Aquarie Stein is having another virtual birthday, Feb. 3^rd. She is turning 138. Looking back at the year she just spent, culturally speaking, it was the 99% Gertrude Stein year.

The excitement created by her modern art collection and her still shockingly modern personality was not just for the ususal 1 % of avant-gardists and art enthusiasts. The traveling museum shows had record-breaking crowds, and every second day, educational  events helped the 99% people (who had never read her) take her in, become part of the “scene”, the media frenzy,  the there there. Everybody who was anybody in 2011 was 99 % Stein.

There were the scandals Stein always triggers like a badge of honor: lesbians sent from the museums because they were holding hands. Attacks against the museums by the press and blogosphere for “whitewashing” Stein’s survival in Nazi-occupied France which, to the hysterics, meant she must have been in cahoots with the Naizs and in love with Hitler.

It so happened that another extraordinary exhibition  about an artist of German Jewish origin was shown at the same time. Charlotte Salomon was also there there, at the SF Contemporary Jewish Museum, while Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories ran on the floor above.  It was one of those moments of serendipity that gives you a frisson, goose-pimples.  Here was the brilliant young Jewish artist from Berlin who fled to the French countryside, like Stein and Toklas did. Sensing the narrowing trap by the Nazis she put down her life story in a frenzy, in over 700 watercolors overlaid with words. She created the first and most original of autobiographical “comic strips” – just in time before being betrayed, caught, deported to Auschwitz and gassed. She was 28 years old.

One of the memorable moments in Stein’s renaissance year for me was the autumn gathering of the Diane Middlebrook Salon, where new books are presented to an audience of women writers of great intelligence.  I had presented Stein at the Salon a while ago. This time, among the Salonistas, I met author Gabriella Mautner, whose harrowing escape through Europe from Nazi persecution was fictionalized in a grippingly “real” novel, Lovers and Fugitives. The same day at the Salon, I met SF State and Stanford professor Mary Felstiner, biographer of Charlotte Salomon. Her study To Paint Her Life: Charlotte Salomon in the Nazi Era gave me sleepless nights with its heart-wrenching suspense and brilliance. This was another serendipity in the rich year of  Nazi survivor Gertrude Stein.

It was Thanksgiving time. Birthdays are reminders of giving thanks. An Aquarie myself, I  am celebrating Stein’s 99% birthday by looking back at that outstanding Salon day when Mary Felstiner distributed, to everyone’s delight, her ”99% Thanksgiving Pie: All But the Upper Crust”. You surely won’t want to miss the recipe:

99% THANKSGIVING PIE: ALL BUT THE UPPER CRUST.

What will 99% of Americans eat for Thanksgiving dessert? Humble pie?

No, we’re too hungry and angry to settle for that. We’re losing jobs, insurance, housing, education, public services. So this Thanksgiving we’re demanding our just desserts, not a slash-and-reduce diet of Tea.

Let’s fill our tables with abundance, then fill our politics, so that every campaign speech and news clip repeats that brilliant number, “99%.”

And how do we make “99%” the watchword of the times?

How about this Thanksgiving we slice our pies for the 99%? We could name each slice for what we want more of, what we’re thankful for. Say, a big slice for public services, for our teachers, our firefighters, our police (they shouldn’t be sent to  attack demonstrators; they’re the 99% too). Big slice for anyone improving our roads and bridges and levees and clinics. Slice for clever businesspeople who increase jobs and invent products. Nice slice for our families and partners and people who care for others. Juicy slice for our artists and writers and singers and filmmakers, who make American culture irresistible. Then a hefty slice for our workers, who do every job we need, and we do need jobs. A nutritious slice for our military, who serve the country. And one for our protesters, who keep it vibrant and on-track.

And here’s a recipe.

“99% THANKSGIVING PIE: ALL BUT THE UPPER CRUST.”

Just so everyone can eat it, this recipe is sugar-free, gluten-free, and vegetarian. And it’s an open pie, open to changes.

BOTTOM CRUST: 1/4 cup oat flour or rice flour; 1/4 teaspoon salt; 2 tablespoons oil or butter or margarine; one egg (optional); 4 tablespoons chilled water. Stir, chill, and pat into pie plate, bake 20 minutes with bottom pricked.

FILLING: Fill with cut-up apples, honey, a little salt, cinnamon, 2 tablespoons corn starch, bits of butter or margarine. Bake 30 minutes until soft. Or try a large can of pumpkin, a cup of milk or soy milk, 3/4 cup honey, egg (optional), 1/4 cup cornstarch, sprinkle of salt, cinnamon and nutmeg, teaspoon of vanilla, all poured into the 99% bottom crust. Bake.

“99% Thanksgiving pie” is one little act of creative resistance, using imagination to thwart the aims of greed and unjust power.

