by Edward Burns
Always
Baby Woojums.
[on back of envelope] Do give Mary Garden our love I will write to her soon so pleased that she is happy.
1. Note by Van Vechten, 22 January 1941: “Sarah Victor, the colored pastry cook of the Algonquin [Hotel], who presided over a table of cakes and pies in the dining-room died. She was a great character and had worked first for May Irwin and then for Bertha Case. I went to her funeral in a Catholic Church. Yes I had photographed her.”
2. Una, Lady Troubridge, was born (1887), Margot Elena Gertrude Taylor, the daughter of Captain Henry Ashworth Taylor. From early childhood she seems to have been called Una. In 1908, she became the second wife of Admiral Sir Ernest Troubridge. In 1915 she left him and from then on lived with the writer Marguerite Radclyffe Hall (1886–1943). Their relationship is described in Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (London: J. Cape, 1928) and in Lady Troubridge’s The Life and Death of Radclyffe Hall (London: Hammond, Hammond and Co., 1961). Stein met Hall (who was known to friends as John) and Lady Troubridge through Romaine Brooks.
3. Stein delivered her lecture “What Are Masterpieces” at both Oxford and Cambridge Universities. At the Oxford French Club she delivered the lecture “An American and France.” Both lectures are printed in her What Are Masterpieces.
4. Wendell Wilcox, a young writer whom Stein met in Chicago.
5. Kahn, a Hollywood agent, reported to Stein in his letter of 8 January 1936 (YCAL) that “The Gentle Lena” was being read by Frances Marion of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios. Although Kahn had hopes that something would develop from this source, no film was made of this story.
6. In his letter to Stein of 9 January 1936 (YCAL) Cerf discussed plans for Stein’s The Geographical History Of America Or The Relation Of Human Nature To The Human Mind. The letter also gives Stein details of his marriage to Sylvia Sidney.
To Gertrude Stein
[Postcard: Portrait of a Spanish boy at a Romería de las regiones, Madrid. Photograph by Carl Wan Vechten]
[postmark: 24 January 1936] [150 West Fifty-fifth Street New York]
Dear Gertrude:
A wonderful letter & a package of MSS (tell Alice it is OK) from you, dear Baby Woojums! I didn’t understand at first which picture you wanted Picabia to have. Of course I’ll send him one. Yours are numbered on the back & if you tell me the number it is easier. Let me know if he gets the right one. Mary Garden adores you. I gave her your message. She is at Essex House West 59 Street New York. Roman’s [i.e., Romaine Brooks] (so I have rechristened her) portrait is going to be good. I think. I’ll write a letter in a day or so. LOVE to Mama & Baby W!
Papa W.
[on front of postcard] This boy was in a Romería in Madrid.
To Gertrude Stein
[“A Little Too Much” motto]
28 January 1936 [150 West Fifty-fifth Street New York]
Completely angelic Baby Woojums:
We are having very cold weather, but I go on posing for Roman (so I call her) Goddard,1 although her studio is cold. It is in a state now where she won’t let me see it, so I can’t report on it, but I’m sure it is marching. . I am making more and more photographs, tonight a nude Negro lady, last week Willa Cather; now the attractive Mai-Mai-Sze, daughter of the Chinese Ambassador, later Sir Thomas Beecham! I am very happy with it all. . Think of my making Austrians happy indirectly with my stamps. Here is another shot at making Austrians happy! . . You weren’t very clear about what Picabia wanted at first, but I guess I know now. A little one is pretty impractical but he will get a big one and if it isn’t right, let me know. . Tell [Giorgio de] Chirico he hangs right in my room! Yes I photographed Sarah [Victor] LOTS, quite sad and beautiful ones. Her funeral in a Catholic Church was wonderful and the priest raved about her character. . Tell me all about England surely and if you meet any nice numbers. You are sure to have a grand success and a good time. Tell Mama Woojums to pack you up tight in your woollens and tell her to wear her rubbers. . Thank you for letting me see Mr. [Wendell] Wilcox’s nice letter and here it is.2. The films are slow but sometimes sure. . I do not think Four in America should come out in the same volume or at the same time as the other. The other is a Tour de Force and quite different in feeling and movement and should make its OWN impression.3 Four in America is for some other time. But of course you may think differently. . What I mean is that I think one would take the interest away from the other and that would be unfortunate. . According to the papers Bennett [Cerf] and his Sylvia are two again, but you can take your choice! Thousands of yellow roses with their stems in tinfoil to you and pretty Mama Woojums and let me know what Picasso says, if any. . I had a WONDERFUL letter from Miro about my Barcelona pictures…4
Papa Woojums!
