Devotion to the Cut

Ilove​ Gertrude Stein but I find it very difficult to think about the way I love her, to be precise about what’s so charming and also valuable in her writing, because everywhere you look there is her image and it can monopolise the attention. Not that I don’t love her image too. The problem is in working out what’s important, the image or the work or the way of living – or even whether these can be or should be separated out at all. Often she is pictured as part of a couple, usually with her partner, Alice B. Toklas, hovering watchfully in the background, or with one of her poodles, but sometimes she is simply herself: a presence in brown corduroy. Or there is the famous portrait by Picasso from 1905, with the face he added in later, not so much a face as a mask, and her joke about it, in Toklas’s voice: ‘After a little while I murmured to Picasso that I liked his portrait of Gertrude Stein. Yes, he said, everybody says that she does not look like it but that does not make any difference, she will, he said.’ She made many jokes, in fact: Stein’s are perhaps the only modernist works that make you laugh. I don’t mean laughing at them, which is what most people did with Stein. She became a kind of clown princess, which is unfair, but then almost all the attention directed at Stein has been unfair or misplaced, even from her admirers. It’s as if her brilliance is always quivering and in doubt, something that exists only in an endless process of attack or defence, which can make trying to think about her very tiring.

One thing I am sure of is her value, even if the map of literary history that displays her influence seems very local, mostly confined to the New York poetry of John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara or the writing of Andy Warhol, though in fact so much of Hemingway’s manner of writing – the short, paratactic sentences, the use of repetition, the idea of removing the obvious subject – was taken from her, so the whole sequence of writers that came out of Hemingway’s style is arguably Steinian. But this occlusion shouldn’t be so surprising, because it took Stein herself a long time to catch up with her writing, to work out how to use her intuitions.

She was born in 1874, which makes her one of the oldest modernists, and unusually for the modernists her greatest works were made in the last decade or so of her life, in the 1930s and early 1940s. The best is also the most famous, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, the only book of hers that actually sold, but I think those that followed it – Picasso, Paris France, Wars I Have Seen – are wonderful too. Of course, I also love her more far-out earlier works, like Tender Buttons (1914) and the prose portraits and also many of the lectures, but not everything, not at all – one achievement of a true reading of Stein would be an assessment of how uneven she is as a writer – and the works I love exist for me more as a kind of abstract pattern, like some grammatical primer which acquires a graver beauty when finally submitted to the weight of the world. In a note Toklas wrote to Stein after typing up one of her manuscripts, she said: ‘It’s such very orderly literature. Much more so than Pablo’s. La Jolie is quite messy compared to this. You never were messy lovie but it’s more crowded now & I like it. You can almost say anything you please can’t you.’ That note is much more insightful than most of what has passed for criticism of Stein in the last century, in its vocabulary of the ‘orderly’ and the ‘messy’ and the ‘crowded’, and that final sense of liberation. Because one delight of Stein’s way of writing is the way she explored what it might mean to speak with impunity – unpoliced and malicious and exuberant.

Another delight is her openness about the conditions of domestic intimacy in which art is created. In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein has Toklas say: ‘You cannot tell what a picture really is or what an object really is until you dust it every day and you cannot tell what a book is until you type it or proofread it. It then does something to you that only reading never can do.’ I suppose you could irritably dismiss this kind of observation as the caprice of a rich collector, someone with their own private MoMA, but in fact it’s ruthless and original in its sense of pleasure as minute and daily and careful, just as this little observation about Matisse is so precisely poised: ‘He used his distorted drawing as a dissonance is used in music or as vinegar or lemons are used in cooking or egg shells in coffee to clarify. I do inevitably take my comparisons from the kitchen because I like food and cooking and know something about it.’

There has rarely been a writer as pleasurable or charming as Stein, or as concerned with describing pleasure and charm. In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, she made a book that was as honest as she could make it about this deep problem of her life and work. It tells the story of Stein and Toklas as a fairy tale, but it also represents a large act of double identity, a proposition that no one is a single thing, that being yourself is a two-person job, and that all works are made by a person with a wife. ‘Before I decided to write this book my 25 years with Gertrude Stein, I had often said that I would write, The wives of geniuses I have sat with,’ she says. ‘I have sat with so many. I have sat with wives who were not wives, of geniuses who were real geniuses. I have sat with real wives of geniuses who were not real geniuses. I have sat with wives of geniuses, of near geniuses, of would be geniuses, in short I have sat very often and very long with many wives and wives of many geniuses.’ This is one of the innumerable riffs in Stein which show off her love of discriminations – as though Henry James’s intelligence has acquired a manic style – but it’s also a demonstration of an unstated theory. According to this theory, all artistic work needs to be placed within its properly domestic sphere. ‘I began with Fernande and then there were Madame Matisse and Marcelle Braque and Josette Gris and Eve Picasso and Bridget Gibb and Marjory Gibb and Hadley and Pauline Hemingway and Mrs Sherwood Anderson and Mrs Bravig Imbs and the Mrs Ford Madox Ford and endless others.’ The writers and artists Stein wrote about didn’t like this theory; they disliked their work being drenched in gossip and personality and anecdote. But I think Stein was right. All art emerges from conditions of intimacy and privacy and private jokes:

She was always fond of pigs, and because of this Picasso made and gave her some charming drawings of the prodigal son among the pigs. And one delightful study of pigs all by themselves. It was about this time too that he made for her the tiniest of ceiling decorations on a tiny wooden panel and it was an hommage à Gertrude with women and angels bringing fruits and trumpeting. For years she had this tacked to the ceiling over her bed.

