the last book I ever read (Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux, excerpt four)

from Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux:

Gauguin was receiving an education in art despite himself. On his regular Sunday visits to Arosa’s house, surrounded by the collection he had known since a boy, it was taken for granted that, following the horrors of war, art was the supreme means of re-establishing a civilised society. Chez Arosa, the latest advances in art and photography were discussed with deep seriousness with fellow guests who often included Philippe Burty, the influential art critic of Le Figaro and the ever-stimulating Nadar. Gauguin was encouraged to go sketching, fashionably en plein air, in the company of Arosa’s younger daughter Marguerite, a red-haired, milky-skinned girl with the bloodless looks of doomed maidenhood made fashionable by Edgar Allan Poe. This made her popular as a photographic model for Nadar and her father, but Gauguin preferred to sketch beside her than to sketch her. His feelings for her were close and tender; brotherly, not erotic. Marguerite was anaemic but her character was robust. She determined to become an artist, an ambition she achieved with a degree of success in Spain and in France.

Marguerite took lessons from Camille Pissarro. Like the Arosas and the Pereires, he was of Sephardic Jewish origin. Gustave Arosa’s elder brother, Achille Arosa, had commissioned Pissarro to decorate a salon in his house at 44 Rue de Bassano. The quartet of canvases he produced, The Four Seasons, is now considered of the greatest importance as the first complete decorative scheme of Impressionist art. There must have been considerable excitement in the Arosa household in 1873 when Pissarro was producing it. That was also the year leading up to the important first Impressionist exhibition, held from April to May 1874 in Nadar’s studio, with Pissarro taking a large part in its organisation.

the last book I ever read (Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux, excerpt three)

from Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux:

On arriving in Paris to set herself up as a seamstress, Aline had become part of the great mass of social displacement and confusion, part of the demi-monde of women on the fringes of respectable life, making a living as best they could. ‘Thousands of floating existences–criminals and kept women–which drift about in the underworld of a great city’ as Balzac wrote to Manet, recommending that the painter take this as the subject of his paintings, which indeed he did, reimagining the Venus of the Second Empire as a streetwalker in his notorious canvas Olympia, which was painted in 1863, the year after Gauguin arrived in Paris. Olympia was to hold overwhelming significance for Gauguin all his life. In 1891, he spent days in the Musée du Luxembourg trying to copy it; though he eventually gave up, this did not dismay him. Rather the opposite: to be unable to capture the magic only made the magic more alluring. Throughout his mature life, he would carry a photograph of the painting and pin it up on the walls of his studio wherever he happened to be in the world.

the last book I ever read (Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux, excerpt two)

from Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux:

The Albert was not a comfortable passenger ship. It was a small, square-rigged two-master brig, the speediest type of merchant ship of its time. Captains of such ships were set in a perpetual circular race against each other to be first to deliver their cargoes before their perishable goods perished, or rival captains beat them to it and spoiled the market for the stuff they were hoping to sell. While the captain of the Albert was running his commercial race, Gauguin’s father Clovis saw the voyage as something quite else, something idealistic and beautiful. He was taking his family back to a pre-industrial country, to a new dawn in whose light he might fight for modern democratic values. That his compassionate fight would be financed by his wife’s family’s immense riches derived from slave labour–the pre-industrial equivalent of machine-led profitability–does not seem to have been a worry.

The atmosphere on board became thicker and thicker with antagonism between Clovis and the captain, who lusted after Aline. She was an extraordinarily direct and appealing person, as we see from Gauguin’s portrait. Slightly built, dark-haired and dark-eyed, Aline never lost a sense of self-worth and self-determination, despite being abused by her father and having spent her childhood parked in institutions. While her mother had been out saving the world, Aline had been left in the guardianship of the novelist George Sand, who didn’t much like Flora but took her duties towards the child Aline sufficiently seriously to keep an eye on her development from a distance. A fiercely independent spirit, Aline’s qualities of candour, receptiveness and optimism made her devastatingly attractive to the rough, tough sea captain, who pursued Aline openly, to the impotent fury of Clovis. They could hardly settle the matter in the usual way: a duel on board guaranteed awkward consequences.

