She came to Paris, she said, to kill the nineteenth century. Her weapons were a pencil and a supply of softcover notebooks, her targets dullness and cliché. She chopped off her long coils of hair and dispensed with punctuation; she spent her mornings asleep and her nights writing furiously, tossing loose scraps of paper to the floor as she went. She rubbed her head with both hands when she was excited, and sat with her knees planted far apart, taking up as much space as possible. She loved driving fast cars, especially through tunnels, and stepped out into roads without looking, long skirts flapping in the breeze. She was a hoarder, of papers, of words, of Catholic ornaments and antique figurines of kittens. Her favourite sound was a hooting owl,2 her favourite flowers were pansies and her favourite colour was salmon-pink. Her laugh, someone remembered, was 'like a beefsteak'. Stretched on a divan underneath her own Picasso portrait, Gertrude Stein was a myth and a monument, a larger-than-life figure whom friends and detractors viewed by turns with amusement, affection and alarm. She was at once a celebrity and an enigma: everyone knew she was famous, but no one was quite sure why.
'I have been the creative literary mind of the century,' she insisted, urging the reading public to 'think of the Bible and Homer think of Shakespeare and think of me'. Her work, spurred by her scientific background, asked questions that pushed language beyond its limits. How does perception work? How do words make meaning? What if writing set out not to describe the world, but to embody the very essence of people, places, objects, existence? But even as Stein gradually became a household name in her native America, her reputation was plagued by uncertainty. As her friend Thornton Wilder diplomatically put it, Stein pursued her aims 'with such conviction and intensity that occasionally she forgot that the results could be difficult to others'. Her writing, full of wordplay, non-sequitur and extended passages of repetition, confounded publishers, critics and readers. Bafflement soon became suspicion. Was Stein a genius, revolutionising a sterile literary tradition, or a self-important charlatan? A true experimenter who freed language from its formal constraints, or a pretender who knew nothing about the modern art she supposedly championed? An outcast, or the ultimate insider?
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I came to Stein, first, through her legend. Like many, I'd absorbed the romantic nostalgia for the Golden Age of Twenties Paris. As a teenager my bedroom walls were adorned with posters for Montmartre cabarets; I'd seen Woody Allen's terrible film Midnight in Paris, in which Kathy Bates plays a matronly Stein cheerfully offering writing advice to a time-travelling screenwriter. And I'd read and loved The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas - Stein's own contribution to that sepia-toned mythology. Written, with a wink, in the voice of her adoring partner, Stein's memoir tells the captivating story of her immersion in the city's bohemian world as the magnetic host of a starry salon, buying cheap canvases by Matisse and Picasso, befriending Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Toklas, the book's ostensible narrator, watches on lovingly as Stein throws out witticisms that dazzle everyone around her, and triumphantly produces a succession of handwritten masterpieces. It's a deliciously intimate, teasing and very funny book, deservedly acclaimed as a classic - but I didn't yet know the circumstances under which it had been written. Because Stein had devised the book with an ulterior motive. In 1932, fed up with decades of mockery and poor sales of her avant-garde texts, Stein had crafted a self-portrait designed to draw in doubting readers and make the case for her 'real' work's importance - and, crucially, its pleasure. It was only half successful. The Autobiography's popularity catapulted Stein (and Toklas) to international celebrity - yet threatened to submerge her in the very fictions she had created. Readers did go mad for Stein, just as she hoped, but the Autobiography cemented her public image as a personality rather than an artist; not a bold innovator, but a collector of other talents.
But one idea gave Stein hope. She had long believed that public recognition lags fifty years behind; that a truly radical artist could not expect to be appreciated in their own time. Those at the forefront of modern art, she wrote in 1926, 'are naturally only of importance when they are dead . the creator of the new composition in the arts is an outlaw until he is a classic'.3 In the last decade of her life, Stein began to set her sights on her posthumous legacy. 'I am working for what will endure, not for a public,' she wrote, adding that 'early setbacks aid the eventual greatness. Quick success is killing.' She began to send her papers - tranches of suitcases brimming with manuscripts, letters and notebooks - to the Yale University Library, to ensure that her final epitaph would be her work. She died, aged seventy-two, in July 1946, her status uncertain; the bulk of her writing was unpublished, and her popular image lingered as that of a sort of eccentric oracle, not a serious literary figure. But the Gertrude Stein Collection formed one of the most comprehensive archives in Yale's impressive holdings. Within months of its opening, a trail of scholars and biographers arrived to sift through this trove of clues and red herrings, seeking to unravel the enduring mysteries about the woman who remained, as one obituary put it, 'one of the least read and most widely publicised writers of her day'.
The more I learned about Stein, the more I was intrigued - and confounded - by her contradictions. I liked her indefatigable self-mythologising, her wry probing of genre and gender. Above all, I was drawn to her work - even if, at first, I didn't know what to make of it. Her monumental epic The Making of Americans - a family saga which morphs, over its thousand pages, into a history of 'everyone who ever was or is or will be living' - has acquired a dubious cult status; it's often rumoured to be 'unreadable'. It took me a long time to take the plunge and open it - but as soon as I did, I was hooked by its rhythms, eager to follow Stein's restless sentences as they quest towards conclusion. 'The business of an artist', she wrote, 'is to be exciting.' Stein renders words physical, sometimes beautiful ('What is a noun. A noun is grown with petals'), sometimes violent ('Prepositions are like burning paint'),4 always surprising, fresh and full of possibility.
Stein always believed she could win over even her fiercest critics. 'My sentences do get under their skin,' she chuckled - and I found that she was right. Stein's work defies traditional ways of reading. It's impossible, for one thing, to say what her texts are about. Her writing often starts from concrete source material - objects in her sightline, snippets of conversation, the people around her - and Stein evokes that material so deftly you can almost taste the Spanish cuttlefish, or luxuriate in the Majorcan breeze, or feel the whoosh of Isadora Duncan's whirling skirt. But her texts aren't so much about that ostensible subject matter: rather, they engage with the way words work together on the page, recasting everyday experiences and perceptions in surreal mutations of language. Stein left few clues to her work: she didn't keep a diary, and rarely discussed her writing in letters. 'I write to write,' she explained, impatiently - a statement, like many of Stein's, whose apparent flippancy masks a deep truth. Stein is less a writer in the conventional sense than a philosopher of language. Words were both her medium and her subject. To think with Stein as she interrogates their power and potential through cascades of rhythmic prose, I found, can be an intoxicating experience. Often, her texts start slowly, as if Stein is turning over thoughts in her mind, then gain momentum as she focuses in on a word or image, testing and stretching it with puns and soundplay before exploding it into a fresh direction. Her work is always about the conditions of its own creation: the process, to her, was more important than the finished text. She wanted each piece to preserve 'the intensity of the fight' that went into its making. The way to read Stein is to trust her: perhaps to say her words aloud, to savour the oddities of her phrasing and to resist the urge to explain what her writing means. But to read Stein's work like a code to be deciphered, I learned, is to set oneself up for serious frustration - and to miss the pleasures her work can offer.
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Stein and Toklas at the rue de Fleurus, c.1922:
the cover image for the Autobiography (photo: Man Ray)
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