Sometimes it feels that there has never been a scene like it, the Paris of around 1910, that there will never be such a scene again, but that’s because our entire idea of what a scene might be has been partly created by Stein and the nostalgic invulnerable beauty she invented in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. In any theory of a scene, Stein’s writing would be canonical, although she herself didn’t have the word ‘scene’. She had the word ‘crowd’ instead. ‘It may seem very strange to every one nowadays that before this time Matisse had never heard of Picasso and Picasso had never met Matisse. But at that time every little crowd lived its own life and knew practically nothing of any other crowd.’ This theory lies behind even such an apparently notational paragraph as this:

It had been a fruitful winter. In the long struggle with the portrait of Gertrude Stein, Picasso passed from the Harlequin, the charming early italian period to the intensive struggle which was to end in cubism. Gertrude Stein had written the story of Melanctha the negress, the second story of Three Lives which was the first definite step away from the 19th century and into the 20th century in literature. Matisse had painted the Bonheur de vivre and had created the new school of colour which was soon to leave its mark on everything. And everybody went away.

To embed art and writing in this kind of rhythm of living, this sense of shared endeavour and people disappearing on vacation, can seem maddening in its egotism and its money, but it’s also a form of resistance. In creating a myth of modernism, Stein did something delirious to the myth the modernists had so far preferred. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas has become notorious as a compendium of name-dropping, of Picasso and Matisse and everyone else, but it’s in fact far denser with the names of single women: Janet Scudder, Mildred Aldrich, a network of lesbian coding. Its major subject is always marriage – an assertion of Stein’s love for Toklas, and Toklas’s love for Stein – as the centre of a new history of literature, whose creator exists because another person loves her.

Maybe I can put it like this. The modernism of Paris in the 1910s, of Picasso and Matisse, liked to argue for pure form, making wilder and wilder gestures towards abstraction. Stein responded in two very different ways. First, she did things with abstraction in words that no one had done before. Later she did things with autobiography that no one had done before. And it may be that the second move, which was by far the more commercial, was also the most original.

One irony​ of charm is that those who have never known what it is to be charming can find charm distinctly uncharming. To live a charmed life – ‘this faculty of Gertrude Stein of having everybody do anything for her’, as she herself wrote – is therefore not a wholly benign fate. Ever since she offered her own biography in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, a biographical furore has surrounded her, beginning with the ‘Testimony against Gertrude Stein’ that Eugene Jolas put together as a special supplement to the February 1935 issue of transition, including angry contributions from Matisse, Braque, Tristan Tzara and others. ‘These documents invalidate the claim of the Toklas-Stein memorial that Miss Stein was in any way concerned with the shaping of the epoch she attempts to describe,’ Jolas wrote in his foreword, with wonderful absence of comic insight. ‘There is a unanimity of opinion that she had no understanding of what really was happening around her, that the mutation of ideas beneath the surface of the more obvious contacts and clashes of personalities during that period escaped her entirely.’ They hated that the book was so funny, and they hated that Stein had become a celebrity, but most of all they hated the way she brought their own seriousness into doubt.

The peak of Stein’s celebrity, in the late 1930s, was interrupted by the Second World War, which she and Toklas survived improbably by continuing to live in their country house in occupied France. Stein died of cancer soon afterwards, in 1946. Toklas lived for another twenty years among their extraordinary art collection, which legally she did not own. Stein’s archive had already been placed at Yale University, box loads of notebooks and manuscripts, where it sat awaiting its future readers. Those who ended up looking into it had different concerns and different accusations, but all were in some way blocked by the presence of Stein’s image, by the sternly hieratic presence in portraits by Cecil Beaton, Man Ray and Carl Van Vechten. There were the biographers who were indifferent to her writing but interested in her celebrity, or her relationship with Toklas, or both. There were the researchers who loved her writing and sought to decode it, and who travelled from Yale to Paris to sit with Toklas, as if their conversations promised a kind of clarity. There were denunciations and underminings, including from Hemingway, who in A Moveable Feast – published posthumously in 1964 – wanted to distance himself from Stein’s lesbianism and from her influence, or rather who tried to distance himself from her influence by distancing himself from her lesbianism. More recently there has been a trend, exemplified by Janet Malcolm in Two Lives (2007), for disliking her writing but most of all disliking Stein for having made her accommodations with the Vichy regime.

How alone Stein can seem, and how courageous! She was Jewish and lesbian and not only lesbian but butch and living openly with another woman. No wonder figures like Wyndham Lewis couldn’t take it – the ‘Jewish lady’ was a ‘highbrow clown’. (Antisemitism was an undeniable theme in her reception by the more talented modernists too: in Eliot’s fear of her work instituting a ‘new barbarian age’ or Ezra Pound claiming that ‘Gertie Stein … writes yittish wit englisch wordts’, or even Hemingway noting her ‘lovely, thick, alive immigrant hair’.) The charges against her have been so many: that her writing was nonsensical, that it was hermetic, that it was too commercial, that she was envious of her more talented contemporaries, that she was a megalomaniac, that she was a fascist, that she had fascist friends, that she demanded adulation, that she was like a child, that her partner wasn’t attractive, that she had no influence, that her influence was only bad, that she couldn’t write English.

