The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Carl Van Vechten, 1913-1946
Page 35
Always
Gertrude
1. See Van Vechten to Stein [1 December 1934].
2. The two enclosures are lost or missing.
To Carl Van Vechten
[Telegram]
[4 December 1934] [The Drake Hotel, Chicago]
MRS [Mahala] DOUGLAS INVITED US IN CHARMING NOTE JUST RECEIVED FOR WEEK END STOP WE WOULD LIKE TO ACCEPT STOP WONT YOU COME TOO STOP WE FLY FROM MADISON WISCONSIN FRIDAY MORNING TEN OCLOCK STOP DO SAY WE WILL FIND YOU ON PLANE FRIDAY MORNING AT MADISON STOP ENDLESS LOVE1
GERTRUDE ALICE
1. Douglas to Stein, 30 November [1934], UCAL.
To Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas
[4 December 1934]
Tuesday 150 West Fifty-fifth Street
[New York]
Dear Woojums, BOTH!
How sweet of you to telegraph me to join at Mahala [Douglas]’s: nothing would give me greater pleasure, but it is absolutely impossible this coming weekend. BUT YOU MUST GO. YOU WILL LOVE IT: YOU ARE SURE TO. BESIDES YOU MUST SEE SOMETHING OF RICH AMERICAN COUNTRY LIFE. I’ll be seeing you soon somewhere. How much longer is the Drake your address?
LOVE,
Carlo!
Bennett [Cerf] and Donald [Klopfer] got their pictures yesterday. This means everybody you told me about except [Alexander] Woollcott whose picture is ready for you to sign and give him.x
Do you know who in N[ew] Y[ork] sells that Pigeon wallpaper?1
xI want to take some more when you get back.
1. Stein and Toklas had seen a wallpaper, white pigeons on a blue background, at the shop of Nancy McClelland, a decorator, at 15 East Fifty-seventh Street, New York. They later ordered this paper and used it in the bedroom of their apartment at 5 rue Christine. See McClelland to Stein, 3 May 1938, YCAL.
To Gertrude Stein
[Telegram]
5 December [1934] New York
HAVE IT HAPPILY WITH A SPOON TONIGHT AND REMEMBER THAT YOU ARE BOTH ROYAL WOOJUMS
CARLO
To Carl Van Vechten
[postmark: 5 December 1934] The Drake [Hotel]
Chicago [Illinois]
My dearest Carl,
I am glad you are going to be somewhere with us because we do want you and we do need you and we do like to have you and it’s wonderful to do so. I enjoyed myself immensely last night. President [Robert] Hutchins and [Mortimer] Adler asked me to take their conversational class with them last night, a course in which they teach by talking with the students and I took it on and I had a wonderful time just enjoyed every minute of it, and we are to come back in March for 2 weeks and a half for a regular course. I xpect to enjoy it a lot, they are interesting students and they say good things to you and they catch you up and it goes hammer and tongs pretty well and I liked it I liked it a lot, it lasted amost two hours and I guess a good time was enjoyed by all. They are an interesting lot of Chicago students and why not nice it is your college,1 but really truly I am awfully happy about all this because it is xactly what I wanted and it has so beautifully come about and just in the right way without anybody pushing but just naturally, just the Carl way, well here we are our last day in Chicago and now into the great prairie wilderness, and soon we will see you, and I will report from every town, you also will be pleased that the plane did not stop at Iowa City and we had to get to Iowa City and we could not get there by the train because it would take too long so the postmaster general is stopping the plane for us in Iowa City, is not that Woojumesque and it should and would and does happen in Iowa after all Carl’s Iowa so you see well that is the way it is, dear Carl I can’t tell you how much we love you and how we grab for the red envelopes, and lots of love and so much love and Fania and I hope it all ended well and that it will all begin again soon, but it will as she has the light and the life of the Play,2
lots of love,
Gtde.
