The Mama of Dada
Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein & Company.
by James R. Mellow.
Praeger. 528 pp. $12.95.
Staying on Alone: Letters of Alice B. Toklas.
by Edward Burns.
Liveright. 426 pp. $11.95.
Gertrude Stein! The name rings like a bell announcing a procession of the avant-garde, heralding, in fact, the most striking figure in that most exemplary avant-garde, the Paris of the early 20th century and l'entre deux guerres. James R. Mellow, an art critic for the New York Times, has written his book as much about the milieu as about the famous personage who liked to think of herself as its center, but even those who might dispute her claim to primacy would grant her prominence in the contemporary mythology of the avant-garde. She was of course called “the mama of dada,” although that was strictly speaking inaccurate. Journalese also termed her “the matron saint of modern art,” and many readers may recall the cheeky limerick that linked her with Albert Einstein and Jacob Epstein: in a canonical drama of neglect-acceptance-adulation, the puzzles of her writing were thought to exhibit the same degree of difficulty as the calculation of mathematics and the densities of modern sculpture. Her story was naturally no vie de bohème; she was neither poor nor struggling, she came from a comfortable California-Jewish background, had been to Radcliffe and Johns Hopkins, and was launched by her brother, Leo, into the Paris of the turn of the century almost like a Jamesian heroine. There were always friends, trips, diversions, and interesting connections to the life around her, there was always money, and, although recognition, or what she called “gloire,” eluded her, there was certainly fame and notoriety beginning quite early. By World War I, she had become the legendary Gertrude Stein.
This figure, the type of the modern difficult writer, attracted to her side philosophers, writers, artists, musicians, scene designers, traveling Americans, journalists, royalties, Swedes, Hungarians, and others who defy precise designation. Word spread of the painting collection formed early in the century with Leo, after the example of their brother, Michael Stein, who had discovered Matisse. The collection of Picassos, Matisses, Cézannes, Renoirs, and other treasures of the modern movement was remarkable, as all would agree who saw it then or later, when it was shown in New York. And not the least of its attributes, its interest for contemporary collectors, lies in the very shrewdness of the investments made by those canny responsive clients when few other people were buying such art. (Later, in the 20's, even Gertrude Stein couldn't afford to buy Picassos.) Long before she had achieved any recognition for her own work, Gertrude Stein had encouraged and sponsored the work of others. Her role in the avant-garde drama thus became a double one: there was the exemplary writer, attempting a serious literary experiment—mocked by the world at large but understood by the “charmed circle”—and, in another part of the forest, there was the perceptive patron, spotting greatness, defending her choices, buying courageously what the established critics and collectors scorned. She and Leo frequently took photographs of their salon with its now famous pictures covering the walls. Word spread even to California, where the Michael Steins had returned with their Matisses.
The subtitle of Mr. Mellow's study, “Gertrude Stein & Company,” suggests how much of a corporate effort it all was in that golden 20's time, how many people were involved, and how their actions reinforced one another. His thorough and carefully-researched treatment of all that period of Gertrude Stein's life is very good, and he manages to achieve a tone of intelligent sympathetic interest without the cloying falsity of partisan naiveté which has too often been characteristic of Gertrude Stein's biographers. His account of her 1934 American tour provides an interesting story, and, if the narrative of her life in the late 30's and during World War II is less detailed, it is nevertheless adequate. His bibliography is lengthy, his sources copious, his notes and references are prodigious, and his manner is discursive and brisk. He had wanted to write about Gertrude Stein the real person, not the legend, and he has succeeded.
Perhaps the most interesting—and least legendary—part of her life was the early part, the years before World War I, and it is to this period that Mr. Mellow devotes half his book. Gertrude Stein's family and its fortunes, her childhood with Leo and the others, her young girlhood and young womanhood, the Cambridge and Baltimore years, the first decade in Paris—these have been overshadowed by the more familiar scenes of the salon in the Rue de Fleurus. New material and new scholarly work have illuminated this time in Gertrude Stein's life and its relation to her early work, especially to Three Lives (1909). Much more is known now about her efforts at automatic writing, her work under William James and his encouragement of her medical studies, her friendships in Cambridge, Baltimore, and New York. The milieus, the atmosphere of intense friendships among young women, the relation with Leo, the genesis of lesbian life, all are discussed both biographically and with reference to the early—and until recently unknown—manuscripts, Q.E.D. and Fernhurst, which deal with such attachments. More than ever, the young Gertrude Stein and her brother and their circle, their moral exertions, their scruples, their passions and discriminations, all seem to issue from The Wings of the Dove or The Ambassadors.
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Although World War II dispersed their milieu, Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas did not follow the migration of the avant-garde to America, but instead stayed on in France all through the war. They lived in the country, they struggled through various adventures with the French and the Germans, but they survived the war to become almost the first to welcome the American soldiers who came to liberate France. And thus began a new career: Mellow calls it “the liberation of Gertrude Stein.” She welcomed the G.I.'s, entertained, befriended, adopted, and adored them, and she became one of the oddest pin-up girls of that early postwar period. She spoke in her most American voice, as if justified by all her early cranky patriotism of The Making of Americans, and became at once a French and an American heroine, quoted, interviewed, photographed, lionized, and visited by everyone as she had never been visited before. It was a triumph over the wartime isolation, the long separation from her native land, the many years of neglect of her work, and her notorious reputation as a difficult gnomic literary persona. She wrote Brewsie and Willie, a paean to the American G.I., and she presented herself as a homey American type, a pioneer woman, as American as apple pie. She died in 1946, before she could savor fully all that this new kind of fame could give her (she would have been one hundred years old this year—how she would have relished that). As she died she made one of the memorable comments of her life. Asking Alice at the bedside, “Well, what is the answer?” and receiving no reply, she then said, “In that case, what is the question?” More than anything she is known to have said, like “Remarks are not literature,” or “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose,” or “You are all a lost generation,” or “America is the oldest country in the world,” this deathbed message insured her a place and a posthumous stature.
