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.

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

from Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade:

The Steins were soon seeing a lot of Matisse. Sarah joined his art class, and she and Michael rapidly became his major patrons, devoting their own collection exclusively to his latest work. But Gertrude and Leo’s attention had already moved on. A few weeks after the Salon, the dealer Clovis Sagot showed them a painting of a nude girl posed side-on against a dull blue backdrop, clutching a basket of red flowers. Placidly chewing licorice, Sagot informed them that this unknown Spanish artist—who was so destitute he slept on a shared mattress in a run-down Montmartre studio—was “the real thing.” Here, unusually, Gertrude’s and Leo’s stories align. Leo immediately recognized the work of “a genius of very considerable magnitude,” but Gertrude was “repelled and shocked” by the girl’s legs and feet, to the extent that Sagot, anxious to make his sale, offered to guillotine the canvas and jettison the lower half. They bought the (complete) painting for 150 francs. But that dynamic slowly reversed after they were introduced to Pablo Picasso by their mutual friend Henri-Pierre Roché. By the end of their first dinner together, Picasso and Gertrude were play-fighting over the last slice of bread, Gertrude concealing her giggles as Picasso, under his breath, poked fun at curmudgeonly Leo’s clichéd enthusiasm for fashionable Japanese prints. Soon, she was in and out of Picasso’s studio, discussing his work with him, lending him money, and buying his work independently. It was Leo who led the way, but Gertrude who stayed the course. Before the end of the year, Picasso asked to paint her portrait.

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

from Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade:

Holed up in rented rooms at 20 Bloomsbury Square near the British Museum, Stein began to record her thoughts in a notebook—descriptions of her surroundings, quotations from books she was reading, snatches of overheard conversation. Her first entry is an evocative sketch of London’s East End—its greyness, its Indian restaurants, its pubs and music halls, laundries and tea shops—that slowly brings the buildings, and their interiors, to life. Lonely and anxious, she was people-watching intently, observing the way “everybody talks to everybody,” familiarizing herself with social quirks and unspoken rules (how anyone will buy a drink for someone out of work, for example, but regular spongers will be despised). Stein applied for a six-month pass to the British Museum’s reading room, where she devised a scheme to read through English literature from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century—extending the project she had begun as a teenager in California. She spent entire days at the museum, breaking only to eat: there she read the works of Fanny Burney; Bunyan’s Life and Death of Mr. Badman; several books about Chinese history and literature; and various studies of saints, including Mary Francis Cusack’s Life and Revelations of Saint Gertrude. Among her notes from her reading, Stein tried out some titles for possible short stories, her first attempts at fiction since the Radcliffe composition classes: “Maggie being the history of a gentle soul”; “The Progress of Jane Sands being a history of one woman and many others”; “The Tragedy of the Wirkin Sisters.” And she jotted down the beginnings of a narrative based on the ill-fated marriage of her older cousin, Bird Stein, who was then in the middle of a high-profile divorce case, involving numerous lawyers and private detectives, that was titillating the New York press.

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

from Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade:

In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein recalled posing for hours in a broken armchair while Picasso sat opposite her on a small kitchen chair, his forehead inches from his easel, brown and grey swirled on his palette. While he painted, she “meditated and made sentences” in her mind. As the months passed, she watched Picasso’s mounting frustration as he redid and scrubbed out her features, before reaching total impasse, painting out the entire head in anger, and vanishing to Spain. The next time they met, six months later, he silently presented Stein with the completed portrait. In the interval, Picasso’s style had transformed. The original, naturalistic features were gone, and the face now resembled a sculptured mask, its features starkly outlined. She looks ageless, androgynous, out of time—and utterly assured in herself. When Stein protested that it didn’t look at all like her—if anything, it bore a closer resemblance to the artist himself—he calmly replied, “It will.”

When, in later life, Gertrude Stein was asked how her portrait came to be painted by the relatively unknown, twenty-four-year-old Pablo Picasso, she simply claimed that neither of them could remember. But—as was clear to visitors to her home, where she held court from a chair placed directly beneath her likeness—the painting became central to her sense of identity: “For me,” she wrote in 1938, “it is I, and it is the only reproduction of me which is always I, for me.” The aura of mystery around the sittings—which Stein, implausibly, numbered at eighty or ninety—turned the portrait, from its conception, into a myth. For Stein, it provided an origin story which would come to define her image, linking herself and Picasso indelibly as the two supreme geniuses of the twentieth century, in literature and in art. While Picasso was deep in the “long struggle” of her portrait—inventing Cubism in the process—Stein was immersed in writing Three Lives, a trio of stories which she considered “the first definite step away from the nineteenth century and into the twentieth.” There was, of course, another reason to foreground the connection. By the time Stein wrote the Autobiography, in 1932, Picasso’s work was growing fast in stature, while hers languished in comparative obscurity. By representing their beginnings as intertwined, Stein was making a plea for their futures, too, to be equal.

the last book I ever read (Offshore: A Novel by Penelope Fitzgerald, excerpt eleven)

from Offshore: A Novel by Penelope Fitzgerald:

It wasn’t the uncertain nature of his livelihood that worried him, nor the police visits, although he had twice been invited to accompany the officers to the station. So far they hadn’t applied for a search warrant to go over the boat, but Maurice didn’t care if they did. Still less did he fear the storm. The dangerous and the ridiculous were necessary to his life, otherwise tenderness would overwhelm him. It threatened him now, for what Maurice had not been able to endure was the sight of the emptying Reach. Dreadnought, Lord Jim, now Grace. Maurice, in the way of business, knew too many, rather than too few, people, but when he imagined living without friends, he sat down with the whisky in the dark.

the last book I ever read (Offshore: A Novel by Penelope Fitzgerald, excerpt ten)

from Offshore: A Novel by Penelope Fitzgerald:

‘And how would you describe the way you feel about him now?’ Richard asked.

‘Well, I feel unemployed. There’s nothing so lonely as unemployment, even if you’re on a queue with a thousand others. I don’t know what I’m going to think about if I’m not going to worry about him all the time. I don’t know what I’m going to do with my mind.’ A formless melancholy overcame her. ‘I’m not too sure what to do with my body either.’