Quoting Gertrude Stein

ack to our “cliff-hanger” (an arch comment to post # 12). Back to Gertrude and Alice’s controversial relationship. Was Gertrude Stein frigid?

Janet Malcolm (“Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice”) speculates that if there were orgasms it was only Alice who had them. Only Wifey, not Hubby. Husband Gertrude provided them to her grateful wife, and poor Gert had to make do with making literature.
How does Malcolm get there? Through prominent scholar Ulla Dydo, who has inspected the private notebooks. In “Gertrude Stein: The Language that Rises” Dydo declares about Gertrude: “Her own sexual feelings always have a babyish and cuddly tone. Baby does not experience orgasms but wants cuddling.” (I beg to disagree.) Malcolm buys this sight more or less unseen and calls it “a remarkable reversal of roles: outside the bedroom Toklas does all the work — she is cook, housekeeper, typist, secretary — but in bed it is Stein who labors: she calls herself ‘the best cow giver in all the world’.” (In Stein’s coded language “cow” stands (mainly) for orgasms.)
A remarkable reversal indeed, right back to the rigid role divisions Shari Benstock was fixated upon in the seventies. Dydo claims, “Toklas’ sexual fulfillment inspires Stein to write, which in turn represents sexual fulfillment for herself.”
Could this kind of blindness among Stein scholars and commentators have to do with the fact that we have entered the 21st century and are still as baffled and challenged by Stein as ever? Could it have to do with the fundamentalist air of our time? With the fact that some people have a hard time imagining lesbian sex other than “laboring” or one-sided or just “cuddly”?
Do me a favor and go back to the photo opening my last blog post. Look again at Gertrude on that Tuscan table top, at the turn of the century, the way she has literally burst out of the corset of convention. You don’t even have to quote her. Look at the exuberant sensuality she displays. This was the woman who would soon write long ecstatic prose poems on love and sex, texts that rise and fall in orgiastic waves. Remember that this young American of a very independent mind had studied medicine and helped birth babies. She knew where to find the clitoris when most women (and probably a lot of scholars who came later) did not. This was what interested me when I composed a photobiography of Stein. The mass of photos is revealing. When I look at her I can tell why both men (like Hemingway) and women (like Mabel Dodge Luhan) fell for Stein’s sexual magnetism, her powerful personality, the shameless way she carried her grand ampleur.
Yes, we don’t even have to quote her, but — to paraphrase her for a moment–, “Don’t worry we will.”
Hang on.

Post # 12.
“I am really almost despairing, I have really in me a very very melancholy feeling, a very melancholy being, I am really then despairing.” (The Making of Americans) This describes Gertrude before she met Alice, when she was writing “for myself and strangers” and nobody understood. All this changed when she met Alice, when Alice moved into 27, Rue de Fleurus, and brother Leo moved out. Every writer needs one good reader, just one, to not despair. For a long time, Alice was that reader, the only one able to understand, comment, and sometimes even edit Stein’s language revolution. Moreover, with Leo’s departure, the two women brilliantly and with chuzpe reinvented the European salon tradition. A salon needed a hostess (it still does) and back then it needed a male genius to be worshiped. Gertrude and Alice stepped into these roles with gusto — which of course was scandalous and created as many enemies as friends.
Even today, their life-long love is controversial. People don’t understand it and keep puzzling over it again and again. Not so long ago, some well-meaning feminists like Shari Benstock (“Women of the Left Bank”) bought into the (still circulating) cliché of Alice, the unfortunate, oppressed secretary and Girl Friday. Benstock resented their butch-femme roles as “imitating the heteronormative patterns of dominance and domesticity.” Oh dear. And just recently Janet Malcolm even upstaged Benstock (“Two LIves: Gertrude and Alice”) by doubting that Gertrude Stein had orgasms. What a hoot — if you have read, really read Stein’s passionate erotic texts. Well, perhaps you can’t really read and decypher these coded texts unless you have some serious lesbian experience under you belt (pun unintended). Voilà la question.
Stay tuned.

Post # 12. This is a sketch by Djuna Barnes:

Gertrude Stein was a “clinical case of megalomania” (Tristan Tzara). A “dictator of art” (Man Ray). Her writing was a “cold suet-roll of reptilian length…all fat without nerve” (French critic Marcel Brion); a “sausage, by-the-yard-variety” (Wyndham Lewis). Stein was controversial from day one.

As we are dealing right now with the “Rose” controversy (see previous post), I will digress a bit from my main topics — my struggle to embrace my muse, and her famous American lecture tour, 75 years ago. As for the latter, here is a charming account of the tour on Hans Gallas’s website that you can follow along in rhymes and have fun: http://gertrudeandalice.com/blog/.
I can’t tell you how often I felt discouraged in my own writing by controversy, misunderstanding or non-response to a book or article or multimedia work — and then just as often my thoughts would go to Gertrude, to the much greater silence, scorn and ridicule she had to suffer with almost everything she wrote, until she was 59 and had her first success… I took courage from her, all the time wondering how she managed to keep up the conviction and self-belief and go on writing.
“In my generation I am the only one.” “I am a genius.” “I don’t care to say whether I am greater than Shakespeare, and he’s dead and can’t say whether he’s greater than I am. Time will tell.”
How did she do it?
I am proud to say that when I composed my photobiography, sifting through her work, reading and reading again, I found many answers to this question. Almost as if my Muse was speaking to me… Answers in her photographs as well as in her writing. I will share a few of them with you as I go along. But here, right off the bat, is one of them. A most evident, powerful one, in one single word: Alice.
Stay tuned.

