Geniuses Together : American Writers in Paris in the 1920s (9780571309412) Read online

  Just at this moment a very aged charwoman came down the same back stairs, mumbled, bon soir monsieur et madame, and quietly went out of the door, after a moment another old charwoman came down the same stairs, murmured, bon soir messieurs et mesdames and went quietly out of the door. Gertrude Stein began to laugh and said to her brother, it is all nonsense, there is no Cézanne. Vollard goes upstairs and tells these old women what to paint and he does not understand us and they do not understand him and they paint something and he brings it down and it is a Cézanne. They both began to laugh uncontrollably …

  They got their landscape (‘a wonderful small green landscape … it covered all the canvas, it did not cost much’), and came back again and again. Vollard explained to his friends that their laughter annoyed him, ‘but gradually he found out that when they laughed most they usually bought something.’ He sold them ‘a tiny little Daumier … Cézanne nudes … a very very small Manet … two tiny little Renoirs … two Gauguins’.

  In another gallery they saw, and fell for, Matisse’s La Femme au Chapeau, though visitors were ridiculing it. The price was 500 francs; they offered 400, but this was refused so they paid the full amount. At the time, Matisse was unknown and in penury, but his wife had guessed that anyone who offered 400 francs would probably give the full price if they only waited, and the 100 francs would make a huge difference. When Gertrude and Leo became friends with the Matisses and heard this story, they were delighted.

  In the daytime, Leo attended his painting classes. Gertrude would sleep late, rising at noon and walking around Paris in the afternoon. During the evenings and nights she sat up writing. Soon after arriving in Paris she began work on Three Lives, a trio of novellas about two German servant girls and a black woman in the American South. The project was partially suggested by Flaubert’s Trois Contes, and also, she claimed, by the Femme au Chapeau, beneath which she sat as she wrote. The language and syntax were very queer and idiosyncratic, often mimetic of the oddities of German and Negro speech of the characters:

  Anna led an arduous and troubled life.

  Anna managed the whole little house for Miss Mathilda. It was a funny little house, one of a whole row all the same kind that made a close pile like a row of dominoes that a child knocks over, for they were built along a street which at this point came down a steep hill. They were funny little houses, two storeys high, with red brick fronts and long white steps.

  This one little house was always very full with Miss Mathilda, an under servant, stray dogs and cats and Anna’s voice that scolded, managed, grumbled all day long … Gradually it came to Anna to take the whole direction of their movements, to make all the decisions as to their journeyings to and fro, and for the arranging of the places where they were to live.

  Leo was convinced that Gertrude’s literary style was due to nature rather than artifice. He once remarked: ‘Gertrude does not know what words mean.’

  A prominent characteristic of the style, now and later, was the mannered repetition of certain words and phrases. Her own term for this was ‘insistence’. Here it is at work in ‘Melanctha’, another of the Three Lives:

  Melanctha was pale yellow and mysterious and a little pleasant like her mother, but the real power in Melanctha’s nature came through her robust and very unendurable black father … Melanctha Herbert almost always hated her black father, but she loved very well the power in herself that came through him. And so her feeling was really closer to her black coarse yellow father, than her feeling had ever been toward her pale yellow, sweet-appearing mother. The things she had in her of her mother never made her feel respect.

  The first publishers to whom the book was submitted thought it must be the work of somebody only dubiously fluent in English. It eventually got into print in 1909.

  *

  The quality of the Steins’ growing Post-Impressionist collection began to attract visitors to 27 rue de Fleurus. ‘Matisse brought people,’ writes Gertrude, ‘everybody brought somebody, and they came at any time and it began to be a nuisance … So the Saturday evenings began.’ Saturday was instituted as a formal salon for visitors, with or without invitation. They might call, inspect the canvases, and be received by Gertrude. Among those who regularly put in appearances was Pablo Picasso.

  Early in the Steins’ Paris sojourn, Leo had come across paintings by the young and penurious Spaniard. He particularly wanted to buy Picasso’s Jeune fille aux fleurs from a circus clown turned picture dealer named Sagot, but Gertrude thought there was ‘something rather appalling’ in the stark depiction of the naked pre-pubescent awkwardly clutching her basket of flowers, so Sagot told her: ‘But that is all right, if you do not like the legs and feet it is very easy to guillotine her and only take the head.’ They bought the entire picture.