Oh Carl and could [Alexander] Smallens who directed the Four Saints orchestra have a photograph with my name and yours by the way I dedicated Mrs. Goodspeed’s which is being framed from you and from me, and she wants one of Alice, you see we are shameless but to know to know to love them so, four Saints prepare for Saints and there we are there we all are, I wish you were here
Gertrude3
1. Van Vechten graduated from the University of Chicago in the spring of 1903.
2. See Van Vechten to Stein [3 December 1934], note 3.
3. Included with the letter were two cartoons by McCutcheon that had appeared in the Sunday Chicago Tribune, 2 December 1934 (YCAL). At the top of one cartoon Stein wrote, “A pleasant winter landscape as the orthodox painter would represent it.” Below the second cartoon she wrote, “As the ultra-modernist painter would claim he saw it.” On the page with the cartoons Stein also wrote, “Proof of the McCutcheon cartoon to come out next Sunday.”
To Carl Van Vechten
6 December [19]34 The Wisconsin Union
University of Wisconsin
[Madison, Wisconsin]
Dearest Carl—
Here we are in Wisconsin and no you and no you tomorrow nor the day after tomorrow. Well I ask you when then may we hope you’ll come flying to us? The lectures here went beautifully—students and faculty afternoon and eve. Then G[ertrude]. met about 30 afterwards and we’ve just come up. They’ve made us very comfy with excellent food and kindness. Chicago is marvelous—the university—I mean G’s being asked there for March. It was so exciting G. didn’t sleep and I dreamed all night a locomotive ran over me—each time freshly. It was all accomplished by being correct as you said we should be.
Tomorrow to St. Paul—we will be staying at some stage of our stay.
The eve. of the 10th c/o University of Iowa—Iowa City
" " " " 11th " Book - Cadillac Hotel—Detroit
Probably until " 15th " " " " "
And I’ll continue to send itinerary.
Very sleepely—very fondly
Alice
When does Fania go to Bermuda? She’s not too tired I hope and my dearest love and we want to see her in something new in Jan[uary].
To Carl Van Vechten
[postmark: 8 December 1934] Hotel Lowry
Fourth and Wabasha Sts.
St. Paul, Minnesota
My dearest Carl,
Here we are. We have seen Mahala [Douglas] and she was very sweet brought us beautiful flowers but we are not there because she was afraid lest the blizzard that was predicted would keep us from coming in in the evening to lecture which would have been awkward so we are lunching with her on Sunday.1 I do so wish you might be there. We had a wonderful time flying from Madison here, we went in a little moth plane just the two of us and the pilot, no stewardess no nothing and we flew low over the snow covered country and I never saw or felt anything like it, I am still all filled up with emotion about it, oh Carl bless you for everything but bless you most perhaps most for making us fly, it is wonderful, wonderful wonderful, the lectures in Madison went off very well both of them given in the University, very intelligent students and one youn[g] professor in the history of language who was one of the very best people I have met yet, it was the English literature one that I gave them, then there is a bedside radio the first hotel that has had one, and that too is sweetly funny because it seems to be all local radio, well we are enjoying ourselves the Woojums are and they only wish Mr. Woojums would Woojum with them here or somewhere dear dear Carl we love you so
Always
Gertrude
Oh and Carl do please ask Frank Case if he got the letter of thanks I wrote him the first day in Chicago, these letters seem to have gotten themselves not mailed and I would not like him to think me ungrateful.
1. Note by Van Vechten, 22 January 1941: “Mrs. Walter Douglas of Minneapolis. I wrote her to look after them.”
To Gertrude Stein
[10 December 1934]
Monday 150 West Fifty-fifth Street
New York City
Dearest Gertrude,
I
have had such wonderful letters from you but until this morning when I heard from Woojums Alice I didn’t know where to write. So here I am sending you back your poem and your telegram.1 Mrs. Hahner and [Alexander] Smallens will get pictures of you and Bobsie Goodspeed will get a picture of Alice but don’t you think I should wait till you can sign them all, please! So I will wait till you can sign them and then we will send with our blessing. I am very excited about your March lectures and about their stopping planes wherever you want them to stop… The weather here is very cold, like Whittier’s SnowBound, without the snow. Or like a Currier and Ives print without the sleighs, but the bustles and tippets and muffs and all that are here,x and I think you would love it. Everybody misses you, but the great public thinks you are still here because your name is in every story that is printed in the papers including accounts of the Six Day Bicycle Race. I hope you get this letter and I send you lots of love and did you go to Mahala [Douglas] and did you like her?