Creative resistance matters. Last year, in Stanford courses on creative resistance, we gathered paintings and writings and music, recipes and jokes and graffiti that people created to keep humane values alight in times of war and genocide. Today, the Occupy movement is bursting with creative resistance. Just think of signs and chants at demonstrations: “We Are the 99%” and “Why is it easier to believe that 150 million Americans are being lazy than 400 Americans are being greedy?” and “Banks Got Bailed Out, We Got Sold Out.” Think of the new songs and videos, of pepper-sprayed students calling to police, “Peace! You can go!” and a sign waved the other day in Palo Alto: “Inequities Occupy My Thoughts!”

How about adding your own skills to this outburst, this most energetic desire in decades to create change — a  posting online, a poster at a march, a letter, a window display, a thoughtful gathering, a ritual? Maybe make a 99% pie. Name the slices. And share your pie around.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

[From Mary Felstiner. mf@sfsu.edu]

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, GERTIE!

Phil Kennicott, Washington Post critic of Stein

Obscene: 1.Offensive to accepted standards of decency or modesty. 2.Inciting lustful feelings; lewd. 3. Repulsive; disgusting. (Free Dictionary)

The joy of making Stein the butt of jokes and ridicule started the very moment she started, a good hundred years ago. We must assume Stein embodied so many offenses to “common decency” that she triggered a response in kind:  1) lewd -repulsed 2), disgusted- offended, and 3) morally outraged. Targets for the punches mostly were literally her belly, the body of the lesbian, the imposing dyke with the big self-esteem; and the Jewish self-declared “genius” whose writing was sheer “nonsense.”

Examples from the past:  Stein was “a huge squat mountain on a distant border of the literary kingdom” (Time Magazine, 1933). French critic Marcel Brion described her writing as  “a cold suet-roll of fabulously reptilian length… all fat, without nerve.” A “sausage, by-the-yard-variety“ according to Wyndham Lewis.  She was “a clinical case in megalomania” (Tristan Tzara) and “her lack of modesty (made) her stubborn, as a caryatid would be had it eaten the house is was intended to support.” (Djuna Barnes). All this is repeated and summed up at present in comments by writer colleagues: for Cynthia Ozick, Stein’s most famous line, “A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” is the “chant of a copycat Cubist” and “all that is left of Gertrude Stein.” (New York Times Magazine, 1996) Ex-feminist Elaine Showalter goes straight below the belt: “Stein seems more and more like the Empress Who Had No Clothes—a shocking sight to behold in every respect.” (A Jury of her Peers, 2009).

Stein’s present renaissance has triggered another old hat of hostility: questions about her survival in the French country-side during the Nazi-Occupation of France. As seasoned Stein expert Catharine R. Stimpson noted last November in her keynote address to the 2nd Annual Feminist Art History Conference in D.C.: “Stein’s detractors have been able to combine the standard attacks with a denunciation of her support of Vichy and Pétain.”

And now my Comment to the article in Scene4:

Karren Alenier’s article on the Washington Post’s obscene review of Gertrude Stein and the exhibition  Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories at the National Portrait Gallery in D.C. brilliantly analyzes one particular case of openly declared “hatred” for Stein. This sort of hatred has followed Stein from the moment she began to publish, in the early twentieth century, but it is worth noting the context that gave rise to this “indecent exposure” in a serious newspaper like the Washington Post. Stein’s present renaissance with two epochal traveling exhibitions has brought out people like critic Phil Kennicott who, as Alenier reminds us, assigns himself, a “seat in the corner with the Stein haters that include ‘the worst sort of critics—anti-Semites, misogynists, homophobes and philistines.’”

It is worth noticing that Stein’s old enemies found new fodder and an academic seal of approval for their attacks in Barbara Will’s book, Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ and the Vichy Dilemma (2011). The inflammatory book fed into the Stein controversy that was triggered by the exhibition Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, linked to the question how Stein and Toklas had managed to survive in Nazi-occupied France. Will’s speculations about the “true Stein” and her alleged “collaboration” with a fascist friend and fascist regime unleashed a cultural hysteria, a sort of license to kill that took over the media and blogosphere. I have no doubt that this cultural atmosphere provided the justification for the Washington Post to publish the infamous article.

Will camouflages the fact that her book is in fact about Bernard Faÿ, an intellectual friend of Steins’s from the twenties, a once respected historian and author who during the war became a Gestapo informer and persecutor of the Freemasons in France. Hardly anybody today would care about Bernard Faÿ and his twisted fate as a condemned collaborator who was ultimately pardoned by French President Mitterand. Gertrude Stein is being used to create a story that pretends to be sensationalist news when the facts and allegations have already been published and rehashed numerous times, most recently by Janet Malcolm in Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice (2007).

I refer readers interested in the personal and political complexities of Stein’s survival to my analysis “Gertrude Stein a ‘Collaborator’, a ‘Nazi’?” published in the Los Angles Review of Books, in the Women’s Media Center as well as in my blog. Here I can only give one telling example of the perverse distortions propagated by this book that serves as the big canon in the latest wars against Stein: Will’s way of setting up Stein as a Hitler fan.

