A Lifelong Passion for Sentences: Introductory Thoughts on Gertrude Stein

From Renate Stendhal. Gertrude Stein: In Words and Pictures. Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 1994, pp. ix-xviii.

She was small and of voluminous proportions. She reminded Ernest Hemingway of an "Italian peasant woman.” Her style of dress reminded him of "strange steerage clothes." The owner of the hotel in Belley where Gertrude Stein used to summer thought she looked like a gypsy as she stepped into the hotel, her skirt flapping around her, her feet naked in sandals. Her companion, Alice B. Toklas, kept herself one step behind the massive Gertrude. With her scant figure and slight stoop, she appeared to the hotelier as "the other one's maid."

Gertrude Stein's unconventional appearance fit well with the salon she held in Paris, first with her brother Leo, then with Alice B. Toklas. Their studio and apartment at 27, rue de Fleurus was the meeting place for the young artistic and literary rebels of the new century: Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Apollinaire, Juan Gris, Mina Loy; later Djuna Barnes, Ernest Hemingway, and many others. The Stein siblings were among the first to collect the scandalous paintings of the Fauvists and Cubists. Their salon at the rue de Fleurus, with its picture-paved walls, was, as Hemingway wrote, "one of the best rooms in the finest museum."

This, in itself, made Gertrude Stein a legend even while she was alive. The world saw her as a patroness, a muse, the "Mother of Modernism" who assisted young artists with the accouchement of their works and nourished the creativity of the Lost Generation. Her own writing seemed accessory. It disturbed the picture, except when she wrote about those (increasingly famous) friends.

The revolutionary spark struck by Picasso in painting was kindled by Gertrude Stein in writing. She wrote the way Cubists painted, moving beyond the spatial limitations of the three-dimensional perspective. Her early "word portraits,” for example, were verbal still lifes capturing the salon artists from different angles simultaneously, in a single "cubist" plane. Her writing and theories about writing liberated language from the nineteenth century, from all romantic, naturalistic, and symbolic overtones. With her most famous words—"A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose"—the nonrepresentational rose of the twentieth century was created.

Yet, in her own time, recognition of Gertrude Stein's language revolution was slow to come. From a traditional perspective, there was "no there there": the words of a woman could not possibly be at the beginning of modernism. The American Gertrude Stein gave her contemporaries a lot to swallow. She was not only a woman, she was an independent woman. She came from a well-to-do German-Jewish family and had her own income (a family allowance). At age fourteen, she had lost her not particularly beloved mother; at eighteen, her much detested father. She had studied psychology and medicine before coming to Paris. She would not tolerate the domination of a man and replaced her brotherly companion with a woman. With all this, the female language pioneer was a step ahead of her time.

Readers of the monumental work of Gertrude Stein (about six hundred titles) are sentenced to a challenge. The author had a "lifelong passion for sentences." Endless sentences. Stenographically short sentences. Constantly repeated, minutely changed sentences. Sentences that refuse to move anything on, that do not move toward any end of a story, any aim or future. Sentences insisting on the continuous present, i.e., "continuous presence." Sentences consisting of word play, double entendres, and seemingly nonsensical linguistic hide-and-seek games.

The works of the male avant-garde—Joyce, the Futurists, Dadaists, Expressionists, Surrealists—were auscultated word for word. Not so the works of the female avant-garde. Gertrude Stein had to wait for her first success until she was fifty-nine years old. Until then, she hardly managed to publish anything unless she paid for it herself. Her freeing of language from its grammatical and emotional traditions was considered absurd, not to be taken seriously. Together with Picasso, she liked to speculate: "Braque and Joyce, they are the incomprehensibles whom anybody can understand. Les incompréhensibles que tout le monde peut comprendre."

Nonetheless, during the early years, Gertrude Stein, flanked by Alice B. Toklas, held court each Saturday night at 27. rue de Fleurus. The American in Paris who was an outsider in so many ways was, at the same time, the hub of the "moveable feast." Chosen friends and visitors were served a French dîner. "We had just hung all the pictures and we asked all the painters," Gertrude Stein wrote in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. "You know how painters are, I wanted to make them happy so I placed each one opposite his own picture, and they were happy so happy that we had to send out twice for more bread, when you know France you will know that that means that they were happy, because they cannot eat and drink without bread and we had to send out twice for more bread so they were happy."

Strict rules applied in Gertrude Stein's salon. "If you brought up Joyce twice, you would not be invited back," Hemingway reported in his Parisian memoirs. "It was like mentioning one general favorably to another general. You learned not to do it the first time you made the mistake. You could always mention a general, though, that the general you were talking to had beaten. The general you were talking to would praise the beaten general greatly and go happily into detail on how he had beaten him."