‘Of all writers she may be the one whose work most cries out for the assistance of biography in its interpretation,’ Malcolm wrote. But it’s difficult, in any biography, to determine which events possess the magic of explanation. Stein’s parents were both from German-Jewish immigrant families; neither spoke English as their first language. She was born in Allegheny, a northern suburb of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the youngest of five children. In Stein’s early childhood, the family lived in Vienna, then Paris, until they returned to the US when she was five, eventually settling in San Francisco. When she was fourteen her mother died of cancer, and three years later her father also died: her eldest brother, Michael, took legal guardianship of Stein and their brother Leo. He was such a talented businessman and investor that Stein had a private income for life.

Then followed the period of Stein’s education. In 1893, when she was nineteen, she enrolled at the Harvard Annex, studying with George Santayana and William James. She seemed set to become a psychologist. But she preferred travelling to studying, and without waiting to graduate she went to Florence to visit Leo, who was training to become a maven of art. It was around this time that Stein began her first major affair, a triangle involving herself and two women: the suffragist May Bookstaver and Bookstaver’s lover, Mabel Haynes. Eventually, in 1903, the affair imploded, when Stein was 29, though Stein and Bookstaver continued to stay in touch, with Bookstaver sometimes acting as Stein’s quasi-agent in New York. Stein didn’t go back to America for three decades. Instead, living with Leo in Paris, in a confusion of depression, she wrote the novella Q.E.D., which offered a version of the relationship with Bookstaver and Haynes but wouldn’t be published until after she died. She began her giant novel, The Making of Americans, as an attempt to make sense of her family, before it gradually expanded into a grand theory of all human psychology; and together with Leo set about a great adventure buying modernist art, starting their collection with Cézanne, Gauguin and Renoir from the dealer Ambroise Vollard.

But it was what happened next that formed her mythology. In 1905, she began Three Lives, three stories of three women, and that autumn the Steins started collecting works by Picasso, who became a friend. It was then that he painted his portrait of Stein. The siblings were living in the rue de Fleurus, near the Jardin du Luxembourg, and they started hosting regular Saturday soirées, in part so that people could come and see the pictures. Then, in 1907, Stein met Alice Toklas. She was now 33.

Stein’s life for the next 25 years is the story of her relationship with Toklas and of her writing: an absolute domesticity. She began a series of what she called portraits – texts of baroque repetition – with a portrait of Toklas herself. Meanwhile, Picasso and Braque were savagely and industriously entering the canonical years of Cubism, and Toklas moved into the rue de Fleurus. In 1912, Stein and Toklas travelled in Spain and Morocco and Stein began the still-life abstractions that would become Tender Buttons, published to absolute indifference in 1914, just as she would carry on writing lectures and poems and play scripts and the opera libretto Four Saints in Three Acts against a continuing background of incomprehension. At the start of the First World War, she and Toklas went to Mallorca, but soon returned to France, where Stein drove a van for the American Fund for the French Wounded. But are these facts useful? Do they explain anything at all? In 1922 Stein met a new generation of writers and artists that included Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Man Ray, all of them about twenty years younger than she was. In 1924, the Transatlantic Review serialised The Making of Americans, a decade after its completion. She lectured at Oxford and Cambridge; she was published by the Hogarth Press; she was notorious but she had no gloire. She and Toklas lived between two worlds – the official avant-garde world of Hemingway and Picasso, and the unofficial lesbian avant-garde of Natalie Barney and Janet Flanner and Ethel Mars and Maud Hunt Squire. Until finally, in 1933, she published The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and a new era of celebrity began.

Now we have​ Francesca Wade’s graceful, exacting biography of Stein and Toklas, and of the ways in which Stein has been interpreted and misinterpreted since their deaths. In some ways it can be seen as a continuation of Wade’s first book, Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London between the Wars, in its effort to do justice to women writers and thinkers from the early 20th century.* But it also does something larger regarding Stein, and biography, as if the question of how useful biography may be for thinking about Stein could become an allegory or test case of biography in general. Biography has often seemed the place where readers might prefer to meet Stein, partly because Stein herself played with ideas of the portrait and the self-portrait, but also because the ways she did this seem so confusing to us, with our idea of the confessional. Her style is so direct that it’s surprising how much it can hide. Biography seems to be an answer to a sense among some readers that Stein does not mean what she says, or that in some way we are being deceived.

The aspect of her biography that has most troubled readers and critics recently is her relationship to politics. There’s no doubt that, like many other rich and avant-garde figures, she was socially conservative. In Paris France, which she published in 1940, just before Pétain signed the armistice with Nazi Germany, she offered her reasons: ‘I cannot write too much upon how necessary it is to be completely conservative that is particularly traditional in order to be free. And so France is and was. Sometimes it is important and sometimes it is not, but from 1900 to 1939, it certainly was.’ It’s a theory that at least has the poignancy of its history, of her effort to live freely with Toklas in Paris, between 1900 and 1939, and in Bilignin, a village near the Swiss border, during the war. Stein is always precise and often surprising, so that while she might argue that it was only because France was ‘particularly traditional’ that the 20th century could be freely invented there, naturally ‘it was foreigners who did it there in France because all these things being french it made it be their tradition and it being a tradition it was not the 20th century.’