The academic professor tries to make use of the famous quote that every article nowadays repeats, wherein Stein suggests awarding Hitler the Nobel Peace Price, in 1934.  (New York Times Magazine, ‘Gertrude Stein Views Life and Politics’)  “‘I say that Hitler ought to have the peace prize,’ she says, ‘because he is removing all elements of contest and struggle from Germany. By driving out the Jews and the democratic and Left elements, he is driving out everything that conduces to activity. That means peace.’”

The more objective commentators in the course of Stein research and biographical writing have recognized the irony – the Jewish humor with which Stein hands Hitler the price for his mockery of “peace.” Her irony is reinforced by many other anti-German, anti-Hitler and anti-Nazi comments one could quote from Stein’s work. Will, however, does not quote them. She doesn’t mention that a moment later in the same interview Stein says, “Building a Chinese wall is always bad. Protection, paternalism and suppression of natural activity and competition lead to dullness and stagnation. It is true in politics, in literature, in art. Everything in life needs constant stimulation. It needs activity, new blood.” In 1939, in Paris France, Stein equates Hitler’s “peace” with death for the arts and death for the country: “The characteristic art product of a country is the pulse of the country, France did produce better hats and fashions than ever these last two years and is therefore very alive and Germany’s music and musicians have been dead and gone these last two years and so Germany is dead well we will see, it is so, of course as all these things are necessarily true.” (Paris France, 1939).

Will isn’t stupid; she can’t quite get around Stein’s Jewish humor regarding the Nobel Peace Price for Hitler, but she nevertheless finds a way. She muses: “Stein probably wanted her audience to respond in both ways…” She claims there is “a strong element of conviction and intentionality in such pronouncements, as though (Stein) requires – indeed demands – that her words be taken literally.” She eradicates Stein’s Jewish humor by arguing, “her political ‘pontifications’ are not clearly ironic but apparently deeply felt.” (all quotes page 71-72).

Are we to take this sort of language – “probably wanted,” “as though she requires, indeed demands,” “apparently” — as clean, academic scholarship? To my reading eyes, this language is an obvious attempt to manipulate the reader .

Will rehashes another Hitler story, this one reported as hear-say by editor/publisher Jay Lansing. In 1934, Lansing heard Stein say that Hitler and Napoleon were both “great men.” For Will, this unquestioningly gives the other Hitler comment a sinister “deeper meaning”. Again, she won’t accord Stein the benefit of a doubt.  Was this another flagrant irony that was missed? Was Stein perhaps referring to the fact that both Napoleon and Hitler were in fact small, demented men and that most of the so-called “great men” of our history (from Alexander the Great onward), idolized by the masses, shared the megalomania that led to mass murder in their conquerors’ wars? It goes almost without saying that Will would ignore quotes like this one: “There is too much fathering going on just now and there is no doubt about it fathers are depressing. “ (Everybody’s Autobiography, 1936)

Will insists on finding a dirty under-belly in Stein at every turn. Three years before WWII, Stein commented in a letter to her friend W.G. Rogers: “…disguise it to yourself as you will the majority does want a dictator, it is natural that a majority if it has come to be made up of enormous numbers do, a big mass likes to be shoved as a whole because it feels it moves and they cannot possibly feel that they move themselves as little masses can, there you are, like it or not there we are. “(W.G. Rogers, When This you See Remember Me) This very realistic assessment, again with ironic-sarcastic undertones, is seen by Barbara Will as “chilling,” a proof that Stein “firmly distances herself “ from democracy: “Stein argues for the power, and, arguably, the rightness of authoritarian leadership.” (Will, p. 97.)

This sort of biased intimation is found throughout the book  – a book that has not yet been unmasked in its hostile, dishonest intentions. Will’s earlier academic work, Gertrude Stein: Modernism, and the Problem of “Genius” (2000) provided valid, useful, even enthusiastic Stein research. But since then, the author has “probably, as though, apparently” suffered a conversion experience.

She can be added to the detractors mentioned by Alenier’s article and take her “seat in the corner with the Stein haters that include ‘the worst sort of critics—anti-Semites, misogynists, homophobes and philistines.’”  If we still wonder about the true intention of these attacks, these wars against Stein, I suggest going to the root of the word obscene:

obscenitas, is latin derived from either ob-scaena, meaning against the scene of a stage (off-stage);

or it might be derived from obs-caenum  — of mud or filth (Origins, the Etymological Dictionary by Eric Partridge).

The intention, I argue, is to blast Stein off the stage and out of her sunny spotlight by besmirching her image in the exact fashion we can trace back to the origins of the term obscenity.

Here she sits (in Gertrude and Alice and Fritz and Tom by Hans Gallas and Tom Hachtman, see my blog # 82) and sips her tea, perfectly unperturbed, as the year of Stein rolls to its last breath. What a year it’s been. A roller-coaster. The month of May brought the so-called “Summer of Stein”: her wild come-back with exhibitions and events in San Francisco. Then came the brooding fall with the political controversies over the controversial author who was not always “politically correct.”

