May Bookstaver was not going to choose between her and Mabel. The affair dragged on. Gertrude did no academic work. Her teachers
would ask her questions although as she said to her friends it was foolish of them to ask her when there were so many eager and anxious to answer. However they did question her from time to time and as she said, what could she do she did not know the answer.
In her final year, Gertrude, once the star pupil, was the only one in her class of fifty-four to get a grade lower than 3. She got 4 in ophthalmology, otology and dermatology and 5 in laryngology, rhinology and obstetrics. She said she thanked her tutors for failing her:
You have no idea how grateful I am to you. I have so much inertia and so little initiative that very possibly if you had not kept me from taking my degree I would have, well, not taken to the practice of medicine, but at any rate to pathological psychology and you don’t know how little I like pathological psychology and how all medicine bores me.
Other women students accused her of harming the struggle for equality and recognition. ‘Remember the cause of women,’ they said. Gertrude responded: ‘You don’t know what it is to be bored.’
Gertrude recounted this in the 1930s when she was sure of her influence and status, safe in her personal life, respected by her peers, confident of her judgement, opinions and views. At the time, academic failure coincided with emotional and intellectual confusion and unhappiness. Her unworkable love affair infected her with rootlessness and uncertainty.
London then Paris
In the summer of 1902, Gertrude joined Leo in Italy, then they travelled together to London and rented rooms in Bloomsbury. Leo bought his first oil painting – a seascape by Philip Wilson Steer, who was an influential art teacher at the Slade and a friend of Sickert. Leo said he felt like a desperado: oil paintings were for the rich. He and Gertrude visited the art historians Bernard and Mary Berenson in Surrey and met Bertrand Russell, ‘a young mathematician of genius’, Leo called him. Russell was married to Mary Berenson’s sister Alys.
Discussions with the Berensons and Russell set Gertrude thinking about the novel she wanted to write: The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family’s Progress, her 900-page novel about herself, ‘bottom nature’ and ‘every kind of men and women and all the kind of being in them’.
I wanted to find out if you could make a history of the whole world, if you could know the whole life history of everyone in the world, their slight resemblances and lack of resemblances…
With the Berensons and the Russells, she and Leo discussed where and how to live: ‘We have America versus England disputes all the time,’ Leo wrote. ‘The general theme is why in the name of all that’s reasonable do you think of going back to America.’ Gertrude planned to stay away for a year to free herself from May Bookstaver, but when Leo returned to Paris in December she was lonely.
She spent her days in the British Museum Reading Room. She planned to read all English literature, from the sixteenth century on, as background material for her novel about everybody in the world. She bought little grey notepads, made lists of books to read, arrived at the museum early in the morning, copied out passages that resonated, took breaks only when hungry and read until closing time. When not in the museum, she wandered the streets of London and felt homesick for America and depressed:
The time comes when nothing in the world is so important as a breath of one’s own particular climate. If it were one’s last penny it would be used for that return passage…
An American in the winter fogs of London can realise this passionate need, this desperate longing in all its completeness. The dead weight of that fog and smoke-laden air, the sky that never suggests for a moment the clean blue distance that has been the accustomed daily comrade, the dreary sun, moon and stars that look like painted imitations on the ceiling of a smoke-filled room, the soggy, damp miserable streets and the women with bedraggled frayed-out skirts…
Gertrude endured this until February 1903, then headed back to Baltimore. She shared a flat with Johns Hopkins friends: Mabel Weeks, Harriet Clark and a sculptor, Estelle Rumbold Kohn. She wrote notes for possible stories, analysed herself and her friends but became ensnared again in the affair with May. She despaired, felt they were incompatible, that ‘their pulses were differently timed’ and that this incompatibility had been there from the start. In summer, in a renewed effort to get away from the emotional tangle of her affair, she sailed to join Leo in Paris, intending the visit to help separate her from May. From then on, Paris became her permanent home.
with Leo in Paris
‘Paris was where the twentieth century was’, Gertrude wrote, ‘the place that suited those of us who were to create twentieth century art and literature.’ She was twenty-nine and ambitious to be a writer. In Paris she flourished as who she was. ‘Our roots can be anywhere and we can survive because if you think about it we take our roots with us,’ she said. It was not just what Paris gave, but all that it did not take away.
