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.