Alias: “The Bride of Gertrudestein“ (see Gertrude Follies # 69)

Happy Halloween!

“Ladies there is no neutral position for us to assume.” (Gertrude Stein, Last Operas and Plays)

 America in the throes of a romantic revolution. If Gertrude and Alice had known! The lesbian pioneers lived their lifelong devotion discreetly but nevertheless quite in the public eye. Nobody who wasn’t half blind could have misunderstood what was going on, even dear young Hemingway who was lusting after Gert.

Creating a heavenly wedding for G &A and inviting them to the big party of American newly-weds was easy: old-fashioned scissors and glue plus Google.

Search # 1: “fat women’s wedding dresses”. (No need to be offended. One of the intimate nicknames in G &A’s love life was “Fatuski”.)

Search # 2: “old-fashioned wedding dresses”.

A few minutes later, I knew how to dress them for the occasion. Queen Elizabeth II was the right frilly thing and body-type to fit Alice in a queenly fashion that would certainly satisfy her king, Gert the First and Only.

Search # 3: Which photograph among the 366 of my book Gertrude Stein in Words and Pictures would be understated enough for these two women of wit? Page 139, no doubt. Alice grumpy comme toujours, Gertrude pleased because she just remembered a pleasing quote from her vast body of work.

Now the game for Facebook.

As I had promised 2 books to the 2 first winners who would guess whose wedding dress Alice was wearing in heaven, I didn’t give away how hot on the trail the first guess already was: Kate Middleton. Almost! And zap, right into target with the second guess! Fortunately, this didn’t convince the rest of the players, at least for a while. Some thought I would stay close to home and make up a not-yet-existing-wedding  dress for my life companion Kim (Chernin). (Note to winner Hannah Roche: Kim would look good, too.) In any case, for all my readers who are not on Facebook, here — for your contemplation and chuckles — are the propositions of the sophisticated fashionistas:

Marcel Duchamp in his femme alter ego Rrose Selavy (Duchamp was a friend of G & S and admired Stein’s style).

Pab’s christening gown: G & A were adoring aunties of Picasso’s first-born baby son, although there might  have been a bit of a size problem.

Coco Chanel. Interesting. Maybe there was a sailor collar at the back of her dress, in case…
Liz Taylor: close, as Gertrude and Alice visited Hollywood in 1935 and taught the stars gathered around her how to get as much publicity as she did (see page 183 in my book).

Q.E.: The mystery! Quod Erat… Could there be a D missing? Q.E.D. famously was the title of Stein’s hush-hush lesbian novel of 1903 that caused a big upset in the “marriage.”

And then, so close to home: Diana! Diana whose skirt was so huge it got all crushed in the fairytale coach…

Now Pierre Balmain: if G &A had really been able to marry, you bet Pierre would have designed some good, heavy corduroy wedding suits to two women ahead of their time.

So, congratulations again to the two winners, both from the British Queen’s own country, but one living in Kansas, USA. Look them up and send them thumbs up: http://www.facebook.com/quotinggertrudestein/posts/533944753319915

Alice to Gertrude: “What took them so long?”

Gertrude to Alice: “What is marriage, is marriage protection or religion, is marriage renunciation or abundance, is marriage a stepping-stone or an end. What is marriage.”

Sources: Renate Stendhal, Gertrude Stein in Words and Pictures; Gertrude Stein, Last Operas and Plays. Can you guess whose TRÈS CHIC wedding dress Alice is wearing? The first 2 successful sleuths will get my book!

by Tom Hachtman

JAMAICA KINCAID QUOTING GERTRUDE STEIN?

Should we call it a new sighting in our search for signs of presence in the Steinian post-renaissance? Is it a QUOTE?

“She was thinking of her now, knowing that it would certainly become a Then even as it was a Now, for the present will be now then and the past is now then and the future will be a now then, and that the past and the present and the future has no permanent present tense, has no certainty in regard to right now. (…) Every morning is the next morning of the night before: and the night before is Now and Then at the same time is the morning after the night before.”

