Gertrude Stein (Critical Lives) (2 page)

When Gertrude was a little girl, she overheard a conversation that would still make her shudder when she remembered it a lifetime later. Gertrude, the youngest of five siblings, was idly listening to her parents’ conversation when she gleaned the fact that another sister had been stillborn, and another brother had died very young. Her father was adamant that he had only ever wanted five children. Had it not been for the deaths of these two babies, buried on a chilly hillside in Pennsylvania, Gertrude Stein and her beloved brother Leo would never have been born.
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In this childhood moment of devastating realization — young Gertrude’s sudden sense of herself as a cosmological fluke, clawing her way into life through the jaws of destiny — seemed to be contained, for the adult Stein, the seeds of her lifelong fascination with personality, character and identity. She would live forever with the fear of her own insignificance. And from then on, it seemed, she was also intent on creating ‘a life’ for herself.

At least, that’s the way she told it. For this childhood memory is but one of many paradigmatic scenarios with which Stein built up her own legend, in which truth and self-invention often overlapped. Gertrude was fully aware of both the value and the artifice of presenting her life as a series of witty and eccentric tableaux. From an early age she was in pursuit of ‘
la gloire
’. ‘Nobody really lives who has not been well written about’, she declared in a memoir written near the end of her life.
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With a Barnumesque instinct for self-promotion, she bound up anecdotes, bon mots, catchphrases and slogans into her personal myth. She even had her most famous line, ‘rose is a rose is a rose is a rose’, embroidered on her table-linen, printed on the china and embossed as a logo on her stationery. After the phenomenal success, in 1933, of
The
Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
, Stein’s first full-length work of pure autobiography, ‘God what a liar she is!’ wrote her by then estranged brother, Leo.
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Her autobiographies cast only the occasional backwards glance that reaches as far as childhood. The state of childhood was disconcerting to the adult Stein; she wrote about the impossibility of envisioning herself as a child without irreparable damage not only to her self-image but to her image of the universe. It destroyed her sense of ‘the everlasting’; it made ‘a broken world’.
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Gertrude, in fact, succeeded in being born on 3 February 1874 to Daniel and Amelia Stein in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, a town which no longer exists, having been engulfed by Pittsburgh. In many ways Stein, the arch-modernist, was a product of the nineteenth century. She envisioned herself as born into an age of science and warfare. Darwin was ‘the great man of the period that framed my youth’.
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It was selling Union uniforms during the Civil War that had turned her father’s family from pedlars into wealthy manufacturers who owned a flourishing wholesale business. In her final book, Stein wrote: ‘I was always in my way a Civil War veteran.’
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Born less than a decade after the end of the Civil War, its stories surrounded her as she grew up. Her birthday was almost the centenary of the birth of the USA, and she would always proudly characterize it as the country of youth and innovation.

‘It has always seemed to me a rare privilege, this, of being an American, a real American, one whose tradition it has taken scarcely sixty years to create.’
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Stein’s new America would always be defined by its marginal inhabitants: the alien, the immigrant, the rebel. Another family legend, worn with repetition: a journey to the new world fraught with turnings back, and multiple beginnings. Stein’s paternal grandparents had arrived in America in 1841 from Germany; they belonged to what became known as the ‘old immigration’, from the countries of central and northern Europe. Her grandmother had led them there with a wagonload of their possessions. At one point on the journey to the ship bound for America she had looked back to find her husband had stopped in the road and turned homeward; she had to go back and urge him to continue trudging towards their family’s glittering American future. Even with the self-conscious portentousness that accompanied so many similar journeys to the new world, Hannah and Michael Stein could never have known that their granddaughter would one day transform this story into her own historical beginning, a moment of epic struggle and conquest that became an American Genesis; that they would become symbolic progenitors of her vision of a new America — ‘the old people in a new world, the new people made out of the old’.
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But in 1875, when that granddaughter was not yet a year old, her American family set sail back to the old world, back to the Europe of their fathers, and settled in Vienna, for the reason that Daniel Stein, that incontrovertible but easily distracted patriarch, for the time being had got it into his head that his children should be educated according to the best European methods.

In adult life Gertrude Stein would become a mesmerizing, magnetic speaker whose mellow Californian tones were remembered by many who met her, whose conversation was what created her fabulous reputation; her talk drew the crowds to her Saturday evening salons, when all the while her written work lay stacked unread in cupboards, and she was hard pressed to find anyone to publish it. Ebullient, garrulous from the start, the baby Gertrude first chattered in German. When she tried to speak English her bizarre sentences caused great hilarity among her family and she would become quite cross. These were only the first of many occasions on which her attempts at communicating her ideas would be misunderstood, and indeed laughed at.

Frequently in her autobiographies she made a point of emphasizing (strange and unnecessary though it might seem) that English was her mother tongue, as if to preempt detractors who thought that it was not. In
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
she framed the same anxiety as a humorous anecdote: the one about the time she was paying for
Three Lives
to be published. An envoy, she claimed, came to see her from the publishers in New York; believing English must be her second language, they were concerned she had an insufficient grasp of its grammatical rules. When she answered the door the young man was embarrassed to find that she was American. Then, she explained, she had to persuade him to print the book the way she had written it, as she had done it that way on purpose. The story only really works with the knowledge that Stein by that time knew she could trust her readers to believe that
Three Lives
was a prescient masterpiece, of all her works the most widely trumpeted as a great and lasting accomplishment.