In Paris France Stein sees her conservatism as part of her devotion to the domestic, to what she called the ‘commonplace’: ‘Familiarity does not breed contempt, anything one does every day is important and imposing and anywhere one lives is interesting and beautiful. And that is all as it should be.’ It can give her a cold insouciance, as an aesthete under Vichy:

The war is going on this war and we were all waiting and the telephone rang, well and it was the Mère Mollard announcing that her quenelles had turned on her, she had ice and she had put them on ice and she had taken them out to look at them and they had turned sour. Well anyway even if there is no food and there is a war and she is not a good cook cooking is important.

But no one should confuse insouciance with indifference. ‘Fathers are depressing … The periods of the world’s history that have always been most dismal ones are the ones where fathers were looming and filling up everything.’ That was her rough summary of the dictatorships of the 1930s, and it’s obvious in Paris France what her values are: ‘It is not civilised to want other people to believe what you believe because the essence of being civilised is to possess yourself as you are, and if you possess yourself as you are you of course cannot possess any one else, it is not your business.’ Against fascism, she preferred France and England, ‘who are to do what is the necessary thing to do, they are going to civilise the 20th century and make it be a time when anybody can be free, free to be civilised and to be.’

The problem is that Stein’s politics overlapped in places with the politics of people whose version of the conservative was much more appalling. And then there is the apparent mystery of why she and Toklas didn’t leave for America after the armistice was signed, and the further mystery of how they survived, living deep in Vichy France. ‘How had the pair of elderly Jewish lesbians escaped the Nazis?’ Malcolm asked. ‘Why had they stayed in France instead of returning to the safety of the United States?’ But there isn’t necessarily any mystery. If Stein and Toklas never considered leaving for America, it may be because America was not an obvious place of safety for them. For Stein, as she explained, France represented freedom: they had made a life there which was impossible in America, the repressive scene of her failed romance with May Bookstaver. If she and Toklas had to die then they would die in France.

The bigger problem is Stein’s friendship with Bernard Faÿ, who played a minor part in the Paris art scene of the 1920s and 1930s. Faÿ was a conservative aesthete with an unusual passion for American culture who went on to work for the Vichy regime: he was appointed head of the Bibliothèque Nationale in 1940 and ran the government’s anti-Masonic purges, and was therefore responsible for hundreds of deaths and disappearances. In the 1930s Faÿ was one of Stein’s closest friends, not least because he was an ardent supporter of her work, translating a section of The Making of Americans into French. After the war, he was condemned to dégradation nationale, and for his trial Stein provided a letter on his behalf, arguing for his efforts to preserve French culture, especially the art collection she had left behind in her apartment in Paris: in August 1944 he intervened to prevent the Gestapo from requisitioning it. What she didn’t mention, perhaps because it wasn’t true, or because it was true but she never knew, was Faÿ’s later unsubstantiated and unsubstantiable assertion that he had been personally responsible not only for the preservation of Stein and Toklas’s art collection but also of their lives – that he had interceded personally with Pétain to ensure that they could live unharmed in Bilignin, under the protection of the local sous-préfet, Maurice Sivan.

It’s not clear, in this miasma of blame and disapproval, what the accusation against Stein really is. She was no Resistance hero, but almost no one was a Resistance hero. Equally, there is no evidence that she knew about Faÿ’s anti-Masonic purges, nor is there evidence that she had any sense of being protected by him or his friends. In 1939-40 she translated a selection of Pétain’s speeches, an endorsement that is, no question, deplorable, except that at the time many people believed that in saving France from total occupation through signing the armistice Pétain had also saved French culture. In any case, the translations are so literal and so clumsy that it’s hard to tell what Stein was really trying to do. Certainly, she abandoned the project very quickly and never returned to it. Much of the disapproval has centred on her failure to disavow her friendship with Faÿ at his trial, but then, she had her own values of friendship and loyalty. And most important, the people she actually felt protected by – and it seems correctly – were the villagers she lived among and who had known her and Toklas for years.

This, I was thinking, as I read Wade’s book, is why biography is usually so frustrating. There is too much uncertainty, not only about facts but about the meaning of those facts. Wade’s book is excitingly different, because it is written not from a position of judgment but from a kind of accurate friendliness. The pages she devotes to Stein’s politics and her survival in the war are wonderful for their calmness, including these devastating sentences: ‘But even if Faÿ had offered Stein assurances in 1940, his influence would have diminished significantly when Pierre Laval – who distrusted Faÿ, and tried to have him fired from the library – replaced Pétain as leader of France. After November 1942, Stein had to survive on her own.’ The argument that Malcolm and others have advanced against Stein by association – with Faÿ, and so with Pétain – is ahistorical, since if the protection existed at all, it was only useful for about a year at most. Laval was lethal, and lethally antisemitic, and he hated Pétain and his protégés. From 1942 until the end of the war, Stein was utterly exposed, and wholly dependent on the goodwill of those around her. (In 1943, Sivan advised them to flee – advice that makes most sense if the sous-préfet knew that, were the Nazis to come for them, he would be powerless to protect them.)

Stein’s experience of the war was far from blissful. Her account of this period, Wars I Have Seen, was typed up from her notebooks and published in 1945, just after the war ended and she had been jubilantly met by American GIs:

They used all of them to want to know how we managed to escape the Germans and gradually with their asking and with the news that in the month of August the Gestapo had been in my apartment in Paris to look at everything, naturally I began to have what you might call a posthumous fear. I was quite frightened. All the time the Germans were here we were so busy trying to live through each day that except once in a while when something happened you did not know about being frightened, but now somehow with the American soldiers questions and hearing what had been happening to others, of course one knew it but now one had time to feel it and so I was quite frightened, now that there was nothing dangerous and the whole American army between us and danger. One is like that.