While the exhibitions continue to delight most viewers and trouble a few in Washington, D.C., and Paris, France, the fall harvest added another show: ”Insight and Identity” at the Stanford Gallery in D.C., a playful look at Stein’s impact on artists today. Some of the familiars who had already wandered through my blog appeared in the show: author and Stein collector Hans Gallas as the initiator of the show, Bay Area artist Katrina Rodabough with her “textually” designed Stein dresses, conceptual artist Gisela Züchner-Mogall with her monumental work of copying The Making of Americans” over and over again into patterned pages of imagination.

New artistic insights into Stein were also proposed this fall in Paris: author and Stein expert Marjorie Perloff (Wittgenstein’s Ladder) talked about parallels between the work of Stein and Marcel Duchamp, telling us it’s time to look beyond the obvious Stein-Picasso link and find a new, exciting territory to explore.
For me, the year ended in several high notes. In November, at the Second Feminist Conference in D.C., keynote speaker Catharine R. Stimpson, an eminent Stein scholar, took a public stand against Stein’s old and new detractors. In the present “Stein wars,” I was not the only one any more speaking up in Stein’s defense.
My arguments, first, of course, expressed in this blog, appeared in Ms. Magazine in November and in the LA Review of Books in December. Lots of reactions proved that readers are waking up to the complexities of the historical and personal situation Stein and Toklas found themselves in during the war. Many shades of color were added to the all-black picture drawn by the media and the blogosphere. Academic Barbara Will, with her tendentious, inflammatory book Unlikely Collaboration, is not the only recent detractor of Stein. Stimpson pointed out the “relentless and redundant hostility” of writer Elaine Showalter. Once a pioneering feminist critic, Showalter’s history of American women writers, A Jury of her Peers, is, in Stimpson’s words, “a compendium of attacks on Stein, none original, but presented as being mostly fresh. Here is Stein, the fat, egocentric monster who thought she was a genius and who manipulated people, especially Toklas, into serving her. … The final chop of Showalter’s little hatchet revises folklore, ‘Stein seems more and more like the Empress Who Had No Clothes – a shocking sight to behold in every respect.’ “
Not only men (like critic Phil Kennicott in the Washington Post), but women, too, descend to expressions of unmasked obscenity speaking of Stein, which shows the deep cultural anxieties and gender worries caused by the big, imposing lesbian author who turned their literary kingdom into mud.

"Once there were two amusing American ladies..."

It begins:
“Once there were two amusing American ladies, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. They lived in a mighty marvelous apartment in Paris…, ” and goes on to describe a Thanksgiving visit by two naughty American boys, which is based on a real story. It’s now the story of a book for children of ALL ages, by Hans Gallas, illustrated by Tom Hachtman: Gertrude and Alice and Fritz and Tom. One of the boys is/was author Fritz Peters (Boyhood with Gurdjeff), the other is his brother Tom. “We are always the same age inside,” to quote Gertrude Stein.

I had announced the marvelous book already last May, in my Post # 65, and now there is the there there in all its funny words and funny pictures, in time for Hannukah, Solstice, X-mas and the New Year, which will of course be another year of Gertrude Stein. You can order the book directly from the author’s colorful, enticing book page, at www.gertrudeandalice.com, or at Amazon.

Guess what Fritz and Tom discover at 27, rue de Fleurus? “It looks like a museum! I hate museums, everything in a museum is musty and moldy.” The story takes up from there and takes the boys, guess where? To the Louvre!
An interesting detail: no dogs in the picture. The visit happened before Gertrude and Alice got Basket the poodle and Pépé the chihuahua.
To see Basket in his wooly war-time coat, open another new book, the handy little calendar book Everyday Dogs: A Perpetual Calendar for Birthdays & Other Notable Dates by Mary Scott and Susan Snyder (Heyday, Berkeley, $14.95). It says, “What do Gertrude Stein, John Muir, Jack London, Queen Victoria, and your next-door neighbor all have in common? Dogs.” They failed to mention yours truly and Hans Gallas as well. “Woof! A dog fancier’s delight — ideal for birthdays and yearly events.” But they quote Gertrude. Voilà.
Now don’t forget to enter Gertie’s Aquarian birthday into the book: Feb. 3.

