At the turn
of the twentieth century, in Paris, a rich expatriate American secular Jewish
family of two brothers and their youngest sister was making a reputation for
itself as art collectors and patrons of upcoming artists, painters to be
precise, who, the siblings were convinced, had great future.
The
siblings obviously knew their onions. The painters they supported and whose
paintings they acquired included Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. Other
painters whose paintings they bought had either died (Cezanne) or were about to
die (Henri Rousseau) in relative obscurity, but who, in the subsequent decades
following their deaths, would be hailed as masters.
The family
was the Steins—the brothers were Michael, the eldest of five siblings, who, in
the 1890s, following the deaths of their parents, had inherited the family
business of streetcars and, with wise decisions, had made a fortune; one of his
brothers, Leo; and a sister, the youngest of the siblings, Gertrude.
In 1903
Gertrude Stein, after abandoning a medical career at Johns Hopkins (she lasted
two years), joined her brothers in France. She lived in France for the rest of
her life, through two World Wars.
Gertrude
Stein lived with her brother Leo at rue de Fleurus, while the other brother,
Michael, with his charismatic wife Sarah, lived in the rue Madame. In the first
decade of the twentieth century, Gertrude and Leo Stein went on to assemble the
most impressive private modern gallery which quickly achieved a formidable
reputation; the siblings were intimately linked with the avant-garde artistic
movement in Paris. They quickly developed a wide-ranging social circle
comprising mainly painters but also poets, and, on Saturdays, presided over
gatherings which became famous. Gertrude Stein, who had the personality to
match her massive frame, dominated these get-togethers. It was the ambition of
many an upcoming artist to be invited to Gertrude Stein’s soirees. While paintings of Picasso dominated the pavilion of rue
de Fleurus, Sarah, Michael Stein’s wife was an enthusiastic supporter of Henri
Matisse, who, she never tired of telling people, was a genius.
Alice B
Toklas was born in California into a comfortably bourgeois Jewish family. Her
mother, of artistic temperament, arranged for Alice to have piano lessons in
which she became fairly proficient and for a while toyed with the idea of
pursuing a musical career. In 1907 San Francisco, where Toklas had lived all
her life, was rocked by a massive earthquake. The earthquake brought Michael
and Sarah Stein to San Francisco to assess the damage caused by the quake to
their income-generating flats, which were supporting their artistic life in
Paris. Sarah Stein brought with her paintings of Matisse, amongst them Portrait
A la Raie Verte, the first Matisse paintings to cross the Atlantics. The Steins
and Toklases were family friends. During their meeting Alice B Toklas saw Portrait
A la Raie Verte and was captivated. Sarah Stein, upon learning that Alice
wished to visit Europe one day with her childhood friend Harriet Levy (who
wrote her own memoir, 920 O’Farrell Street), urged Toklas
to return to Paris with them. It didn’t quite materialize at that time;
however, a few months later, in September 1907, Alice B Toklas arrived in
Paris. Within a week of her arrival Toklas visited Michael and Sarah Stein.
With them was Gertrude Stein. More than fifty years after this first meeting,
more than a decade after Gertrude Stein’s death, and three years before the end
of her own long life, in her autobiography (not to be confused with the book
reviewed in this post), Toklas wrote:
‘It was
Gertrude Stein who held my complete attention, as she did for all the many
years I knew her until her death, and all these empty ones since then.’
Soon Toklas
moved into rue de Fleurus (much to the uneasiness of Leo Stein), Harriet Levy
was dispatched back to America, and Stein and Toklas became partners. The relationship
lasted for almost 40 years and ended with Stein’s death in 1946.
Gertrude
Stain wasn’t just an art collector; she also fancied herself as a writer; and
not just any old writer, but a pioneering modernist writer who was going to be
hugely influential, a writer who was a true inheritor of the legacy of Henry
James (under the tutelage of whose psychologist brother, William, she had tried
‘automatic writing’ while at the Radcliff in the 1890s). The problem was: no
publisher was willing to publish Stein’s works, which were described variously
as dense, incomprehensible and inaccessible. She managed to find a publisher
for her Three Lives, but no one was willing to touch The Making
of Americans, Stein’s epic novel of an American family (written in
modernist style, in the continuous present tense and with repetitive
phrases—needless to say I shall steer clear of it). After various unsuccessful attempts
to have this novel published despite help offered by influential friends (Ford
Madox Ford published excerpts from the novel, upon recommendation from Ernest
Hemingway, in Transatlantic Review), Stein launched her own publishing
firm—nominally owned by Alice B Toklas—the existence of which was devoted to
publishing and promoting Stein’s work. Stein sold off one of her early Picasso
paintings to fund the venture. The Plain Edition, as the publishing
firm was called, limped on for a few years and published five of Stein’s works
(including five hundred copies of The Making of Americans) which
failed to lift Stein’s fortunes.
