GERTRUDE STEIN: An Afterlife, by Francesca Wade
Since her death in 1946, Gertrude Stein has proved a boon for biographers but a quagmire for critics. Her celebrity is incontestable; her status as a genius — she recognized only three in her lifetime: Picasso, the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead and herself — less so. Younger writers, including those like Hemingway and Fitzgerald whom she dubbed the Lost Generation, made the pilgrimage to the Paris apartment she shared with her partner, Alice B. Toklas, to listen to her pronouncements and gape at the astonishing paintings on the walls.
In Stein’s triumphalist view, Picasso had killed off 19th-century art just as her own experimental writing — not James Joyce’s or T.S. Eliot’s or Virginia Woolf’s — had put the era’s literature out of its misery. Stein’s latest biographer, Francesca Wade, takes Stein at her word. In her buoyant if somewhat boosterish “afterlife,” Wade — the author of “Square Haunting” (2020), about Woolf and four other women writers working in proximity in London between the wars — describes Stein’s multiple sittings in 24-year-old Picasso’s shabby Montmartre studio as “the birth of modern art and literature.” When Stein complained that Picasso’s proto-Cubist portrait didn’t look like her, he responded, “It will.”
Not everyone agreed with Stein’s high assessment of her own work. Woolf rejected Stein’s family saga, “The Making of Americans,” for her publishing house. “We are lying crushed under an immense manuscript of Gertrude Stein,” she wrote. “I cannot brisk myself up to deal with it.” Eliot, with whom Stein once engaged in “a stiff conversation about split infinitives,” warned that if future writers followed her transgressive lead, a “new barbarian age” would result.
Wade, by contrast, translates even Stein’s seeming shortcomings into strengths. She quotes from “Melanctha” (1909), Stein’s portrait of a biracial woman in a fictional city based on Baltimore, where Stein had lived during her younger life: “More and more every day now they seemed to know more really, what it was each other one was always feeling.” In such passages, Stein “was not aiming to approximate realistic dialect,” Wade writes, “but to liberate language from literary conventions altogether.” Maybe, though the novelist Richard Wright, grateful for this early attempt to record Black experience, said that “Miss Stein’s struggling words made the speech of the people around me vivid.”
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