The so-called Mother of Modernism defended her battlefield with the will of a sovereign and the energy of a tyrant. Only those useful to her were granted entrance; only those who had praised her were praised in turn. She liked to talk and give young, ambitious writers like Hemingway "fatherly" advice: "Remarks are not literature." Her self-confidence was unshaken by criticism, rejection. or ridicule.

She showed the same obstinacy in her daily living. In 1928, she discovered the summer house of her dreams in Bilignin, a village near Belley in the Rhone Valley. When the tenant, a French lieutenant, refused to leave the house, she used her American connections to get him transferred to the Middle East. For the next fifteen years, the house with the romantic garden towers was hers.

"She had such a personality," Hemingway wrote, "that when she wished to win anyone over to her side she would not be resisted." Quite a number of both men and women found her sexually irresistible as well. In the cases of Hemingway and the American patroness Mabel Dodge, for example, Alice B. Toklas had to step in and occasionally even make a scene in order to render Gertrude resistible. People were particularly attracted by her full, melodious voice, her elemental laughter, her taking space in an obvious, physical way; by her humor, her curiosity, her sensuous appetite for everything in life—which lasted to the very end of her life.

As death approached, she asked Alice the now legendary question, "What is the answer?" And, when there was no reply, said, "In that case, what is the question?"

The legend still holds. Everybody knows of Gertrude Stein, even if only a few have read her. "A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose" is an evergreen, self-sufficient and satisfying to the point where inquiring further into her writing might seem unnecessary. Here, the idea and practice of modernism are captured in a single line, a magical "Open, Sesame" that promises access to the avant-garde literature of the twentieth century. Here, at the literary threshold, one can linger and weigh with a pleasant shudder how far the experiment of language has moved out into impassable terrain. In Stein's phrase, the rose is still recognizable as what it had been for centuries in the Western lyrical tradition. Yet, it has gained a concreteness of irreducible presence and, at the same time. awakens an intimation of strangeness, the estrangement of a new era. The line is a literary "invitation to the dance": we, the readers, are invited to create the well-worn rose anew.

Familiar and strange. The photographic image of Stein's beautiful, massive head with the Caesar haircut belongs to the culture of our century as solidly as Picasso's 1906 portrait of her. A modern equivalent to archetypal Western images of women—the Mona Lisa for example—Stein's head raises the timeless question of identity. "I want to be historical," "In my generation I am the only one," "I am a genius"—the pronouncements of a woman who stepped onto the world stage at a time when other women were just beginning to demand egalitarian treatment.

Who was this woman?

THE IDEA of a book combining texts and pictures grew naturally out of Stein's life and work. Gertrude Stein was an author for whom being seen was as important as being read. Being portrayed by painters and sculptors pleased her, as it pleased her to have her photo taken by the great and "small" photographers of her time. (Her companion Alice B. Toklas, by contrast, seems to betray a growing fatigue with posing over the course of years.) The resulting wealth of photographic images that inspired this "picture-reader" invites a new view, a visual as well as literary reading of Stein's personality, life, and work.

The most immediate, striking effect of Gertrude Stein's photographic portraits is the impression they give a viewer that Stein took the same freedom with her appearance she took with her writing. Shortly after her arrival in Paris, at the beginning of the century, she removed her stays, literally stepping out of the corset of convention.

Appearance is a question of style, as telling as a style of writing. Stein insisted all her life that her writing had nothing to do with automatic writing. Her appearance, too, was not the product of happenstance. On the contrary her readiness, at any moment, to establish her bodily presence has the quality of a deliberate statement. She faces the camera and posterity with the nonchalance of a woman for whom it is natural to be fully herself.

Generations later, such a posture still looks avant-garde, even though our fin de siècle may be catching up with Gertrude Stein. We have grown accustomed to abstract, conceptual, repetitive, and minimal art. In the context of performance art and new forms of writing, Stein's work seems less and less alien. If we were to see her today, sitting at the Coupole in Paris, dressed in her army coat and leopard hat, how seamlessly she would fit into the contemporary artists' scene. That "cool" look of hers wouldn't easily be matched by her own contemporaries, Joyce, Proust, or Pound. Her androgyny might still amaze: the challenging gaze of a general, the inviting body of a wet nurse, the lust for life of a child tyrant. "Literary Einstein of the century," "Mother of Modernism," and enfant terrible in one and the same person.