Leo had paved the way for her. Before she joined him, he had travelled to Japan, Ceylon, Cairo, collecting prints and art objects but uncertain which of his many interests to pursue. He went to Paris in 1902, intending to look at paintings. In his impulsive way he then decided to become an artist. He booked into a hotel, enrolled, like many Americans, at the Académie Julian at 28 Boulevard St-Jacques in the 6th arrondissement, did drawings of statues in the Louvre and life studies of his own body, and set out to learn the art market. He was a sociable man, intensely curious, and in Left Bank Paris writers and artists were valued. The art critic Bernard Berenson was his mentor, the cellist Pablo Casals a dining companion.
Leo’s maternal uncle, Ephraim Keyser, a sculptor and teacher, told him of a studio for moderate rent at 27 rue de Fleurus, a short street off boulevard Raspail near the Luxembourg Gardens. It was a stone building, seven years old. A central archway led to a small paved courtyard; on the left was the concierge’s office, to the right a two-storey apartment with kitchen, double-doored dining room and study, and on the floor above two bedrooms and the bathroom. There was an adjacent studio angled to catch the north light.
‘I’ve got my house, my atelier and my fencing school all engaged for the summer as likewise a cook lady…’ Leo wrote to Mabel Weeks, a student friend of Gertrude’s. He asked Gertrude to come and live with him, hoping she would anchor him. She was hesitant, but agreed to join him for the summer. She stayed until her death in 1946.
They travelled to Rome, Florence and Fiesole to look at paintings. They met up with the wealthy Cone sisters, Claribel and Etta, Baltimore friends of Gertrude’s, who were keen art collectors. ‘Gertrude and Sister C. came,’ Etta wrote in her diary. ‘Had a table d’hôte dinner at Fiesole and all got drunk… Gertrude and I lay there and smoked… Gertrude is great fun.’
Gertrude Stein with the Cone sisters © Wikimedia Commons
Gertrude then went back with Leo to rue de Fleurus. Together they bought stuff for the apartment: high-backed Renaissance chairs, a fifteenth-century buffet decorated with carved eagles, seventeenth-century terracotta figurines, Italian pottery and, above all, paintings. Leo led the way but it became a joint enterprise, a shared enthusiasm. They bought prints – a picture of a woman in white with a white dog on a green lawn by Raoul du Gardier (a French painter and engraver with a studio in boulevard du Montparnasse), but the contemporary figurative work Leo saw did not particularly interest him and the older paintings were too expensive. ‘I wanted an adventure,’ he said.
her fit vocation
Paris worked its magic for Gertrude: the apartment was lovely, Hélène, Leo’s cook, served an excellent roast chicken, Leo was protective, a fixed income went further than in the States.
To exorcise May Bookstaver, she wrote in fictional form about the affair. She worked in the studio adjacent to the apartment: ‘Leo never did paint there. I sat down in there and pretty soon I was writing and then he took a studio elsewhere, and we lived together ther
e…’
She called her novel Q.E.D. May Bookstaver’s letters were her reference material and they showed what she knew they would prove. Quod Erat Demonstrandum. The novel was a literal portrayal with only the names changed and her thesis was that the relationship had an inevitable trajectory, clear from the start. She wrote FINIS on the last page on 24 October and put the manuscript away in a cupboard. She said she forgot about it for thirty years and told no one of it until 1932, when she showed it to her agent, William Bradley – he and his wife, Jenny, were agents for most of the ‘Paris exiles’. They discussed publication but he advised against, because it was about lesbians. Alice B. Toklas, by then Gertrude’s partner for twenty-six years, read the manuscript and in a jealous rage destroyed all May Bookstaver’s letters to Gertrude. Q.E.D. was not published until 1972, when all involved were dead.
After finishing Q.E.D., and while making notes for her book about everybody in the world, Gertrude began writing Three Lives, fictional stories of three women, or as she put it ‘a German woman, a German American woman and a negro woman, three serious stories and in each story one of them’.
In December 1903 Michael gave up managing the railroads and moved to Paris with Sarah and their young son, Allan. He realized that he, as well as Gertrude and Leo, could have enough money to live in Paris on the dividends from his various investments. He was known by some as Mr Sarah Stein. His wife was boss. They rented an apartment converted from a Protestant church, at 58 rue Madame, near rue de Fleurus. The living room, which had been a schoolroom, measured 40 × 45 feet.