GERTRUDE STEIN’S ABANDONED KNITTING

Could it be an unknown Stein, forgotten in some Paris attic of modernism? Is it real or is it a fake? The great Orson Wellesian question. Perhaps someone made a few cuts in the manuscript of Blood on the Dining-Room Floor (could it be Alice, always the severe editor, thinking it was already a bit crowded down there?) Let’s listen to Blood on the Dining-Room Floor:

“Every day and every day she had to see that everything came out from where it was put away and that everything again was put away. That was their way. That had always been their way. Any way was that way. Any way, she came that way to be that way. In that way she passed each day and each day passed away which was a night too.“Anybody knows that a night is not a day.“She cried when she tried but soon she did not try and so she did not cry. As a day was a day it came to be that way. But it was never only a day, and that a little left it to her still to cry, because it was a day, but it was not only a day. Every day had a day in its way.”

Or has someone dared “venture into the parlour of modernism and pick up Gertrude Stein’s abandoned knitting”? (The Guardian)

Yes, as my favorite sleuth Tom Hachtman pointed out, the remarkable Jamaica Kincaid’s latest book, See Now Then, “channels Stein” – and not for the first time. Kincaid did it again. It may be irresistible. See Now Then takes up the knitting from her earlier Mr. Potter. But the new book review  in the New York Times    never picks up the thread. We are given a warning, however, that could have been issued for any of Stein’s books: “You will have to back up and reread many of the sentences here just to be certain that she isn’t, in some regard, attempting satire.”

Aha, satire! Another typical Steinian suspicion. Could she be taken seriously at all? Wasn’t she making fun of her readers? And particularly her critics? Perhaps, the reviewer speculates, the satire aims at Here but Not Here, the 1998 memoir of New Yorker writer Lillian Ross with whom Kincaid’s (ex-)husband allegedly had a long secret affair? We may never know.

The Los Angeles Times finds this tangled yarn “mesmerizing”;  others, like the Wall Street Journal, describe it as “little more than chunks of Ms. Kincaid’s autobiography lumped onto the page like unshaped clay.” Interesting. This reviewer, quite unconsciously, may be hot on the trail of something – in case you remember Stein’s famous statement in Everybody’s Autobiography: “My writing is clear as mud, but mud settles and clear streams run on and disappear…” The unconscious works its own funny way and maybe Kincaid’s “mud” will do just the same.

Be it what it may, whatever you can see now or then — mud-throwing, wool-gathering, channeling, satirizing, plucking music from the torn shreds of a marriage, read on, notice the word Stein as Kincaid sprinkles into the text, and be amused:

“But all that aside, for all that would have its then and has its own now, Mr. Sweet sitting on a stool in the studio above the garage, the dun-dun, wooo-wooo, whoosh-whoosh noise made by the clothes-cleaning machines, and he sat there, hovered above the black and white keys of that musical instrument made by the company called Steinway, his hands poised above those keys, his fingers extended, his fingers resembling his long-ago ancestors who lived in that long-ago era, and he composed more nocturnes, more nocturnes, and more of those: his life was not what he wanted it to be, not what he had imagined it to be even though he had not imagined it to be anything in particular other than he would be princely and entitled to doormen and poor but princely and entitled to doormen and sad because he loved ballet and Wittgenstein and opera and entitled to doormen, no matter what, there must be doormen.”

Who is this husband? A satire of the husband Stein gave her heroine in her 1940 novel Mrs. Reynolds? Perhaps yes, perhaps not, for…”sometimes people mistook him for a rodent, he scurried around so.  And he was not a rodent at all, he was a man
capable of understanding Wittgenstein and Einstein and any other name that ended in stein, Gertrude included…”

Another Happy Birthday, Gertrude Stein!

