Her mother died in 1888 and her father in 1891. Stein was seventeen, and the inheritance left her and her siblings with an income for life. She never had to earn a living.

Radcliffe and William James

Stein studied at Radcliffe College, the women's college attached to Harvard, from 1893 to 1897. Her most important teacher was the psychologist William James, and she worked in his laboratory on experiments in attention and automatic writing.[1]

James taught that consciousness is a stream rather than a sequence of separate thoughts. Stein spent the rest of her career trying to get that stream onto a page. That is why her prose repeats, circles and stays in the present tense: she believed that is how the mind actually runs.

She then entered the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in 1897, intending to become a psychologist. She lost interest, failed a course and left in her fourth year without a degree.

Paris and 27 rue de Fleurus

Stein moved to Paris in 1903 and settled with her brother Leo at 27 rue de Fleurus, near the Luxembourg Gardens. The flat had a large studio room attached, and that room became the centre of her life for thirty years.

Leo bought the first pictures and chose most of what the two of them bought. Together they began buying work the Paris art trade could barely sell: Cézanne first, then Matisse, then Picasso. In October 1905 they bought Matisse's Woman with a Hat from the Salon d'Automne, where critics had been mocking it. They were not rich by the standards of American collectors, and they bought what was cheap because it was despised.[2]

The paintings covered the walls to the ceiling. On Saturday evenings the Steins opened the studio, and anyone with an introduction could come and look. Almost no public gallery showed Cézanne, Matisse or Picasso at the time, so for years the studio was one of the few places their work could be seen.[3]

Picasso

Stein met Pablo Picasso in 1905, when he was twenty-three and poor. He painted her portrait over about ninety sittings in 1905 and 1906, then painted out the face and finished it from memory after a summer in Spain.

The finished portrait does not look much like her, and when this was pointed out Stein reported Picasso's reply: she would come to look like it. The face is flattened and mask-like, and the same treatment appears the following year in his Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.

Their friendship lasted forty years, with quarrels. Stein bought his work when nobody else did and argued for it in print. She also treated the Cubism of 1909 to 1912 as the visual version of what she was attempting in words: an object broken apart and put back together so it can be seen from several positions at once.

Alice B. Toklas

Alice B. Toklas arrived in Paris from San Francisco and met Stein on 8 September 1907. They were together until Stein's death, thirty-nine years later.

Toklas typed Stein's manuscripts, ran the household, cooked, managed the visitors, and eventually did the practical work of getting Stein published. Their division of labour was strict and public: at the Saturday gatherings Stein talked to the artists and Toklas talked to the wives.

Stein wrote about the relationship in works such as Lifting Belly, in private language rather than direct statement. The two women are buried in the same grave.

Three Lives and The Making of Americans

Stein's first published book, Three Lives, appeared in 1909, paid for by Stein herself. It contains three stories about working women, and the middle one, Melanctha, uses repetition and a continuous present tense in a way nothing in English had done before.[4]

The Making of Americans, written between 1902 and 1911, is a nine-hundred-page family history in which very little happens and the same sentences return with tiny variations, attempting a complete description of human types. It was not published in full until 1925, and it is cited far more often than it is read to the end.

Tender Buttons

Tender Buttons, published in 1914, is a short book of prose poems in three sections: Objects, Food, Rooms. It takes ordinary things — a carafe, a box, roast beef — and writes about them through sound and association rather than appearance.

The famous opening piece begins "A carafe, that is a blind glass," and proceeds by sound and association rather than statement. Stein was doing in words what Picasso and Braque were doing in paint: breaking the object away from its normal representation to make the reader see the thing and the words at the same time.[4]

Tender Buttons baffled reviewers and sold badly. It is now the most studied of her experimental books.[1]

The First World War

When the First World War began in August 1914, Stein and Toklas were in England. They returned to Paris and then spent a year in Mallorca. In 1916 they came back, bought a Ford van, had it fitted out and drove supplies for the American Fund for French Wounded in the south and east of France.