How could anyone loving France not want to stay in France, I asked myself, even (and maybe especially) when France was in grave danger? Just last September, when I was in Paris and spent a good week at the Loire, it was a shock to be reminded how wonderful France, life in France, really is. No matter that I had lived in Paris for almost 20 years and visited often, I had forgotten! Here, around San Francisco where you get the best food in America, the best coffee, best croissants, French cheeses and wines, I almost believed that the “Global Village” had succeded and obliterated the need to travel to France.
But then there I was, and there was the real thing again, and I can tell you there is nothing like it. Nothing you eat here tastes anything like a baguette, a croissant, a round of goat cheese, a glass of Loire wine, a fresh walnut from the Dordogne, big as a lime, tastes over there. You have to go half around the world to realize that French coffee, excellent in even the smallest bistro anywhere in the countryside, is a world apart. That French butter has almost nothing in common with what we can buy here as “European-style” butter. I could go on…
This and the beauty of the old villages, the way the sandstone catches the light throughout the day – I kept wondering and wondering how anyone could question Stein’s decision. She had grown up on 10 acres of Californian land, a tomboy, with goats and chicken and apple trees, and in her French village, where she and Alice spent every summer, she was rooted like an old tree by the time the war arrived. She loved her country neighbors, and they told her to stay: they would care for her and Alice. They would protect them.
The suspicious questioning of how Stein and Toklas were able to survive the war as Jews reveals a considerable ignorance of the conditions in Vichy and Occupied France and a troubled confusion of France with Germany. In Germany, half of the German Jews were trapped after 1938, and almost every one of them was murdered. In France, three quarters of the Jewish population survived in the same way Stein and Toklas did, with the help of friends and neighbors, and often even with the help of French officials who quietly ignored German orders. Not that it was easy or safe. Any day, they could have been denounced. Should they flee to near-by Switzerland – without legal papers, as they were advised – into the complete unknown? Without being able to take their beloved dogs?
In 1939, they had made a mad dash to Paris to take a few things back to their country house, among them just two paintings from their vast collection: Picasso’s portrait of Stein and the Cézanne’s Portrait of Mme Cézanne. They didn’t find their passports, but they found the pedigree papers for Basket, their big poodle. This turned out to be a blessing as the Germans — with their racial obsessions — accorded special food rates to pure-bred dogs. No, they wouldn’t leave their dogs behind for a questionable safety for themselves. They would hold out and muddle through, all of them together, with their peasant neighbors and friends, a vegetable garden, with Alice’s kitchen artistry and Gertrude’s Black Market skills. Five years is a long time of deprivation. At some point, when all of France was occupied and all ties to America were cut, they had no source of money for an entire 6 months. Again, a friend and neighbor helped them out. But they ended up having to sell and “eat the Cézanne.” They had no heating and the language revolutionary who used to claim, “It takes a lot of time to be a genius. You have to sit around so much doing nothing,” would cut wood all day, walk miles and miles for an egg or a bit of flour, and weed her garden.

The two elderly Americans (even Alice turned 65 during the war) were not noticed by the Germans – only Basket was. He was admired – which reminds me: A new little calendar book has come out: Everyday Dogs: A Perpetual Calendar for Birthdays & Other Notable Dates, from Heyday Books in Berkeley. Of course, there is Gertrude, late in her life, holding a very furry Basket on her lap. You will see it by turning to the third week of January 2012.

Yes, I am not alone in taking on the war-mongers against Gertrude Stein and her survival in Nazi-occupied France, with their many ignorances, lies and innuendos… For a while, I felt quite lost in a desert, with bullets coming in right and left from the blogosphere and online magazines, the latest fired like a cannon-shot from critic Phil Kennicott at the Washington Post. But now comments are floating in from She Writers and others like a balm, and it’s heart-warming and encouraging to hear that others are seeing what I am seeing, and saying so.

The cartoon is by German-Australian, trés Steinian, artist Gisela Züchner-Mogall (whose work can be seen in the present exhibition on Stein at the Stanford in Washington Art Gallery in D.C.).

Here are some other thoughtful, thought-provoking comments I received to my last blog post from both women and men and would like to share with you.

From brand-new She Writer Karren Alenier:

“Good going, Renate. Your comment is really on the money.

Did you ever see Mabou Mines Dollhouse? Nora & the other women are very tall (6 ft) and the men are all dwarves. I have never seen anything so hysterically funny. And your lead-in reminds me of this play.”

More from across the ocean — the main German publisher of Stein, Arche Verlag, in Zürich and Hamburg, Nikolaus Hansen, writes: “skandalös – und großartige Replik!“(“scandalous — and a brilliant response!”)

From Stanford professor and Stein expert Marjorie Perloff:

” Stein was certainly misguided and no one ever claimed she had astute politics but what does that have to do with her great experimental writing?

The same people who excoriate Stein are often Heidegger fans—to me, incomprehensible vis-à-vis his real evil, his involvement in getting rid of the Jews beginning with his mentor Husserl.”

From Carlos Lens, art and ballet aficionado in LA:

“As Ms Alenier states – these comments reflect more on the author than the subject itself.

I think it’s important to have the likes of “Kennicotts” write comments like these only to show how much insecurity, fear, ignorance, envy, misogyny, bigotry and homophobia still exist.

· “intellectually infantile” – Yes indeed – inventive childlike imagination unconstrained by limitations.

· “cheerfully amoral “ – AMEN to that! And whose morals is he referring to anyway?

· “profoundly insecure” – Name one singular great mind that is not. The lack of it would only be proof of hubris.