What is eternally 39 year-old Alice bringing Gertie for her celebration? You bet it’s something she baked, some “entertaining refreshment,” “effective,” “ecstatic,” “brilliant,” “ravishing” — in short, a “food of paradise”. To be exact: “the food of Baudelaire’s Artificial Paradises.” Often quoted, often repeated, sometimes verboten, always imitated, the stuff of Urban Legends: here is the recipe. Not just from her famous Cookbook  — no, here recited by Alice in 1963, in old Alice’s original, delicious-malicious, slightly trembling but still snooty cigarette voice, recited for all eternity:

on Pacifica Radio  [MP3 link] (4’46″): http://t.co/wqWfraRG

This little radio gem was sighted by friend Tom Hachtman, cartoonist extraordinaire, who also sighted G & A on a heavenly Super Bowl Sunday cheerleading team:
http://www.nowwhatmedia.com/pages_folder/stripmall_pages/gert_pages/gertrudesfollies.html

Enjoy a small sample appetizer of the whole cartoon here:

Then put the brownies in a super bowl and Bon Appetit, Gertrude and Alice, in Saint Tom’s, Saint Theresa’s (or some other) artistic paradise!

BYE-BYE  SUMMER OF STEIN

The cartoon by Rick Meyerowitz, “The Girls of Summer,” brings home the sad fact. The year-long Summer of Stein ended last year. In May 2012, the last of the big exhibitions on Stein closed. Gertrude – watch out – threw her last ball. Or was that a grenade? Did Meyerowitz see Stein launch a last retort in the controversies that had raged over her political sporting from one summer to another?

If you have a Google Alert set on Stein you know it: All quiet again on the Gertrude front.  “Le Gang Stein” (Meyerowitz) is off the field. No more media attacks and daily blog matches. Academe has locked her back into the ivory tower. Quietly the Gertrude Stein Society held a symposium at the Yale Beinecke Library, discussing Stein’s hermetic poetry in Stanzas in Meditation, debating how to teach Stein in the classroom. From political upheaval back to the normal diet of scholarship.

We may have to wait for another decade, another generation, another slew of big media events to bring Stein (and Toklas) back into the limelight.

RECENT SIGHTING OF GERTRUDE STEIN

Meanwhile, in the world of arts and media, sightings of the redisappeared have been reported. I count myself a witness. I spotted Stein in full glory in Robert Wilson’s Einstein on the Beach. How could it be otherwise?

The landmark cultural event of the seventies that was finally revived in 2012, revealed Stein’s inspiration more clearly now than in 1976. The many repetitions of abstract, wonderfully absurd texts in Einstein on the Beach ring in today’s ear like pure Steinese, enhanced by the wonderfully repetitive score of Phil Glass, who knew what he was doing. Less obvious but as striking when you see it: an entire scene of the so-called opera is designed as an homage to Gertrude Stein. I pointed it out in my review of the piece and want to repeat it here:

“Without Stein’s inspiration, another scene in Einstein would in fact be unthinkable. The scene is called The Building. A toy-like house-front shows a woman in a “tower” window, counting with her hands. Below her window, one by one, men gather in the street, and just stand there for some length of time, not doing much of nothing, until again one by one, they leave and the scene is over. Stein: “It is a much more impressive thing to any one to see any one standing, that is not in action than acting or doing anything doing anything being a successive thing, standing not being a successive thing but being something existing. That is then the difference between narrative as it has been and narrative as it is now.” (Narration, 1935)

The congruency between the repetitive happening-not-happening onstage and the repetitive happening-not-happening in the music creates a “being something existing” that is hard to define, but is thrilling in its hypnotic presence. I felt both strained and elated coming out of the theater. Thrilled to witness that this new narrative of then is still the narrative par excellence of now.”