Stein drove. Toklas navigated and handled the paperwork. They did this for the rest of the war and were decorated by the French government for it.[3]

The lost generation

After the war a new group of Americans arrived in Paris — younger, poorer and mostly writing. Sherwood Anderson sent Ernest Hemingway to Stein with a letter of introduction in 1921. Hemingway came often, brought his manuscripts, and took her advice about cutting.

The phrase attached to that generation came from her. Hemingway told the story in A Moveable Feast. A garage owner had complained to Stein that his young mechanics were no good at repairs, une génération perdue, a lost generation. She repeated the phrase to Hemingway about the men who had come back from the war. He printed it as an epigraph to The Sun Also Rises in 1926, and the label stuck to an entire literary generation.[5]

Their friendship soured. Hemingway's account, written after her death, is affectionate and cruel by turns. Stein's came first: in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas she wrote that Hemingway "looks like a modern and he smells of museums", meaning he had learned his manner from older books. Both said in print that they had learned from the other.[6]

The break with Leo

Leo Stein did not follow his sister into the new painting or her new writing. He came to dislike Picasso's Cubism and thought Gertrude's prose was nonsense.

In 1913 and 1914 the two divided the collection and separated. Leo took the Renoirs and most of the Cézannes; Gertrude kept the Picassos. They never spoke again.[7]

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

In 1932 Stein wrote The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas in about six weeks. It is her own memoir, written in Toklas's voice, describing thirty years in Paris from Toklas's point of view.

The book is funny, gossipy, unfair to several of the people in it, and written in clear conventional sentences. Published in 1933, it became a bestseller in America, and at fifty-nine Stein was suddenly a famous writer in her own country.[3]

Several people she had described objected. In 1935 a group including Matisse and Braque published a pamphlet, Testimony Against Gertrude Stein, disputing her account of the early years of Cubism.

The American tour

Stein returned to the United States in October 1934 for a lecture tour, her first visit in thirty-one years. She travelled for six months, spoke at universities and to packed public halls, appeared in newsreels, met Eleanor Roosevelt, the president's wife, and was recognised in the street.[1]

Her opera Four Saints in Three Acts was staged in Hartford and then on Broadway in 1934, with music by Virgil Thomson. The cast was made up of Black singers, which was unusual for an American opera house at the time.

The occupation years

Stein and Toklas spent the Second World War in the French countryside, at Bilignin and then Culoz, in the Rhône-Alpes. They were two elderly Jewish American women living openly in Vichy France and then under German occupation, and they survived.

They were protected in part by Bernard Faÿ, a French academic and collaborator who ran the Vichy campaign against Freemasonry and had personal access to Marshal Pétain. Stein and Faÿ were long-standing friends. She translated some of Pétain's speeches into English early in the war, with an introduction, though the translation was never published. After the Liberation, Faÿ was convicted of collaboration and sentenced to hard labour; Stein and Toklas later helped him after his escape from prison.

Their Picassos survived the war in the Paris flat. Stein wrote about the occupation years in Wars I Have Seen, published in 1945.

Death

Gertrude Stein died on 27 July 1946 at the American Hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine, of stomach cancer, at seventy-two. Her doctors judged the operation too dangerous to attempt. She insisted on having it, and died after it.

Toklas recorded her last words. From the trolley Stein asked, what is the answer? Getting no reply, she said, in that case, what is the question?[8]

She is buried in Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris. Alice B. Toklas lived another twenty-one years, in increasing poverty after Stein's relatives claimed the paintings, and was buried in the same grave in 1967. Toklas's name is on the back of the headstone.[9]

Why Gertrude Stein matters

Stein's influence runs three ways: as a collector, as a writer, and as a public figure after 1933.

As a collector and host she made modern painting visible. The Saturday evenings at 27 rue de Fleurus were where Matisse met Picasso, where American visitors first saw Cubism, and where a generation of artists and writers were introduced to one another.

As a writer she took English further from ordinary sentence order and punctuation than any of her English-speaking contemporaries, and younger writers borrowed the parts they could use. Hemingway's repetitions and flat rhythms come partly from her.[1]

After 1933 she was both widely famous and a difficult experimental writer, which few people manage at once. She used the audience to explain, in plain language, work most readers found impossible.

Gertrude Stein, illustrated

A few scenes from Stein's Paris years — drawn illustrations, not photographs.