Stein's personality caused as much dissent as her writing. She had as many enemies as friends (some of whom changed fronts several times over the course of the years). Opinions about her clashed as long as she lived, and they continued to do so after her death. Was she a genius, as she claimed? As gifted with words as her soul-friend Picasso was with paints? Or was she a "clinical case of megalomania" as Tristan Tzara declared? Did her language possess the "exactitude, austerity, absence of variety in light and shade" of a Bach fugue as the French critic Marcel Brion attested? Or was her writing a "cold suet-roll of fabulously reptilian length ... all fat, without nerve," a "sausage-by-the-yard-variety," as Wyndham Lewis claimed? Was she self-assured or self-obsessed? Was it artistic rigor and integrity that compelled her to set limits on others ("We are not amused"), or was it narcissistic arrogance? Was she a "dictator of art," as Man Ray saw her, or, in Sylvia Beach's view, an "infant prodigy”?

Gertrude Stein, born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, to parents of German-Jewish descent, learned English at the age of five. Her first language was German. She spent her early years in Vienna and Paris before her family moved back to America. From that time on, and for the rest of her life, she knew how to remain the five-year-old child who discovers the English language for the first time, tries it out without prejudice, endlessly repeating, wantonly changing, destroying, and recreating it. She played with every possible literary genre, from nursery rhymes to opera libretti. No matter how difficult her texts appear, she always insisted they were perfectly simple. And many are disarmingly simple and playful:

If you hear her snore
It is not before you love her
You love her so that to be her beau is very lovely
She is sweetly there and her curly hair is very lovely
She is sweetly here and I am very near and that is very lovely.
She is my tender sweet and her little feet are stretched out well which is a treat and very lovely.
Her little tender nose is between her little eyes
which close and are very lovely.
She is very lovely and mine which is very lovely.

—Portraits and Prayers

Having come into the world as the spoiled youngest of five siblings, Gertrude Stein described her childlike quality as freedom from "sentimental feeling" and as "aggressive liveliness" ("that is the way I was and that is the way I still am, and any one who is like that necessarily liked it. I did and I do"). The "child within man," as the German language has it, in this case survived within a woman.

FOR ME, composing Gertrude Stein's life story in pictures and quotations was giving in to the temptation of a riddle. There was not only the question, Who was Gertrude Stein? There was the unavoidable challenge of the question, How to read Gertrude Stein?

The riddle fascinated me from the moment when, as a schoolgirl, I heard how a comma is "holding your coat for you" ("Poetry and Grammar"). The fascination lasted even when it turned into avoidance: whenever I advanced from her more accessible theoretical and autobiographical texts into the hermetic fields of her "Cubist" writing, my courage would desert me. Her continuous present tense seemed to have left the past, the literary tradition of the fathers, so far behind that the literary connection between them was cut. I would find myself face to face with a sphinx holding up a mirror to my incapacity. Is she making fun of language? I would ask myself. is she intentionally fooling us?

I sensed that there was something else at play. If one could only find the rules of the game one would be able to play along with her and share the fun. With an excluded reader's agony, I would look for the "useful knowledge" my author had promised (in a book of that title, in 1928). 1 would go back and forth between my possible sources of understanding, puzzling over her cryptic words, her personality, her psychology, her life story, then trying to read her face, the foxy but good-natured, serious fun it radiates. I sensed that if this sphinx had hidden the answers to her questions, well, she must have also left sufficient clues about how to find them. "If there is no answer, what is the question?" My hunch proved right. My lack of courage would be countered to the extent that pieces of the verbal puzzle kept falling into my hands.

I remember the night when I first tried my teeth on Stein's famous portrait-poem "Susie Asado," written in 1913. The portrait begins:

Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea.
Susie Asado.
Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea.
Susie Asado. Susie Asado which is a told tray sure.
A lean on the shoe this means slips slips hers....

Reportedly the portrait had been inspired by the flamenco dancer La Argentina, whom Stein and Toklas had admired when they were in Spain in 1913. How then could the first evocation of the dancer be dominated by the highly un-Spanish association of tea on a tray? I did not find poetic peace that night. I continued hearing the staccato rhythm of flamenco shoes in these lines, but I fell out of rhythm every time I came to the "sweet tea." The turnoff or cutoff at the end of these lines seemed so jarring that I sensed a purpose behind it. Did the abrupt shift from Spanish "sweet" to English "tea" capture a dislocation Stein herself had experienced? I literally had no clue. I felt duped and slighted. I decidedly did not like Susie Asado, that fake Spanish dancer with a half-English name.