· “nakedly ambitious” – When did ambition become a fault? Would “hidden or deceitful” ambition be more virtuous?

As another great “queer” genius once said :

“The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius” – Oscar Wilde”

From Sharon La Pena Davenport (researcher for Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories):

“In my beginning is my end. In my end is my beginning.” I am tempted to ask what Mr. K would make of these lines of poetry “This is the way the world ends/This is the way the world ends/ This is the way the world ends/ Not with a bang but a whimper” from the canonical favorite of English Lit classes, T.S. Eliot. Eliot, a near contemporary of Stein, was after his meteoric rise to fame based on a few poems written in his 20s, politically conservative, flirting with fascism, and famously anti-Semitic. “What is still more important is unity of religious background; and reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable.” Free thinkers and Jews are undesirable in the Unity, which is England; one sees the results of that sort of provincialism in contemporary Britain. The sort of thinking that Mr. K indulges in is no less teeny-weeny in its philistine attack of Stein in my humble opinion.”
From Prof. Amy Moorman Robbins, head of the Gertrude Stein Society:

“Thank you for including me in this post – the review is atrocious yet does the service of reminding us how vexed is Stein’s reputation in the public imagination and the scholarly community.”

From artist Joan Bradie:

“Appalling little man…

All summed up in ” Writing a sensational essay is always more about the essayist than the subject matter of the essay. ”

No need to say more. He doesn’t deserve another line.

Go, Gertrude!!!”

All this in a couple of days, what a harvest. Stay tuned.

Giant Gertrude Stein Ridiculed By Little Male
If you want to see a fresh example of how a great woman author is being diminished by a male critic, with no holds barred, go to the Washington Post and read:

Review of Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories, by Phil Kennicott

Sunday Arts

You won’t easily forget the experience.

What is the occasion? The Stein exhibition from SF, Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories, just opened at the National Portrait Gallery in D.C. Everybody who is anybody is celebrating the event, talking about the present Stein renaissance (the other seminal exhibition, The Steins Collect, has moved to the Paris Grand Palais and will soon open in NY), except those who feel somehow excluded from the excitement because they harbor a deep old resentment against Stein.

In the comment thread below the article, you will read a fascinating analysis of this attack by one commentator:

“Let’s put it this way, Mr. Kennicott holds a position of power as a writer for a major American newspaper. It is his job as a cultural critic to bridge the gap between an exhibition such as “Seeing Gertrude Stein” and the public. Voicing his hatred for Gertrude Stein is irresponsible both on his part and his editors at the Washington Post. Writing a sensational essay is always more about the essayist than the subject matter of the essay. We have to recognize this in his choice of such words as hoover (i.e. “enough money to hoover up paintings”), strategic friending (i.e. Part of Stein’s strategy for becoming famous), Yoda (i.e. He uses the Star Wars character to say Stein “had one linguistic trick and like Yoda it was”), swanning (“Stein modeled a familiar figure still swanning the galleries of cultural capitals around the world: Intellectually infantile, cheerfully amoral, profoundly insecure and nakedly ambitious.”). I have studied Stein for a long time, seen the exhibit, and read Barbara Will’s book “Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Fay, and the Vichy Dilemma.” Therefore I can say I am more embarrassed over Kennicott’s writing than Gertrude Stein’s and both authors can be judged on their behavior if you will, but that’s part of the outside story relative to whether the writing has literary and cultural merit.”

The commentator turns out to be Karren Alenier, the author of a modern Stein opera, who paid attention reading the article. You can see in the comment thread how many buttons were pushed –maybe yours too. And mine.

I wanted to comment as well but lo and behold, after only 22 comments, the Post shut down. “Comments are closed.” What? In the era of unlimited web space we are told we can’t participate? Is this a new form of censorship? As it happened, the great majority of comments expressed distaste and dismay over this below-the-belt attack. A reason to shut down the faucet?

Here is my comment that was shut out from the Washington Post:

“It would be laughable if it weren’t so pathetic — 100 years of male whining over the one woman who represented the birth of modernism, wrote the line that is the most quoted line of English poetry of the last 100 years: “(A) rose is a rose is a rose is a rose,” and who had the chuzpah to say aloud, “I am a genius.” Moreover, she was queer! This has always been too much for her male competitors and commentators, and still is, as we can see in the Washington Post review of Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories, at the National Portrait Gallery in D.C.. Are we having an era of post-Pound? Post-Joyce? Post-Woolf? Guess not, dear Mr. Kennicott. We are having an era of Gertrude Stein — the only one who is in fashion in our post-modern age.”

I’ve said it before: More, much more needs to be said about the lies, distortions, myths told and told again about Stein. About Stein and Hitler, Stein and Modernism, Stein and France — French politics, French history–, Stein and her survival in Nazi-occupied France.

Stay tuned.

