Gertrude Stein (Critical Lives) (16 page)

Stein’s working life consisted of extremes of sociability and solitude. What she did almost in her spare time, the time off from writing, came to constitute a major part of her cultural legacy. Stein’s own image for her salon, as refracted through the Alice Toklas narrator in
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
, was: ‘like a kaleidoscope slowly turning’.
¹
What this suggested was that as the years rolled by an astonishing number of bright colourful presences came and went, the dynamics shifted, but all the time there was a focal centre: Stein herself.

By writing about it she cultivated the myth of her embodiment of Left Bank bohemia, but as the lives of ‘heroic dissipation’ that went on around her became more and more well known, she became more famous for her friendships with the great than for her own work. The salon was instrumental both in building up her fame and in obscuring her literary reputation, and for years afterwards she was known for genius by association.

The litany of famous names she drops in the autobiographies and who stepped through her atelier door includes William Carlos Williams, John Dos Passos, Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy, H. D., Bryher, Wallace Stevens, Salvador Dalí, George Antheil, Jacques Lipchitz, Lincoln Steffens, John Reed, Jean Cocteau, René Crevel, Tristan Tzara, Ernest Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Paul Robeson, Erik Satie, Archibald Macleish, Josephine Baker, Hart Crane, Robert Graves, Laura Riding, Katherine Anne Porter, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Nella Larsen, Paul Bowles and Aaron Copeland. Stein kept herself permanently in vogue via the perennial rejuvenation of having young admirers and followers.

That she managed to be both the centre of the most famous salon in Paris and a writer of such stature was unprecedented. No other salonière ever achieved in her own work the sort of influence that Stein would have over the literature of her time through her own writing. It suggests an extraordinary dynamism on Stein’s part. But she was so successful as a hostess, and her writing was so audaciously different from anything else being produced, that at the time her writing was seen by the public as merely the byproduct of her persona, or even a joke. When in 1923 Carl Van Vechten, writing for the
New York Tribune
, was able to say: ‘Probably few writers are better known in this country than the American Gertrude Stein’,
²
he meant that she, not her work, was phenomenally well known.

All the more extraordinary is Stein’s rise to such a position in Paris of all places, where she was considered distinctly déclassé by traditional salon society. Salons had been authorities on taste and fashion in the arts and beyond since their heyday in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By the end of the nineteenth century the salon was a very different entity, but it was still a cultural institution.

The stereotypical image of a salon hostess suggests a glamorous, moneyed, fashionable, perhaps personally under-talented woman, encouraging the male artists around her. Stein was not that rich, nor glamorous in any traditional way; she was a rough and ready, middle-class Californian. There was not much she had in common with her forebears of the
ancien régime
like Madame de Staël, or with Madame Récamier (about whom Stein wrote a play in 1930),
³
nor even, more recently, with Madame Arman de Caillavet, at whose salon Anatole France presided, or the Jewish salonière Geneviève Straus, on whom Marcel Proust’s Duchess of Guermantes was based — or any of the
femmes savantes
of French literary and artistic history whose role was to facilitate and encourage conversation and intellectual exchange between the mainly male luminaries they surrounded themselves with. Regular meetings of salons would allow these literary and artistic lions to display their social standing. The old-style salon, as much as being a cultural meeting place, was an introduction to Parisian society, and a genteel preserve. This was how salons had always worked; one built a salon by positing oneself as the elite, and the arbiter of the elite, but one had to be part of that closed world in order to do so. The salon was an institution, and as such was ready to be demolished. The modern iconoclasts frequenting the rue de Fleurus were champing at the bit to break down the old salon culture.

When Gertrude and Leo came to Paris very few of the expatriate Americans now associated with the Left Bank had already set up home there. On the other side of the Boulevard Raspail Edith Wharton, who arrived in Paris in 1906, set herself up in emulation of the old Faubourg salons, partly in order to gain entry to that social world. Wharton, a foreigner like Stein, infiltrated the Parisian
haut monde
and to some extent made it more cosmopolitan. Stein on the other hand, when she first arrived in Paris, was neither wealthy nor well-connected, and the truly well-to-do would not have touched her with a bargepole (that included Edith Wharton — the two women lived a stone’s throw away from each other for fourteen years and never met, though they had many friends and acquaintances in common
⁴
).

The Steins’ indifference to protocol, their eccentricity and conspicuous Americanness roused antipathy, and anti-Semitism, in some. Stein of course knew that she was
persona non grata
in certain circles. This was partly because she was American, partly because she was Jewish and partly because she was middle class. That was why, after
The Autobiography
, when she had the pick of Hollywood’s own glitziest social strata as dinner companions, she made a point of distinguishing between what she had had before and this new-found fame: finally, she said, she was able to choose who she met.

The Steins’ salon was far less formal than Wharton’s. In
The
Autobiography
Stein refers to her habitués as being of ‘all degrees of wealth and poverty’; she also makes a point of adding that ‘there was no social privilege attached to knowing anyone there’.
⁵
It was all done by connections — people brought along their friends, and the question would be put: ‘de la part de qui venez-vous?’
⁶
One simply had to give a name to gain admittance, though even this was a mere formality. When in the 1920s Stein’s reputation was fixed and her home had become a place of pilgrimage, the occasional aristocrat would happen by. The Infanta Eulalia of Spain found the people ‘delightful
’
but the pictures ‘horrors!’
⁷
(Stein: ‘Somebody brought the Infanta Eulalia and brought her many times.’
⁸
) In 1908 Mary Cassatt, the American painter, had turned away in disgust, with the words:

I have never in my life seen so many dreadful paintings in one place; I have never seen so many dreadful people gathered together and I want to be taken home at once.
⁹

She was clearly expecting something more decorous from a Paris salon. Stein, happily subversive, was amused by such reactions. Many were appalled at the paintings on the Steins’ walls, and some came on purpose to ridicule or deride them.