  Gertrude thought Picasso ‘a good-looking young bootblack’. At the dinner table, writes Gertrude, she ‘took up a piece of bread. This, said Picasso, snatching it back with violence, this piece of bread is mine. She laughed and he looked sheepish. That was the beginning of their intimacy.’

  Gertrude and Leo introduced Picasso to Matisse – they had never met before. Indeed, Gertrude was becoming more and more of an introducer. She writes sarcastically of a man named Roché as ‘one of those characters that are always to be found in Paris … a general introducer. He knew everybody … and he could introduce anybody to anybody.’ But the same could be said of her.

  Picasso started to paint her portrait; neither of them could remember whose suggestion it had been. She sat amid the cheerful disorder of his Montmartre studio, and Fernande, his current mistress, offered to read La Fontaine aloud while she posed. The portrait came at the end of Picasso’s ‘Rose Period’ (harlequins and circus subjects) and hints a little at his future Cubism. It was abandoned for a time; Gertrude writes that one day Picasso obliterated the entire head, saying ‘I cannot see you any longer when I look.’ He eventually finished it during 1906 without the sitter. As completed, it greatly sharpens Gertrude’s features, giving an impression of quickness of mind and concentration. The real Gertrude Stein was more fleshly, with a rounder, less energetic but more humorous face. Picasso himself commented of the picture: ‘Everybody thinks she is not at all like her portrait but never mind, in the end she will manage to look just like it.’ He gave it to Gertrude as a present – which later American collectors found hard to believe or understand.

  *

  Gertrude did not grow to look like the portrait; by the time Picasso had finished it she was fast putting on weight. A 1914 photograph of her in the studio at rue de Fleurus shows a much more corpulent figure than in the painting. Corpulence was a feature, too, of her next book, The Making of Americans, written between 1906 and 1911 but not published in full until 1925; Edmund Wilson has said that it suffers from ‘a sort of fatty degeneration of her imagination and style’. Here is a typical passage:

  The children of all three of them by her possession of the mother of them and a little of the father of them had cut off from them in their later younger living a part of them and they had then a right to their sore feeling at her possession of their mother and a little of the father of them. There will be now more history of Madeleine Wyman in this possession.

  This is part of a section which attempts to describe a family’s relationship with its governess, and it exemplifies the three principles on which the book was written. First, like Three Lives, the book’s style was intended to reflect the language and minds of the people it portrays – in this case an American German-Jewish family, the Herslands. Second, the absence of punctuation and the repetition or ‘insistence’ of certain phrases, sometimes even whole sentences, was meant (as Gertrude explained) as an attempt to get to ‘the bottom nature in people’ by ‘hearing how everybody said the same thing over and over again with infinite variations’. Third, the actual narrative technique tries to convey an endless series of instant pictures of the present moment, rather than a historical and cumulative presentation. Possibly it owed so
mething to Gertrude’s studies with William James, who, she said, had taught her that ‘science is continuously busy with the complete description of something’. A more obvious influence is Cubism, a movement born while she was at work on the book.

  Though the aims of The Making of Americans are laudable, what results is quite different. The book is subtitled The Hersland Family, and underneath all the experimental writing it is an American family novel in the genre pioneered by Louisa M. Alcott and her imitators. The narrative is spattered with observations which, if conventionally punctuated, could come from the pages of the Alcott imitators, or at better moments from Henry James or even Jane Austen. Here are two pieces from it, with nineteenth-century punctuation added:

  Henry Dehning was a grown man, and, for his day, a rich one, when his father died … He was strong, and rich, and good tempered, and respected; and he showed it in his look; that look that makes young people think older ones are very aged.

