The Duchess Who Wouldn't Sit Down

by Jesse Browner

  From the very beginning, the Steins' Saturday "at homes" were essentially open houses. All you needed was an introduction to attend. "De la part de qui venezvous?rr Gertrude would ask at the door. "By whose invitation are you here?" On at least one occasion, the new arrival was there by her own invitation, which she had extended and promptly forgotten. He would be ushered through the interior courtyard into the crowded studio, where Leo harangued the throng with passionate and learned discourses on the new art. The paintings rose in tiers to the ceiling, the higher ones all but invisible in the dim gas light. Gertrude sat silent and Buddha-like, her legs tucked under her ample frame, on an overstuffed armchair to the side. It was a position she was to maintain with increasing comfort for the next thirty years.

  Special friends - the Matisses, the Picassos, Georges Braque, Andre Derain, Marie Laurencin, Marcel Duchamp, Marsden Hartley, Charles Demuth, Arthur Dove, a very young Joseph Stella, and the poets Guillaume Apollinaire and Max Jacob among them - were invited to supper before the salon, where they were served simple meals, roasts and omelettes. Matisse once offended the Steins' cook, Helene, by asking about the evening's menu before accepting an invitation. Helene considered such rudeness acceptable in a foreigner but not in a Frenchman, and thereafter served fried eggs instead of omelettes whenever he attended. After the meal, the artists were served up to the hungry crowd in the studio. James Mellow writes:

  Inevitably, the tourists came because it was the thing to do when one was in Paris. A few went away converted, spreading the gospel of modernism among the heathen, sending fresh troops for later visits. Others came to scoff at the pictures, barely able to conceal their laughter before the doors closed behind them. Some came purposely to bait the artists.

  The Steins bought their first Picasso, Lajeunefille aux fleurs, in 1905. Gertrude hated the painting but grudgingly allowed Leo to acquire it. When they sought out the young artist in his studio, however, she was immediately drawn to him and they struck up a friendship that was to endure for the next forty years. They spent $150 on that first visit and came away with "scores" of paintings from his blue and rose periods. The following year, after great struggle, he produced his Portrait of Gertrude Stein, an important transitional work on the way to cubism, which emerged full­blown in 1907 with Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Although he had been Picasso's initial champion, Leo reviled the new development, whereas Gertrude reveled in it. From that moment, Picasso and Gertrude owned the modernist movement, and Matisse and Leo found themselves on the sidelines. Gertrude usurped Leo's role as oracle, and young men began to gather at her feet to look and listen in veneration. It was at this juncture that she began to assume the appurtenances of "a Sumerian monument."

  It was also in 1907 (just as Ottoline Morrell was inaugurating her Thursday evenings on Bedford Square) that Gertrude first met Alice Babette Toklas, who was to become her lifelong companion and factotum, further accelerating Gertrude's alienation from her brother. Although they had been each other's vital companions in earlier years, after Leo eventually moved to Italy in 1913 they never spoke again.

  At this point, Gertrude Stein had had little success with her own writing, nor would she for many years afterward. It is true that many an intelligent critic has dismissed her talents as obscure or illusory. Her own brother (admittedly embittered) once told a friend that "you have no idea how dumb she is" and that "Gertrude can't think consecutively for ten seconds," but that is beside the point. Much of her work may be impenetrable and numbingly repetitive, but there is no doubt that no one was writing like her at the time, and since she was at least partially responsible for discovering the work of the century's best artists when they had few other boosters, she may perhaps be forgiven for assuming her intuition to be infallible when it came to her own genius. Boastful she certainly was - intolerably so to those in whom she had no interest - but her arrogance was of far greater benefit to her artists than it ever proved to herself.