Stein was
nearing sixty, largely unpublished, and, as a writer, not very well known
outside the coterie of her friends and well-wishers. After the acrimonious
split from her brother Leo just before the First World War (the cause of which
was never made public although Leo was said to have been deeply disapproving
both of Stein’s lesbian relationship with Toklas and her writing style),
Stein’s decisions to back what she thought were great artists had not paid off.
(Indeed, many still believe that Stein owes her fame as a patron of the
avant-garde to the astute judgment of Leo.) She was a genius; she had no doubt
about it. She had led an extraordinary life—she was sure of it—and had contributed
to the development of modern art and literature. The wider public needed to
know all this.
Stein told
her partner Alice B Toklas to write her, Stein’s, biography. Toklas refused.
Stein then proceeded to write it herself, and titled it, tongue firmly lodged
in cheek (one imagines) The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas.
Of course it wasn’t Toklas’s autobiography; it was Stein’s autobiography. Stein
made this clear by (rightly) taking the credit of the autobiography.
The Autobiography of
Alice B Toklas,
apparently written in six weeks, gave Stein what she had always yearned for:
literary celebrity. The book was a success upon its publication and remains the
best known (and probably most accessible) work of Stein.
The ‘autobiography’
begins with Toklas’s life in San Francisco before she came to Paris, her
arrival in Paris with Harriet Levy, and her first meeting with Stein. From then
on Stein takes over. We learn of Stein’s life from before she arrived in Paris,
through the pre-First World War years, and through the war to the early 1930s. The
book gives a light-hearted, amusing account of artists who visit Stein or whom
Stein visits. Pablo Picasso, Henri Mattise, Henri Rousseau, Georges Braque,
Francis Picabia, Guillaume Apollinaire (the man who coined the term
surrealism), Jean Cocteau, Andre and Alice Derain, Juan Gris, Francis Rose, Ramon
Pichot, Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemmingway—they are all here. We also meet artists
whose names lay buried under the sands of time: such as the painter and printmaker
Marie Laurencin, one-time girlfriend of Apollinaire; Mildred Aldrich, the
American journalist and writer (known these days, if at all, for her wartime
letters, A Hillitop on the Marne) of whom Stein appears to have been
especially fond; and the forgotten British novelist Hope Mirrilees. Fernande
Oliver, Picasso’s first famous mistress and the only one to have known him
intimately when he was an unknown, struggling artist is there too. Daniel-Henry
Kahnweiler, the German art gallery owner who supported the cubists, makes a
guest appearance. We learn that Stein was one of the first subscribers of the
lending library started by Sylvia Beach who went on to open the original
Shakespeare and Co, the legendary bookshop of English language books on the
Left Bank. The American millionairess Mable Dodge, whose ‘portrait’ Stein wrote
and which Dodge published privately and tastefully, makes a cameo appearance. It
is a list of Who’s Who in art in the first quarter of twentieth century.
The book
has a gossipy, anecdotal feel to it. While telling an anecdote Stein jumps
several years in time on a related topic; then goes back in time, before
returning to the time of the anecdote which she begins telling. Thus, Guillaume
Apollinaire, who died just after the First World War might make an appearance
when Stein is narrating an incident that took place is, say, 1926, without any
reference to time frame. It gets a tad confusing with regard to chronology. But
it doesn’t matter: the inherent energy and insouciance of the narrative carries
you through; you go with the flow and enjoy the ride. For example, the
description of the party Picasso threw to celebrate a painting of Henry
Rousseau is vivid and full of verve.