  Mrs Dehning was the quintessence of loud-voiced, good-looking prosperity … a woman whose rasping insensibility to gentle courtesy deserved the prejudice one cherished against her; but she was a woman, to do her justice, generous and honest; one whom one might like the better the more one saw her less.*

  The Making of Americans appears, then, to be rather false modernism, an attempt to seem avant-garde when the underlying plan and material are somewhat conventional. It seems that Gertrude Stein was really trying to write ‘the great American novel’ – an expression she sometimes used – while disguising it as experimental.

  The resemblance to James was noticed by the book’s typist: ‘Of course my love of Henry James was a good preparation for the long sentences.’ The lady at the typewriter was Alice Babette Toklas, then aged thirty, two years Gertrude’s junior, recently arrived in Paris. The name Alice B. Toklas sounds like one of Gertrude’s queer inventions in Three Lives or The Making of Americans; and Alice eventually became a shadow of Gertrude, to the extent that it was hard to believe she had ever had an independent existence.

  She came from a very similar background: she was the daughter of a Polish-Jewish businessman in California, and, like Gertrude, her mother had died when she was in her teens. Alice received a college education, and thereafter drifted through a life of ladylike amusement in San Francisco. When she was thirty she went on vacation to Paris with a friend, Harriet Levy, and while she was there, Gertrude’s brother Michael Stein, whom Alice knew from San Francisco, introduced her to Gertrude.

  Alice was no beauty. She had a perceptible moustache and an impassive, rather sullen expression. Mabel Dodge, a wealthy American friend of Gertrude’s, found her thoroughly disconcerting, ‘like Leah, out of the Old Testament, in her half-Oriental get-up … her barbaric chains and jewels – and her melancholy nose’. But Gertrude fell for her instantly.

  Alice writes of their first meeting, in September 1907, in Michael Stein’s apartment:

  It was Gertrude Stein who held my complete attention, as she did for all the many years I knew her until her death … She was a golden brown presence, burned by the Tuscan sun and with a golden glint in her warm brown hair. She was dressed in a warm brown corduroy suit. She wore a large round coral brooch and when she talked, very little, or laughed, a good deal, I thought her voice came from this brooch. It was unlike anyone else’s voice – deep, full, velvety like a great contralto’s … She was large and heavy with delicate small hands and a beautifully modelled and unique head.

  This is one of the brighter passages from Alice’s real autobiography. What is Remembered (1963). Most of the book reads like a pale imitation of Gertrude, without any of the humour, vitality, or perception.

  Gertrude’s own version of their first meeting, which she apparently means the reader to take seriously, has Alice coming to a swift judgement about her new friend: ‘I may say that only three times in my life have I met a genius and each time a bell within me rang and I was not mistaken … The three geniuses … are Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso and Alfred Whitehead … In no one of the three cases have I been mistaken.’ (Ezra Pound said that Gertrude told him the Jews had produced three geniuses: herself, Spinoza, and Jesus Christ.)

  Gertrude invited Alice to a Saturday salon at rue de Fleurus, and to dinner with her and Leo beforehand. When Alice arrived she found Picasso and Fernande among the other guests. In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude has Alice say of this: ‘Fernande was the first wife of a genius I was to sit with. The geniuses came and talked to Gertrude Stein and the wives sat with me.’

  Alice took an apartment for herself and her friend Harriet, but Gertrude set about undermining Harriet’s influence on Alice. When Harriet got religious mania, Gertrude advised her to kill herself. ‘This upset me more than it did Harriet,’ writes Alice. Gertrude then turned psychologist, analysing Alice according to her own terminology, and, says Alice,

  diagnosed me as an old maid mermaid which I resented, the old maid was bad enough but the mermaid was quite unbearable. I cannot remember how this wore thin and finally blew away entirely. But by the time the buttercups were in bloom [summer 1908], the old maid mermaid had gone into oblivion and I had been gathering wild violets.

  This appears to be a reference to sexual initiation, and some lines in one of Gertrude’s poems suggests that a fairly happy physical relationship was soon established:

  Pussy how pretty you are …

  Kiss my lips. She did

  Kiss my lips again she did.

  Kiss my lips over and over again she did.

