A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.” That’s pretty much the only line of Gertrude Stein’s sizeable literary output that most of us can cite. But it rather sums it up, because relentless repetition was her key shtick, along with an unabashed impenetrability. The reading public has always been split between those who regard her writing – which eschewed conventional narrative forms and sentence structures – as maddening gibberish and those for whom she is a towering revolutionary of modernist literature. But this meticulously researched new book provides a more nuanced picture of Stein, based on previously unearthed documents that shed light on her personal relationships and her attitude towards her work and legacy.
Stein kept everything – down to the last scribbled shopping list – and left her vast archive of private papers to Yale University, intending to show that she, and not James Joyce or T.S. Eliot, was the first and foremost modernist writer. This archive now sits alongside the extensive interviews academic Leon Katz carried out after Stein’s death with her lifelong partner, Alice B. Toklas. They became accessible to researchers after Katz’s death in 2017 and provided Wade with new insights, including that Toklas was more actively involved in Stein’s creative process than previously acknowledged.
The first half of Wade’s book chronicles Stein’s life. Born in 1874, the daughter of a businessman whose German-Jewish family had emigrated to America, she grew up in California. Lively and ambitious, at Radcliffe College she studied the “experimental psychology”, which later fed into her experimental writing. Then in 1903 she moved with her art-obsessed brother Leo to Paris, where their apartment at 27 rue de Fleurus became a hub for the artistic avant-garde – Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Picasso and Matisse, et al – and where they began collecting artworks that would one day be worth a fortune.
An eccentric bohemian of the old school, Stein was as famous for her lesbian relationship with Toklas as she was her salon
An eccentric bohemian of the old school, Stein was as famous for her lesbian relationship with Toklas as for her salon. While she was ostensibly the dominant one, with Toklas the self-effacing acolyte who dutifully typed up her manuscripts, it was actually the latter who called the shots, her diffidence masking a ruthlessly controlling nature. The granddaughter of a Polish rabbi, she and Stein were immediately taken with each other and Toklas moved in with her and Leo. Thus began a 40-year liaison so obsessive that it upended many of Stein’s other relationships (including that with Leo, who exited their ménage in disgust).
Toklas took on the wifely domestic duties while self-proclaimed genius Stein beavered away at her 1,000-page unintelligible novel The Making of Americans, which finally found a publisher in 1925 but left her in obscurity. When The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas appeared in 1933 (written by and largely about Stein, purportedly in Toklas’s voice) it was a readable, entertaining bestseller. Wade’s research led her to believe the book was Stein’s attempt to recognise publicly Toklas’s importance in her life to ease their often rocky relationship.
The pair survived the war in Vichy France, thanks to friends and neighbours in their small rural community, who refused to betray them. Controversially for a Jewish-American intellectual, Stein was a supporter of Marshal Pétain and his 1940 Armistice with Germany, even proposing to translate his speeches into English for publication as a book. The project never came to fruition, but she would later be labelled by some a fascist sympathiser and collaborationist. Was Stein naive and so inhabiting in her own cerebral world she was detached from reality? Or trying to please the regime in order to survive? Wade has no definitive answer, but forces us to acknowledge Stein’s enigmatic nature and moral ambiguity.
Stein died in 1946 and the second half of Wade’s book deals with her “afterlife” – the efforts of researchers, biographers, scholars, her literary executor Carl Van Vechten and, of course, Toklas herself, to forge Stein’s posthumous reputation and cult status. The epic self-mythologiser hoped to shape her own legacy. But Wade’s forensic examination of the letters, manuscripts and other documents in the Stein archive at Yale helps to separate fact from myth. She clearly admires Stein and tells us how to read her work: forget the usual meanings of words and patterns of speech, just let the great ocean of non-sequitur verbiage wash over you until you reach a kind of deeper, emotional meaning. Well, perhaps. Most of us probably feel life is too short. Thankfully, Wade’s own writing style is lucid and highly readable. And her lengthy tome gives us enough Stein to last a lifetime.
Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade
Faber & Faber
