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Life & Times

About the Author

‘I know that I am the most important writer writing today,’ Gertrude Stein declared in a 1937 memoir, a statement that, even at the time, would have sparked lively debate. During the early decades of the twentieth century, she had produced novels, poems and plays, much of her work being written in an iconic experimental style that her admirers considered daring, her critics nonsensical. But there is little doubt that Stein was one of the most important artistic figures of her day. As a writer, she challenged the established boundaries of the English language; as an art collector, she amassed and exhibited an extraordinary hoard of era-defining paintings; and as an unapologetically gay woman, she lived her life in the public eye with an openness that would still be remarkable today.

‘There is No There There’

Gertrude Stein was born in Pennsylvania in February 1874, the youngest child of wealthy Jewish parents. Her early years were spent in Europe, notably in the artistic and cultural hub of Vienna, but the family returned to the United States when Gertrude was four. They lived in Oakland, California, for fourteen years, a period during which both parents passed away and Stein’s brother Michael assumed responsibility for the family. Revisiting her neighbourhood many years later and finding it unrecognisably altered, Stein famously commented that ‘there is no there there’.

Michael Stein sent his eighteen-year-old sister to live in Baltimore, Maryland, with an uncle and aunt. There was certainly ‘there’ here on the East Coast: Stein first attended Radcliffe College (part of Harvard University) to study psychology, and then went to medical school at Johns Hopkins. She was never overly enthusiastic about these scientific studies, but her university years threw her into the company of women who would awaken both her sexuality and her imagination.

Baltimore would later become the setting for Stein’s first published book, Three Lives (1909). It was also where she made the acquaintance of the Cone sisters, Claribel and Etta, just a few years older than her but already making their names as art collectors and patrons. Under their influence, Stein discovered an exhilarating new world of art, artists and creative collaboration. She never looked back.

The Lost Generation

In 1902, Stein’s most beloved sibling, her brother Leo, left the United States for Europe to make a career for himself in the art world. She followed him to London and then to Paris, where they lived together for over a decade. Their house and studio at 27 rue de Fleurus became a focal point of the Parisian arts scene, filled as it was with an increasing – and increasingly valuable – collection of paintings by both established artists such as Cézanne and newer names such as Matisse and Picasso. The latter was so grateful for Stein’s early patronage that he painted her portrait, a piece she later bequeathed to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

As word of their acquisitions and illustrious social circle spread, the Steins came, almost by accident, to host a weekly artistic salon. As she later explained in her autobiography, ‘Little by little people began to come to the rue de Fleurus to see the Matisses and the Cézannes. Matisse brought people, everybody brought somebody, and they came at any time and it began to be a nuisance, and it was in this way that Saturday evenings began.’

The salon drew in not only up-and-coming artists but also young writers, among them Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ezra Pound. Many of these, two decades younger than Stein, fell into what she termed the ‘Lost Generation’: those who came of age during the First World War and found themselves disorientated and disillusioned in its aftermath. Hemingway used Stein’s assessment – ‘You are all a lost generation’ – as the epigraph for The Sun Always Rises, his 1926 novel about mid-twenties life as a young man in Europe.

Pictures and Words

The friendship between Stein and Picasso was fruitful for both their careers: her enthusiastic support gave him the financial freedom to keep painting, and his early experiments in what became known as Cubism inspired her to apply similarly controversial styles to her writing. Where Picasso and his peers would deconstruct familiar objects into their constituent shapes, Stein began to employ a mode of writing that was hypnotically fragmented and simplified. The best-known example of this is her modernist novel The Making of Americans, which she completed in 1911. Its repetitive style – ‘I hear it and I love it and I write it. They repeat it. They live it and I see it and I hear it. They live it and I hear it and I see it and I love it and now and always I will write it.’ – prompted London publisher Arthur C. Fifield to pen his rejection in the same manner: ‘Only one look, only one look is enough. Hardly one copy would sell here. Hardly one. Hardly one.’

It was during the writing of The Making of Americans that Stein published her first book, Three Lives, a trio of stories about working-class women in Baltimore. Though the stories are unrelated, together they paint a vivid portrait of life as a powerless woman in turn-of-the-century America. Anna, Melanctha and Lena live quietly and die in obscurity, but each of them has a complex inner life – a web of dreams and aspirations – that Stein gradually teases from behind the façade of their ordinary lives. This technique was entirely deliberate, and once again was inspired by a work of art: Cézanne’s ‘Portrait of Madame Cézanne’ (1881), which hung above Stein’s writing desk. She later explained that the more she looked at the painting, the more it revealed its manner of composition: layer upon layer of colour and texture until the complete image was ‘structured into existence’. ‘So it was with Gertrude’s repetitive sentences,’ she wrote of herself, ‘each one building up, phrase by phrase, the substance of her characters.’

Alice B. Toklas

Stein had her brother Leo to thank for bringing her with him into the Parisian artistic scene, but from 1907 until her death in 1946 it was Alice B. Toklas who helped cement her legacy there. Toklas, also an American Jew, had been in Paris less than a day when she met Stein at a party. They began a relationship that lasted for the rest of Stein’s life, with Toklas – as muse and ‘wife’ – soon becoming the hostess of the rue de Fleurus salon, a development often credited with causing a permanent rift between Stein and Leo, who moved out in 1914.

Toklas was propelled into the limelight in 1933, when The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas – Stein’s own memoir, written as if by her partner – was published to great acclaim; it became her best-selling work. In 1937 Stein published a sequel in her own voice, Everybody’s Autobiography, in which she offered some candid assessments of her place in history: ‘Einstein was the creative philosophic mind of the century, and I have been the creative literary mind of the century.’

Toklas was with Stein when she died in Paris at the age of seventy-two. Fittingly, even her final words were a linguistic puzzle. ‘What is the answer?’ Stein demanded of Toklas, who failed to find a response. ‘Then what is the question?’

Alice B. Toklas died in 1967 and was buried beside Gertrude Stein in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.