Lucy Daniel - Gertrude Stein (Reaktion Books - Critical Lives)

Reaktion Books

Writing, posed in front of her portrait, 1914, photographed by Alvin Langdon Coburn.

The monumental presence of Gertrude Stein presides over NewYorks Bryant Park, serenely overlooking the New York Public Library,in the form of the sculpture by Jo Davidson first cast in Paris in 1922.Sitting in characteristic pose, pensive, relaxed, taking in the world, onthe verge of laughter, she seems to represent a little bit of Montmartretransported to Midtown Manhattan. An image of Left Bank bohemia,the American in Paris has also become a Parisian in America.

What lies behind that burnished, Sphinx-like creation? Theimage of herself Stein projected in her work encompassed manycontradictions central to modern intellectual life. Stein was a fiercepatriot, and much of her work was about defining Americannational character, but she lived most of her life in Paris where,part-snob, part-democrat, she became the hostess of the citys most important artistic salon. She was a scientist who became a literary giant, and a serious formal experimenter who ended up a bestseller and a literary celebrity. Seen as a feminist and a lesbian icon, she was conservative in her political views; she wasobsessed by middle-class values, but was also the self-appointedqueen of the avant-garde.

She was perhaps the most important experimental writer of thecentury. Her claim to be the most experimental experimental writeris also closely contested. She produced, from the early 1900sonwards, work of such radical experiment that readers doubtednot only her sanity but whether what she produced could even beclassified as writing. In the 1930s she was reborn through a seriesof populist auto-hagiographies. From the beginning, the events ofher life found their way wholesale into her work, while even herown works became her subject matter, and were enshrined asevents in her written version, her legend, of her life.

Even before her groundbreaking autobiographies, her personalitywas overbearing. It was a personality and a flamboyant life storythat overshadowed, and still does overshadow, her work. Remarksare not literature, she once told Hemingway, but much of her literaryreputation was erected on the rickety foundations of her ownremarks. She was hoisted by her own petard by the brilliance ofher self-invention. It was Edmund Wilson who wrote in 1934 thatthough her influence has always been felt at the sources of literatureand art ... neither the readers of modern books nor the collectorsof modern painting have realized how much they owe her.Thesame is still true today. After years of solitary toiling, extraordinarilydetermined almost pigheaded adherence to her own beliefs inthe theory of composition and, it is true, association with the greatnessof others, Stein eventually achieved the fame she had alwayshungered for. This was somewhat crassly summed up in the realizationof two lifelong dreams, an entry in Whos Who and publicationin The Atlantic Monthly (two ambitions all the more interesting, consideringthe outlandishness of both her style and her personality,for being so conventional). Stein wrote a bewildering number andbaffling variety of works; there are 571 separate named pieces in theYale catalogue of her work. But, though her work spans half a centuryand comprises novels, poetry, portraits, stories, essays, childrensbooks, scientific work, librettos, memoirs, plays, autobiography andlectures, as well as some work that seems genuinely unclassifiable,she remains both one of the most easily recognizable and one of theleast-known of the centurys great literary figures.

Her retrospective embellishments, stylizations and reiterationsof momentous occasions in her own life lit up a dazzling image ofthe separate lives of Stein: the icon, the salonire, the patron ofmodern art, and the private artist, the solitary writer. I am writingfor myself and strangers, she declared. Among the slew of memoirsof Paris in the 1920s, none is complete without at least apassing sketch of Stein and her Saturday night gatherings at therue de Fleurus, and the real events are misted over in anecdote andvendetta. The problem for Steins readers is often how to free herfrom the facade of her own making. And there is a separate story ofhow the cult of Gertrude Stein was created, both by herself and herconstellation of admirers.

Jo Davidson, Gertrude Stein, 1922, bronze.

For anyone familiar with the bravado of Gertrude Steins autobiographicalvoices, her legendary personal charisma and her stoicaldeclarations of her own genius, repeated like a mantra, it comes as a shock that she chose to sum up her life, while reflecting onDarwins theory of evolution, as a realization of the fact that starswere worlds and that space had no limitation and ... civilizationscame to be dead ... and I had always been afraid always would beafraid.was partly a way of covering up that loneliness and fear,as if by a series of mesmerizing, entrancing tricks she could distractpeople from her insecurity. In her grandest work, The Making ofAmericans, a book which started as a history of her own GermanJewish family and their arrival in America, this would mutate into a megalomaniac urge to catalogue all possible variations of humanlife; in her need to leave a legacy to future generations, nothingwould do other than knowing everything, and always being right.

When Gertrude was a little girl, she overheard a conversationthat would still make her shudder when she remembered it a lifetimelater. Gertrude, the youngest of five siblings, was idly listeningto her parents conversation when she gleaned the fact that anothersister had been stillborn, and another brother had died very young.Her father was adamant that he had only ever wanted five children.Had it not been for the deaths of these two babies, buried on achilly hillside in Pennsylvania, Gertrude Stein and her belovedbrother Leo would never have been born.In this childhoodmoment of devastating realization young Gertrudes sudden senseof herself as a cosmological fluke, clawing her way into life throughthe jaws of destiny seemed to be contained, for the adult Stein,the seeds of her lifelong fascination with personality, character andidentity. She would live forever with the fear of her own insignificance.And from then on, it seemed, she was also intent on creatinga life for herself.

At least, thats the way she told it. For this childhood memory is but one of many paradigmatic scenarios with which Stein builtup her own legend, in which truth and self-invention often overlapped.Gertrude was fully aware of both the value and the artificeof presenting her life as a series of witty and eccentric tableaux.From an early age she was in pursuit of