Other sighting are to be reported in the next blog. Stay tuned.

http://www.scene4.com/0912/renatestendhal0912.html

It’s fascinating how the story of Stein’s war years and survival refuses to settle into a consistent story line. I wrote about Assemblyman Dov Hikind, commentator Alan Dershowith and their distortions of history in their attempt to bully the Metropolitan Museum. Dovkind, Dershowitz and others wanted the wall text of the exhibition “The Steins Collect” to follow their own version of the story – i.e. the urban legend based on the rumor-mill of Stein’s detractors. Even the White House got caught in the cauldron of hear-say and allegations against Stein, dis-inviting her on the sly from the official celebration of Jewish Heritage Month. For the details see my essay “Why the Witch-Hunt Against Gertrude Stein?” in Tikkun Magazine.

Tikkun, the left-wing Jewish magazine, offered me its platform for my defense of Stein and, at the same time, questioned (if not attacked) my arguments in an editorial caveat by the publisher of the magazine, Rabbi Michael Lerner. Inviting differing opinions is a policy of Tikkun magazine, a laudible policy – in fact an intrinsic part of the great Jewish Talmudic, Rabbinical tradition which has always maintained the principle of argument. In this tradition, my defense of Stein was and is not aimed at convincing anybody, it is meant to inspire critical thought.

In this case, Tikkun’s policy has triggered a feisty response from Denny Stein, a member of Stein’s family and a writer in her own right:

Letter to the Editor regarding his commentary on the Gertrude Stein “controversy.”
Tikkun editor wrote:
“we believe that artists, writers, poets, and intellectuals are not exempt from the moral obligation to fight against the rise of evil (as manifested in racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, anti-Islam, anti-democracy, destruction of human rights, repression of free speech and freedom of assembly, destruction of the environment, militarism, torture, etc.), which becomes most dangerous when these pathologies move from the realm of thought to the realm of political movements that embody or champion them. Like all citizens, they are morally deficient when they fail to challenge the rise of evil in any given society, and all the more so because unlike most citizens, these people typically have greater access to the means of communication than the ordinary person. ”
No matter what the Tikkun editors “believe,” all citizens including writers, artists, poets, etc. are only human. They are not super-human. They do not have capes, or magic weapons, or sonic transport, or extraordinary powers. They are no more capable of rising above the distresses of everyday dangers or historical horrors than the rest of us. Some people do throw themselves in front of tanks or bulldozers, some publish defiant tracts and are arrested, some take up arms. They are many (I am sure) artists who retreat into their own safe worlds of creativity and hope the horrors won’t find them. And there are those who maintain life in their village and support the small community in which they live. No man or woman should be called out for not “rising to” every occasion. And the number of occasions listed by the editor (above) would keep an army of creative citizens so busy that they would have no time to think or create. Sometimes even writing a letter to the editor is too much.
Gertrude Stein may or may not have been a genius, but she was one person in thousands who made it through the war. Should we invent reasons for each survivor “proving” that they were complicit with the enemy in order to survive?
And it is oh so easy to sit in an air-conditioned office, with a title, computer, minions, and opinions, and pronounce judgment on others, especially 66 year old dead women. It is easy to assume Gertrude Stein knew this or that, could have done this or that, and should have done that. It is so easy to take her comments out of context, attribute inflammatory motives to them, then posthumously tar and feather her.
Remember, there is a vast difference between holding distasteful opinions and actually sending Jews, or anyone, to the gas chamber. It is time to put this subject to rest, and file it under “We are all human, no one is perfect.”
Thank you,
Denny Stein
I want to add a quote from the well researched book And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris, by Alan Ryding (Knopf, 2010):
“In the face of defeat and occupation … the French responded successively with anger, despair, resignation and accommodation. With the notable exception of those Fascist writers who cheered the Nazi victory, most French artists and intellectuals reacted in much the same way. Initially, at least, they, too, looked to Marshal Pétain to shield France from the worst in what promised to be a long ordeal. Feeling powerless, they adopted attentisme, an on-the-fence posture, which allowed them to get on with their lives—to write, to paint, to perform, to teach – while waiting to be saved by some external force, presumably the United States.”
This passage speaks for itself, and it speaks for Stein as well.