78(789)65 yellow pumpkins to you both!
Carlo!
EDith and PEarl send love and F[ania] M[arinoff] has gone to Bermuda where she is resting in the HEAT at the Hotel Langton in Hamilton.2
Just as I am sealing this your letter from St. Paul arrived. Frank Case did get the letter of thanks. He spoke of it the other day and was very proud and happy and wants you back QUICK as do we all.
xagain.
1. See Stein to Van Vechten [3 December 1934].
2. Edith Ramsey and Pearl Showers, the Van Vechtens’ household staff.
To Carl Van Vechten
[postmark: 12 December 1934] Hotel Book-Cadillac
Detroit [Michigan]
My dearest Carl,
Here we are and we were met so sweetly by your letter, we came on a Douglas plane that had only been flying a week and it was enormous and silent and commodious and Carl, don’t you think it would be nice to buy a second hand plane of the Hanford Line and we all three pilot it together here and there, don’t you think the three Woojums would be lovely woojum pilots up above the sky so high, all by themselves, we spent the day with Mahala [Douglas] and enjoyed it, I think we all liked each other a lot and made up our minds to meet again, in Pasadena, she was charming to us, and we delighted in hearing all about Carl as a very young man, and they told us such nice stories and how everybody sat around and said and what is he doing now and now what is he doing, and at first they were so shocked and then they were so proud. Her brother was there and he drove us back to St Paul and he talked charmingly about you and we had a very pleasant time. Then we had our first air affair, we left St. Paul for Chicago to change for Iowa City as per front man and programme, and the plane did not want to leave the ground, finally after a great deal of coaxing it did and we were on our way, then they suddenly announced after being very considerably later that they were stopping in Milwaukee, Alice protested, and the second assistant pilot who was also a steward said Lady wouldn’t you rather be even in Milwaukee than in your coffin, well Milwaukee it was and there they put us in a tram-car for Chicago where apparently was raging quite locally the worst blizzard they had had for some years, the Goodspeeds tried to get to the air-port to get us as they were worried their car got on fire, we did not turn up and finally we all got home that is Chicago and got to bed, but it was xciting. And now here we are, and next is Ann Arbor then Indianapolis, Toledo, Columbus and then Baltimore, and always dearest dearest Carl all our love
Gertrude.
To Carl Van Vechten
[Telegram]
13 December 1934 Detroit, Mich[igan]
JOSEPH BREWER TAKES US TODAY TO SPEND THE NIGHT AT OLIVET AND TOMORROW TO ANNARBOR STOP HOTEL CLAYPOOL INDIANAPOLIS FOR THE FIFTEENTH STOP THE WOOJUMS WELL AND HAPPY BUT LONESOME FOR THEIR CHIEF SEND ENDLESS LOVE1
GERTRUDE AND ALICE.
1. Joseph Brewer had been with the firm of Payson & Clarke when they published Stein’s Useful Knowledge in 1928. Brewer was president of Olivet College, Olivet, Michigan, from 1934 to 1944.
To Carl Van Vechten
14 December [19]34 Olivet College
Olivet, Michigan
Dearest Chief Woojem,1
As you know we are here, and a blessing it is and all due to the Van Vechten grandmamma of Joseph Brewer, who came over night before last with part of his faculty, his administrators and his students in numerous cars to rescue us from Detroit, which we did not “get” but which did not get us, as we thought it might. Perhaps it was a Chevrolet convention, perhaps it [was] too much darkness, perhaps it was a hotel that was full of adventure, one or all was commencing to overwhelm us when PRESIDENT Brewer took us away. In any case it was not the lecture which G[ertrude]. really liked, the audience very sympathetic.
