the last book I ever read (Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade, excerpt ten)

from Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade:

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is a joke, a myth, an audacious act of knowing artifice. It contravenes every rule of autobiography—and, in doing so, draws attention subtly to its own act of creation. Narrated, simply and charmingly, in Toklas’s voice, the book is a portrait of Stein through the eyes of her most intimate observer. Although she is the book’s ostensible subject, “Toklas” reveals little of herself—she is, she declares, a “pretty good housekeeper and a pretty good gardener and a pretty good needlewoman and a pretty good secretary and a pretty good editor and a pretty good vet for dogs.” The book begins with a brief account of Toklas’s childhood in San Francisco before skipping, within a couple of pages, to her transcendental meeting with Gertrude Stein, already hard at work on The Making of Americans. From here, the narrative presents a selective sequence of events from their charmed life together: raucous dinners in Montmartre studios, nights at the Russian ballet, European travels, and evenings at home, the salon teeming with distinguished visitors eager to pay homage. Friends are praised or skewered at will, scores are settled cheerfully; well-known figures are less likely to be celebrated here than scolded for an ancient petty crime toward Stein they had in all probability forgotten. As a history of the Parisian avant-garde, it’s deliberately abstruse: Toklas, humorously, tends to miss the point, noting personality quirks and oddities rather than the new directions in art and literature being pioneered before her eyes. (“ I like a view,” she declares early on, “but I like to sit with my back turned to it.”) The only genius fully recognized as such is Gertrude Stein. On the final page, the ruse is revealed with a wink: Gertrude Stein, writes “Toklas,” had always encouraged her to write her autobiography, but had given up hope that she was ever going to do it. Stein decided to write it for her, “and this is it.”

What no one knew was that the book had been written as a form of reparation. Toklas’s fury about the hidden manuscript had driven Stein to compose a work that would affirm her commitment to Toklas once and for all, uniting their names, publicly, forever. Every person who had caused strife between them was either excised from the narrative entirely or witheringly dismissed. Hemingway was demoted to a former friend whom Stein was faintly embarrassed to have encouraged in his writing; Leo Stein was not mentioned by name; May Bookstaver was smoothly erased from Stein’s personal history. Instead, Stein wrote into being a version of her life in which their roles were defined only by each other: Stein the genius husband, Toklas the adoring wife. On one level, it’s entirely Stein’s story: she dominates every page, bragging brazenly about her achievements. But at a second glance, Stein’s identity is contingent on Toklas’s recognizing and declaring: it is she who creates Stein, who makes possible everything Stein does. Toklas’s invisible household labor—the cooking, the sewing, the typing—is brought to the fore: Stein celebrates the wifely work which enables—even guarantees—her own achievement.

the last book I ever read (Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade, excerpt nine)

from Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade:

The negative reactions to Geography and Plays rankled particularly because they rounded off a year widely considered a watershed for modernist literature. In 1922, Willa Cather later declared, “the world broke in two”; Ezra Pound referred to it as “Year One,” reforming the calendar after the publication, in February, of James Joyce’s Ulysses. The first English translation of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time had followed in September, two months before the author’s death; T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land and Virginia Woolf’s breakthrough novel Jacob’s Room both appeared in October. These works mounted a radical challenge to established forms: in their different ways they each explored how language might match the unfolding of experience, fluidly shifting perspective to offer readers access to characters’ inner lives. These ideas—the workings of consciousness, the nature of perception—were the very preoccupations that had concerned Stein, now, for almost twenty years, and she was frustrated to see others celebrated while her own work was so bitterly derided. She was pleased when a friend told her he had heard Joyce’s close associate Oliver Gogarty read aloud from Stein’s “Portrait of Mabel Dodge” in a crowded Dublin café some years earlier—and chose to believe this indicated Joyce had been influenced by her work. Some critics did acknowledge her precedent—one review of The Waste Land complained that it “seems to us a bad example of the thing that Gertrude Stein did years ago”—but Stein was well aware that a group was forming, of which she wasn’t part.

the last book I ever read (Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade, excerpt eight)

from Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade:

For the first time, Stein explained, individual words began to feel “more important than the sentence structure or the paragraphs.” Drawing, perhaps, on her neurological research at Johns Hopkins as well as William James’s ideas of thought as a stream of consciousness, Stein was thinking deeply about perception, and the way the brain processes language. She briefly experimented with inventing words, but soon went back to English: Stein was beginning to imagine a kind of writing so original that to read it would almost require a rewiring of the brain’s neural architecture, to unlearn all the ways we expect written language to behave. After The Making of Americans, Stein’s desire to wring every ounce of meaning from a limited set of words transformed into an even bolder ambition: to shed language of all its previous associations, so that her words would mean something fresh and specific, unique to the particular context she was giving them. In the Autobiography, Stein described this impulse as her “intellectual passion for exactitude,” and linked it to her need to realize a thought perfectly before putting it into writing: “The more exactly the words fit the emotion,” she wrote elsewhere, “the more beautiful the words.” Later, Stein defined this urge as her reaction to the falsity she had begun to see in purely representational art, and the alternative possibilities being put forward by Picasso, who was by now experimenting with geometric compositions (soon to acquire the label “Cubism”) which invite viewers to identify familiar shape but reject straightforward imitation of the object in favor of fragmentary distortions. “I was alone at this time in understanding him,” Stein wrote later, “perhaps because I was expressing the same thing in literature.” Just as Picasso sought to convey the essence of a person or object without simply creating a replica, Stein wanted her writing to feel not like a description of sounds, colors, or emotions, but an “intellectual re-creation” of the “thing in itself.”