The next morning, however, when sweet Susie had become an annoying "earworm” (a German notion), I suddenly heard it. "Sweet tea": sweetie. It was a revelation that changed the entire portrait for me. Stein's sound play suddenly pulled the rapid dance of "Sweet sweet Sweet sweet sweet . . ." over the end of the line—and over the edge of proper British manners—into a rapturous calling of "sweetie Susie Asado." Now the whole beginning sounded like the beginning of a lover's plea, with "tray sure" melting into "treasure," another tenderness. "Told" seemed to speak of "bold," of something risqué having been communicated between the adorer and the adored. On the sound stage that had suddenly opened before me, I could take the liberty of playing with associations. The passionate context of flamenco music, song, and dance held another, private, and perhaps secret, passion—a passion involving an author who spoke English (and who had just been in England before coming to Spain) and whose communication of her admiration may not have been as easy as she had desired. Movements of desire may have run into obstacles (broken-off lines) because of different languages—English and Spanish, perhaps even French ("tray sure" can be read as "tres sure," the French feminine version of "very sure"). Desire may also hive run into invisible lines of manners, drawn by Alice's presence as a guardian of tea on a tray, the virtues of the home. The dancer's mysterious English name, Susie, may point to the French word for worry, "souci." Any too-passionate leanings ("lean on the shoe") might have caused slippings, a loss of balance, especially if the dancer's movements ("slips slips hers") had conveyed too bold a message (with her slippers, her lips, or revealing her slip) as the sounds seem to suggest.

I felt bold myself in this speculative reading, but encouraged by the fact that my playing with Stein's text never seemed to leave the text. I rather felt that I was finally playing inside her own playfulness, dancing along with her own verbal dance. I was fortunate to know some of the bilingual "steps" of that dance. To read "Susie Asado," knowing French as well as English seemed a precondition. In other cases, I soon noticed, a knowledge of German and Yiddish also helped in keeping up with Stein. (My first language, as it was for Stein, is German; I learned English at age ten, French at sixteen, and Yiddish at twenty, shortly before leaving Germany to live in Paris as my chosen place of "exile.")

"Susie Asado" made me aware that biographical knowledge can be useful indeed for reading Gertrude Stein. I am not sure I would have found access to her text had I not known about the multilingual context of her writing and taken a few hints from what I knew about the erotic side of her life. Then, by reading and repeating the words (in the way Stein liked to call "caressing"), the "abstract" portrait had revealed itself as equally evocative, risque, and rich in color as the portraits Picasso had painted at the same time.

In the past two decades, feminist scholars have confirmed my own tentative reading. Linda Simon, Gloria Orenstein, and others have clearly established the eroticism that crosses through Stein's work, partly in disguise, partly with surprising explicitness. The discovery led scholars to a new hypothesis: perhaps more than erotic deviance was hidden in Stein's texts. Perhaps even her most experimental work was not altogether abstract, but strategically coded. The coding, in Orenstein's view, was a device to disguise anything that would have hindered Stein's literary success. In order to hold her own against her male rivals, the female author had to veil the disturbing elements of her identity: being female, Jewish, and lesbian. According to this thesis, Stein over(p)layed these disturbing elements with the less provocative identity of an American in Paris. Hidden in the text, she played out her true identity in word games, sound associations, false abstractions, maskings, and masquerades.

Stein's "Susie Asado" can be read as a perfect example of such a masked homoerotic subtext. Another example is "Caesar," an image that appears repeatedly in her work. "I say lifting belly and then I say lifting belly and Caesars. I say lifting belly gently and Caesars gently. I say lifting belly again and Caesars again. I say lifting belly and I say Caesars and I say lifting belly and Caesars and cow come out." ("Lifting Belly"). "What are Caesars. Caesars are round a little longer than wide but not oval. They are picturesque and useful" ("Today We Have a Vacation"), Or, "A fig an apple and some grapes make a cow. How. The Caesars know how. Now" ("A Sonatina Followed by Another"). The name Caesar contains a sound play on "sees her" and "seize her," as well as an allusion to Stein herself, the author with a claim to literary authority and with the haircut of an emperor famous for his homosexual leanings. Again the ear decodes what is partly hidden to the eyes.

It has been argued, however, that Stein's way of loading a word/sound/ name/image with complex associations does not necessarily indicate coding. "Opaqueness" is characteristic of the entire modernist avant-garde. Instead of being a special case, Stein can be read simply as a prototype of modernism. Indeed, if she wrote in code, we would have to explain an obvious contradiction: she, whose language insistently abstracts itself from the personal and representational, presents her physical self with such shocking liberality.