No wonder the book is haunted from its beginning by the fact of death: ‘I remember being very worried in reading, if anybody in the book died and did not have children because then nobody in that family could be living yet, and if they were not living yet how could they hear what was happening.’ Wars I Have Seen is a study in anxiety, that ‘now in June 1943 something very strange is happening, every day the feeling is strengthening that one or another has been or will be a traitor to something.’ In Picasso and in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein had been anxious to define herself as modern, 20th-century. But now her idea of the 20th century had changed: ‘Anybody can understand that there is no point in being realistic about here and now, no use at all not any, and so it is not the 19th but the 20th century, there is no realism now, life is not real.’

Stein​ can seem so monolithic that it takes a long time to realise how vulnerable her writing is, and one expression of this is the way her sentences refuse to obey our usual priorities, leaving something out or only alluding to it briefly, so that its absence continues to work on the surface story. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas includes a portrait of Hélène, who worked as the couple’s cook and servant:

Hélène stayed with the household until the end of 1913. Then her husband, by that time she had married and had a little boy, insisted that she work for others no longer. To her great regret she left and later she always said that life at home was never as amusing as it had been at the rue de Fleurus. Much later, only about three years ago, she came back for a year, she and her husband had fallen on bad times and her boy had died. She was as cheery as ever and enormously interested.

I suppose many people will find it a moral failure to allow a child’s death to occupy only a miniature part of an ongoing story. But it seems to me a moment of stylistic courage, to display so openly the way so many conversations indifferently deal with the tragedies of minor characters, just as it is another moment of courage for Stein to write about herself: ‘After the death of first her mother and then her father she and her sister and one brother left California for the East’ – the first and only mention of her parents’ deaths.

Perhaps the most important absence is at the centre of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, hinging on an event that is mentioned with absolute disingenuousness in two sentences: ‘She wrote a short novel. The funny thing about this short novel is that she completely forgot about it for many years.’ Since Wade’s book offers not just a biography of Stein and Toklas but also of Stein’s afterlife – of Toklas’s efforts to manage the way the archive should be approached, long after Stein was dead – she can subtly layer different versions of the same moment over one another, until its full meaning emerges. Wade’s first mention of this missing manuscript is a plain biographical fact: in 1932, as they were packing to go to the country, Stein found the old notebook in which she had written Q.E.D., the novella about her relationship with May Bookstaver and her rivalry with Mabel Haynes.

Turning the pages of this long-forgotten manuscript – ‘was it hidden with intention?’ Stein asked herself – she was overcome with a mixture of shame, anxiety and intrigue. But she held back from showing it to Toklas … Stein had not told Toklas about the strength of intimacy she had once shared with May Bookstaver, who had been so helpful with her manuscripts in the early years, and had even visited them once in Paris, though she hadn’t been in touch for a long time. Perhaps Stein had anticipated Toklas’s jealousy; perhaps she simply hadn’t thought it needed mentioning – either to keep the youthful affair as a private memory, or because it no longer felt relevant now her life had moved on.

When Stein eventually showed the manuscript to Toklas, ‘Toklas was silent. Stein was filled with remorse – and knew only a dramatic gesture would restore her partner’s trust.’ This was the background, Wade explains, to the writing of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, a work ‘which would reassert Toklas’s place at the very centre of her life’:

What no one knew was that the book had been written as a form of reparation. Toklas’s fury about the hidden manuscript had driven Stein to compose a work that would affirm her commitment to Toklas once and for all, uniting their names, publicly, for ever … Stein wrote into being a version of her life in which their roles were defined only by each other: Stein the genius husband, Toklas the adoring wife.

More than a hundred pages later, Wade begins to sketch in further details of ‘Toklas’s fury’, using the interviews with Toklas conducted by Leon Katz, one of the earliest Stein researchers, in Paris in 1952:

Toklas told Katz she had not realised the historical significance of the relationship until 1932, when Stein had stumbled, by chance, on the old manuscript of Q.E.D … ‘In a passion,’ she told Katz, she had destroyed all [Bookstaver’s] letters to Stein. But even after Stein had told Toklas to keep the manuscript – even tear it up if she wanted to – Toklas, now on edge, became ‘hypersensitive to signs’. She found a previously innocuous ‘M’ carved into Stein’s writing table, and sanded it off in rage. For a year and a half, Toklas confessed to Katz, she ‘tormented’ Gertrude … In Thornton Wilder’s apartment in Chicago, Stein told her that if she did not drop the subject once and for all, their life together would be over.

The centrality of the relationship with Toklas to Stein and her work is so absolute that it’s almost unnerving to discover how much the myth of their love affair was in a way an invention of the book, or how precarious it was at the moment when Stein was creating this monument. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas was an act of propitiatory magic.

