Gertrude Stein (1874-1946)

Gertrude Stein (1874-1946)
American writer, eccentric, whose Paris home was a salon for the Cubist and experimental artist and writers, among them Henri Matisse, Sherwood Anderson, Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. In Paris Stein became a legend with her Roman senator haircut, verbal facility and especially surviving the German occupation and percecution of sexual minorities and Jews in France.
"Most of us balk at her soporific rigmaroles, her echolaliac incantations, her half-witted-sounding catalogues on numbers; most of us read her less and less. Yet, remembering especially her early work, we are still always aware of her presence in the background of contemporary literature - and we picture her as the great pyramidal Buddha of Jo Davidson's statue of her, eternally and placidly ruminating the gradual developments of the process of being, registering the vibrations of a psychological country like some august human seismograph whose charts we haven't the training to read." (Edmund Wilson in Axel's Castle, 1931)
Gertrude Stein was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, of educated German-Jewish immigrants. Her father, Daniel Stein, was a traction-company executive, who had become wealthy through his investments in street railroads and real estate. His business took the family for four years to Vienna and Paris, when Stein was a child. In 1879 the family returned to America. She made SUBSEQUENTLY with her parents several cultural trips to Europe. In 1893 Stein entered Harvard Annex (now Radcliffe College) in Cambridge. She studied psychology under William James (1842-1910) and experimented with automatic writing under his direction. James also visited Stein in Paris in 1908. After studies at Johns Hopkins medical school, Gertrude Stein moved to Paris. She lived there from 1903 with her brother Leo, and from 1914 with her life companion, Alice B. Toklas, an accomplished cook for the salon's guests at the 27 Rue de Fleurus flat, near Luxembourg Gardens. Her salon attracted intellectuals and artists to discuss new ideas in art and politics. In the atmosphere of creative energy, Stein also wanted to produce a literary version of the new art. As a writer Stein made her debut with THREE LIVES (1909), clearly influenced by the Jameses, novelist Henry and psychologist William. The book was based on a reworking of a late Flaubert text called Trois Contes. She and her brother started to collect works by contemporary painters.

She also tried to connect theories of Cubism to literature, as in the essay COMPOSITION AS EXPLANATION (1926), which was based on her lectures at Cambridge and Oxford. After differences emerged between the Cubists and the post-Impressionists, Stein sided with the former while her brother Leo championed the latter. In her book about Picasso (1938) Stein recalled that in 1909 the artist showed her some photographs of a Spanish village to demonstrate how Cubist in reality they appeared. According to Stein, Picasso's paintings, such as 'Horta de Ebro' and 'Maison sur la colline' were almost exactly like the photographs. Her modernist literary style Stein lauched with THE MAKING OF AMERICANS, written between 1906 and 1908 but not published until 1925. Stein tried to translate in it Cubist paintings into a prose form and present an object or an experience from every angle simultaneously. The effect was reinforced by minimal use of punctuation. In the course of the book's 925 pages Stein's family history became a history of whole humanity. In 1914 Stein published the poetry collection TENDER BUTTONS. It presented a series of still lives, such as 'A Chair', 'A Box', 'Roastbeef', and 'End of Summer'. Each of these is characterized by unexpected phrases that collide. When England declared war on Germany, Stein was visiting the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead in England, with her lover Toklas. After a brief trip to Majorca in 1915 they returned to Paris, joining the American Fund For French Wounded. She and Toklas received the French government's Medaille de la Reconnaissance Française in 1922. "America is my country and Paris is my home town and it is as it has come to be. After all anybody is as their land and air is. Anybody is as the sky is low or high, the air heavy or clean and anybody is as there is wind or no wind there. It is that which makes them and the arts they make and the work they do and the way they eat and the way they drink and the way they learn and everything" (from 'An American and France,' 1936)
In 1934 Stein travelled to New York. Her opera, FOUR SAINTS IN THREE ACTS, music composed by Virgil Thomson, had become A huge success with an all-black cast. She toured America and returned to France next year. Toklas and Stein were both Jews, but they remained in France during World War II, living under the protection of Pétain in various country houses. In December 1944 they returned to Paris. Stein's war memoirs, WARS I HAVE SEEN, appeared in 1945. Stein's best known work, THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ALICE B. TOKLAS, is actually her own autobiography. The last years of her live Stein suffered from cancer.