  She eventually managed to publish Three Lives in 1909 at her own expense (six hundred dollars), selling fewer than a hundred copies in the first eighteen months but garnering some favorable reviews. It also brought her work to the attention of a generation of American writers that would rise to prominence with her name balanced reverentially on the tips of their tongues, like a communion wafer. Roger Fry's writing about Stein in the Burlington Review prompted visits by Augustus John, Henry Lamb, and their patron. "There was Lady Ottoline Morrell looking like a marvelous feminine version of Disraeli and tall and strange shyly hesitating at the door," Stein would later write. Stein's reciprocating visit to Garsington a few years later was not a success, as she was unable to abide the "continuous pleasant hesitating flow of conversation, the never ceasing sound of the human voice speaking in english."

  The truth is, Stein would essentially remain a figure of ridicule and bemusement to the general public until the astounding commercial success of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas in 1933. She was the high priestess of a dangerous and arcane cult, revered by her followers, feared and maligned by the rest. Although often bitter about her lack of publishing success, especially as so many younger writers in her stable rose to fame, she was self-confident enough to amortize her image as a "pagan idol" and to scorn popular opinion. The 1913 Armory Show in New York, to which she loaned many of the most important works, only heightened that reputation, but it was the 1914 publication of Tender Buttons that sealed it, spawning a raft of malicious parodies of her style. Tender Buttons, she claimed, "had an enormous influence on all young writers and started off columnists in the newspapers of the whole country on their long campaign of ridicule." She would read the best of these out loud to Alice and chuckle.

  The outbreak of war caught her in England, visiting with Alfred North Whitehead. She and Alice spent much of the following two years in Spain, but eventually she was overcome by a strong need to involve herself in the war effort and returned to France in 1916. She had a Ford truck shipped from the United States and fitted out as an ambulance, which she drove for the American Fund for French Wounded. Throughout the rest of the war, working in Perpignan and Nimes, she delivered medical supplies and adopted numerous military "god-sons," to whom she wrote long letters after their return to the front. For her efforts, she was ultimately awarded the Medaille de la Reconnaissance Franaise.

  After the war and some civilian relief work in Alsace, she and Alice returned to the rue de Fleurus but did not resume their Saturday evenings. Too much had changed. It was "very difficult to think back and remember what happened before." Apollinaire was dead; she and Picasso were (temporarily) on the outs; Matisse was in Nice; Juan Gris was sick. "We saw a tremendous number of people but none of them as far as I can remember that we had ever known before."

  Still, Stein remained the patron saint of the avant-garde and continued to take her role seriously, befriending the young American writers and artists who flocked to Paris in the Jazz Age. By 1926, Janet Flanner was able to write in The New Yorker: "No American writer is taken more seriously than Miss Stein by the Paris modernists." Those who sought her out, called her friend, and enjoyed her hospitality included Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, Djuna Barnes, Virgil Thomson, Paul Bowles, and Glenway Wescott, but they did not come for her help and patronage - they came for her benediction.

  It is not difficult to come up with any number of reasons why Ottoline Morrell ultimately failed and Gertrude Stein succeeded as patrons and hostesses. Stein had an abundance of self-confidence and hubris where Ottoline had none. Stein's primary identity was as a creator and artist in her own right and she was able to look even the most arrogant of her benefactees in the eye. Ottoline had little "natural sufficiency" and her artists could not help but recognize and disdain the vicarious nature of her attachment to them. Both had plenty of vocal detractors, but in Stein the waves of ridicule ran up against an impervious dike, while they simply overwhelmed and swept away Morrell's castle of sand. Many of Ottoline's guests, including Virginia Woolf and D
. H. Lawrence, mistrusted and resented what they saw as her aristocratic maternalism, whereas Stein's salon was always and emphatically democratic and inclusive. Then, too, it was a question of their respective guest lists: Stein's Frenchmen, Spaniards, and Americans were thirsty and excitable, whereas Ottoline's Englishmen were jaded by class distinctions and bitter, especially during and after the war.