The postscript to this story is a moment of intuition that has become famous in Stein scholarship, when Ulla Dydo noticed that in the manuscript of Stanzas in Meditation – the long poem Stein was writing in 1932 when she discovered the manuscript of Q.E.D. – every instance of the word ‘may’ had been crossed out and replaced with another word (like ‘today’ or ‘day’ or ‘can’), often violating any sense of meaning or rhythm or rhyme. The editors of the Yale edition of Stein’s writing, in 1956, had blithely printed Stanzas in Meditation with all these uses of ‘may’ removed, never questioning what was happening. Forty years later, ‘Dydo proposed that the alterations, more than four hundred of them, were made at Toklas’s behest, when she was given Stanzas to type shortly after reading the manuscript of Q.E.D.’ The final element in this drama involves Katz and Dydo themselves. Dydo ‘was never quite sure whether or not Toklas had said anything to Katz that confirmed her theory that Toklas herself demanded these changes, or even carried them out herself’. Eventually, in 2012, writing in the Yale Review, Katz seemed to quote Toklas directly, confirming the story. ‘But in the handwritten notes from his interviews with Toklas,’ Wade writes, ‘and in the subsequent index cards recording the encounters, I could find no record of this sensational statement.’

What is the meaning of this story? For Wade, this dissolving finale proves that biography ‘is a precarious structure; some mysteries must remain unsolved.’ And of course this is true, but what does it mean for Stein? At stake for Dydo and Katz was the question of the portrait, of whether Stein’s writing was truly abstract or in fact deeply autofictional. Stein’s writing, for Dydo, was ‘a single spiritual autobiography whose vocabulary is generated by the daily life but whose voice is uniquely hers’. The archive at Yale was vital because it could reveal that everything in Stein was highly specific, a manic series of private jokes. The task of the critic would therefore be to move from the printed book to the archived manuscripts, to find the hidden references:

These preparatory notebooks were filled with private ritual – the coded initials, the talismanic dedications – whereas Stein’s printed books, Dydo wrote, were ‘stripped of the process that gave them being’. In the archive, Dydo concluded, were the vestiges of the private life which she saw as ‘the central context for Stein’s capacity to meditate and to write’. Only through a close study of the notebooks and manuscripts, she argued, could Stein’s work be read as it was written.

In one sense, this is the direction Stein herself had offered in her late autobiographies, both The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and Everybody’s Autobiography (1937), with their intensely domestic details. But it seems to ignore or at least betray an essential element of Stein’s writing, which is its devotion to the cut. Stein loved the idea that writing might have esoteric meanings but that those meanings would be only faintly perceived by the abstract reader, that a text could simultaneously be plain while explaining nothing. The pleasure would have to be elsewhere. This may be the final lesson of Wade’s book, which explores Stein’s biography not for explanations, but in order to better enjoy the pleasure of her sentences as a kind of physical delight. In the end, you have to go back to where you started: the surface and its sentences. ‘All of which was literally true,’ Stein writes in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, ‘like all of Gertrude Stein’s literature.’

Early​ in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein describes the pictures she and Leo acquired as they began their collection: a Daumier and two Gauguins and a Cézanne landscape along with two ‘tiny canvases of nude groups’ and ‘a very very small Manet’. But two paintings in particular are given special emphasis: Cézanne’s Madame Cézanne with a Fan and Matisse’s Woman with a Hat. It’s as though the paintings together offered an ongoing possibility, that the most searching artistic experiments might need to be done through portraits – and that the best subject for an avant-garde portrait is your wife.

Stein wrote her first portrait in 1910, a text in three or four pages about Toklas. She describes Toklas telling stories to her dying mother (like Stein, Toklas’s mother died of cancer when Toklas was young) and then leaving her father and brother for the utopian bliss of the final paragraph, which is her love affair with Stein, a mutual balance of speaking and being heard:

She came to be happier than anybody else who was living then. It is easy to believe this thing. She was telling some one, who was loving every story that was charming. Some one who was living was almost always listening. Some one who was loving was almost always listening. That one who was loving was almost always listening. That one who was loving was telling about being one then listening. That one being loving was then telling stories having a beginning and a middle and an ending. That one was then one always completely listening.

Stein argued that her major advance was Three Lives, but it’s possible that the true advance in her methods was this portrait, and in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas the moment is deliberately given its triumphant domestic setting, while Toklas is cooking supper for them one Sunday night:

She came in much excited and would not sit down. Here I want to show you something, she said. No I said it has to be eaten hot. No, she said, you have to see this first. Gertrude Stein never likes her food hot and I do like mine hot, we never agree about this. She admits that one can wait to cool it but one cannot heat it once it is on a plate so it is agreed that I have it served as hot as I like. In spite of my protests and the food cooling I had to read.

In the short portraits Stein continued to write, a series of statements are forced through multiple discriminations. It was a method she had begun in Three Lives and then developed at exhaustive length in The Making of Americans, but it works best in these short works, such as the portraits of Matisse and Picasso that would be published by Alfred Stieglitz in 1912 in Camera Work. Stein seems to have realised that everyone is having portraits made of them all the time, constantly being assessed and reassessed in conversations that go over the same limited ground. So each of her portraits is really a portrait of the way people talk. ‘He certainly very clearly expressed something,’ she writes in ‘Matisse’. ‘Some said that he did not clearly express anything. Some were certain that he expressed something very clearly and some of such of them said that he would have been a greater one if he had not been one so clearly expressing what he was expressing.’ ‘Matisse’ works like a fugue in the intensity of its repetitions, as it goes over and over the dilemma everyone felt about Matisse – was his clarity an emptiness or the form of his mastery? Stein had discovered that we use sentences in conversation with an untenable authority, that often we are using words that have no meaning or are only imposing meaning precariously, and that much of our language is based on minute differences in the placing of minute words, little connecting words such as ‘like’ or ‘some’, the words that are always so invisible and so difficult to assimilate when learning a new language, as in this early passage from ‘Orta or One Dancing’, which is in one sense a portrait of Isadora Duncan but is much more usefully seen as an attempt to define the word ‘one’:

Even if she was one and she was one, even if she was one she was changing. She was one and was then like some one. She was one and she had then come to be like some other one. She was then one and she had come then to be like some other one. She was then one and she had come then to be like some other one. She was then one and she had come then to be like a kind of a one.

