But what do you do while you’re waiting around to become a classic? And how can you help the process along? Francesca Wade’s Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife is an attempt to answer that question. The book is a biography of Stein, but an oddly structured one, in which the subject dies about halfway through. “Biography, like detective fiction, tends to begin with a corpse,” Wade writes (a killer line), “but Stein well knew that a writer’s life does not end at death, if their work has the power to survive them.” Stein, she contends, was unusually concerned with her posthumous reputation: Having accepted that her work wasn’t destined to be appreciated in her lifetime, she put her faith in posterity. “Those who are creating the modern composition authentically are naturally only of importance when they are dead,” Stein once wrote. Accordingly, she spent a good portion of her life making arrangements for her afterlife.
Stein was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, in 1874, the child of well-heeled second-generation German Jewish immigrants. When Gertrude was five, the family relocated to Oakland, California, where her father made his fortune investing in the nascent public transportation industry. (The adult Stein’s famous pronouncement on Oakland—“There is no there there”—is one of several Steinisms that has achieved proverbial status.) Gertrude, the youngest of five children, was called “Baby,” a nickname she retained for the rest of her life. She was cosseted and indulged by her parents and siblings, establishing a lifelong pattern of contented dependence on the ministrations of others. “It is better if you are the youngest girl in a family to have a brother two years older,” she wrote of her early bond with her brother Leo, “because that makes everything a pleasure to you, you go everywhere and do everything while he does it all for and with you which is a pleasant way to have everything happen to you.”
Seeing the astonishing innovations in painting of the time encouraged Stein, who was already writing fiction, to experiment more radically in her own work. Cézanne, she later remembered, “gave me a new feeling about composition … it was not solely the realism of the characters but the realism of the composition which was the important thing.” Her formal breakthrough as a writer came in 1909 with Three Lives, a trio of novellas that adapted Cubist aesthetics to fictional portraiture, making a first, decisive break with literary realism. From there Stein was off and running, moving on to the exhaustive character analysis and intricate repetitions of The Making of Americans—a monumental novel charting the “History of a Family’s Progress” over the course of nearly a thousand pages—and the playful abstractions of Tender Buttons (“A shawl is a hat and hurt and a red balloon and an under coat and a sizer a sizer of talk”). More than a century on, these works are still bracingly strange, written according to an internal logic that is as implacable as it is inscrutable. And yet they are also, as Wade emphasizes, deeply pleasurable, if one gives oneself over to the experience: by turns funny, sexy, touching, and deeply bewildering. “The way to read Stein is to trust her,” Wade assures her reader early on. There’s no other way.
Stein and Alice B. Toklas became so closely entwined that Stein merged their names in the margin of one of her notebooks: “Gertice. Altrude.”
Stein’s most important early supporter, however, was Alice B. Toklas, who first entered her life in 1907 and quickly became her secretary, muse, lover, and “wife.” (Though the two were not, of course, legally married, Stein consistently used this word to refer to Toklas in private.) A native of San Francisco who, like Stein, had grown up in a well-to-do Jewish family before immigrating to Paris to sample la vie bohème, Toklas was immediately taken with Stein. Recalling their first meeting in her 1963 memoir What Is Remembered, Toklas wrote that “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.” Toklas did everything for Stein—whom she called “Baby,” as her parents and siblings had—from typing up her manuscripts to cooking her meals to organizing her social life. Stein quickly became completely reliant on her; Van Vechten observed that Stein could not “cook an egg, or sew a button, or even place a postage stamp of the correct denomination on an envelope.” Toklas believed completely in Stein’s genius and did everything she could to cultivate and protect it, subsuming her ambitions into her partner’s without remainder. The two became so closely entwined that Stein merged their names in the margin of one of her notebooks: “Gertice. Altrude.”
It was in the 1930s that Stein began preparing for her posthumous career. Via her friend Thornton Wilder, she learned that librarians at Yale University were beginning to assemble archival collections related to contemporary American literature, and that they were interested in acquiring her papers. Such acquisitions were then highly unusual: Modernism was just beginning to be canonized, and the notion that academic institutions would play a central role in shaping literary history was a relatively novel one. Building an entire archival collection around a still-living author, now a commonplace curatorial practice, was then entirely unheard of.
Through packing her texts into boxes, Stein was able to imagine a reality in which they would be received with pleasure, not derision: recovered, examined, celebrated … This was Stein’s chance to create a paper trail: to project a version of herself into the future.
There was more than gossip at stake here. Stein’s sexuality, and the suppression of it, turned out to be crucial to the story of her literary development, as well as to the future of her reputation. One of the first major discoveries in Stein’s archive was an early autobiographical novel called Q.E.D., which told the story of the young Stein’s tormented love affair with a woman named May Bookstaver. The book, written in a much more conventional realist style than her later works, was subsequently reworked into Stein’s story “Melanctha,” the centerpiece of Three Lives, which transposed the characters from white lesbians to a black heterosexual couple. That story had been much praised, including by many black writers and intellectuals, as a nuanced portrait of “Negro psychology,” but before Stein’s death no one had suspected it had any kind of autobiographical basis. Wade speculates that Stein “saw a certain affinity between her own outsider status”—as a lesbian, and a Jew—“and that of the mixed-race Melanctha—that in changing the characters’ races, she had wanted to think through the experience of otherness without being immediately identifiable as the protagonist.”
Q.E.D. had other significant consequences for Stein’s oeuvre. She wrote the novel in 1903, while still in the throes of her youthful infatuation with May Bookstaver. Almost three decades later, in the summer of 1932, she came across the manuscript again. Toklas, who had not previously known of the Bookstaver affair, was gripped by jealousy, resentment, and insecurity. According to Wade, Stein embarked on The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas around this time “as a form of reparation”: Her intention was “to compose a work that would affirm her commitment to Toklas once and for all, uniting their names, publicly, for ever.”
Though Wade’s discussion of such scholarly intrigues is deft and will be fascinating to connoisseurs of literary history, it can’t be denied that Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife loses some narrative momentum in its second half. The decision to bifurcate the book into a conventional, if truncated, full-life biography followed by a posthumous reception history is a clever one, but the book inevitably suffers from the absence of Stein as charismatic main character. To some extent, Toklas fills the vacuum, becoming the narrative’s de facto protagonist. In Wade’s telling, she is indeed a compelling, albeit tragic, figure. After Stein’s death, she was utterly bereft. Her friend, the journalist Janet Flanner, called her “the most widowed woman I know.” “Without Baby,” Toklas wrote to another friend in 1948, “there is no direction to anything—it’s just milling around in the dark.”
But without Toklas, would the legend of Stein have existed at all? Genius takes work, with only a small portion of that work done on the part of the genius herself. Without Toklas—and Mabel Dodge, and Carl Van Vechten, and Thornton Wilder, and dozens of other willing helpmeets—there would be no “Gertrude Stein”: Her achievement was the work of many hands.
Almost 80 years after her death, it seems safe to call Stein’s strategy to secure her posthumous fame a success: She is now a canonical American author, central to the histories of modernism, of queer literature, and of twentieth-century culture writ large. If not quite at the level of Shakespeare or Homer, she is at least as famous as Joyce and Pound. “Stein didn’t believe in an afterlife,” Wade comments. “Her fervent desire for posthumous recognition was her bid for immortality.” Toklas wasn’t so sure: At the age of 80, she converted to Roman Catholicism, largely because she had become fixated on the idea of reuniting with Stein in heaven. Her belief in Stein’s genius was inextricable from her love, just as her life had been inextricable from her devotion. As Toklas put it in a letter to Van Vechten in 1958: “I am nothing but the memory of her.”
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