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.’

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

from Offshore: A Novel by Penelope Fitzgerald:

Nenna had no more than an animal’s sense of direction and distance, but it seemed to her that the right thing to do would be to try to reach the City, then, once she got to Blackfriars, she knew where the river was, and though that would be Lambeth Reach or King’s Reach, a long way downstream of the boats, still, once she had got to the river she would be on the way home. She had worked in an office in Blackfriars once, before Tilda came.

That meant turning south, and she would have to ask which way she was headed. She began to look, with a somewhat dull kind of hopefulness, for somebody friendly, not too much in a hurry, walking the opposite way, although it would be more reasonable, really, to ask somebody walking the same way. Handfuls of sleet were beginning to wander through the air. Radio shop, bicycle shop, family planning shop, funeral parlour, bicycles, radio spare parts, television hire, herbalist, family planning, a florist. The window of the florist was still lit and entirely occupied by a funeral tribute, a football goal, carried out in white chrysanthemums. The red ball had just been introduced into Soccer and there was a ball in the goal, this time in red chrysanthemums. Nenna stood looking into the window, feeling the melted hail make its way down the gap between the collar of her coat and her body. One shoe seemed to be wetter than the other and the strap was working loose, so, leaning against the ledge of the shop window, she took it off to have a look at it. This made her left foot very cold, so she twisted it round her right ankle. Someone was coming, and she felt that she couldn’t bear it if he, because it was a man, said, ‘Having trouble with your shoe?’ For an unbalanced moment she thought it might be Gordon Hodge, pursuing her to see that she would not come back, and make a nuisance of herself to Edward.

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

from Offshore: A Novel by Penelope Fitzgerald:

The Bourgeois Gentilhomme was one of many enterprises in Chelsea which survived entirely by selling antiques to each other. The atmosphere, once through the little shop-door, cut down from a Victorian billiard-table, was oppressive. Clocks struck widely different hours. At a corner table, with her back turned towards them, sat a woman in black, apparently doing some accounts, and surrounded by dusty furniture; perhaps she had been cruelly deserted on her wedding day, and had sat there ever since, refusing to have anything touched. She did not look up when the girls came in, although the billiard table was connected by a cord to a cow-bell, which jangled harshly.

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

from Offshore: A Novel by Penelope Fitzgerald:

She bounded off, as though over stepping stones, from one object to another that would scarcely hold, old tyres, old boots, the ribs of crates from which the seagulls were dislodged in resentment. Far beyond the point at which the mud became treacherous and from which Small Gains had never risen again, she stood poised on the handlebars of a sunken bicycle. How had the bicycle ever got there?

‘Mattie, it’s a Raleigh!’