the last book I ever read (I Give You My Silence: A Novel by Mario Vargas Llosa, excerpt two)

from I Give You My Silence: A Novel by Mario Vargas Llosa:

“You knew him well, then,” Toño concluded, deciding to take another sip of his chamomile tea, which was ice cold, as he’d expected. Cecilia had ordered, as always, tea with lemon and a bottle of mineral water.

“He had great gifts, you know,” she said. “But he was also vain, smug, incredibly difficult. A neurotic the likes of which I’ve never seen. He refused to play with the rest of the band, he wanted the stage for himself alone. The whole company hated him. They called him ‘the one and only.’ He never talked to them, and everyone thought he looked down on them. Of course, he played the guitar like a dream. But if I hadn’t fired him, the whole company would have quit on me. That last day, when he came to say goodbye, was the only time I ever saw him sad. ‘I give you my silence,’ he said, and departed, almost ran off. I don’t know what he meant by that: I give you my silence. Does that mean anything to you?”

“When I heard him playing at Abajo el Puente, a silence fell like you hear at times in the bullring,” Toño said. “It touches my soul, him having said that. I give you my silence. Of course he was in love with you, Cecilia.”

the last book I ever read (I Give You My Silence: A Novel by Mario Vargas Llosa, excerpt one)

from I Give You My Silence: A Novel by Mario Vargas Llosa:

Toño Azpilcueta was a scholar of creole music—all of it, from the coastal and mountain varieties to the versions played in the Amazon. He had dedicated his life to it, and had won the distinction—naturally worthless in monetary terms—of being known as the country’s greatest expert in Peruvian music, especially after the death of the grandee of Puno, Professor Hermógenes A. Morones—the A stood for Artajerjes, he would eventually discover. He had met Morones when he was a student at the Colegio La Salle, not long after his father, an Italian immigrant with a Basque surname, had rented the small house in La Perla where Toño would grow up. Toño earned his bachelor’s degree at the National University of San Marcos, and his thesis on the Peruvian vals was overseen by Morones, whose assistant and favorite disciple he had become. Toño’s work expanded upon Morones’s own studies and findings concerning regional music and dance.

In his third year, the professor allowed Toño to teach several classes, and it was expected in San Marcos that, when the master retired, Toño Azpilcueta would inherit his chair. Toño took this for granted as well. For this reason, upon finishing his five years of study in the School of Arts and Letters, he began research for a doctoral dissertation to be entitled “The Street Cries of Lima,” dedicated, naturally, to Morones.

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

from Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade:

“Again,” wrote the poet John Ashbery in his review of the MoMA show, “we are reminded that the twentieth century, whatever else it may be, is the century of Matisse, Picasso and Gertrude Stein.” Ashbery was part of a group of young New York artists—musicians, painters, actors, poets—who congregated in Greenwich Village dive bars (the Cedar Tavern; the San Remo). In this circle, Stein’s books were read avidly, tattered copies passed around and discussed between friends over cheap beer and Martinis. One of Ashbery’s closest friends was the poet Frank O’Hara, who as an undergraduate at Harvard had written a term paper on The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, which he described as “one of the most interesting things I’ve ever read by anyone.” In his poem “Memorial Days 1950”—his announcement of himself as an artist, which features an image of Picasso chopping through dead art with an axe—O’Hara described his intention to complete “several last things / Gertrude Stein hadn’t had time for.” He took her as a model of immediacy and directness, drawing on her multiplicity of meaning and her American idiom, which he inflected with a cool contemporary lyricism.

To Ashbery, O’Hara and their peers, Stein offered a model of a life devoted entirely to art—an uncompromising commitment to her vision in the face of mockery, rejection, and misunderstanding. They admired the way she turned her home into a crucible of artistic innovation; they read her lectures not as self-aggrandizement but as multifaceted works of aesthetic theory. Above all, they were interested in her writing, and the possibilities it offered to theirs. To many poets, of the New York School and beyond, the way Stein took language apart, violating all the rules of grammar, offered a blueprint for their own probings of form, memory, and voice. To artists pioneering new varieties of pop art or abstraction, her repetition and her nonrepresentational use of words offered a literary equivalent to the freedom they sought in painting, sculpture, or collage. And to theatre directors, actors, dancers, and musicians, her exploration of words’ sonic quality lent itself perfectly to cross-disciplinary performance, the form perhaps most on the ascendance in postwar New York. Stein was part of more than one revolution” after her death, across an ocean, she founds readers who would take her work utterly seriously, and build on its foundations with an explosion of creativity that would shape every notion of twentieth-century art.

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

from Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade:

The news, which broke in January 1968, that Gertrude Stein’s collection was up for sale set the New York art world abuzz with excitement. A bevy of French and American lawyers, acting on behalf of Allan Stein’s three children, worked around the clock to remove the paintings from Paris before the French government could prevent their export. The Museum of Modern Art was eager to acquire six of the best Picassos, but the Steins had set the condition that the works—thirty-eight by Picasso and nine by Juan Gris—must be sold together as a single collection, independently valued at $6.8 million. The museum’s trustee David Rockefeller made a proposition to four of his colleagues on the board: that they club together to purchase the collection in its entirety, and pledge to donate six paintings to MoMA, with the rest to be shared among themselves. The syndicate prevailed, and on the afternoon of December 14, 1968, the five men met in a back room of the museum, leaned the paintings against the walls, and drew lots from an old felt hat to determine the order in which they would select works for their private collections. Rockefeller went first, and chose Young Girl with a Flower Basket, which (despite Gertrude’s dislike of the legs) she and Leo had bought in 1905 for $30. It was now valued at almost a million dollars.