Well here we are and it really is too nice. The students all hovering about G. and [Joseph] Brewer doing the honours quite darlingly. We have twenty-four hours and after lunch the cavalcade advances to Ann Arbor where G. lectures and where we spend the night. On Saturday, which turns out to be to-morrow on to Indianapolis, Hotel Claypool. On Monday to Colu[m]bus, Ohio, c/o of Miss Jean Reeder, Chi Delta Phi, University of Ohio (know [i.e., no] one seems to be able to advise a hotel) to Toledo, Commodore Perry Hotel. Dec. 18th to 20th and then Cleveland until the morning of the 23rd when we fly to Washington to be picked up for Baltimore. At Baltimore until morning of 29th when Emily Chadboume comes for us to take us to Washington2 where we stay with Mrs. Ann Archibald, 8905 Reservoir (neither St. nor Ave. mentioned) then we go back to Baltimore. G. lectures Washington 29th Phillips Memorial3 and 30th Univeristy Women.
Now for Mrs. [Mahala] Douglass, she was quite wonderful in her home, brilliant and brittle and fin de siecle, when she came into the room she did what no once since Lady Windermere’s Fan has done to me, not even The Crust of Society. She is quite quite perfect and I did love it, she and her home. I think our hotel room appalled and smothered her.
And where are you meeting us perhaps (I’m only quoting you—you know. This room is invaded and so all my love
Woojems Alice
1. This is the first letter to use the term “Woojums” (misspelled by Toklas as Woojem) in the salutation. See Van Vechten to Stein, 26 April [1932], note 2.
2. Emily Crane Chadboume and her friend Ellen La Motte had been introduced to Stein and Toklas by Dr. Claribel Cone in 1913.
3. For an account of Stein’s visit with the Phillips’ and her lecture see Marjorie Phillips, Duncan Phillips and His Collection (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1970), pp. 184-87.
To Carl Van Vechten
[postmark: 17 December 1934] Claypool Hotel
Indianapolis, Indiana
My dearest Carl,
Here we are in Indiana, and alas we did not get to Iowa, but we will, we certainly will, if not now then later because we must see the state which gave you to us but we are not seeing Allegheny [Pennsylvania]1 either just now so I think we are determined to pilgrimage to our birthplaces together later in our moth plane. I think it would be a wonderful thing to do to pilot each other to remember [where] we each were born, it was nice to be born and to have it be us, then we would go out to San Francisco and have Alice born and so the Woojums would be complete, sometimes I get tempted by the idea of a car but I really am faithful to the moth plane. [Joseph] Brewer came to Detroit and kidnapped us, he said we should have that xperience and why should it not be he, and so in two cars and five men strong they carried us away to Olivet, and we had a good time there, I never had known that he was a cousin of yours and that makes him just that much nicer. Then they brought us back to Ann Arbor, and there I had a long talk with the man who is administering Avery [Hopwood]’s fund, he has just instituted a library room, a room that is to contain only contemporary literature, and he wants in it a painting of Avery, I told him that I knew only of the one done by Florine Stettheimer but that he should write to you as you may know of something else, I think of course the Stettheimer one would be wonderful to have there but could that be, we also had several other ideas
about things that he was rather interested in and that I would like to talk over with you, they might really do something rather important there about it all, and he says [he is] very ready to do anything you or I suggest,2 but all that when we see each other and when do we see each other, we are so disappointed that it has not been anywhere yet, I want it to be somewhere yet. We go on from here to Columbus and then Toledo and then Cleveland Wade Park Manor Hotel, will reach us there and we would be really disappointed if there were no red envelope there when we got there. I am sorry Fania did not get warm but one never does in the South at this time, never, oh Carl we love you so much and we always tell you so