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Be More Like Gertrude Stein

Is my new mantra… This is from a 1934 New Yorker “Talk of the Town” piece on her:

Miss Stein gets up every morning about ten and drinks some coffee, against her will. She’s always been nervous about becoming nervous and she thought coffee would make her nervous, but her doctor prescribed it. Miss Toklas, her companion, gets up at six and starts dusting and fussing around. Once she broke a fine piece of Venetian glass and cried. Miss Stein laughed and said “Hell, oh hell, hell, objects are made to be consumed like cakes, books, people.” Every morning Miss Toklas bathes and combs their French poodle, Basket, and brushes its teeth. It has its own toothbrush.

Miss Stein has an outsize bathtub that was especially made for her. A staircase had to be taken out to install it. After her bath she puts on a huge wool bathrobe and writes for a while, but she prefers to write outdoors, after she gets dressed. Especially in the Ain country, because there are rocks and cows there. Miss Stein likes to look at rocks and cows in the intervals of her writing. The two ladies drive around in their Ford till they come to a good spot. Then Miss Stein gets out and sits on a campstool with pencil and pad, and Miss Toklas fearlessly switches a cow into her line of vision. If the cow doesn’t seem to fit in with Miss Stein’s mood, the ladies get into the car and drive on to another cow. When the great lady has an inspiration, she writes quickly, for about fifteen minutes. But often she just sits there, looking at cows and not turning a wheel.

Miss Stein always drives, and Miss Toklas rides in the back seat, squealing and jumping, for they say that Miss Stein is the worst driver in the history of automotive engineering. She takes corners fast, doesn’t put out her hand, drives on the wrong side of the street, pays no more attention to traffic signals or intersections than she does to punctuation marks, and never honks. Now and then Alice will lean over from the back seat and honk. They haven’t had any accidents. One writer who visited her had a fake wire sent to him from Paris calling him back, because he was afraid he’d be killed in the Ford.

Miss Stein spends much of her time quarrelling with friends—always about literature or painting. The quarrels are passionate ones, involving everybody, taking hours to get under way, lasting for years (like the one with Hemingway). Nobody remembers after a couple of months exactly what the quarrels are about. The maid at the Stein house in Paris has to be told every day who will be persona grata at tea—it all depends on the quarrel of the night before. Gertrude sits up late, talking, arguing, and laughing; she has a rich, deep, and warming laugh. Afterward she wakes up Alice, who goes to bed early, and they go over the talk of the whole day. Miss Stein has a photographic memory for conversation.

The lady wears astonishing clothes: sandals, woollen stockings fit for a football-player, a man’s plush fedora hat perched high on her head, rough tweed suits over odd embroidered waistcoats and peasant tunics. She also wears extraordinary blue-and-white striped knickers for underdrawers. This came out when she lost them once at a concert given by Virgil Thomson at the Hotel Majestic. She just stepped out of them somehow and left them lying there on the floor. She thought it was very funny and laughed loudly.

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https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1934/10/13/tender-buttons

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I tried to flatter myself into extinction; tried to bury alive in a landslide of disparagement ego and subjectivity and the first person singular pronoun. I ran identity to ground with the dogs of irony; I tried to kill, bury, burn, embalm, and erase the outlines of me, mummify myself in the damp wrappings of surrealism, sever and rearrange me with Stein’s cubisms, break, buy, bribe, drive a stake through me; tried to whip to death the whole frumpish horse-and-buggy, essentialist, runs-in-the-blood notion I had of who “I” was; like Stein I tried to bleed the bloody paragraph to death, killed the semicolon with the machete of my wit, tried to censor and edit, rewrite and emend me, my belief in lifeblood, marrow, core, and fiber; tried to swap my DNA at the DNA supermarket I read about in Philip K. Dick. So what is I still doing here? Why is I having to keep its eyes peeled? Its eye on the ball? Trying to steer by some dim star, that small, raw planet of self-loathing hammered into the night ahead? Why is I hauled forth over this choppy terrain like a tug on the rough boulevards of a black river? And by whom?

Lynn Emanuel, from Noose and Hook

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On Janet Malcolm’s Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice

image[Origin: St. Mark’s Bookshop remaindered pile, originally $25, purchased for $7. 2007, 224 pages, non-fiction]

I just finished this book, and I can’t say that I’m sure what the author’s intention was.  It’s a book about writing a book about Gertrude Stein. It’s also written in an engaging, sometimes acerbic, direct and personal style that makes it a pleasure to read.  Her approach to biography is refreshing: she refuses to give a definitive narrative take on another person’s life; she highlights the outstanding biographical questions; she outlines the process by which she came to certain conclusions.

* No chapters, which gives it the flow of a long magazine article. It’s structured in three long sections. Part I is about Stein & Toklas during World War II, how they managed to survive; Part II is an inquiry into the impenetrable The Making of the Americans, including a great account of Malcolm’s reading of it and the scholarship surrounding the juicy notebooks Stein kept while writing it; Part III mostly concerns the fate of Alice Toklas after the death of Stein… All of this is interspersed with Malcolm’s questions about what can constitute established fact when dealing with biography; her dealings with various Stein critics & her own investigations into the life of Stein & Toklas; her own take on Stein’s writing.

* Perhaps an inadvertent theme that comes through is Malcolm’s distress at Stein & Toklas’s denial of imagetheir Jewishness, in both their life & their writing.  (They were close friends with a Nazi collaborator, who was the one who helped them remain in occupied France, did not ever write directly about the atrocities of the Holocaust, although there was no way they could not have known, at a certain point.)

* Surprises revealed: Stein was extraordinarily charming. She made people want to help her & be around her. She needed constant human company (visits to friends) to keep writing. Men and women both were attracted to her. She was described by more than one person as a golden presence, like the sun, or else earthy brown. However, in her youth, she was depressed, confused, hyper-critical of those around her. Her first four years in Paris were not spent hosting the great Modernist artists, but in an “American ghetto” of friends and relatives, and she spent that time depressed.

And in one of the scant end notes, on their sex life: Stein preferred “cuddles”, while Toklas got the orgasms, which Stein referred to as “cows” (whoa!). “She calls herself ‘the best cow-giver in the world.’" 

* Features sweet photos of Gertrude & Alice.

* It ends abruptly. A curious ending focused on how no one actually liked poor Alice Toklas. I guess this is on par with Malcolm’s determination not to make sweeping statements or grand conclusions. But the abrupt ending makes you wonder what you’re supposed to be taking away from this bok.

* A remarkable number of "side characters” in the Stein story wrote their own memoirs and autobiographies, funny. 

* Aside: How did everyone have so much time to write letters all of the time? 

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The alacrity with which [Gertrude Stein] catches her thoughts before they turn into stale standard expressions may be the most singular of her accomplishments. Her influence on twentieth-century writing is nebulous. No school of Stein ever came into being. But every writer who lingers over Stein’s sentences is apt to feel a little stab of shame over the heedless predictability of his own.

Janet Malcom, Two Lives