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A Jamesian heroine, too, was Alice Toklas, from California also, hesitating over the Michael Steins' invitation to go to Europe with them, then traveling with Harriet Levy, another adventurous young woman, joining the Stein circle in Paris and in Fiesole, making those excursions to the Italian hill towns, and finally becoming indispensable to Gertrude Stein. She walked, typed, edited, admired, managed, commented, supervised; she did needlework, complex cooking, gardening, sewing, and exercised every skill necessary to further the imperatives of Gertrude Stein's genius, remaining her devoted companion for nearly forty years. By 1910 Alice had displaced Leo at the Rue de Fleurus, and by 1914 the calling card stated “Miss Stein, Miss Toklas.”
Alice Toklas seems to have been an extremely gifted, complex, perceptive, and witty person. Mr. Mellow's study demonstrates this, and it is even more striking in the collection of Alice's letters recently published, which presents a much older Alice Toklas of the years after Gertrude's death. They were a famously devoted couple, with Alice explicitly designating herself as votary to Gertrude's genius. Indeed, one of the many stories has it that Wives of Geniuses I Have Sat With was an early title for Gertrude's tour de force, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, that famous best-seller of 1933. The kind of unstinting, selfless, single-minded devotion Alice gave to Gertrude was remarkable and almost without parallel, certainly unlike most of the relationships in the “charmed circle.” Alice lived on until 1967 when she was almost ninety, tending Gertrude's flame, cherishing Gertrude's memory, Gertrude's friends, Gertrude's pictures. It is one of the unpleasant ironies of the story that that famous painting collection—to whose preservation Alice gave so much, and which was supposed to provide the means of support for her declining years—was in fact the cause of the penury in which Alice lived out her life. That ending, too, is Jamesian, as is the death of Gertrude's nephew, the residual beneficiary, the quarrel with the children, the lawyer's negligence in providing Alice's income, and then the sequestering of the pictures while Alice was away in Rome. Alice, with poor vision, could hardly see the blank spots on the walls then, but could see all the pictures in her memory.
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Gertrude Stein's fame has not flagged: as patron and client of modern art, and as “difficult” or “experimental” writer, she plays a prominent part in the history of the avant-garde, and her importance is repeatedly underlined in all the studies which followed all the popular recollections and memoirs. Her opera, Four Saints in Three Acts, with music by Virgil Thomson, has been performed many times since its first production in 1934, and in the contemporary theater this abstract fantasy about Saint Thérèse and landscape finds a natural place. The opera about Susan B. Anthony, The Mother of Us All, has had a similar if less enthusiastic revival. The resurgence of feminism in the 60's and 70's has inspired many to adopt Gertrude Stein as a heroine and as an example of a woman's alternative style of life.
But what of her work? Has it been rediscovered, and reappraised, apprehended anew? Does it continue to generate interest? That part of the avant-garde story is less clear, and Mr. Mellow is guarded in his comments, occasionally irritated or bored by the work, and perhaps not especially interested in the “product” of Gertrude Stein & Company. Actually, her importance in the development of modern prose is great. It was through her influence that Hemingway developed his laconic declarative style with its serious insistence and its simple repetitive, incantatory rhythm, and it is from Hemingway himself that contemporary prose learned one of its voices. Nevertheless, Gertrude Stein's early work that so affected Hemingway has not subsequently been consulted by many readers either for interest or pleasure. Three Lives is a classic of this type, like La Princesse de Clèves or Adolphe, but how often is it taken down from the shelf? Who would voluntarily read The Making of Americans, or the plays, or Tender Buttons, unless obliged to do so? Her art criticism, although frequently and piously referred to, is not notably illuminating, and, in any case, her interest was less in art than in certain artists she knew, liked, or disliked, such as Braque, Matisse, Picasso, Bérard, Sir Francis Rose, Berman, Marie Laurencin, and others. Like her writing about Ulysses S. Grant, or Washington, or aspects of American history, it was all quite personal, that is, of interest to her only as it nourished her own sense of her own genius. The effect of Cubism on her writing has often been cited as an example of the new direction she was attempting, and her word portraits are said to rely on the same sort of unity in fragmentation. Even if this dubious analogy is accepted, however, it does not make the work more resonant or available.
Hemingway did not acknowledge too graciously Gertrude Stein's importance for him; in fact, he went out of his way to denigrate her. There was Sherwood Anderson . . . but who else? Finally, it would be hard to find a writer who claimed continuity with Gertrude Stein. She saw her efforts with language as similar to those of others, say, Eliot—purifier les mots de la tribu—but there was merely a polite visit and letter from the editor of The Criterion, no shock of recognition. The fact is that all our ideas of the “difficult” writer and the “difficult” work of art have changed profoundly since the avant-garde developments began early in the century. An enormously expanded public and a transformation of the social circumstances in which art is made, presented, and acclaimed—these are surely responsible. Then, too, after Joyce, after Proust, Eliot, Mann, Beckett, Ionesco, after the American poetry and fiction of these fifty years, it is no longer possible to think about language in the old way. Does anyone any longer really believe that the sentence should be broken up, or that words would gain in power if they lost their connotations? Or that nouns must be eliminated? In fact, the whole effect of the New Criticism was to reclaim all that baggage of language which Gertrude Stein thought could be checked at the station indefinitely. More recent criticism, and recent poetry, have moved to salvage language as if from a débacle. Perhaps it was the 30's, and then World War II, that made language come to seem a fragile, battered thing, unequal to further assault or experiment.