She died on 27 July 1946 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France. Toklas lived on until 1967. Her memoirs, What is Remembered, appeared in 1963. Although Stein's output is characteristic of high modernism, she also had a strong influence on such popular writer as Ernest Hemingway, who combined her use of repetitive patterns with vernacular speech. For further reading: Gertrude Stein by E. Sprigge (1957); Charmed Circle by James R. Mellow (1974); Everybody Who Was Anobody by Janet Hobhouse (1975); Language and Time and Gertrude Stein by C.F. Copeland (1975); Lesbian Images by J. Rule (1975); Different Language by M.A. De-Kove (1983); The Structure of Obscurity by R.K. Dubnick (1984); The Third Rose: Gertrude Stein and Her World by J.M. Brinnin (1987); Gertrude Stein by B.L. Knapp (1990); Gertrude and Alice by Diane Souhami (1991) - - Note: Stein launched the phrase 'There's no there, there', originally applied to suburbanised American cities, but now used to describe the de-centered Internet. - SEE ALSO: Richard Wright
Selected bibliography:
· THREE LIVES, 1909 (from Flaubert's Trois Contes)
· TENDER BUTTONS, 1914
· A MOVIE, 1920
· REREAD ANOTHER, 1921
· OBJECTS LIE ON TABLE, 1922
· SAINTS AND SINGING, 1922
· GEOGRAPHY AND PLAYS, 1922
· AM I TO GO OR L'LL SAY SO, 1923
· CAPITAL CAPITALS, 1923
· A LIST, 1923
· THE MAKING AMERICANS, 1925
· COMPOSITION AS EXPLANATION, 1926
· CONCLUDING WITH AS A WIFE HAS ACOW, 1926
· A LYRICAL OPERA MADE BY TWO TO BE SUNG, 1928
· A BOUQUET, THEIR WILLS, 1928
· A VILLAGE, 1928
· FOUR SAINTS IN THREE ACTS, 1929 (with V. Thomson)
· USEFUL KNOWLEDGE, 1929
· DEUX SOEURS QUI SONT PAS SOEURS, 1929
· AT PRESENT, 1930
· LOUIS XI AND MADAME GIRAUD, 1930
· MADAME RECAMIER, 1930
· PARLOR, 1930
· THEY WEIGHED WEIGHLAYED, 1930
· SIX PORTRAITS, 1930
· LUCY CHURCH, AMIABLY, 1930
· THE FIVE GEORGES, 1931
· CIVILIZATION, 1931
· HOW TO WRITE, 1931
· THEY MUST BE WEDDED, TO THEIR WIFE, 1931
· SAY IT WITH FLOWERS, 1931
· LYNN AND THE COLLEGE DE FRANCE, 1931
· MATISSE, PICASSO AND GERTRUDE STEIN, 1932
· THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ALICE B. TOKLAS, 1933 - Alice B. Toklasin omaelämäkerta
· FOUR SAITS IN THREE ACTS, 1934
· PORTRAITS AND PRAYERS, 1934
· LECTURES IN AMERICA, 1935
· NARRATION, 1935
· THE GEOGRAPHICAL HISTORY OF AMERICA, 1936
· A WEDDING BOUQUET, 1937
· EVERYBODY'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY, 1937
· PICASSO, 1938
· THE WORLD IS ROUND, 1939
· PARIS, FRANCE, 1940
· WHAT ARE MASTERPIECES?
· IDA, 1941 - suom.

(1988)
· WARS I HAVE SEEN, 1945
· BREWSIE AND WILLIE, 1946
· THE FIRST READER, 1946
· SELECTED WRITINGS, 1946 (ed. C. Van Vechten)
· IN SAVOY, 1946
· THE MOTHER OF US ALL, 1947
· FOUR IN AMERICA, 1947
· BLOOD ON THE DINING-ROOM FLOOR, 1948
· LAST OPERAS AND PLAYS, 1949
· THE THINGS AS THEY ARE, 1950
· TWO, 1951
· MRS REYNOLDS AND FIVE EARLIER NOVELLETTES, 1953
· AS FINE AS MELANCTHA, 1954
· PAINTED LACE AND OTHER PIECES, 1955
· A NOVEL OF THAK YOU, 1955
· STANZAS IN MEDITATIONAND OTHER POEMS, 1956
· BEE TIME VINE AND OTHER PIECES, 1957
· ALPHABETS AND BIRTHDAYS, 1957
· LOOK AT ME AND HERE I AM, 1967
· LUCRECIA BORGIA, 1968
· GERTRUDE STEIN ON PICASSO, 1970
· CORRESPONDENCE AND PERSONAL ESSAYS, 1972
· FERNHURST, QED AND OTHER EARLY WRITINGS, 1972
· PREVIOUSLY UNCOLLECTED WRITINGS, 1974
· THE LETTERS OF GERTRUDE STEIN AND CARL VAN VECHTEN 1913-1946, 1986
· REALLY READING GERTRUDE STEIN, 1989
· LIFTING BELLY, 1989.