The closest analogy to these texts might be minimalism in music: there is the same sense of tension and of excitement when a new note enters – when the word ‘dancing’ enters the vocabulary of Stein’s portrait after three pages it feels like a giant baroque decoration – and also the same danger of slackness or monotony. And they can’t be read quickly; they seem to require deep leisure time before and after, just as they were written, almost as if you have to be in Paris or the South of France, with many parties ahead of you, to be able to enjoy them.

In the summer of 1912, Stein and Toklas travelled to Spain. According to the usual logic of modernism set up by Picasso, where a sunlit holiday led to an avant-garde invention, Stein created a new mode:

hitherto she had been interested only in the insides of people, their character and what went on inside them, it was during that summer that she first felt a desire to express the rhythm of the visible world. It was a long tormenting process, she looked, listened and described. She always was, she always is, tormented by the problem of the external and the internal.

Having explored the idea of the portrait, she moved to the outside world, in a series of texts that became Tender Buttons, a book divided into three sections: ‘Objects’, ‘Food’ and ‘Rooms’. Not that an innocent reader will find their usual idea of description here.

In the inside there is sleeping, in the outside there is reddening, in the morning there is meaning, in the evening there is feeling. In the evening there is feeling. In feeling anything is resting, in feeling anything is mounting, in feeling there is resignation, in feeling there is recognition, in feeling there is recurrence and entirely mistaken there is pinching. All the standards have steamers and all the curtains have bed linen and all the yellow has discrimination and all the circle has circling. This makes sand.

This is the first paragraph of a piece titled ‘Roastbeef’, but as a description of roast beef it is useless. As a kind of impressionism, it becomes more interesting, but the larger pleasure is of language working through concrete nouns and abstract nouns, a series of harmonious shocks.

There’s something so physically delightful in the cadences Stein was discovering in the portraits and Tender Buttons that it’s often tempting to compare the way she was writing in 1912 to the way the artists she collected were working. Her friendship with Picasso has led to many comparisons – none of which, I think, is helpful. One giant difference is that in Picasso’s Cubism there was always a decisive move towards reference, as if Cubism offered a delirious scene of representation mimicking itself, but this is not what’s happening in Stein’s writing from the same period. Stein herself always said that Cézanne was formative for her writing (Madame Cézanne with a Fan, she wrote, ‘was an important purchase because in looking and looking at this picture Gertrude Stein wrote Three Lives’), that it was Cézanne who helped her think about composition in a new way because in his paintings ‘each part is as important as the whole’: a kind of all-over effect. But if there’s a real analogy to painting, it is Matisse’s Woman with a Hat that might be the more important. Mme Matisse’s dress has been stabbed and smeared with garish touches of hot pink and red and a kind of absinthe-y green, a multicoloured surface to represent a dress that Matisse boasted was, in fact, black. Colour floated free from any obviously referential function, and I think it’s possible to argue that the painting suggested to Stein that words could be used in the same way Matisse used colour, without any obligation of meaning. In this way, she found a new linguistic musicality, a kind of grammatical structure that functions in the absence of semantics. As John Ashbery wrote in 1957, comparing Stein’s Stanzas in Meditation and Henry James’s The Golden Bowl,

If these works are highly complex and, for some, unreadable, it is not only because of the complicatedness of life, the subject, but also because they actually imitate its rhythm, its way of happening, in an attempt to draw our attention to another aspect of its true nature. Just as … life seems to alter the whole of what has gone before, so the endless process of elaboration which gives the work of these two writers a texture of bewildering luxuriance – that of a tropical rainforest of ideas – seems to obey some rhythmic impulse at the heart of all happening.

The sadness for Stein and her future readers is that at the time no one wanted to talk about her with this kind of seriousness: instead, as Wade details, she was endlessly ridiculed in the newspapers – the Detroit News and Pittsburgh Dispatch and Boston Evening Transcript and New York Evening Sun and Chicago Tribune. Although she is now routinely mentioned in histories of modernist Paris in the 1920s, only Hemingway seemed to read her with any understanding – Eliot and Joyce and Woolf had no idea what to make of her (for Woolf she was mostly a curiosity to be met at an Edith Sitwell party, ‘a lady much like Joan Fry, but more massive; in blue sprinkled brocade, rather formidable’) – and Hemingway didn’t want to talk about her in public. In A Moveable Feast, long after she was dead, he offered only a single sentence of measured praise: ‘She had also discovered many truths about rhythms and the uses of words in repetition that were valid and valuable and she talked well about them.’ Stein liked to present an image of herself as grandly aloof – ‘all alone with english and myself’. But in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas she makes clear her wish for appreciation: ‘After all, as she said, we do want to be printed. One writes for oneself and strangers but with no adventurous publishers how can one come in contact with those same strangers.’ It’s a wish that is even more pronounced in her restless activity in the 1920s and 1930s, doing the work for herself that critics wouldn’t do: the lectures she gave, where she tried to explain what she was doing; the ‘Bibliography, 1904-29’ she had printed in transition; and the five books of the Plain Edition, edited by Toklas and published with Stein’s money, between 1930 and 1933. The theoretical counterpart to this effort was the care she took to define ‘explanation’. ‘I say this not to explain but to make it plain. Anybody knows the difference between explain and make it plain. They sound the same if anybody says they do but they are not the same.’ This problem of explanation was everywhere in her work at the time. It is underneath her notorious put-down of Pound: ‘Gertrude Stein liked him but did not find him amusing. She said he was a village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not.’ In ‘Henry James’ it emerged as this complaint: ‘Clarity is of no importance because nobody listens and nobody knows what you mean no matter what you mean, nor how clearly you mean what you mean.’