1. Romaine Brooks: see Van Vechten to Stein, 10 January 1936, note 2.
2. Stein had sent Van Vechten Wilcox’s letter to her of [2 January 1936] (YCAL). Stein had tried to interest Harcourt in a novel by Wilcox. When Harcourt refused the novel, Stein tried to get Cerf interested in it.
3. “The other” is Stein’s The Geographical History Of America Or The Relation Of Human Nature To The Human Mind.
4. Van Vechten had photographed the Spanish painter Joan Miró while he was in Barcelona, Spain. Miró’s letter to Van Vechten is not in YCAL or NYPL-MD.
To Carl Van Vechten
[postmark: 8 February 1936] [27 rue de Fleurus Paris]
My dearest Papa Woojums,
We are all ready to fly to London our fetishes in our pockets and only papa Woojums behind us missing and what a miss, we wish oh how we wish that you were there to kiss us and bless us, we are staying first with Lord Berners,1 they say he has one of the best Victorian country homes and very luxurious, then we go to Cornwall and stay with the Abdy’s at Newton Ferrers very 18 century handsome,2 in between we stay modestly at Garland’s hotel in London, and then Cambridge so far nothing grand there but we hope it will come, we will be away in all ten days, Picasso was delighted with the negro photographs, he is very low in his mind and they cheered him quite a little, I asked him if he wanted any more negroes, no said he with a very pretty enthusiasm no I would like some of you he would like XIII 0:43 he and Picabia both would like beside anyone of XXIVg:2 and XXXIVG 15 XXXIII: g24, XIV g: 7 the last one with the fetishes would delight them, I get awful jealous Carl when you say you are photographing the others, you never did or will photograph any of them so often, that I know, but I get a twinge. I have not seen [Giorgio de] Chirico but I will when I get back there will be a list for you, Pablo, Picabia, Chirico, Mardrus,3 the Egyptian men, Gaston Bergery the future Kerensky of France and his wife Bettina Jones4 Daisy Fellowes,5 Nadine the Belgian Chinese are all waiting in rows for Papa Woojums to photograph them, if you would send [Wendell] Wilcox a photo it would make him so happy, had such nice letters from Bennett [Cerf] he seems all himself again and very pleased to be doing my book in the fall, I am entirely of your mind about the 4 [i.e., Four in America], the time will come and please Carl what is the Columbia Encyclopedia where Mark [Lutz] says I am,6 who is Ted Husing who seems to be in spite of as a negro fan said,7 and Mrs Sherman says Charlie Chaplin seems hating G. H. Wells [i.e., H. G. Wells],8 we are all in a stew finding out how little we can be elegant in with in England, and that is all that is all for all, Papa Woojums and us, and I was so happy to have a birthday and a wire, and love
Always
Baby Woojums
and Daisy Fellowes 19 rue St. James, Auteuil, Paris wants a photo too, she just clamored.
1. Gerald Hugh Tyrwhitt, Lord Berners (1883–1950), English composer and author. Lord Berners composed a ballet, A Wedding Bouquet, based on Stein’s play They Must. Be Wedded. To Their Wife. (printed in her Operas and Plays, pp. 161–94, and Last Operas and Plays, pp. 204–38). Lord Berners’ home was Farington House in Berkshire, England.
2. Stein had met Sir Robert Abdy (d. 1975) and his second wife, Lady Diana Abdy (d. 1967), in late 1931 or early 1932. The formality of Sir Robert Abdy’s
first extant letter to Stein, 30 March 1932 (YCAL), suggests that they had only recently met. Later the Abdys and Stein would form a very close relationship.
Abdy was a wealthy Englishman interested in antiques, furniture, china, finely printed and bound books, and eighteenth-century French painting. He was associated with the Wildenstein Gallery in Europe and later opened his own art gallery. The Abdys had homes in London and Cornwall, England, and Saint-Germain-en-Laye, just outside of Paris.
Stein wrote “A Portrait of the Abdys.” published in Janus, May 1936, p. 15. The Abdys are referred to as Sweet William and Lillian. These characters, with their references back to the Abdys, reappear in a number of Stein’s writings in the late 1930s, particularly in her play Listen to Me, in Last Operas and Plays, pp. 387–421.