No Oedipus will once and for all unriddle this sphinx. The most enticing riddle is precisely the one that promises and, at the same time, withholds its solution. Continuously tempting, it stays continuously present.

THE GUESSING game of reading Stein demands patience and sufficient motivation to listen to and around her words, to feel them out, let them roll over one's tongue, and read them aloud (or listen to Stein's recorded voice). Aloud and, I would add, administered in the right dose, in a rhythm similar to that in which she wrote: every day a bit. In my experience, this practice best brings out the unity of sound, rhythm, sense, and ambiguity in her writing. Even the most seemingly absurd statements do, after all, make sense.

Take a line from one of her hermetic texts, Tender Buttons (1912-14): "A little called anything shows shudders." What are we to make of it? Does anything show shudders when called "little,” or when called only a little bit? The sentence is evocative without evoking anything clearly recognizable. It stays abstract, pure "Steinese."

The mystery, in this case, happens to have been solved by Gertrude Stein herself. She revealed in an interview, in 1946, that the sentence referred to her car, to "the movement of one of those old-fashioned automobiles, an old Ford ... [a] movement that is not always successful." The "absurd” sentence instantly fills with life. There is tenderness, worry a hint at nicknames for a beloved car. Every word vibrates with associations, with the "peaceful and exciting" certitude of meaning. Readers who are not satisfied with Stein's practical explanation, however, may seek further inspiration from the intriguing title of the book, Tender Buttons. "Button" is a slang word for clitoris. Read with this in mind, "a little" and its "shudders" radically change meaning. One and the same sentence can be abstract on one level, realistic on another, and a double entendre on a third. With her own interpretation the author has pointed toward a possible explication de texte, in the sense of a personal, creative relation to language in which meaning and interpretation are necessarily private and consistently in flux. Commenting about her sentences, Stein once evoked "the intense feeling that they made sense, then the doubt and then each time over again the intense feeling that they did make sense."

Stein's strategy is obviously different from the "female voice" (écriture de différence) celebrated by recent feminist authors. The "Mother of Modernism" was not particularly interested in being a woman. On the contrary, she used every possibility of the English language to neither reveal nor conceal her gender. She chose to leave the question open. She, the outsider, wrote about herself as "he,” "one," "someone," "nobody," and "everybody." She called the second part of her autobiography Everybody’s Autobiography. As she considered her writing self-explanatory, she never commented on what she intended with this tactical move. We are left to speculate. Did she intend to proclaim the universality of her—female—person?

Intended or not, Gertrude Stein's use of language was not her only gender-bending strategy. The American in Paris with the "lifelong passion for sentences" also subverted the European salon tradition. After the departure of her brother Leo from the rue de Fleurus, she herself took the role of the male genius in her salon, while Alice B. Toklas played the indispensable role of hostess. Alice B. Toklas took care not only of the guests' well-being, serving them eau-de-vies and petits fours, she also maintained protocol. As an intellectual "bodyguard," she made sure that the genius stayed unbothered by undesirable or useless conversation.

Gertrude Stein's ways of writing and surviving—her chutzpah, cunning, her playful "aggressive liveliness"—may explain her ability to play with dignity the lifelong role of an outsider. Another explanation, I surmise, is her lifelong relationship with Alice B. Toklas.

THE RELATIONSHIP between these two women piqued onlookers from the start. It has been (and is still) seen by some as an exploitive arrangement, profitable to only one partner. According to this view, it was a "marriage" based on patriarchal "authority and submission patterns" (Shari Benstock), with Alice B. Toklas in the thankless role of the wife/domestic. In 1938, in a letter to the painter Romaine Brooks, salon patroness and writer Natalie Barney expressed her concern about Alice's .. stress": "I am afraid 'the bigger one who gets fatter and fatter and fatter, will sooner or later devour [Alice]. She looks so thin."

What do the photos reveal? Was Alice B. Toklas nothing but the servant-shadow of a genius? Or was Gertrude Stein a passion for Alice B. Toklas the way writing was for Stein? Or was the radical background position that Toklas maintained (even after Stein's death) an expression of her passion? By contrast to most muses, mistresses, and wives of male writers, Alice B. Toklas is strikingly present, both in the photos and in Stein's work.