Post # 10. “Before the flowers of friendship faded friendship faded.” This family photo shows Gertrude, freshly settled in Paris with brother Leo (left), in 1907, a few years before their friendship faded.
I was going to tell you how moving to Paris, my new “hometown,” helped me to finally befriend Gertrude Stein, the unreadable writer. Well, twice before I had felt a flash-like connection with my difficult muse. When I heard the quote about friendship my small life experience as a school girl went, Aha! — and again when I read in “Poetry and Grammar” how “commas are holding your coat for you.”
“Poetry and Grammar,” a lecture Gertrude had given on her America tour, was a treasure that came with me when I moved away from Germany. I still have the copy, dog-eared and faded, and I used to stare at those sentences, Stein’s ruminations on what makes a sentence and what makes a paragraph, like young Coco Chanel used to stare at striped sailor shirts on the coast of Normandy. Which brings me to Paris.
“That is why writers have to have two countries, the one where they belong and the one in which they live really. The second one is romantic, it is separate from themselves, it is not real but it is really there.” A friend handed me the small book called “Paris France” (no comma). I opened it and started laughing. Already on page one, where she comments on the comedy of French traffic wars between cars and pedestrians, I recognized the Paris I knew. “If anybody jumps back or jumps at all in the streets of Paris you can be sure they are foreign not french.”
A little later she says,”A frenchman always goes completely to pieces when his mother dies,” and the absurd “always” in this sentence cracked me up. I recognized what I had already observed in different terms: that French men allowed themselves a certain femininity and even hystericalness whereas French women had permission to be sharp-minded and outright sexual. This fascinating balance within gender, the harmony between logic and fashion that Stein describes as elements of civilization was something I knew. She calls the mixture “peaceful and exciting”, and I knew what she meant and I knew that suddenly I could read Gertrude Stein.

“One cannot come back too often to the question what is knowledge and to the answer knowledge is what one knows.” (“Lectures in America”)

Post # 9. So, Gertrude (with Alice, of course) is back in her country and there will be a lot of firsts: she is filmed by Pathé News at the Algonquin Hotel (she quotes “Pigeons on the grass, alas”), signs books at Brentano’s, has her first radio broadcast at the NBC Studio in New York, and takes her first airplane flight: “…when I looked at the earth I saw all the lines of cubism made at a time when not any painter had ever gone up in an airplane. I saw there on the earth the mingling lines of Picasso, coming and going, developing and destroying themselves, I saw the wandering lines of Masson, yes I saw and once more I knew that a creator is contemporary, he understands what is contemporary when the contemporaries do not yet know it…”
She is interviewed by a dashing young reporter named Walter Cronkite, she has photo sessions with Carl van Vechten and later, at the Hotel Mark Hopkins in San Francisco, with Imogen Cunningham. She starts her lecture tour in NY, speaking first to members of the Museum of Modern Art. She sees “Lohengrin” and “Salome” at the Chicago Grand Opera, but more importantly, the Chicago premiere of her own opera,”Three Saints in Four Acts” (conducted by its composer, Virgil Thomson) at the Auditorium Theatre. She has tea with Eleanor Roosevelt, eats “superlative lemon pies” and enjoys being a “lion”: “It was pleasant being a lion, and meeting the people who make it pleasant to you to be a lion.”
We can leave her for a moment and come back, in my next blog post, to how I learned to read Gertrude Stein…
Stay tuned.

Post # 8: “To have a hat it is as pleasant as that to have a hat.” Arrival in New York, Oct. 24, 1934, welcomed by the press.

“The descriptions of what Miss Stein wore, by the male band of reporters, were sometimes more extreme than the clothes themselves. …Her hat was called a braumeister’s cap, a deerstalker’s cap and a grouse-hunter’s cap. It was a small gray tweed, it was mannish, its brim turned down ‘visor-like so that it gave a squirrel-like appearance to her face.’ One observer explained:
‘A strange article, apparently a compromise between feminine toque and male cap; black and white tweed, with visor in front and coy upcurl at rear.’
Another… ‘A Stein hat, a hat as persistent as the repetitions which are a feature of her abstruse writings. … Peaked in front…it roamed backward tightly…to fold at the rear; a gay hat which gave her the appearance of having just sprung from Robin Hood’s forest.’…
…the hat that attracted so much attention was old. It was especially modeled for miss Stein after a Louis XIII, that is, thirteenth century hat which Miss Toklas saw and liked in the Cluny Museum. In answer to a question, Miss Stein said:
‘It’s just a hat.’” (From W. G. Rogers, “When This You See Remember Me”
The New Yorker featured a cartoon with two customs officials next to a ship, looking at some paper forms, puzzled: “It begins like this: ‘Gertrude says four hats is a hat is a hat.’ What the hell can you make out of a declaration like that, chief?”