the last book I ever read (Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade, excerpt seven)

from Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade:

Near the beginning of The Making of Americans, Stein breaks off abruptly to address her reader—“ but truly,” she adds, “I never feel it that there ever can be for me any such a creature, no it is this scribbled and dirty and lined paper that is really to be to me always my receiver.” She knew the novel was long, repetitive, and unwieldy; that it was wholly unlike anything written before. But as the novel progressed, her desire for affirmation only swelled. Throughout, Stein—or her narrator—contemplates the future of her work. “I write for myself and strangers,” she admits, lamenting the indifference of those around her—thinking, perhaps, of Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon, which still languished in his studio, disdained and unsold. She implores her readers to be patient and eager, to trust her intuition, and follow her in her quest. At this early point, Stein was already setting herself up as a kind of Cassandra, harbinger of a significant message yet doomed to be misunderstood and ignored. “I want readers,” she reiterated, “so strangers must do it.”

the last book I ever read (Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade, excerpt six)

from Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade:

As Stein’s enthusiasm for portraits grew, the manuscripts piled up. She enlisted the help of the same friends who had tried to interest publishers in Three Lives, and kept a small black notebook tracking the editors and magazines to which each text had been sent. After each rejection, she wrote “returned” next to the title. In early 1912, May Knoblauch—who had regained Stein’s trust by negotiating the deal with the Grafton Press for Three Lives—took Stein’s portraits of Picasso and Matisse to the photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz, whose 291 gallery on Fifth Avenue had held the first exhibition of Matisse’s paintings in America. Stieglitz offered to publish the pieces in a special number of his magazine Camera Work, accompanied by images of paintings from the Steins’ collection. The portraits, read together, contrast the pair as two titans of modern art, Matisse “struggling”—the portrait’s central word—to convince himself of the value of his art, buffeted by conflicting reactions from his audiences; Picasso the emerging leader “whom some were certainly following,” a man of charm and vision but possibly flighty: “He was,” she writes, “not ever completely working.” “You will be very careful, will you not,” wrote Stein to Stieglitz, “that no punctuation is introduced into the things in printing. It is very necessary as I have put in all of it that I want and any that is introduced will make everything wrong.” Stieglitz promised, and in his preface to the publication, he declared that in Stein’s work “the Post-Impressionist spirit is found expressing itself in literary form.”

the last book I ever read (Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade, excerpt five)

from Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade:

That year, 1908, Toklas and Levy joined the Steins for their regular summer sojourn in Fiesole—Toklas spontaneously tossed her corset out of the train window as they approached—where they rented two villas near I Tatti, the sumptuous Renaissance-style home of Bernard and Mary Berenson. (Gertrude, meanwhile, scandalized Mary by swimming in the lake “clad in nothing but her Fat.”) Ever the elder brother, Michael inquired into Toklas’s financial affairs, and—on learning she had a letter of credit, drawing on an inheritance from her grandfather, which was intended to last her ten months—set to stretching her budget to last a full year. Together, Stein and Toklas explored Florence’s galleries (Stein fell asleep stretched out on the Uffizi’s benches, claiming she liked to wake up surrounded by art); they traveled to Assisi and Arezzo to see paintings by Fra Angelico and Piero della Francesca, and climbed a mountain to the fabled meeting place of Saint Francis and Saint Dominic, where they munched sandwiches in the swirling clouds. During this trip, Stein showed Toklas some pages from her work in progress. Toklas responded positively, and Stein saw her chance. Would Toklas, she asked, take over the typing of her handwritten manuscripts? Toklas, who had been seeking a purpose in Paris, agreed instantly.

the last book I ever read (Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade, excerpt four)

from Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade:

At twelve minutes past five on the morning of April 18, 1906, San Francisco began to quake. Alice Babette Toklas left her bed and looked, bleary-eyed, out of the window, then ran straight to her father’s bedroom: “Do get up,” she told him. “The city is on fire.” After checking on friends, visiting the bank, and picking up a supply of cigarettes, Toklas packed the family silver into a chest and buried it in the garden—a preservation instinct that would serve her well—then took the ferry to Berkeley to spend the night with a friend, unable to bring herself to look back at her hometown blazing behind her. When she returned, Toklas stopped by a local flower shop: the heat of the flames had stirred hundreds of carnations into immediate bloom.

The San Francisco earthquake—the deadliest in American history—left the city in ruins, and indirectly changed the course of Toklas’s life. Three years younger than Stein, she had grown up in the prosperity of San Francisco, just across the bay from Oakland; her father had arrived in America from Poland in 1865, aged twenty, while her mother had grown up in San Francisco, the daughter of Jewish immigrants from Prussia. Like Stein, Toklas traveled in Europe as a child, rolling hoops in the Luxembourg Gardens and watching Victor Hugo’s casket process down the Champs-Élysées; as a teenager, she spent six years in Seattle, where her father’s booming mercantile business had headquarters. A talented pianist, she enrolled in the local university’s music conservatory at sixteen, but her life was put on hold when her mother died in 1897, when Toklas was twenty. Her father took her and her younger brother back to San Francisco to live with her grandfather and great-uncle, and she abandoned a promising musical career to wait on a household of demanding Victorian gentlemen.