There certainly is ample evidence in Stein's writing that she pleased herself in the sexual role of the "husband." But this is a husband whose "wife has a cow." A cow? Another example of "Steinese." Is there a question of a bucolic romance? Apparently not. The term "cow" covers a whole range of taboo topics ("sacred cows") of traditional writing: female sexual organs, desire, and above all orgasm. For example: "Cows are very nice. They are between legs" ("All Sunday"); "Yes tenderness grows and it grows where it grows. And do you like it. Yes you do. And does it fill a cow full of filling. Yes. And where does it come out of. It comes out of the way of the Caesars. . . . And the cow comes out of the door. Do you adore me. When this you see remember me" ("A Sonatina Followed by Another"). The romance clearly is of a bodily, orgasmic nature. Pleasing Alice seems to have been a prime concern of "husband" Stein: "Have Caesars a duty. Yes their duty is to a cow. Will they do their duty by the cow Yes now and with pleasure" ("A Sonatina"). A line in "Lifting Belly" ironically demands, "Husband obey your wife." Role-play and role reversals (both partners took turns being "Baby," for example) should not be confused with fixed gender stereotypes. If patriarchal patterns are played out, they are played out with gusto, ad absurdum.

Alice B. Toklas's intellectual brilliance was admired by many contemporaries and by Stein herself. She was not just the secretary who typed up every word of Stein's for print. She was for years the only person who understood Stein's work, who validated and discussed it with her and sometimes corrected it. Without her recognition and encouragement, Stein might have continued writing day after day and page after page about her "despairing," as she did in her early novel, The Making of Americans. She might have ended up paralyzed rather than inspired by the boldness and solitude of her vision of language. Without Alice B. Toklas there might not have been the female genius Gertrude Stein.

It was Alice B. Toklas who discovered the "rose" in Stein's writing, who recognized and propagated it as an emblem of Modernism. In 1930, she created her own publishing company, Plain Edition, to further Stein's work. Stein specialist Richard Bridgman seriously considers the possibility that manuscript passages in Alice's handwriting indicate her active participation. Others disagree. Ulla Dydo makes the distinction between Stein's private writing, which included messages and intimate "banter" between her and Alice, and her "literature:' But the distinction may be strained. Numerous literary Stein pieces have the distinct ring of domestic dialogues. For example: "This must not be put in a book. / Why not. / Because it mustn't. / Yes sir" ("Bonne Année," from Stein's self-published collection Geography and Plays, 1922). Without calling this possible interchange a coauthorship, it is easy to imagine that Stein's joy in experimenting opened the door to occasional writing in two voices. (One example of such a duet with Alice is the poem written in two hands, on page 64.)

Years after Stein's death, Alice B. Toklas wrote two cookbooks (the first one garnished with anecdotes and with a famous recipe for hashish cookies), and finally her own memoir, What is Remembered (1963). After Stein's Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Toklas's curt, sarcastic wit sounds familiar indeed. Whether or not some form of collaboration was part of the game, Gertrude Stein's most successful book is a monument to the equal spirit of her companion, a monument evidently true to nature.

MY CHOICE of pictures and texts is not intended to solve the mystery of Gertrude Stein's identity My intention is to sow clues for the reader.

When I set out to do detective work on this obscure high priestess of Modernism, I was surprised to find that she herself had left a trail of clues. Apart from her extensive autobiographical and self-explanatory texts, I discovered the gigantic mass of pictorial "messages" that she had collected and left to posterity: an almost unbroken, year-by-year account of her life. The sheer size of this photo collection called my attention to the possibility that Stein's insistence on a visual record might have a meaning. She had left us two kinds of "texts" to read: her writing, and the photographic chronicle of her life, perhaps as a deliberate hint that these two kinds of texts can read each other.

Looking at her childhood pictures, I am struck by the early absence of any attempt to please the onlooker. To the contrary, "Gertie" is clearly not pleased and won't compromise with a smile. She sticks to her mood, her boredom or suspicious vigilance, simply pleasing herself. The same willfulness can be read in the snapshot from Del Monte, in 1935, where she comes walking straight toward the camera. She is a celebrity by then, a "lion," and shows the same unbending refusal to please anyone but herself. Her slightly crumpled, half-buttoned tweed costume, the half-tugged-away scarf, her childlike duck shoes, pay tribute to her comfort—not, however, in an aggressive way that would deny any sense of aesthetics or attractiveness. The fine silk blouse, the decorative brooch, the black velvet collar and matching cap setting off her graying hair bespeak an undeniable pleasure in her appearance. Her stride is grounded, filled with purpose. She does not smile. She looks at the inquisitive eye of the beholder with the intensity of one who is inquisitive herself, for whom it is crucial to know. Of course she knows that someone is looking at her, trying to capture her, read her, decode her, judge her. She must be aware of the situation: an author in fashion, returning from Hollywood, her star rising with every picture taken. It does not for a second distract her. Whatever is sought from her is already there, to be given, generously, in utter simplicity, without rancor about past ridicule, without speculation about future revenge. She looks, as in her childhood pictures, intensely involved in her very own, personal experience of the present. Her face has the same determination, as does her fist, to show herself, not in order to please, but to be—which clearly pleases her.