Questions abound. Suddenly everyone asks about Gertrude Stein’s whereabouts during WW2. How come she stayed in France when France was Nazi-occupied? Why didn’t she leave? Why didn’t she and Alice get the treatment of enemy aliens (i.e. Americans) like Sylvia Beach of Shakespeare & Company, who got rounded up in Paris and taken to the Vittel detention camp? Why didn’t they get deported like other Jews, other lesbians, other unwanted people? Were they protected somehow and for some reason? Was their collection of “degenerate” art, all those pictures by Picasso, Matisse, Cézanne, left behind in their apartment in Paris, protected too?
The same questions were raised many times before in Stein biographies. A few years ago they were raised loudly by Janet Malcolm’s Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice, and the answer has always been the same: Stein’s close friend and frequent visitor, Bernard Faÿ, who turned collaborator during the war, allegedly protected them. When Malcolm’s book came out in 2004, nobody cared.
Suddenly this is not good enough. An urgent, belligerent need to question Stein started with criticism of the exhibition Seeing Gertrude Stein and with a few loud-enough voices accusing the curators at the Contemporary Jewish Museum of hiding facts and protecting Stein’s image by not properly addressing her war survival. (It doesn’t seem to matter that the catalog addresses the war chapter at some length.)
Suddenly there is great concern from certain academic corners. A new book – Barbara Will’s Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Fay and the Vichy Dilemma – tries to place Stein under an x-ray examination that makes her look guilty before tried (She is not invited to defend herself.) At a museum panel, local historian Fred Rosenbaum gets “extremely worried” about Stein. Visitors and bloggers who have never before read or studied Stein are enraged by certain details they snap up from the agitation around them: What? Stein had a Nazi friend? Stein said Hitler ought to get the Nobel Peace Prize? How scandalous! Stein a collaborator! Worse, Stein, a Nazi!

As I said before in my blog, Jewish humor is lost even on Jewish commentators when Stein, in an interview with NY Times Magazine in 1934, recommends Hitler for the Nobel Peace Prize, just as Freud, in my argument, “recommended” the Gestapo with the same perfect irony. People don’t bother to look at the interview by Lansing Warren even though it can be found online, and don’t note that the interviewer points to the laugh and “impish” look on Stein’s face as she brings out this outrageous proposition. Isn’t this the way Jewish humor works?
The “fact” that makes people most hysterical, is that Stein made an attempt to translate Pétain’s speeches. Pétain was every French person’s hero after Verdun, and he was Stein’s and most French people’s hero again when he saved Paris and most of France from the total destruction that had just been witnessed wherever the Nazi war machine had crossed a border. French people had seen the refugees running from Belgium. “…grandmothers holding dead babies in their arms, women with parts of their faces shot away, and insane women who had lost their children, their husbands, and all reasons for living.” (in Charles Glass, Americans in Paris: Life and Death under the Nazi Occupation, 2010) They had seen the beginning of the end when Orléans was destroyed by the Germans. Yes, Stein was a conservative to the point that would make her a perfect mid-line Republican today. She said it repeatedly in her 1939 portrait of the French, Paris France: “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.”
So how can a radical avant-gardist at the same time be a traditionalist, a conservative, even perhaps reactionary? Just as well ask the question: how can a radical avant-gardist like Picasso turn communist after Stalin’s show trials, gulags and mass murders?
It’s like the voices accusing her of staying in occupied France are complaining that Stein didn’t have a crystal ball to foresee what would happen under the Vichy Régime that chose Pétain as their prime minister. Was she supposed to foresee that her friend Faÿ, who was highly respected as an academic and author in the States and had in many ways helped her career, would turn collaborator? That her stay in the Zone Libre, where American Jews lived freely, especially if they were over 65 years old, would be eliminated by Nazi Germany in Nov. 1942? That she and Alice would need special protection?