More about the interesting way the Metropolitan Museum managed to resist the bullying, in my next blog.

Me, Denny Stein and Hans Gallas

“It’s the critics who thought about form, I thought about writing.” (Gertrude Stein)

Imagine my surprise, when I asked my academic audience at the lecture panel whether they were aware of the Stein controversy, Stein the “urban legend,” the Metropolitan Museum crisis and the White House scandal. They had not heard of it. Any of it.
Academia sometimes seems like a far-away, foreign land. Where else would the speakers invited to an intellectual conference have to pay a fee in order to share their papers? I can’t come up with another example. The 400 panels in a long weekend were offered once again at the Hyatt in San Francisco by academics most of whom also had to pay for their air tickets and hotel rooms.
But anywhere, there we were, a morning panel of outliers, bringing news of the year-long raging controversy regarding Stein to Academe.
This was only the third year of Stein’s “official” existence as the object of an scholarly Society. My blog post in 2010 reported the birth of the Gertrude Stein Society and the panel I shared with Gisela Züchner-Mogall, the German-Australian artist who since then has made several appearances on my blog, the most recent one sharing one of her Stein brooches or “tender buttons” with me. Gisela was present once again, this time in the audience, and she had brought more “tender buttons” for the panelists –before heading to New York to see the last days of The Steins Collect and get Gertie’s very personal view of her ALA day.

Photo Gisela Züchner-Mogall

The morning panel this year was called “Gertrude Stein On View” and all the speakers happened to be friends, all of us local. Denny Stein, a real-live member of Stein’s family, was talking about the 30-year correspondence between her own grandmother, who was a cousin of Stein’s, and Gertrude who was fondly attached to her. Thirty years of yet unpublished letters. Denny Stein presented a Powerpoint with postcards from the edge, written during the Occupation of France, and interpreted Stein’s ways of slyly getting past the censors by writing her best Steinese, saying all was well not so well but all well.
Hans Gallas, probably the world’s most eminent collector of Stein’s first editions and memorabilia of Gertrude and Alice, shared some of his book treasures on the screen and on the desk, woven into amusing anecdotes about how Stein’s books got published. If you have never set eyes on one of the books Stein and Toklas published in the thirties in their own publishing venture, Plain Edition, you would not necessarily grasp the double and triple meanings of the word “plain.”

Hans has also made many appearances on my blog, with cross references to his gertrudeandalice blog and news about his first book, “Gertrude and Alice and Fritz and Tom,” illustrated by another friend, Tom Hachtman.
Newer books on Stein, like his or my photobiography were missing from the scanty book stalls; the once overcrowded book room at the ALA was only half there there. What could it mean? The general book crisis has reached the ivory tower of the ALA?

On the afternoon panel “Gertrude Stein In Places,” we heard about possible influences of Jazz on Stein’s language (by Andrew Vogel), about Stein’s contributions to “Children’s Literature and the Avant-Garde” (by Katie E. Strode), and challenging notes and musings about Stein’s style and rhetoric: “There are different ways of making of, of course,” presented by Sharon Kirsch from Arizona State University.
Kirsch talked about the books on the style of writing that were fashionable when Stein came of age, holding up the ancient canon of rhetoric centered on “exactness” – on “seeing what you describe.” Kirsch showed how Stein followed and bent those classic rules, for example in the Portrait of Picasso where Stein riffs on the “exactness of resemblance”:
“Exact resemblance to exact resemblance, the exact resemblance as exact as a resemblance. Exactly as resembling exactly resembling exactly in resemblance exactly a resemblance exactly and resemblance. For this is so. Because.”
And later, in 1935, Stein sums it up, “It’s the critics who thought about form, I thought about writing.”
Between and after panels, gourmet Hans Gallas took the panelists on long promenades through San Francisco, to be rewarded by superb meals at BlueStem and Il Fornaio restaurants where everyone agreed that Gertie got it right: “Books and food, food and books, both excellent things.”