Stein's writing can be read with the same eyes. There, too, is her unbending refusal to satisfy any exterior demand, her uncompromising attitude of following her own command. She has made herself comfortable in language, puts on words that fit her like her tweeds. Linguistically, she walks in shoes made strictly for her own use. She wears the hats of every literary genre. She caresses the rhythms of words as her brooch caresses her throat. If her sentences give pleasure, it is because they are a pleasure to herself.

Reading Stein's photographs encourages us to approach the obscure genius as she, in the Del Monte picture, approaches us. The unflinching, no-nonsense authority of her gaze tells us to trust our own eyes, to trust what we see when we read her.

The repeated snapshots and studio photographs betray the same principle of ever-changing repetition Stein used in her writing. Similarly, Stein's continuous photographic self-presentation mirrors her literary use of the continuous present tense and perhaps interprets it as a celebration of being, a faculty of being present in the moment, in her body, herself, with the flow of life present at every moment.

Another important clue from the photographic context is Stein's good humor. Whether she lets Carl Van Vechten wrap her in melodramatic curtains, lets Cecil Beaton dress her up as a Dalai Lama, whether she seats herself like Humpty Dumpty on her garden wall, singing, or dons her improbable hats: it is obvious that she always places herself on the same level as her spectators. There is no attitude of pious hauteur, of being above her readers, the genius unreachable by us, mere mortals.

The same message of equal standing is conveyed by her playfulness: giggling with her nephew as a teenager, dancing with her dog when already a woman well past her prime, Stein invites us to join in and play with her. Looking at her photos provides, I think, the best answer to the questions we have always asked: is Stein making deliberate fun of us? Are we laughed at by an author who cynically plays tricks behind our backs, pulls our legs, and smirks at our falls? Seeing her face, I find the answer. She has fun and she makes puns, but she looks us in the eye with a wink that says we are both in the same place, we are wise and we are fools, we can laugh together.

Stein herself was aware of this democratic attitude. She considered it part of her American heritage, and she often commented on it. When she "entered the war," in 1917, driving her Ford truck with supplies for the American Fund for French Wounded, she had her share of mishaps, like any other driver. The difference, however, that "puzzled the other drivers of the organization" was that when she blew a tire, got lost, or got stuck in the snow, she would unfailingly get help. In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, she explains why: ". . . the others looked so efficient, of course nobody would think of doing anything for them. Now as for [Gertrude Stein] she was not efficient, she was good humoured, she was democratic, one person was as good as another, and she knew what she wanted done. If you are like that she says, anybody will do anything for you. The important thing, she insists, is that you must have deep down as the deepest thing in you a sense of equality. Then anybody will do anything for you.”

"Having deep down as the deepest thing in you a sense of equality," shines a light from the textual record back to the photographic record. Her words en/lighten her way of looking at the camera, at us. She takes herself seriously, to say the least; her "democratic" rootedness, however, keeps her from taking herself too seriously. Taking oneself too seriously inevitably hampers one's creativity through lack of play. Her unusual balance explains why Stein, whose sense of equality did not stop her from knowing herself to be a genius, is a powerful inspiration for women readers today. I have often witnessed the effect of Stein's example on other women writers. I have observed the impact of her inspiration, leading from a first uncensored thought to a daring utterance, to rediscovering one's innate sense of play, to embracing the full peril and pleasure of one's creativity. After almost a century, Stein continues to be present as a role model, teacher, mentor, muse. Her two kinds of "texts," her eccentric story-telling photographs, the visionary composition of her words, continue to shock, challenge, ravish.

IT WOULD have been impossible, in a "picture-reader," to do justice to all facets of Stein's oeuvre. Her work, however, lends itself to fragmentation. One of her most masterful stylistic means is the aphorism, the line that "goes under the skin" as she herself knew so well:

"There is no there there."

"Pigeons on the grass alas."

"I am I because my little dog knows me."

"Before the flowers of friendship faded friendship faded."

"A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose."

Another of her significant stylistic traits is the anecdote. How could the story of her life be better told than through matching up her story-telling photographs with her own literary anecdotes, both with their ironic smile about the absurdity of life?