3. A reference to either Dr. Joseph-Charles-Victor Mardrus or to his wife, the writer Lucie Delarue-Mardrus. Stein had met them through Natalie Barney.
4. Gaston Bergery was the publisher of the newspaper La Flèche and was a long-time member of the French Chambre du Députiés. Bergery began his career in politics as a member of the French Radical Party but gradually moved toward the extreme right. On 7 July 1940 he authored a resolution denouncing the Third Republic and calling for a new government based on that of Nazi Germany. Bergery served as the Vichy government’s ambassador to the Soviet Union and to Turkey. His wife, Elizabeth (Bettina) Shaw Jones, was an American who had come to France with her two sisters in the early 1930s. She decided to stay in France and went to work for Elsa Schiaparelli, the fashion designer. Mrs. Bergery was a friend of Natalie Barney’s, and it was probably at Barney’s that she met Stein.
5. Daisy Fellowes was the daughter of the fourth Duc Decazes and the widow of Prince Jean de Broglio. In 1919 she married Reginald Fellowes, a wealthy Englishman. They lived in London and Paris. Mrs. Fellowes was a writer, an editor of Harpers Bazaar, and a well-known hostess.
6. The Columbia Encyclopedia is a one-volume encyclopedia first published by Columbia University Press, New York, in 1935.
7. Ted Husing (1901–62), a radio sports announcer. There is no correspondence at YCAL between Husing and Stein. It is possible that they met during Stein’s American tour, 1934–35.
8. Charlie Chaplin, the film actor, and H. G. Wells, the English novelist.
To Gertrude Stein
[Postcard: Comtesse D’Haussonville by Jean August Dominique Ingres (1780–1867), The Frick Collection, New York]
[postmark: 17 February 1936] [150 West Fifty-fifth Street New York]
Dearest Baby Woojums—
Another package of mss. arrived yesterday, including a copy of 4 in America. Tell Mama W everything is okay. Roman Goddard’s1 picture of me is presque terminé. I like it very much indeed & will photograph it so you can see it. .
love to both
Papa W.
Did you know The Good Anna is in a book of short stories that Bennett [Cerf] edited?2
1. Romaine Brooks.
2. Stein’s “The Good Anna,” in The Bedside Book of Famous American Stories, ed. Angus Burrell and Bennett Cerf (New York: Random House, 1936), pp. 636–80.
To Carl Van Vechten
[postmark: 24 February 1936] Garlands Hotel Suffolk Street, Pall Mall London, S.W. 1
My dearest papa Woojums,
Yesterday it was Cambridge1 and we did have a good time, before the lecture we went to tea in their room with all the American students in Cambridge and they were so sweet and after the lecture which was a great success they were so proud, I was awfully pleased to represent the flag to them, at the tea party there were only Americans xcept two English one admitted because he had been in America and was enthusiastic and the other I found came from South Hampton, they said they never had known before why they liked him but that was it, they said when they first came they said they would not know each other but would only know the English and they hardly spoke but as the winter got colder they drew together and now they are never apart, it did make me homesick seeing them all, they were so nice, and now we stay in London a couple of days longer, and then back to Paris, everybody has been delightful, and don’t be jealous Papa Woojums but a long way after you Lord Berners is the nicest man and do not breathe it out loud because nothing will probably happen and anyway it is best that nothing is said but he kind of wants to put the play Say it with flowers, to music, and that would be nice, I also told him about the Byron, and he was interested but Say it with Flowers appealed to him a lot, you never told me what you thought about the Byron,2 there is also a possibility of arranging an English edition of the lectures which would please me a lot,3 and [Sir Robert] Abdy wants to de lux an edition of the Stanzas in Meditation4 but all this of course are but happy dreams and can only be told to Papa Woojums who always has to know everything as soon as we know it, I am hoping that you will know them all sometime because they are all so nice, and to-morrow we dine with Lady Cunard5 and the next day beside the editor perhaps we meet Havelock Ellis and anyway we love Papa Woojums all the time the best and the best6
Always
Baby Woojums.
1. See Stein to Van Vechten [17 January 1936], note 3.
2. Lord Berners did not set either Stein’s play Say It With Flowers (Operas and Plays, pp. 331–43) or her Byron A Play (Last Operas and Plays, pp. 333–86) to music. Instead he used her play They Must. Be Wedded. To Their Wife. See Stein to Van Vechten [8 February 1936], note 1.