In her lectures, she argued for her years of abstraction, her effort ‘to tell what each one is’ or to ‘tell what happened’ without telling stories, to show ‘what made what happened be what it was’. But the problem with seeing subjects at such an abstract level – with all its musical syntactic pleasures – is that the largest pleasure of any subject is the gory detail that abstraction disallows. Without it, everything becomes weightless – which leads to Stein’s problem of excessive length. This is why her writing can be so uneven, because it was never clear either for Stein or her reader what a decision in writing for Stein might be.

This​ was also why the crisis between Stein and Toklas in 1932 was so useful. She had to do something for Toklas; she had to do it in a way that other people, not just Toklas, could understand; and she had to do it fast, which meant she no longer had the luxury of infinite length. It forced her writing to approach the things of the world, and in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas it turned out that her writing could represent the world with poignant comical beauty. ‘I am trying to be as commonplace as I can be, she used to say to me,’ Toklas says towards the end of the book. ‘And then sometimes a little worried, it is not too commonplace. The last thing that she had finished, Stanzas in Meditation, and which I am now typewriting, she considers her real achievement of the commonplace.’ But Stein was wrong. It was The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas itself that was the achievement. The ghostly conversational syntax, the manic precision of abstract discriminations, relaxes into an extraordinary mimicry of the way a voice talks when it’s telling a story. Her sentences are at their most beautiful when at their most dishevelled, as in the slouchy, innocent bravura of this from Paris France: ‘Once in talking to the Baronne Pierlot a very old french friend she said about something when I said but Madame Pierlot it is natural, no said Madame Pierlot it may be nature but it is not natural.’ We’re so used to voice as confession, as a form of radical honesty, that it can be hard to appreciate her socialised way of talking, which involves not precision but wish fulfilment, fantasy, repression, a devastating insistence on charm.

Stein had spent her life trying to understand humans through the civilised fog of power relations, their patterns of dependency. In early work such as Three Lives, this led to small icy insights: ‘Mrs Lehntman needed Anna just as much as Anna needed Mrs Lehntman, but Mrs Lehntman was more ready to risk Anna’s loss, and so the good Anna grew always weaker in her power to control.’ But in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas she allowed herself to display the far more mundane forms of every relationship’s imbalances: ‘Sometimes later in Spain I sat under a tree and wept,’ Toklas says about their different experiences of heat, ‘but she in the sun was indefatigable.’

One of Stein’s last and best texts was about Raoul Dufy, another artist distrusted for their tone. It begins with two startling images of Dufy and war:

I came back to Paris after the long sad years of the occupation. I will tell all about that, and I wandered around the streets the way I do and there in a window were a lot of etchings and there so pleasantly was one by Dufy, it was an etching of kitchen utensils, in an inspired circle and at the bottom was a lovely roasted chicken, God bless him, wouldn’t he just have a lovely etching by him in the window of a shop and of lots of kitchen utensils, the factories could not make them but he had, and the roast chicken, how often during those dark days was I homesick for the quays of Paris and a roast chicken.

Dufy and wars. I remember it was just at the end of the last war 1919, and we were at the first Salon d’Automne and there unexpectedly was a sofa and fauteuils and chairs, and the material was a design by Dufy, it was shock of pleasure, there it was a shock of pleasure. Wars are sad but Dufy is in their midst a shock of pleasure. I often wonder who has that sofa, I would like to see it again, it was so real a pleasure, after a war, so real a pleasure.

This late portrait is wonderful for its frank nostalgia, and for its refusal to allow war to colonise pleasure, and it also seems to me to be one of Stein’s most useful attempts at self-explanation. She knew what it was to experience absolute loss. But to contemplate that loss, in writing, was the highest pleasure. ‘That is one of the things that we who abstract things have, we are never bored we are always in a state of pleasure. And I always think of Dufy and the etching of the kitchen utensils and the sofa and the Moulin de la Galette, war, rheumatism no nothing touches it, it is always in a state of pleasure.’

The truest portraits of Stein herself are always the most fragile, containing without refusing this contradiction, like her own image in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas of writing through the night, poised between darkness and dawn:

She said she always tried to stop before the dawn was too clear and the birds were too lively because it is a disagreeable sensation to go to bed then. There were birds in many trees behind high walls in those days, now there are fewer. But often the birds and the dawn caught her and she stood in the court waiting to get used to it before she went to bed.