The Enigma of Gertrude Stein

No one understands Gertrude Stein. For this, we should all give thanks. It is almost a cliché to emphasize her work’s difficulty, but her writing remains imposing, both due to its sheer volume—her unpublished writings were originally collected in eight volumes, to say nothing of the numerous books published during her life—and its style.

The style, of course, is what made her both famed and ridiculed, striking out from conventional narrative and often even the conventional meanings of words. If you ever find yourself absorbed in Stein, there is almost a natural desire to imitate her rhythms. Nobody ever entirely nails her peculiarities, though: the flat, dry vocabulary, the off-kilter blend of abstraction and table talk, and perhaps most of all the repetition—sentences that extend themselves and double back and fill up space with their insistence. As Francesca Wade quotes Stein in her new biography, Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife, “Repeating is the whole of living, and by repeating comes understanding, and understanding is to some the most important part of living.” Maybe the reverse maxim here is that we can never repeat enough, so we can never really understand.

Stein’s work staked out the boundaries of what was possible for writers to do with language in the 20th century; our idea of the literary avant-garde is unthinkable without her. Understandably, Stein also wanted credit for this innovation: to be seen as a central figure, as she frequently claimed she was, and not simply someone expanding the margins. Readers, however, have been more ambivalent, and to this day Stein is often considered a catalyst or foil for other, more celebrated male moderns (Picasso, Hemingway), an interesting experiment that perhaps need not be repeated.

T.S. Eliot warned that if later writers did copy her, a “new barbarian age” of literature would follow. A handful of Stein’s books are still widely read today (The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Tender Buttons, Three Lives), but the majority are not. Much of Stein remains undiscovered, at least for the common reader, even as she figures as a known quantity in the imagination: “A rose is a rose is a rose,” “There is no there there,” and so on. Despite her reputation for inscrutability, few modern writers had such a knack for catchphrases that could be plucked from their work.

Curiosity and mockery garnered Stein attention and eventually celebrity, which she harnessed, transforming herself into a public personality. She presented the image of the brash American abroad, the witty ringleader of the mythological Parisian salon with her partner, Alice B. Toklas, always hiding just behind her in the shadows. She drove fast, wore monkish robes, and walked her poodle Basket along the Seine. Biographies are made for lives like hers, perhaps because Stein satisfies two desires inherent in the form: gossip and controversy. She agitates the old, inevitable question of how the life interlocks with the writing, and perhaps the dangerous biographical question of the life overtaking the work. (After all, shouldn’t we love the work first to want to know the life?) Her experiences had everything to do with it: “Facts of life make literature,” she wrote, while also denying that the texts meant anything beyond the words on the page. A real understanding of the two poles remains blocked, elusive, and so all the more intriguing. But why try to hold together both knowledge—one service a good biography can offer us—and the mystery of incomprehension? As Stein wrote, “Nobody knows what you mean no matter what you mean, nor how clearly you mean what you mean.” Perhaps it is a testament to her greatness that, within her fame, she can be as little known as she is.

Wade’s biography approaches this gap between fact and reputation with a formal decision, dividing her account of Stein’s life into two halves—“Life” and “Afterlife.” Wade’s own sense of the two parts is instructive:

The first is the narrative she crafted carefully in her autobiographies, lectures and interviews, where her long struggle to find readers leads triumphantly to success.… The second, filling in some of the first version’s deliberate gaps, is a story that could only be told posthumously, taking account of the archive’s secrets: the unpublished texts, the private jottings, the people—mostly women—Stein purported to have forgotten. The two stories mirror and complement one another: one cannot be told without the other.

From the outset, this view casts some doubt on the first account; if it needs to be adjusted later, then we know from the start that we shouldn’t trust it completely. Still, it’s a charming picture. The book’s opening half is a tight, controlled narrative of Stein’s life. It covers all the major moments, beginning with her California childhood and the creation of the wealth that would largely sustain her literary career (Stein’s brother helped create San Francisco’s cable-car system), then on to Radcliffe and the important work she would do in William James’s psychology lab, where Wade convincingly draws connections between the experiments Stein ran and her later interest in spontaneous writing. After a failed bout with medical school, where her supervisors discouraged women students, Stein exited for Paris and the bohemian milieu, surging upward and scarcely looking back.

These early years are of particular interest, as it becomes clear that Stein’s narrative of her own life became more controlled as she developed as a writer—the autobiographical is always near to hand in Stein, even at her most abstract. An account of the all-important meeting and merger with Toklas remains sketchy (almost certainly by Stein’s choice), but the reader is introduced to the intermediary figure of Annette Rosenshine, a cousin of Toklas’s “whom Stein saw daily for psychological interrogation” in Paris. Stein seems to have mildly tortured Rosenshine, perhaps as the friend of a potential love interest, then dropped her completely as the relationship with Toklas blossomed. Neither biographer nor reader ever gets to quite touch the quick of this famous partnership, but it lends a sense of how important omission is to the construction of the persona.

Once Stein is settled at 27 Rue de Fleurus, her famous residence, and determined to produce great works of literature, the narrative flows from one book to the next, all shepherded by Toklas’s devoted typing and editing. The hunt for fame was dogged, and then suddenly it came. These are the iconic scenes of Stein: the witty talk and status-jockeying of the salon; the volunteer ambulance driving in the First World War; the opera Four Saints in Three Acts; and her triumphant American tour. The amusing quips in interviews and on the lecture circuit, the idyllic life in the South of France, the Second World War and the German occupation (complete with a flight from Paris with a Cézanne and a Picasso stashed in her car), and the illness that claimed her soon after the armistice—it’s a life so full that it’s almost surprising there were things to hide.

With what level of skepticism, then, should we take this story as re-presented by Wade? It’s hard to say that it is exactly Stein’s version of things—after all, she had already written several accounts, most famously *The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas *(1932), the commercial breakthrough that gave her the taste of success she craved but also triggered further doubts about her ability. Written almost as a joke at the reader’s expense, it quickly came to overshadow all her previous labors, to Stein’s chagrin. She freely admitted that she hungered for adulation, and Wade’s biography suggests that the PR routine, while thoroughly enjoyed by Stein, was also secondary to the pursuit of serious writing and the effort to get it into the hands of readers. Stein took considerable trouble in her life to get her work published, whether it was cultivating important friends to advocate for