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

from Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade:

The writing of her memoir, however, was interrupted by a bitter dispute. Multiple high-profile art robberies had hit the headlines in recent years, which had heightened the anxiety of Allan Stein’s widow, Roubina, that her children’s inheritance remained in the care of a frail, possibly erratic old woman, protected only by ancient wooden shutters which could easily be breached. Over the years the estate’s lawyer, Edgar Allan Poe, had often recommended reevaluating the paintings, since their value had increased so greatly that the current insurance was no longer adequate; he also urged Toklas to consider placing them in a safer location than the apartment, which she staunchly refused to do. In 1960, Roubina Stein was alerted that a Picasso drawing, labeled as once belonging to the Stein collection, had sold at auction for around $10,000. Picasso’s fame was booming: his 1905 painting La Belle Hollandaise had recently garnered the highest price ever commanded by a living artist, while his retrospective that year at London’s Tate Gallery had opened to enormous fanfare, with a party featuring flamenco dancers and a special after-hours viewing attended by the queen. Shocked to discover one of the Steins’ works on the secondary market, Roubina demanded a new inventory be made of the collection, which revealed that it had depleted since Stein’s death: a portfolio of Picasso’s drawing and an oil painting, Man in Top Hat, had vanished without a trace.

Toklas calmly explained to Roubina’s personal lawyer, Bernard Dupré, that she had sold these works to Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler back in 1953, when Van Vechten needed funds to guarantee the Yale Edition. Roubina was furious that Toklas had made a sale without consulting her, and at a fee (set, Toklas retorted, by Picasso himself) she considered far below market rate. She brought a legal action against Toklas, complaining that she left the collection unguarded for prolonged periods when she was away from home on her regular trips to the baths at Acqui in Italy (which helped with her arthritis), and that even when she was in residence, the apartment was vulnerable to intruders. Roubina demanded that the collection be declared “endangered,” and that all the artworks should be removed at once to a safe, dry, guarded place: the Chase Manhattan bank vault in Paris.

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

from Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade:

But rather than contemplate mortality, Toklas was preoccupied with her own rebirth. On Christmas Day of 1957, she joyfully told Van Vechten that she had, a few weeks earlier, been admitted to the Catholic Church, confessed, and received Holy Communion. Dora Maar, who lived a block away and whom Toklas saw regularly, had laid the groundwork, assuring Toklas that Stein was such a great figure—“like Moses”—that she was undoubtedly in heaven, and that Toklas would be able to see her again, if she joined the Catholic Church. Denise Aimé-Azam—who had orchestrated Bernard Faÿ’s escape from prison—recommended an English priest, Father Edward Taylor, to whom Toklas talked at great length before deciding to convert. (Taylor expressed some discomfort taking confession in a room decorated with paintings of naked women; Toklas made some small skirts and bodices from cloth and paper, and attached them to the Picassos before he arrived.) She told Van Vechten she was informing only a few people of her “new life,” but that she would write to Gallup. “It is wonderful to be part of the great Catholic Church,” she told another friend, “where I should have been long ago.”

It was an astonishing statement. Toklas was Jewish by birth—her Polish grandfather had been a rabbi—and though she had never practiced, the conversion seemed a drastic and incongruous step. Her friend Donald Sutherland was one of few who understood. The previous summer, Sutherland and his wife had taken Toklas on a road trip from Paris to Albi, diverting from their route to visit notable churches along the way, including one at Germigny-des-Prés. Toklas, Sutherland remembered, was entranced by the small church, the oldest in France: its tranquility and light, its Byzantine mosaic showing angels and the Ark of the Convenant. As they left, she pointed out a series of blue enamel plaques set along the walls of the nave, and asked if he remembered a blue brooch Stein used to wear of exactly that color. Months later, Toklas told him that her conversion had occurred in that church. Stein loved blue: “Every bit of blue is precious,” she once wrote. Seeing that color in the church, Sutherland imagined, helped Toklas “remember the beatific side of Gertrude, not her angry or vengeful or desperate moments.” What’s more, he felt she needed to “devote herself completely to something”: without Stein in person, Catholicism was her choice.

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

from Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade:

Random raids and deportations began to increase across France in early 1944. On April 6, a Jewish children’s home in Izieu, a tiny village thirty kilometers from Culoz, was raided overnight: fifty-one children and carers who had been living there peacefully, under the protection of the Belley authorities, were deported. No one knew who had ordered or organized the arrests. Years later, a neighbor of Stein’s remembered they had never heard about either the home or the raid, but Stein’s writings make clear her awareness of the peril around her. She never mentioned the Statut des Juifs specifically in her war writings, but she reckoned, in her notebook, with historical and ongoing anti-Semitism, which struck her as “a plunge back into medievalism.” She recalled the horrifying persecutions of the Boer War and the Dreyfus affair, as well as the recent “Jew baiting” in England led by Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts, and wondered whether Germany was not “desperately clinging” to a “strange delusion” of Jewish power. In the same passage, she remembered her shock at Oscar Wilde’s trial, in 1895, when she was twenty-one: “the first thing that made me realize that it could happen, being in prison,” she wrote, implicitly linking her sexuality and her Jewishness, the two aspects of her identity which she knew made her suspect in the eyes of occupying forces. As her notebook progresses, her sense of vulnerability is palpable, as is her admiration of the local Resistance. “We who lived in the midst of you salute you,” she wrote, aligning herself firmly with the community. She knew, by now, that her survival was out of her control: all she could do was carry on writing.