3. No English edition of either Lectures In America or Narration was published.
4. Probably in the early spring of 1932 Stein began a long meditative poem that she eventually called Stanzas in Meditation. This poem was written during the summer of 1932 concurrently with The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, which Stein said (Everybody’s Autobiography, p. 9) she wrote in November 1932 but which probably was begun somewhat earlier.
Sir Robert Abdy, who had an interest in finely printed books, had proposed an edition of the stanzas to be printed by Guido Morris. Abdy went so far as to have a sample sheet made of a stanza to test the paper and type face. No copy of this sample sheet is at YCAL. A copy is known to have been given by Stein to a friend, but it cannot be located. The world economic situation was probably one of several reasons why the project was abandoned.
5. Lady Maud “Emerald” Cunard (d. 1948) was the American-born wife of Sir Bache Cunard. Lady Cunard was known as a hostess whose interests were literary, artistic, and musical. She was greatly admired by Sir Robert Abdy, who had probably introduced her to Stein.
6. Stein lunched with the editor Alan Lane and Havelock Ellis (1859–1939), the English scientist and writer who conducted research in the psychology and sociology of sex.
To Carl Van Vechten
[Postcard: Delacroix. Baron Schwiter]
[postmark: 25 February 1936] [Garlands Hotel Suffolk Street, Pall Mall London, S.W. 1]
Our last day in London and we have had a good time lots of funny stories and some very amusing meetings, the last a dinner with Lady Cunard, but I’ll tell you all about that, everybody likes us and we are very pleased and so loving
Gtrde.
Dearest Papa Woojums,1
I started a letter to you but could never finish it and now I find it has mysteriously disappeared—or rather exchanged for another because here is Baby’s to you. Where did it go to or was it used as a laundry list? I only wanted to know if you had ever read “Sainte-Una Fois” and do you think it could be translated. I’m sending it to you from Paris.2 Heaps of love to Fania and to you.
Mama W.
1. Toklas reversed the card and wrote her message between the lines of Stein’s message.
2. Sainte-Unefois (Paris: NRF, Gallimard, 1934). This was the first book published by the French writer Louise de Vilmorin (1902–1969).
To Carl Van Vechten
[postmark: London, 25 February 1936] Newton Ferrers Callington, Cornwall1
My dear Carl papa Woojums
We have had a good time and we are still havi
ng a good time, the two lectures in Oxford did go off awfully well the second one had a lot of amusing young men, the first one more high-brow, both lively, at the end of the second lecture as I went out four stalwart Americans and two Canadians lined up and one after the other said thank you for what you made them take about America thank you and solemnly shook hands, the New College wanted me to dine with them en masse but unfortunately we had to leave the next day for here, Lord Berners is charming will send you a photo of us all, I am hoping that there may be the opera in London, everybody is trying to introduce me to the right people to produce it, and I’ll let you know more about it after I know, it has been nice most xtraordinarily nice, the stately homes of England are awfully comfortable now, Lord Berners I think the most amusing so far and what a cook, we were always telling about papa Woojums and how sweet he was wonderful how naturally that subject arises Alice makes me write so many polite letters that I can only once more say that Baby Woojums loves its Papa Woojums
Gtrde.
1. This letter, postmarked London, was written on the stationery of the country home of Sir Robert and Lady Abdy. It may have been written there and mailed in London or else written and mailed in London.
To Carl Van Vechten
[postmark: 25 February 1936] [27 rue de Fleurus Paris]
My dear Carl,
Just back and have received this letter, I am inclined to accept their idea but Alice thinks perhaps just at the moment that they are trying for the other in Hollywood it might not be wise beside she thinks they would not be serious and come through with the arrangement, I hate to bother you about this but I do not like to act without your advice, I am inclosing a letter accepting which please read and send them if you think it a good thing and the letter covers it, if not tell me and I will send them a letter refusing,1 I told you about [Lord] Berners’ idea and then a man from the Xpress who interviewed me in London said why do not they put on one of your plays,2 it is in the air but I am hoping that it will materialise and [Turner?] has had ideas about it, on the other hand I do not want to make a bad start which might spoil things so as usual it is a crie de secours to papa Woojums from his Woojumses,