In its first bloom the Steins’ salon was a product of the belle époque, and in reality, despite their eccentricity, they were far from being a couple of brash parvenus. Stein objected to the millionaire American collector Albert Barnes, for example, on the grounds that he came to the atelier and ‘did literally wave his cheque book in the air’.
¹⁰
In the first years of the Steins’ Saturday evenings, theirs was an artistic salon, the focus of the edification was to see the strange and shocking paintings, and to listen to Leo’s explanation of them. In
Everybody’s Autobiography
Stein writes that in those early years she was silent in the face of Leo’s dominance. The literature Gertrude Stein was producing was a back-room business. But by 1910 Stein was in charge. The salon took on a more literary atmosphere, as Gertrude Stein’s salon,
sans
Leo. She would take and mould the salon they had started together and fashion it into the myth of her own making.

Stein’s was a most ‘twentieth-century’ salon. For visitors it ‘became a kind of American oasis on the banks of the Seine’.
¹¹
It was a mass-market version of the salon at which pretty much everyone was welcome if they had an interest — visitors were trooping through in their hundreds even by 1913 and before the influx of Americans that the war brought. It was in fact more hectic before Alice stepped in and brought an element of decorum. It was an American salon in Paris, and Stein was a great declaimer on the subject of American democracy, but to say that Stein democratized the Parisian salon is going too far, because her gatherings were also all about choosing an elite; the writer Solita Solano, who was not asked to return, said sourly that they were ‘well-sieved’.
¹²
But her elite was of a more idiosyncratic sort, not based on wealth or social standing. While salons had always fostered a certain egalitarian mingling — to a limited extent, the privacy of the salon made it a place where the classes could mix — she seemed an anomalous person to be taking charge of salon culture, being Jewish, American, middle class, with a doctor’s education.

In fact Stein belongs to an illustrious line of Jewish salonières in Europe, stretching back to the eighteenth century; there was, too, the salon of the Jewish Ada Leverson in 1890s London; after the First World War, the Jewish artist Florine Stettheimer (who in the 1930s designed the striking sets for Stein’s opera
Four Saints in
Three Acts
) held a salon in New York, modelled on the Steins’.
¹³
‘Brother Singulars we are misplaced in a generation that knows not Joseph ... we fly to the kindly comfort of an older world’, Stein wrote in 1903, self-conscious about the project of creating a new American bohemia in Europe. In Stein’s case, the fact that she was from somewhere else meant that she attracted other people from other places; her own anomaly brought anomalies to her door. Being a woman, a Jew and a lesbian was synonymous in the discourse of the day with inferiority, subversiveness and degeneracy. Being an American, for Stein, was an identity that could be used to blot out and supersede all other classifications. She may have been providing a Parisian refuge for unconventional America, but she also used her distance from the country to make a novelty of her own Americanness, and to attest that precisely that unconvention was an American quality. She never relinquished her claim to an American literary tradition.

If being an expatriate American had allowed her to supplant class and ethnic classifications, just as it did for other expats in Paris, this also encompassed strange new gender identities. Stein cites Picasso’s comment on the people he encountered at the Steins’: ‘They are not men, they are not women they are Americans.’
¹⁴
27 rue de Fleurus became a home for those who considered themselves strangers and foreigners, refugees from conformity. Stein used her own marginality to the most extravagant effect. She was the epitome of unconventionality. She took advantage of the power of her exclusion, becoming the motherly mentor of all who could not find a home elsewhere. She attracted those of unexalted backgrounds, a cosmopolitan bunch of alienated souls. She was a natural show-off, and her famous laugh, her
joie de
vivre
and the warmth of her reception when she liked you were enough to make you want to come back, and bring your friends.

The ‘Picasso chairs’, embroidered by Alice.

In the expat milieu, as of old, the salon was an introduction to Paris society, but now it was a new society, a multinational artistic community.
¹⁵
Partly because of social phenomena like the salon, visual artists and writers had more opportunity and inclination for interaction in those days. It was a forum for little magazines, small presses and new collaborations, exchanges of ideas between those at work in different media. What went on at the Steins’ was philosophical debate, art appreciation and intellectual conversation. It wasn’t just tittle-tattle, as Stein’s later populist memoirs might suggest. She also gave advice which according to Natalie Clifford Barney was always immediate and pertinent. Barney called her ‘the most affirmative person I have ever met’ — and she must have met a few, being the hostess of the main rival salon in Paris.
¹⁶
Stein gave people real answers to real problems when they came to her with them. (At her suggestion, Ernest Hemingway went to Spain, Paul Bowles went to Tangier and Richard Wright came to live in Paris.) It was also of course a meeting place, both an enjoyable gathering and a way of being seen and heard. It was held not in a grandly proportioned drawing room, but rather a medium-sized, cosy living space, where you were given liqueur and homemade cakes. Hemingway said: ‘It was like one of the best rooms in the finest museum except there was a big fireplace and it was warm and comfortable.’
¹⁷
Her ‘at homes’ were just that, held from the home, and a sign of her outward-looking character that sits strangely with her internalized writings. They brought ‘genius’ into a domestic setting, just as the chairs on which they sat were lovingly embroidered by Alice Toklas from designs by Picasso. The salon was both a public and a private place, encouraging both commonality and intimacy. Some impecunious writers went because, apparently, ‘the teas were bountiful’,
¹⁸
and others went to gawp at the spectacle. There were no formal readings, though guests might be treated to an extract from Stein’s work. Stein’s dominance was above all reliant on the traditional salonière’s metier: conversation and the rule of wit.