In order to create a synchronicity between quotes and photographs, I tried to follow the chronology of Stein's writing. I did not want to resist the temptation, however, to occasionally sacrifice synchronicity and enjoy a purely associative link between a quote and the expression of a picture.
Exact biographical timing was often impossible simply because dates were not established. The gigantic mass of Gertrude Stein's unpublished texts and photos, which had to be managed, after Stein's death, by Alice B. Toklas, her literary executor Carl Van Vechten, and Yale University, could not entirely be dated with precision. Some crucial events remained questionable. Stein specialists don't agree, for example, when exactly Gertrude and Leo Stein separated. Was it in 1911 (Leon Katz), 1912 (John Malcolm Brinnin), 1913 (Donald Gallup), or, in Gertrude Stein's memory, 1914?
Least well established were the photographic dates, sometimes even in pictures taken by famous, well-documented photographers. One and the same picture by Cecil Beaton, for example, can appear in different publications with dates that vary by as much as ten years. Whenever there were no established dates or when the existing biographies of Gertrude Stein contradicted one another too drastically, I chose to leave solid academic ground and play instead with a Steinian perspective of time-lags. Approaching the puzzle of Gertrude Stein always happens at one's own risk and peril. She knew how to avoid being categorized, and not only in her writing. Her lack of respect for traditional values, safe judgments, and solid categories forces one into creative guessing, subjectivity, and tolerance for the unavoidable error, the unpredictable, the unknown.

Occasionally a detail under the looking glass, a piece of clothing, a brooch, hat, or a painting in the background provided an indication about a possible time and place. In a view of Stein's head in front of a pigeon wallpaper, for example, the wallpaper served as evidence. Several pictures from rue Christine show rooms bedecked with the same pigeons, indicating that the earliest possible date for the photo had to be 1938, the year of the move to rue Christine. But the archival number of the photo indicated Carl Van Vechten as the photographer, and Van Vechten had taken his last pictures of Gertrude Stein in 1935, during her American lecture tour. The correspondence between Stein and Van Vechten finally rendered the solution: in the States, Gertrude Stein had fallen in love with the wallpaper and had her picture taken in front of a piece of it, in 1935. By 1938, Carl Van Vechten had sent her a sufficient supply of rolls across the Atlantic to cover the walls of her new apartment in rue Christine.

An early photographic series shows Gertrude Stein enthroned on her Renaissance chair and working at her desk. Her face, hair, her velvet gown indicate a time before the 1920s. But what is the actual date? The arrangement of the paintings on the walls can't serve as a safe indication, since they were constantly rearranged. One hint, however, is provided by Picasso's Architect’s Table, recognizable in a corner. The date of this painting, 1912, places the photos in a period after that time. To me, the series seems to symbolize perfectly the time when Gertrude Stein reigned over the rue de Fleurus for the first time alone, without her brother, and established herself as a literary genius with Alice B. Toklas's support. I further assumed that some, if not all of the photos belong to a series taken by the American photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn, whom Gertrude Stein had mentioned (without giving a date) as the first photographer who came to her to take her photo "as a famous woman." I therefore used the series to illustrate the period of her growing fame, after Leo's departure in 1913, after the publication of Tender Buttons in 1914, and before Stein's "entering the war" in 1917.

For Gertrude Stein's lecture tour through the United States, in 1934-35, there was a choice of several photo series by Carl Van Vechten, taken at his New York studio. Van Vechten had organized a good part of the tour, welcomed Stein and Toklas at their arrival, and waved them good-bye. I chose to make an exception in this case and break the chronology of Van Vechten's photo series for the purpose of recreating the effect of his building a caring frame around the whole tour.

This limited "photo-poetic" license seemed justified by my goal to make Gertrude Stein's story not only as precise, but also as entertaining as possible. Her story is told on three different levels, one visual, one strictly biographical, and one literary-anecdotal, in her own words. My aim was to find the right dosage for a "picture-reader," for browsing, choosing, repeating, remembering. The interplay of the parts will, I hope, highlight a particularly modern aspect of Gertrude Stein's work: its wholeness, its nonhierarchical unity of highflying thoughts and everyday trivia, spirituality and common sense, philosophy and erotics. The juxtaposition of words and images may also shine a light on the paradox of Gertrude Stein's personality, embracing the legendary, and the down-to-earth, the female and the male, the self-enthroning and the self-ironic, the word-dictator and the fool at the court of world literature.

—R. S.
Berkeley, 1994