Gertrude Stein has always split opinion. During her lifetime, half the world seemed to consider her a modernist, revolutionary genius, and the other half a talentless, baffling crank. With her fragmented prose style certainly not for everyone, she was considered by many to be unreadable, rather than unputdownable – a reputation that endures today.
But as Stein is an author who has been dead for 80 years, with books still being written about her and her work still in print, surely there has to be something there. Is this confounding, obtuse, frequently aggravating author someone we should be listening to in the 21st century?
“She’s always been much more written about and talked about than actually read,” says Francesca Wade, author of the biography Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife, recently published in paperback. “I think her writing endures because it’s so polarising.”
Wade herself was fascinated by Stein’s literary standing without knowing a great deal about her actual writing until she started investigating her life. “I didn’t start particularly with an agenda,” Wade tells me. “She won me over through a long, sustained immersion in her work. Which not everyone will have time for.”
Through her work, which ran from poetry to memoir to opera librettos to novels, Stein made it her mission to “kill the nineteenth century”. Do away with the torpid, sentimental rubbish that clogged up library shelves, gallery walls and the feeble minds of men.
Gertrude Stein, right, with her partner Alice B Toklas, and her dog, Basket, in front of her home in France (Photo: Bettmann Archive)As indicated by the endless fascination with the novelists publishing work in that century – Dickens, Austen and the Brontës – her mission didn’t go all that well. But in her attempts to thrust modernism, surrealism and profundity into the public consciousness, she made herself, briefly, a sensation and, ultimately, a legend. Her name is still widely known, even if the details are vague.
Gertrude Stein was born in 1874 to a German-Jewish middle-class family that had moved to the United States in the 1840s. Interested in science, she studied with psychologist William James (brother of novelist Henry, one of those 19th-century stalwarts Stein was determined to kill) where experiments included dalliances with automatic writing, a type of stream-of-consciousness prose produced without plan or thought.
Shedding light on this approach, in her new work of fiction My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein, Deborah Levy writes: “She did not believe it is worth having a conversation if everything is understandable.” Levy’s unnamed narrator delves deeper into Stein’s work, trying to get to the core of her continued popularity and, in doing so, questions many facets of her own life. She finds Stein an enigma, her friends in Paris find her baffling and irrelevant. All the time, Stein drifts through the book, smiling benignly.
Stein and Toklas in the 1940s (Photo: Fotosearch/Getty Images)Stein, tiring of her studies and stung by a failed infatuation with feminist Mary Bookstaver (the romance was the basis of Stein’s first novel QED, not published until after her death), moved to Paris in 1903 with her brother Leo. Leo’s love of art rubbed off on Gertrude. They began to collect work by starving artists who were derided by the art establishment: Matisse, Cezanne, Picasso. Soon, more open-minded connoisseurs were curious about their collection.
The Steins’ apartment at 27 rue de Fleurus developed into a free-floating salon entertaining writers, artists and passing intellectuals. Picasso painted Stein’s portrait, her face an expressionless mask.
In 1907, Stein met Alice B Toklas, a sophisticated, well-read San Franciscan, determined to escape her stifling family and seeking artistic adventure. It was love at first sight. Toklas moved into rue de Fleurus and stayed at Gertrude’s side for 40 years. Leo had reportedly told Gertrude that “any manifestation of homosexuality of any kind annoyed him and could they kindly refrain”. They could not. Leo moved out and never saw his sister again. Toklas became the de facto “art wife”, typing up Stein’s work, keeping the unwanted away and eventually protecting and propagating her legacy.
The mélange of psychological study, cubism and the avant-garde giddiness of Paris in the early 20th century, plus her own fierce determination, drove Stein to write in a completely new way. 1914’s Tender Buttons, a collection of poems dedicated to “Objects”, “Food” and “Rooms”, describes coffee as, “More of double. A place in no new table. A single image is not splendor. Dirty is yellow.” Some were intrigued, most appalled.
Regardless, Stein gushed forth with reams of singular prose. They included epic fiction (The Making of Americans), bizarre operettas (Four Saints in Three Acts) and playful biographical essays (Word Portraits). Stein struggled to get this work published. And when she did, it was often roundly ridiculed.
Gertrude Stein indicated to others that it was possible to be subversive and still be revered (Photo: Bettmann Archive)“I think in her lifetime, so much of the discourse that grew up around her was people tearing her apart or questioning her,” Wade says. “She was trying to push language beyond its limits and make a kind of literature that had never been seen before.”
Though widely reviewed, when the books made it out into the world, few actually read the latest Gertrude Stein. Nearing 60 and with little in print, Stein snapped and decided to write something coherent, commercial and cynically designed to put her on the map. The result was 1933’s The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas. It is Stein, pretending to be Toklas, writing about Stein. Ernest Hemingway, whom Stein mentored, considered it a “damned, pitiful book”. But, despite Papa’s objections, the book became a sensation and made Stein a star.
She toured the States, her name up in lights in Times Square (“GERTRUDE STEIN HAS ARRIVED”). Used to holding court at her Parisian salon, she was the perfect interviewee, happy to be rude, obtuse and sensational. But after years of trying to be taken seriously as an “artist”, Stein was now firmly a celebrity thanks, ironically, to a book that subtly lampooned celebrity. It didn’t sit well.
Many works followed – and controversies, not least her support of Philippe Pétain, head of state of the pro-Nazi collaborationist Vichy regime in France during the Second World War, which has been much debated in the years since her death. None of her subsequent works had the impact of the Autobiography, but they did establish a legion of fans and scholars. Stein succumbed to stomach cancer in 1946. Toklas fanned the flames of the Stein myth and determined to get all of her work into print, until her own death in 1967.
Stein with her dog Basket in her Paris apartment, 1946 (Photo: Horst P Horst/Conde Nast via Getty)Wade’s biography and Levy’s novel indicate a continuing fascination with this illusive, mercurial figure. Both books quote extensively from Stein’s voluminous back catalogue. It reminds the reader of the sheer variety of Stein’s work. She was known for repetition, obscurity, obtuseness. But once you dive in, everything can be found. Everyday objects obtain sentience. Phrases take sudden right turns with startling effects. Scenes are delivered pugnaciously, with bright flashes of humour. As Wade states: “She asks you to read and see English in totally new ways.”
Yes, her work can be maddening and stomach-churningly pretentious. It can be hard to understand. Giving yourself over to a piece of writing that demands no attempt to disseminate meaning, no plot twists or propulsion, requiring a different type of intellectual rigour, can feel a little hollow, a little meaningless. But reading Gertrude Stein is simply an act of throwing yourself into the beauty of the language and just letting it wash around you. Tackling the non-understandable in a time when we demand everything be crystal clear is a reading challenge that ultimately pays dividends and feels like the perfect antidote to brain rot.
And even without the writing, Stein must be marvelled at for what she was, when she was. Queer when such things were unthinkable, Jewish at a time when antisemitism was rife, big when gamine was all the rage, loud when women were required to be silent and docile. She spent her life getting away with it, indicating to others that it was possible to be subversive and still be revered.
And if nothing else, you can comfort yourself in the knowledge that no Large Language Model could ever come up with something as confounding and singularly human as Gertrude Stein. And that must count for something.
‘Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife’ by Francesca Wade is published by Faber, £12.99 and ‘My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein: A Fiction’ by Deborah Levy is published by Hamish Hamilton, £18.99
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