The scandal has finally reached the highest levels (so far?) with the White House striking Gertrude Stein from the list of “generations of Jewish Americans (who) have brought to bear some of our country’s greatest achievements and forever enriched our national life.” On May 1st, the beginning of Jewish Heritage Month, the list originally named Aaron Copland, Albert Einstein, Gertrude Stein and Justice Louis Brandeis. Then the controversy raged again, this time pushed by Orthodox Assemblyman Dov Hikind and Manhatten Borough President Scott Stringer’s incessant defaming of Stein as a “Nazi collaborator.” The American hysteria over Stein’s survival during the WWII has never abated. I have written a lot about it, to the point where some concerned liberal friends in Europe started wondering if enough hadn’t been said already about the topic. Now we know otherwise. On May 2nd, all the Jewish names were eliminated by the White House celebratory comments. Gertrude Stein was uninvited, an irony not lost on people who remember that in 1934, Stein and Toklas were invited by Eleanor Roosevelt to have tea with her at the White House.

Dov Hikind’s Urban Legends of Stein, “the Nazi”

Dov Hikind and his likes  who beat the drum of Stein as a Hitler lover, a fascist, a Nazi collaborator, also bullied the Metropolitan Museum in New York into including more commentary on Stein’s survival in the show “The Steins Collect,” which is on the last leg of its journey from San Francisco to Paris to New York. The New York provincialness of these battles in the press and blogosphere doesn’t even take into account that the controversy and the whole rumor mill started a whole year ago with “Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories” in San Francisco. There is no such thing as an old hat when it comes to scandal-mongering. (See even the  New Yorker blog)
I talked about Urban Legends before. Stein the Nazi now is a top favorite. In Dov Hikind’s words: “It is a matter of fact that, among other things, Stein lobbied for a Nobel Peace Prize for Adolph Hitler and was only allowed to remain in France and continue collecting art because she aided the Vichy government in its collaboration with the Nazis.”
There is not a single fact in this statement, but the more the nonsense of Dov Hikind is repeated the more it sounds like facts to people who don’t know any better. He trumpets around the notion that Stein “lost her soul”: “People need to know who owned this art and how she came to maintain it while her fellow Jews were being robbed, tortured and murdered. Indeed, the collection should be presented as collected and safeguarded by a Nazi Collaborator.”

Gertrude Stein’s War Years: Setting the Record Straight

Slowly, however, and finally, public responses are forming that bring back factual facts into the distorted picture. Some of the most eminent Stein scholars have united under Charles Bernstein to circulate a Dossier“Gertrude Stein’s War Years: Setting the Record Straight” . Ulla Dydo and Edward Burns repeat and add to their solid analysis of Stein’s survival; Joan Retallack and Marjorie Perloff join the dossier confirming their knowledge that Stein ”was no fascist.” It’s a great breath of fresh air in a poisonous atmosphere. I will write more about it, but here I would like to share how already in 1996 Burns and Dydo had debunked the rumor that Stein lobbied the Nobel Peace Price Committee for Hitler – a favorite for the Dovkinds of this world.

Stein did not campaign or lobby for Hitler and the Nobel Peace Price!

The rumor was spread in 1995 to the Israeli journal Nativ by the Committee member Gustav Hendrikksen. He was enraged by the nomination of Arafat and wanted to underscore the Jews’ failure to support their own interest– no matter to him that in 1937, Hitler had already decreed that no German could ever receive a Nobel Price in any category. Hendrikksen’s accusation was quoted in 1996 by the English language edition of Forward and subsequently denied by the office of the Nobel Peace Price Committee in Oslo. But the official correction of the outright lie has done little for Gertrude Stein’s reputation. (The evidence is found in The Letters of Thornton Wilder and Gertrude Stein by the eminent scholars Ulla Dydo and Edgar Rice.)
To be continued.