Gertrude Stein
Stein, Gertrude
Gertrude Stein (
February 3,
1874 -
July 29,
1946) was an
American writer,
poet,
feminist,
playwright, and catalyst in the development of modern art and literature, who spent most of her life in
France.
Biography
Born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania (now the North Side of Pittsburgh), her family moved to Vienna and then Paris when she was three. After returning almost two years later, she was educated in California, graduating from Radcliffe College in 1897 followed by two years at Johns Hopkins Medical School.
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\n\n| Portrait of Gertrude Stein by Pablo Picasso, 1906 | \n
\nIn 1902 she moved to
France during the height of artistic creativity gathering in
Montparnasse. \nFrom 1903 to 1912 she lived in
Paris with her brother Leo, who became an accomplished art critic. \nGertrude Stein was a
lesbian. She met her life-long companion
Alice B. Toklas in 1907; Alice moved in with Leo and Gertrude in 1909. During her whole life, Gertrude Stein was supported by a stipend from her family's business.
In Paris she started to write in earnest: novels, plays, stories, librettos and poems. Increasingly, she developed her own highly idiosyncratic, playful, sometimes repetitive and sometimes humorous style. Typical quotes are \n:"Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose"\nand \n:"Out of kindness comes redness and out of rudeness comes rapid same question, out of an eye comes research, out of selection comes painful cattle."\nas well as\n:"The change of color is likely and a difference a very little difference is prepared. Sugar is not a vegetable."\nThese stream-of-consciousness experiments, rhythmical word-paintings or "portraits", were designed to evoke "the excitingness of pure being" and can be seen as an answer to
Cubism in literature. Many of the experimental works such as
Tender Buttons have since been interpreted by critics as a feminist reworking of partiarchal language. These works were loved by the avant-garde, but mainstream success initially remained elusive.
She and her brother compiled one of the first collections of Cubist art. She owned early works of
Pablo Picasso (who became a friend and painted her portrait),
Henri Matisse,
Andre Derain plus other young painters.
When England declared war on Germany in
World War I, Stein and Toklas were visiting with
Alfred North Whitehead in England. They returned to France and volunteered to drive supplies to French hospitals; they were later honored by the French government for this work.
By the
1920s her salon at
27 Rue de Fleurus, with walls covered by avant-garde paintings, attracted many of the great artists and writers including
Ernest Hemingway,
Thornton Wilder,
Sherwood Anderson and
Georges Braque. She coined the term "
Lost Generation" for some of these ex-patriate American writers. Extremely charming, eloquent, cheerful and overweight, indeed cheerfully overweight, she had a large circle of friends and tirelessly promoted herself. Her judgments in literature and art were highly influential.
\nIn 1932, using an accessible style to accommodate the ordinary reading public, she wrote
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas; the book would become her first best-seller. Despite the title, it was really her own autobiography. She described herself as extremely confident, one might even say arrogant, always convinced that she was a genius. She was disdainful of mundane tasks and Alice Toklas managed everyday affairs.\nThe style of the autobiography was quite similar to that of
The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, which was actually written by Alice and contains several unusual recipes such as one for
Hashish Fudge (also called Alice B. Toklas brownies).
Gertrude Stein wrote in long hand, typically about half an hour per day. Alice B. Toklas would collect the pages, type them up and deal with the publishing. Indeed, Toklas founded the publisher "Plain Editions" to distribute Stein's work.\nToday, most manuscripts are kept in the
Beinecke Library at
Yale University.
Politically, Gertrude Stein was deeply conservative; she regarded the jobless as lazy, opposed
Franklin Roosevelt and his
New Deal and supported
Franco in the
Spanish Civil War. She would later start a project of translating speeches by
Vichy regime leader Pétain into English.
With the outbreak of
World War II, Stein and Toklas moved to a rented country home in Bilignin,
Ain, in the
Rhône-Alpes region. Referred to only as "Americans" by their neighbors, the Jewish Gertrude and Alice escaped persecution probably because of their friendship to Bernard Faÿ, a gay collaborator with the Vichy regime with connections to the
Gestapo. \nWhen Bernard Faÿ was sentenced to hard labor for life after the war, Gertrude and Alice campaigned for his release. Several years later, Alice would contribute money to Faÿ's escape from prison.
After the war, Gertrude's status in Paris grew when she was visited by many young American soldiers. She died of stomach cancer in Paris on
July 29,
1946 and was interred there in
Le Père Lachaise Cemetery.
Stein named writer and photographer
Carl Van Vechten as her literary executor, and he helped to usher into print works of hers which remained unpublished at the time of her death.
Several of Stein's writings have been set by composers, including
Virgil Thomson's operas
Four Saints in Three Acts,
The Mother of Us All, and
James Tenney's skillful if short setting of
Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose as a
canon dedicated to Philip Corner, beginning with "a" on an upbeat and continuing so that each repition shuffles the words, eg. "a/rose is a rose/is a rose is/a rose is a/rose."
Selected works
- Three Lives (1909)\n*Tender buttons: objects, food, rooms (1914) online version\n*Geography and Plays (1922)\n*The Making of Americans (written 1906-1908, published 1925)\n*Four Saints in Three Acts (libretto, 1929: music by Virgil Thomson, 1934)\n*Useful Knowledge (1929)\n*How to Write (1931)\n*The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933)\n*Lectures in America (1935)\n*The Geographical History of America or the Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind (1936)\n*Everybody's Autobiography (1937)\n*Picasso (1938)\n*Ida; a novel (1941)\n*Wars I Have Seen (1945)\n*Reflections on the Atom Bomb (1946) online version\n*The Mother of Us All (libretto, published 1949: music by Virgil Thompson 1947)\n*Last Operas and Plays (1949)\n*The Things as They Are (written as Q.E.D. in 1903, published 1950)\n*Patriarchal Poetry (1953)\n*Alphabets and Birthdays (1957)
External links
\n* Photographic portraits of Gertrude Stein, by Carl Van Vechten, in the
public domain\n*
A letter by Alice relating Gertrude's thoughts about Pittsburgh\n*
The World of Gertrude Stein, extensive biography site\n*
[1] - several photographs.
Listening
\n*UbuWeb: Gertrude Stein featuring a reading of
If I Told Him, A Completed Portrait of Picasso and
A Valentine to Sherwood Anderson
Further reading
\n* Janet Malcom: Gertrude Stein's War, The New Yorker, June 2, 2003, p. 58-81