  All of these are reasonable and acceptable explanations, but they do not necessarily provide us with insight into the true nature of our hospitality and the secret currency of human transactions. After all, each of us knows people endowed with extraordinary arrogance or insuperable insecurities - often both together. Many may be extremely and generously hospitable, but few are so rash as to open their home and wallet (let alone the fortress of their ego) to hungry, self-centered, and ungrateful artists. And with good reason: you may be able to persuade a group of stock analysts to line up obediently before a bowl of iced Beluga and a bottle of '71 Chateau Petrus, but artists are harder to wrangle. They do not necessarily respond to the standard stimuli of hospitality. Any host determined to transform her guests into teddy bears had better stalk tamer game unless she is very sure of herself, because this exercise is certain to strip away the comforting illusions about hospitality, revealing the ugly bedrock truth that we would all prefer to remain buried: no one, wealthy arts patrons least of all, gives something for nothing. Even when she is not sure of what she is after, even when she is unconscious of having an agenda, a host expects a return on her largesse. It may be and is likely to be an intangible return, banked only in hidden vaults, but it must be made if the contract between host and guest is to prove profitable to both.

  The guest senses this even more acutely than the host - who may be blinded by a dazzling perception of her own disinterest and is constantly seeking clues and signals as to the nature of the host's desires. It is only when the host is somehow able to communicate those desires - when she has exercised her will upon her teddy bears - that the experience of her hospitality will be positive and fruitful for both. When her signals are murky and half-hearted, when she speaks her strength but acts her weakness, when she seeks more than she can or is willing to give, the guest has every right to feel cheated and to turn against his would-be partner.

  Gertrude Stein understood this. She offered leadership for solidarity, and it was a fair deal for everyone. Ottoline Morrell did not. She offered tea and cakes in return for a natural sufficiency that no one could give her. It was a preposterous proposal, and they all laughed at her. If you pretend to feed a teddy bear, he will pretend to eat, and you will both be happy. If you try to force-feed him, you will both end up covered in slop.

  CHAPTER III

  ODD FISH

  The host in the role of confidence man never inspires faith.

  Richard Ellsworth Call, The Life and Writings of Rafinesque

  In the spring of 1818, a weary traveler disembarked from a small boat on the Ohio River at the village of Henderson, Kentucky. Carrying what appeared to be a sheaf of dried clover on his back, wearing a badly stained and worn suit of yellow nankeen and pantaloons buttoned down to the ankles, and sporting a long beard and lank black hair below his shoulders, the traveler gave every appearance of being a wandering quack or herbalist of no social standing. Approaching the first person he met on the riverbank, he asked in a heavy French accent for directions to the grocer's house. The man happened to be that very grocer and told him so. The traveler then presented the grocer with a letter of introduction from a mutual acquaintance in Lexington.

  "I send you an odd fish," the brief letter read, "which you may prove to be undescribed." The grocer asked the traveler if he might see the fish. The traveler smiled with good humor.

  "I am that odd fish I presume," he said.

  In Greek, the word for hospitality is xenia, derived from xenos, meaning "stranger" or "foreigner." Although xenia was a central element of Greek culture, the word survives in common English only as the root of xenophobia, with very negative connotations. Our word hospitality, on the other hand, comes from the Latin hospes, meaning "host," as well as "guest," and which itself is a condensed form of hostipotis, meaning "lord of strangers." In other words, the Greek concept of hospitality was based on the primacy of the guest, whereas the Latin concept, which we inherited, was based on that of the host. In ancient Greece, the host always sat in the smaller chair, lower than that of the guest; with us, the host sits at the head of the table. In Greece, even the wealthiest host served simple dishes designed solely to satisfy a guest's hunger; with the Romans, as with us, elaborate culinary constructs serve mostly to highlight the host's tastes and skills. Some may argue that our espousal of the Latin model has nothing to do with cultural identity, but that is clearly not so. We choose our words to fit our ideas, and the Latin fit better than the Greek. In the West, it is the role of the host that matters, for he is lord of strangers.