the last book I ever read (Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux, excerpt one)

from Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux:

Shortly after his first birthday, Paul Gauguin was bundled aboard a ship called the Albert, to sail some 12,000 miles from the French port of Le Havre to Peru. The year was 1849, and France was no place for outspoken radicals such as Gauguin’s parents. Charles-Louis Napoleon had become president of the French Republic and it didn’t take political genius to foresee that he would segue smoothly from the post of president to that of Emperor Napoleon III of France. Gauguin’s father, Clovis, was an anti-Bonapartist journalist determined to continue the republican fight from Peru, where he planned to start a newspaper on the back of an excellent connection: Simón Bolívar, who overthrew Spanish rule in much of South America and had Bolivia named after him, had been a family friend. Gauguin’s mother, Aline, was also a ‘person of danger’ on the list of the French Republic’s spies and secret police. Aline had not had much time recently to be a national danger. Two years previously, she had given birth to Gauguin’s elder sister Marie, and then Gauguin himself had come along. Her hands had been more than full of babies. But sometimes symbols adhere more firmly to particular names than to their recent activities and Aline Gauguin had inherited the symbolic mantle of firebrand feminist and proto-Communist from her mother Flora Tristan.

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

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

The idea that so many of his countrymen turned to witch doctors to cure their ailments had unsettled Toño for several days. What was most repugnant to him was the apparently widespread belief in Peru that if a witch or shaman passed a guinea pig over a person’s naked body, the creature would die as soon as it touched the skin beneath which an infected organ lay. For hours, the patient would have to lie still and allow that filthy cousin of the rat to caress his bare skin. The mere thought of it repelled him.

And all of this took place in cabins or miserable, filthy rooms, because these people with so-called magic powers were poor and had learned their trade from their parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents in lessons passed on in silence. Their work was outside of the law, like drug dealing—and that was another aspect of his homeland that depressed him. Marijuana, pills, cigarettes dipped in who knew what, easy to make, easy to buy, sold cheap to addicts in the street, given away outside the doorways of schools to create future addicts … In principle, Toño thought it was people’s right to ruin their lives with drugs—to hell with them, was his attitude—but children needed to be cared for until they were old enough to make responsible and realistic decisions about these things.

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

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

Mexico has the largest number of Spanish speakers, followed by the United States, where more than sixty million speak it to a greater or lesser degree. There is debate here, however: some say that Spanish speakers who reside in the United States eventually lose their language, with English replacing it. The evidence isn’t clear. I’ve heard that there are families where Spanish stubbornly abides across the generations the way muscle clings to bone.

So let us give the conquistadors this one thing: where else in the world can you travel from one extreme of a continent to another, understanding everything the people say and being understood by everyone? Can you do that in Africa, in Asia? In Europe, it’s a known fact that you either learn languages or you’re condemned to silence when you leave your home country.

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

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

Nowhere, perhaps, can the endless varieties of huachafería be better appreciated than in literature, because writing and speaking are its natural medium. There are poets who exhibit this quality sporadically, like César Vallejo, and others whose every verse reveals it, like José Santos Chocano. As a poet, Martín Adán was quite sober, but his prose was rife with huachafería. Julio Ramón Ribeyro is an odd case, a writer devoid of huachafería; in Peru, he is naturally the exception. More common are those like Alfredo Bryce Echenique and Salazar Bondy, who, despite their apparent prejudices against and phobia of huachafería, reveal it, like a badly hidden vice, in every line they compose. And then there’s Manuel Scorza, whose very periods and commas positively drip with huachafería.