Vittel detention camp

Friendship was the only thing in wartime that could make or break your life, and we know about Stein’s unusual talent for friendship. Friendship was much more important to her than politics. According to her, no serious writer could be interested in politics. Did you know that Slyvia Beach was rounded up in Paris in 1942 and deported to the Vittel detention camp, but set free in 1943, when her lover Adrienne Monnier turned to a friend with SS connections (a collaborator!) to save her? That the same SS sent her beloved assistant Francoise Bernheim to Auschwitz to die? Did you know that Sylvia Beach, who lived in Paris at the hub of international connections, did not hear about the death camps until Polish women at the camp opened her eyes? You begin to open your eyes to the complexities of the situation. When you know that two thirds of French Jews survived in France during the war, you begin to understand that Gertrude and Alice had reason to hope that staying in the country, among friends, with a vegetable garden, might be the best place to survive. Stein does not write about death camps, it is true, and isolated in the deep countryside for years, refusing to listen to the radio, one can only wonder if she got the news at all in Occupied France. She describes in detail what the first days and weeks of war were like in an article published in The Atlantic Monthly, in 1940: “The Winner Loses: A Picture of Occupied France.” She expresses the same feelings toward the Nazis that her French neighbors felt, deep fear and loathing and a profound sadness about France.
Yes, Gertrude and Alice were afraid. They got many warnings to leave. But how would they emigrate (to near-by Switzerland, as was suggested) without being able to take their beloved dog? How would they fare as an aging couple in a new place, among strangers?
“And then Italy came into the war and then I was scared, completely scared, and my stomach felt very weak, because – well, here we were right in everybody’s path any enemy that wanted to go anywhere might easily come here. I was frightened; I woke up completely upset. And I said to Alice Toklas, ‘Let’s go away.’”
They asked all their friends and neighbors: “’Well,’ said Doctor Chabout, reflecting. ‘I can’t guarantee you anything, but my advice is stay. I had friends,’ he said, ‘who in the last war stayed in their homes all through the German occupation, and they saved their homes and those who left lost theirs. No,’ he said, ‘I think unless your house is actually destroyed by a bombardment, I always think the best thing to do is to stay.’ He went on, ‘Everybody knows you here; everybody likes you; we all would help you in every way. Why risk yourself among strangers?”
“’Thank you,’ we said, ‘that is all we need. We stay.’’’ (“The Winner Loses”)
Even protected and helped, anything and everything could have gone wrong. The Gestapo came twice to look at the degenerate art in their Paris home. Again it was friends, this time in Paris, among them Picasso and their neighbor friend, the painter Katherine Dudley (perhaps also Faÿ), who helped and took care of their apartment (by then in rue Christine) with all their art inside.
In their second country house, in Culoz, Italian soldiers were billeted under their roof. Germans were milling in Bellay, their next-door town, and roaring on their motor-bikes through the village of Bilignin.
In Wars I Have Seen, Stein’s diary-like memoir of those years, Stein does not seem to have any sense of being protected; she has a sense of pervasive unreality and anxiety. But as the war turns, by 1943, she declares herself increasingly enamored with the resistance, la Résistance, and keeps excitedly reporting about local successes of the Maquis. She is now clearly anti-Vichy. She passionately writes, “The one thing that everybody wants it to be free… not to be managed, threatened, directed, restrained, obliged, fearful, administered, none of these things they all want to feel free, the word discipline, and forbidden and investigated and imprisoned brings horror and fear into all hearts, they do not want to be afraid not more than is necessary in the ordinary business of living where one has to earn one’s living and has to fear want and disease and death… The only thing that any one wants now is to be free, to be let alone, to live their life as they can, but not to be watched, controlled and scared, no no, not.” And please note: she did not write this book in hindsight. It got smuggled out of France before the war was over, and Stein didn’t add or change a word of it when it was published — to great success — in 1945.
When you read Stein’s war writings you can’t have any doubt that this is a profoundly apolitical person writing, someone with no idea, no interest in politics, parties, ideology; she is only interested in the day-by-day ardent task of staying alive, finding food, and taking active part in the survival and personal life of her country neighbors.
Translating Pétain? Even Barbara Will, who would love to condemn Stein, even she is baffled. She doesn’t know what to make of it, because Stein didn’t really do it. She translated a number of speeches, yes, but into a language that is unreadable. As we know from computer gobbledigook, word-by-word translations don’t make sense; they are ridiculous. And that is exactly what Stein did.
Here are some examples Will gives:
“’Telle est aujourd’hui, Français, la tâche à laquelle je vous convie’’ becomes ‘This is today french people the task to which I urge you.’ An idiomatic phrase such as ‘Le 17 juin 1940, il y a aujourd’hui une année’ becomes ‘On the seventeenth of June 1940 it is a year today.’ ‘Ils se méprendront les uns et les autres’ — a speech denouncing Pétains’ critics – is translated ‘But they are mistaken the ones and the others.’ Syntax is distorted: a speech describing the refugees from Lorraine notes the abandonment of ‘le cimetière où dorment leurs ancêtres’; Stein translates this as ‘their cemeteries where sleep their ancestors.’ Even the term ’speech’ is avoided: ‘Discours du 8 juillet’ becomes ‘Discourse of the 8 July.’’’
Will ponders that perhaps Stein had such an admiration for the old man that every word of his had to be honored in and of itself. What a laugh. Maybe Stein wasn’t fluent in French, we are tempted to ask. She had spent almost four decades in France and had written and published in French. And what about her English? Stein, the recent bestseller author of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas unable to write English? How about Stein unwilling to write English? How about just pretending, using a fool’s cap the way she had with her comment about Hitler and the Nobel Prize? Rendering these speeches unreadable and unpublishable? Taking on the task to begin with might have been an act of friendship toward Fay. Perhaps it even was a bargaining chip to do it, or to pretend to do it. None of it makes Stein what we today understand under the term collaborator.
We don’t know what she intended. The mystery remains and even Barbara Will can’t will the answer. She can only interpret the bits as she chooses, making Stein look bad. But Stein as a modernist was one of the first to know what a post-modernist should know even better: that reality itself is in the eye of the beholder.