Back in 1878, when Gertrude was four years old, the family moved from Vienna to Paris for a year. She would later recall very little of this first visit to her adopted hometown. But when, during the First World War, the streets were empty of vehicles, there seemed to be something in the atmosphere that she remembered: the smell of horse manure, she thought perhaps it was. She did not remember but loved to hear the story of a Parisian shopping spree; the five-year-old Gertrude returned triumphant to the USA decked out with a new sealskin coat, gloves and riding costume, and the proud owner of two talismanic objects that foretold her future scientific career: a microscope and a multi-part French history of zoology.

Gertrude Stein, aged four.

Her father having abandoned the particular educational theories that had taken them to Europe, the family’s new home was in Oakland, California, a wealthy suburb of San Francisco. After a short stay in Baltimore, the trip to California became in her recollections an epic journey across the open country with vistas of ‘Indians’, a magical, perennially replenished hamper of food, and her sister’s bright red ostrich plumed hat surreally blowing out of the window of the train into the desert. Her father was this type of man: he stopped the train to go and get it.
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Daniel Stein had not come to California as a prospector, as the generation before him had; he was already a self-made man, but he headed with his family out West as a pioneer of sorts. He invested in the San Francisco Stock Exchange and in street railroads, as well as property. Energetic, volatile, argumentative, a sympathizer with the northern cause during the Civil War, and an espouser of healthy outdoor living, he wanted his children to be ‘individual and independent’.
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But at the same time he placed restrictions on Gertrude’s liberty which she resented. He was progressive, but a faddist, impatient, capricious and overbearing, particularly towards the meek and gentle Milly, his wife. To his children he could sometimes be frightening. ‘Fathers are depressing’, Gertrude succinctly, and repeatedly, noted.
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His domineering attitude to her was a driving force in her desire to overcome heredity and find a different basis for the formation of character: ‘living down the tempers we are born with’. Her idea of parenthood was, like many of her ideas of human relationships, rooted in antagonism. A scribbled note from 1903 which eventually became the epigraph of
The
Making of Americans
emblazoned the late Victorian theme of intergenerational discord across her work:

Once an angry young man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. ‘Stop!’ cried the groaning old man at last, ‘Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree’.
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Cycles of aggression and repetition pervade her work. In
The
Making of Americans
the relation between father and children involves ‘mostly fighting’.
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The father is angry, and psychologically violent. She refers to the children as ‘big struggling children’, with Darwinian significance, while the ‘little gentle mother’ is one of the casualties of evolution, who simply ‘died away’.
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In the novel Stein cast herself as Martha Hersland, the type of a vigorous, healthy American girl, perhaps in reaction to the memory of her mother’s weakness and ailing health.

Oakland was the place of which Stein was to declare, when she returned in the 1930s: ‘There is no there there.’ But that was a comment on her own inability to recast herself as belonging in America, a sense of emptiness at the heart of her earliest experiences, an inability to reconcile herself with her own previous incarnation. Her San Francisco childhood was in fact a cultured one; here she first saw French painting, French plays. Roundly impressed by Millet’s
Man with a Hoe
, she bought a reproduction, of which her brother Michael commented that it was ‘a hell of a hoe’. To her it seemed the beginning of her aesthetic education, the first time she had noticed that art was a thing apart from reality, that it could be not just an emulation of real life but its own world.
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Gertrude, the baby of the family, was cosseted and petted. Michael, the eldest brother, was the family’s rock; Gertrude treated her next two siblings with an attitude ranging from disinterest to disdain, and claimed that she never liked Bertha (‘not a pleasant person’), while Simon was something of a simpleton.
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Gertrude’s ability to shrug off inconvenient family members when they failed to collude with her perception of her own genius would be echoed in later life in her abrupt terminations of many friendships. Gertrude and Leo, the two youngest, early developed a strong bond of affiliation, but Leo too would eventually fall by the wayside, and many luminaries would also feel her stony wrath; Virgil Thomson, the composer and friend with whom she collaborated on the opera
Four Saints in Three Acts
, once received out of the blue a card inscribed with the words: ‘Miss Stein declines further acquaintance with Mr Thomson’.
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Stein once asked the poet William Carlos Williams what he would do if he had as many unpublished works as she did. His reply was that as there were so many, he would probably select the best and throw the rest into the fire. ‘The result of my remark was instantaneous. There was a shocked silence out of which I heard Miss Stein say, “No doubt. But then writing is not, of course, your métier.”’
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That was the precipitate end of another possible friendship. The shutting of her atelier door could be as abrupt as the opening of it could be magnanimous.

The young Stein was schooled in various ladylike accomplishments, but it was a wide open, Western, frontier world the family inhabited; she played the piano, but also knew how to use a gun. Both she and Leo were bookish and outdoorsy in equal measures. Books were at the centre of family life. Stein claimed that as a child she read Wordsworth, Scott, Bunyan, Shakespeare, ‘congressional records encyclopedias etcetera’ ... everything she could get her hands on, indiscriminately: from Richardson’s
Clarissa
to Carlyle’s
Frederick the Great
and Lecky’s
History of England
. When she was eight years old she decided to write a play, and got as far as an optimistic stage direction: ‘the courtiers make witty remarks’,
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but was forced to abandon the endeavour after realizing she was unable to think of any witty remarks. (The telling of this story was both a pricking of her own pomposity and a subtle homage to herself; ‘witty remarks’ had by then become her currency.) She and Leo, prudent collectors in the making, claimed that when they were in their early teens they bought books as security against the possibility of their family’s drop in fortunes. Gertrude boasted that by the age of fifteen she was worried that the world was going to run out of good things for her to read. Gertrude and Leo also spent many long, happy days out trekking together in the rolling Californian hills. By the time they reached adolescence they were inseparable. ‘We were born bohemians’, wrote Gertrude only a few years later while at college, already staking out their mutual future.
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