There are
not many personal anecdotes involving these personalities, which stand out
(except perhaps those of the mercurial Fernade Oliver); all the great names
mentioned in the book seem to treat Stein like a precocious teenager who is
overbearing, probably insufferable, but perhaps also a genius. Stein has
absolutely no doubt in her mind that she is a genius. With un-selfconsciousness
that is so endearing it brings a smile to your face she informs the reader that
she wrote poetry that has ‘so greatly influenced the younger generation’. The
opera she wrote on Saint Theresa of Avila and Ignatius Loyola (which Virgil
Thompson, another admirer of Stein, set to music) was ‘completely interesting
both as to words and music’. She is the true successor of Henry James; rather Henry
James is Stein’s forerunner. Stein is one of the few who has created the
literary methods of the twentieth century. For someone who, until then, was
virtually unknown and whose gargantuan novel (The Making of Americans,
which gets a mention on every other page in the first half of the book) was
rejected by practically every publisher, the self-confidence is astonishing. Stein
is also a woman of cut and dry opinions. She does not believe that writers can
be proficient in more than one language, and declares: ‘one can only have one metier
as one can only have one language. Her [Stein’s] metier is writing and her
language is English.’ ‘The African’, according to Stein, is ‘not primitive; he
has a very ancient and a very narrow culture and there it remains. Consequently
nothing does or can happen.’ At one stage ‘Alice B Toklas’ declares that she
has met only three geniuses in her life: Picasso, Whitehead and Stein. Stein is
clearly a woman who sees a genius every time she looks into a mirror. (To be
fair, when Alice B Toklas finally decided to write her autobiography—thirty
years after Stein published The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas—she
confirmed that Stein was one of the three geniuses she met in her life.)
On the front of the book is the portrait of Stein by Picasso. When someone commented that Stein in real life did not look like Picasso's painting, Picasso replied, "She will."
The Autobiography of
Alice B Toklas
is Stein’s autobiography, but not a great deal of information is provided about
the life of Stein and Toklas; what we get instead is a near-continuous
cavalcade of luminaries with whom Stein socialises. Stein and Toklas were
lesbian partners, but not so much as a glimpse is provided into their daily
lives. After reading The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas
you’d be excused for thinking that all that the two women did every day of the
week, every week of the year, year in year out, was hold soirees, visit rich friends, and go on holidays to Spain. Not a
word is said about Stein’s acrimonious split with Leo Stein who went on to live
in Florence after the split and died a year after Stein’s death; the brother
and sister did not exchange a word for more than three decades. In her ‘real’
autobiography (What is Remembered) Alice B Toklas described the split in one
sentence: ‘When he [Leo Stein] and Gertrude Stein disagreed about Picasso’s
pictures and her writing [so not over Stein’s relationship with Toklas] he became
unreasonable and unbearable. (Leo Stein, according to WikiPedia, described The
Autobiography of Alice B Toklas as a ‘farrago of lies’.) The other
brother, Michael, who was instrumental in bringing first Stein and then Toklas
to Paris and who must have funded Stein’s cosy lifestyle (one does wonder while
reading the book how Stein, who never worked and whose books didn’t sell, was
able to afford it all) is completely ignored after the first chapter. Michael
Stein lived in Paris until 1935 before he moved back to America with his wife;
their son, Allan (immortalized by Picasso in a 1908 painting) who continued to
live in Paris, was approached by Toklas for help in Stein’s last illness.
The Autobiography of
Alice B Toklas
came out in 1933. Stein could not have known what was in store for her in
future. What was in store for her was the Second World War and the occupation
of France by the Germany. It is way beyond the scope of this post to write
about Stein’s conduct during the occupation years or her relationship with the
Vichy regime. Stein and Toklas, both Jews, survived the occupation as did their
treasure of paintings. This was possible because of Stein’s friendship with a
right wing historian Bernard Fay who protected Stein (even as several thousand
Jews marched to their death) during the Nazi occupation of France. (In her autobiography,
which came out in 1963, four years before her death, Alice B Toklas—no doubt
driven by the desire to protect the reputation of her dead partner—chose to
completely gloss over Stein’s Faustian bargain or Fay’s role in saving her
skin. Bernard Fay gets a very warm mention in The Autobiography of Alice B
Toklas. He is a ‘dear friend’. As subsequent events showed he was also
a loyal friend.)
It is a
life, you get the impression, steeped in art. As you finish this witty, amusing
and agreeably diverting account of an artist’s life in the first half of the
twentieth century who was a close witness of the modern art movement, what
stays in your mind is Stein’s larger than life personality. Gertrude Stein, in
all probabilities, was not the genius she was convinced she was, but this is an
eminently readable book.