  I must admit, to my chagrin, that almost everyone who gets to enjoy my hospitality is a friend, or at least someone I know. I wish I could say that, like the Greeks, we make friends and connections by offering food and shelter to strangers, but that doesn't seem to be the way in New York City. We make friends by going to someone else's house and meeting their friends, which is not terrible per se, but may be limiting. You tend to meet more people like yourself that way, people who probably don't need more friends and who are almost certainly not strangers stranded in a foreign city, for whom hospitality is more than just a pleasant way to while away an evening.

  As an example of just how limiting this approach can be, my wife and I recently learned of a dinner party given by friends of ours, to which we had not been invited. That was fine, of course, but we were dismayed to discover that they had invited friends of ours whom they had met at a dinner we had given several weeks earlier. Everyone we spoke to agreed that it was at the very least bad manners to exclude us, the introducers, from their first unmediated encounter. There was a sense of poaching in the reproach, almost as if something had been stolen from us. At the time, I shared the general feeling that a wrong had been committed, but I've changed my mind. A host, I've come to see, should aspire to be the lord of strangers, not the lord of friends of friends.

  Many anthropologists believe that hospitality arose as an adjunct to long-distance trade. Long before xenia even, Mesopotamian traveling merchants were compelled to rely on strangers for shelter in a world without hotels. Brillat-Savarin claimed that hospitality began as protection for travelers who brought news from other lands, a sort of primordial diplomatic immunity. However it may have begun, reliance on strangers for hospitality was ubiquitous in ancient and medieval Europe.

  It was also a prominent feature of life on the American frontier - such as Henderson, Kentucky, in 1818 - where white settlements were few and far between, inns and other amenities scarce, and currency either unavailable or unreliable as a means of exchange. You had little choice: if you were planning to travel west, beyond the States, you had better line up your letters of introduction well in advance, because you were going to be sleeping in the homes of strangers. You would need to feel comfortable that you could trust them, as they would you.

  The traveler in yellow and the grocer had much in common, though they didn't know it. Both were native French speakers, the sons of successful merchants, who had fled to the United States in their youth to escape being drafted into Napoleon's armies. Both had arrived in calamitous circumstances - the traveler in a near fatal shipwreck, the grocer with a near fatal case of yellow fever. Neither had a formal higher education. Both had spent arduous years of wilderness trekking throughout the vast country. Both were ambitious and driven men, yet neither was able to make any sort of a living at his chosen calling. Both were considered to be exceedingly unconventional by those who knew them, and both were naturalists. The grocer was John James Audubon, who twenty years later was to be the most celebrated artist and ornithologist in the New World. The traveler was Constantine Samuel Rafi
nesque-Schmaltz, a prolific autodidact with a modest but growing reputation as a discoverer of new species, who twenty-two years later would die alone, penniless, and unmourned in a garret on Race Street in Philadelphia. Their encounter in Henderson was, in some measure, to contribute to the fates of both.

  Whatever Audubon and Rafinesque had in common was essentially superficial, but their differences were critical. Whereas Audubon was consistently characterized as "simple" (in the sense of unaffected), Rafinesque could never shake "eccentric." Audubon was charming, handsome, and well-groomed, a born storyteller and talented musician at a time when and in a place where home entertainment was pretty much the only entertainment. Although the next few years were to prove extremely difficult for him following a painful bankruptcy, he was always able to get what he needed out of people, especially women. He had a devoted and doting family willing to put up with years of absence and penury for the sake of his professional advancement.

  Rafinesque, on the other hand, was perennially unkempt, physically unimposing, socially awkward, absentminded, and the object of some ridicule and contempt among his peers. In the 1890s, Richard Ellsworth Call interviewed several people who had known him in their youth: "Careless of his style of dressing, indeed, his clothes never fitted him and appeared to have been made for some one e l s e . . . an eccentric man"; "a man of peculiar habits and . . . very eccentric"; "He was a stranger . . . all the young people made jokes at his expense . . . he knew none of the arts that make a man popular"; "A small, peculiar looking Italian . . . very scientific, absorbed in his books and his bugs, his researches and his writings . . . an innocent, inoffensive sort of man."