Allow me a brief list of notable examples of huachafería. In high society: dueling, bullfighting, owning a home in Miami, the use of nobiliary particles in your surname, anglicisms, and, of course, calling yourself white. In the middle classes: watching telenovelas and acting them out in real life, taking stockpots of noodles to the beach on Sundays to gobble them up between breaking waves, saying “I think” when you’re not thinking at all, using diminutives (a nip of champagne), stressing your own or someone else’s Indian heritage, for better or for worse, when convenience strikes. For the workers: wearing pomade, chewing gum, smoking marijuana, dancing to rock and roll, and being racist.

The surrealists said that the archetypal surrealist act was to walk outside and shoot the first person you saw on the street. The emblematic act of huachafería is that of the boxer with a battered face calling out to his mother, who is watching him on TV and praying for his victory, or maybe of the failed suicide who opens his eyes and asks for a priest to take his confession.

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

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

He told Collau and Matilde that night that he’d filled an entire notebook with a prologue and several chapters. He was happy, and his wife and friend noticed, remarking that they’d never seen him so euphoric. He spent an entire week like that, writing morning, noon, and night, and on Sunday, he read through all that he had written. Then, feeling content, deeply satisfied, even, he carefully tore all his notebooks into tiny pieces. He would have to change everything. The book would instead have an anodyne beginning, kids playing soccer, a ball rolling across a field, a boy sending it flying with his head. Lalo Molfino would be there, sympathetic, lively. Then someone would tell him where he’d come from. The story would move backward from that point to Father Molfino giving Domitila her last rites.

He spent a few days on this new version and informed Collau and his wife one night that now his book had truly taken off and the wind was in his sails. Again, they remarked on how pleased he seemed, if a little overexcited. The next day, he tore everything into pieces once more and dropped them into his wastebasket. He started over with his dialogue with Maluenda at a table in the Bransa. He would explain early on that Lalo suffered from a sexual trauma. A revelation like that would trap readers right at the start. From his intimate wound, everything would unfold: the guitar, his experiences at school; only at the very end of the book, with a wealth of detail, would he recount Lalo’s sordid beginnings.

Toño’s fascination with his subject didn’t flag, and each night, Collau and Matilde listened to him patiently, respectfully, nodding along as he rambled in yet another fit of euphoria, sensing already that once more, he would tear up his work and start over, and not understanding why. But Toño knew. He was searching for the perfect way to begin his book, which he knew would be the first and last he wrote, despite his many years as a critic and scholar; he was sure that he would finish it and die, exhausted, of stomach cancer or something like that, leaving those pages behind for Matilde and Collau to publish when he was gone. The book would appear posthumously, when the worms would already be eating him, unless he were cremated—how much would that cost? He didn’t want Matilde to have to go on paying for him even after he was gone—but of course, the book would be a great success. Not initially: it would first make inroads among the “intellectuals,” who would recognize Toño Azpilcueta’s great talent, the originality of his ideas, the brilliance of his theories on the origins of the Peruvian national character, the importance of mestizos in the country’s history, his message about unity in diversity. All this would come across in time to the music of Lalo Molfino, the poet, that extraordinary guitarist who took up his instrument by chance and out of nowhere became the symbol of everything Toño wished to express. Toño Azpilcueta was happy.

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

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

When they were done talking, Toño accompanied her to the door and watched her disappear between the cars and trucks parked along Lima’s town square. He imagined her passing the cathedral, where the alleged remains of Francisco Pizarro were kept, though they’d turned out to be the bones of llamas and vicuñas. Lalo Molfino’s tale was so complicated and so mysterious that Toño realized he might have to do as the custodians of those bones had done: mingle the fragments imparted to him by Pedro Caballero, Abanto, and Maluenda with the bones of some beast from the Andes to produce something resembling a life.

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

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

On his return to Lima, Toño Azpilcueta felt the urge to see Toni Lagarde and Lala Solórzano, to have lunch with them and talk about his project. He knew they went out for a walk in their neighborhood every afternoon. They were getting on in years—they must have been around ninety—but they still hadn’t lost the habit.