  ‘Then my friend went back to California, and I joined Gertrude Stein in the rue de Fleurus.’ So writes Gertrude on behalf of Alice in the Autobiography, but it was more complicated than this. Harriet was still with Alice in the summer of 1908, so Gertrude invited them both down to Fiesole in Tuscany, fixed them up with a villa, then persuaded Alice to abandon Harriet and come away with her on a walking tour. On this journey, Gertrude would, as always, refuse to get up before midday, so they invariably set out when the sun was at its highest, Gertrude having donned her usual brown corduroys although she sweated profusely. Alice tagged along patiently. ‘The sun was giving a torrid heat,’ she writes of one such walk, from Perugia to Assisi, ‘so under some bushes I discarded my silk combination and stockings. It was all I could do.’ (Gertrude’s version has Alice say: ‘I gradually undressed … but even so I dropped a few tears before we arrived.’) Another time they walked in Spain, where the peasants assumed that Gertrude’s corduroys were the habit of a religious order. Alice meanwhile ‘always wore a black silk coat, black gloves and a black hat, the only pleasure I allowed myself were lovely artificial flowers on my hat’.

  Still Harriet clung to Alice, and when they all got back to Paris after the 1908 trip, Alice and Harriet resumed apartment life together, despite heavy hints from Gertrude. In one of the ‘word-portraits’ Gertrude had begun to write of her acquaintances, there is a description of Harriet’s indecision and failure to understand when Gertrude and Alice had pointedly asked her what were her plans for the summer: ‘She said she did not have any plans for the summer. No one was interested in this thing in whether she had any plans for the summer. That is not the complete history of this thing, some were interested in this thing in her not having any plans for the summer …’ Finally, when Harriet took a trip back to California, Alice sent her a message that there was little point in coming back to Paris, as she was moving in with Gertrude.

  ‘And with that,’ says Alice, ‘I moved over to the rue de Fleurus.’ Leo does not seem to have minded; he gave up his study so that she could have a bedroom. He was currently involved in a lengthy courtship of a much-bedded artist’s model, Nina Auzias. He said he had no physical feelings for her, but regarded her as a ‘psychological study’, taking a voyeuristic interest in her sexual affairs. They were eventually married in 1921.

  Leo sometimes wrote burlesques of his sister’s word-portraits, but this was scarcely necessary, for the originals often seem to set out to
parody themselves. For example this is what Gertrude has to say about Picasso:

  This one always had something being coming out of this one. This one was working. This one always had been working. This one was always having something that was coming out of this one … (etc.)

  Which is far less illuminating than her rough notes for the piece:

  Do one about Pablo his emotional leap and courage as opposed to lack of courage in Cézanne and me. His laziness and lack of continuity and his facility too quick for the content. Too lazy to do sculpture …

  Nevertheless the word-portraits are far more genuinely experimental than The Making of Americans – a real attempt at Cubism in prose. When some of them were published in Gertrude’s Tender Buttons (1914), they excited a number of young writers who were hoping to struggle free from the constraints of nineteenth-century diction. Among these was the American novelist Sherwood Anderson, who says of his discovery of her prose: ‘It excited me as one might grow excited in going out into a new and wonderful country where everything is strange.’

  After the publication of Tender Buttons, the New York Times dubbed Gertrude a ‘Cubist of Letters’, and she was delighted by this growing fame, telling Mabel Dodge: ‘I get awfully excited about the gloire.’ Meanwhile she was enthusiastic about the Cubist movement in painting. It had virtually begun at 27 rue de Fleurus, for she and Leo had hung Picasso’s drawings for Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, the movement’s first important achievement. Indeed, Picasso may have painted the picture in jealous reaction to Gertrude’s admiration for Matisse, since he said it was intended to present ‘venal realities’ rather than the ‘bourgeois idyll’ of Matisse’s Bonheur de Vivre. But though Gertrude greatly admired Les Demoiselles, Leo thought it ‘a horrible mess’, and said he had only bought Picasso’s ‘Negroid things’ in ‘hopes of something better’. He and Picasso began to quarrel about Cubism. Gertrude says of this: ‘I was alone at this time in understanding him [Picasso], perhaps because I was expressing the same thing in literature.’