Their conversation began on the topic of Toni’s reading. Since his retirement, he’d developed a near-obsession with the history of Peru, and had devoured books by the masters in the field, such as Porras Barrenechea, Jorge Basadre, and Luis E. Valcárcel. These men had come to life in his head, the Hispanists fighting the indigenists, and he still wasn’t sure which side he was on. When he cracked open a book by José de la Riva Agüero and fell prey to the enchantments of his prose, with its fin-de-siècle flourishes, he told himself he was a Hispanist, but when he turned to authors from Cuzco, above all Uriel García, he became an incurable indigenist. His ideological changefulness amused him, but it got on everyone else’s nerves.

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

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

Toño asked him to wait while he ran to his room for his notebook. He didn’t want to miss anything that might prove important. He came back sweating, thirsty for another beer despite his finances, but thinking that Collau had lent him money to research, not to wet his whistle. He bombarded Pedro with questions, starting from the beginning, with Lalo’s origins. Toño supposed that someone close to Lalo, his mother or his father, perhaps, had taught him the guitar, but Pedro Caballero told him otherwise: Lalo Molfino had been an orphan. He never knew who his real parents were.

“And where he came from?” Toño asked, scribbling frantically.

“He never knew that either, I think,” Pedro said with a shrug. “Neither did Father Molfino, who raised him. At least he said he didn’t.”

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

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

They both fell silent for a while, Toño because he was afraid if he spoke, his voice would crack and he would make a scene in front of her. That urge to cry wouldn’t leave him—and over a person he’d never spoken a word to in his life! In that moment, he made a decision. Come hell or high water, he would write a book about Lalo Molfino. He would comb through the newspapers and magazines, would talk with all the people who had known him. This book would be an homage to his talent, but also much more: he would at last put to paper those ideas about the Peruvian vals he had entertained so often as he’d observed the effect the music had on its public, epitomized in Lalo’s concert in Abajo el Puente. He would write the book even if he couldn’t find a publisher, make it known that the greatest guitarist in the world had been born here in Peru. His heart was beating faster than usual—that was Cecilia’s presence—and it gave him courage. Her scent was delicate like fresh water, but fragrant. She was smiling, beautiful, graceful, as always. He imagined the guitarist’s body lying in a potter’s field, and it infuriated him to his depths. Not even the death of Hermógenes A. Morones had affected him so. At the latter’s wake, the crowd was teeming, and even the president of the republic had sent a wreath. But now, Lalo was forgotten. It wasn’t fair. Toño would write his book about Peruvian music, even if he had to pay from his own pocket to publish it, and he was sure he would make it a fitting homage to Lalo and a contribution toward solving the great problems that plagued the nation.

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.

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

from Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade:

Rumors of Stein’s penchant for crime fiction had reached Chicago, and one night they were invited to ride in the back of a squad car with a battalion of homicide police detectives, searching for criminals at large. They were collected from a lively dinner where Stein had ignited a heated debate with several academic philosophers over the relative merits of various eighteenth-century writers: she made the case for Swift, and professed for good measure that it was more important to teach students the history of literature than of politics. “Government is the least interesting thing in human life,” she argued, rising to her feet, “creation and the expression of that creation is a damn sight more interesting… the real ideas are not the relation of human beings as groups but a human being to himself inside him.” Just as Toklas was trying to calm her down, the maid burst in to announce the police were at the door—which caused momentary commotion, until everyone realized this was merely Stein’s next entertainment (“ no murders,” she lamented, “but lots of fun”). She was thrilled, too, at a different brush with the world of crime, when the writer Dashiell Hammett—the person she claimed she was most eager to meet in America—joined her for dinner in Beverly Hills, along with Charlie Chaplin, Lillian Hellman, and Anita Loos. “It is very nice being a celebrity,” wrote Stein in Everybody’s Autobiography, her memoir of the tour, “a real celebrity who can decide who they want to meet and say so and they come or do not come as you want them. I never imagined that would happen to me to be a celebrity like that but it did and when it did I liked it.”

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.

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.