‘In our American life’, Gertrude wrote in her second novel, Fernhurst:
where there is no coercion in custom and it is our right to change our vocation so often as we have desire and opportunity, it is a common experience that our youth extends through the whole first twenty-nine years of our life and it is not till we reach thirty that we find at last that vocation for which we feel ourselves fit and to which we willingly devote continued labor.
By 1904, Gertrude was thirty and writing was her fit vocation to which she ‘willingly devoted continued labor’, albeit as the years went by only for half an hour after dinner. Her drifting days were done. She and Leo created a home together that quickly became famous. He went to art school in the mornings and a life-drawing class in the afternoons, but, unlike Gertrude, he could not settle to any profession.
collectors of modern art
Leo was at ease with Gertrude and wanted to spend the rest of his life with her. He rescued her when she was in turmoil and gave her a context to find herself. Their pleasure was to buy modern paintings together. Leo described this as a big adventure. They set themselves a limit of 300 francs a picture and purchased not with thoughts of investment, but because they liked the pictures and wanted to hang them on the apartment walls. They could only afford work by relatively unknown artists.
The adventure began in spring 1904. Bernard Berenson was in Paris. He asked Leo, ‘Do you know Cézanne?’ Leo said no. Berenson told him of Charles Loeser, an American art historian who lived in the Villa Torri Gattaia in the Florentine hills and had a collection of Cézanne’s paintings. That summer, Gertrude and Leo visited Loeser and saw an array of Cézanne’s work. Leo said he went back to Paris ‘a Columbus setting sail for a world beyond the world’. He and Gertrude went straight to the art dealer Ambroise Vollard’s musty little shop, crammed with pictures, in rue Laffitte. Vollard had organized Cézanne’s first one-man exhibition in Paris in 1895 and had a large stock of his paintings. A keen collector, he bought directly from artists, sometimes all the paintings in their studios en bloc, and he had a stash of work by Van Gogh, Gauguin, Bonnard, Vuillard, Derain, Rouault, Rousseau, Picasso and Matisse. He often commissioned portraits of himself from these artists.
Vollard got out paintings by Cézanne of an apple, a nude, a fragment of landscape, a small landscape of Aix-en-Provence, which both Gertrude and Leo liked.
Gertrude wrote to Mabel Weeks using the voice of one of her fictional characters, Melanctha in Three Lives:
We is doin business. We are selling Jap prints to buy a Cézanne at least we are that is Leo is trying. He don’t like it a bit and makes a awful fuss about asking enough money but I guess we’ll get the Cézanne… That is Leo’s connoisseurship. It’s a bully picture all right.
Also in rue Laffitte was the confectioner Fouquet, where Gertrude and Leo treated themselves to strawberry conserve in a glass bowl or honey cakes and nut candies.
In October 1904 the second autumn salon opened at the Grand Palais in the Champs Élysées. The autumn salons began as a showcase for new artists, in contrast to the more staid spring salons. There was a whole room of Cézannes, fourteen paintings by Matisse, work by Toulouse-Lautrec, Bonnard and Vuillard. For Gertrude and Leo, the show was a turning point in their passion for modern art. That month, Michael said they had an unexpected windfall of 8,000 francs between them. They went to Vollard’s, looked through his stacks of canvases, chose two Gauguins – Three Tahitians for Leo and Sunflowers for Gertrude (‘they were rather awful, but finally we liked them,’ she said); two versions of Cézanne’s The Bathers and two Renoirs. Gertrude said they bought in twos because they couldn’t agree on which they preferred. They still had money left, and over honey cakes at Fouquet’s discussed buying a big portrait by Cézanne of his wife, Hortense, sitting in a red armchair. They took it home in a taxi and hung it in the studio where Gertrude worked at night.
The little-known artists whose paintings they bought, happened to be Matisse, Picasso, Cézanne… For Gertrude, the ideas resonant in their work – new ways of seeing and departure from received forms of expression – echoed her own thinking. Within a short space of time, her and Leo’s collection was worth more than a great deal of money.
Madame Cézanne
Gertrude thought the portrait of Madame Cézanne revolutionary. It influenced her writing of Three Lives. She said Cézanne built up his portrait with planes of colour and she built up her characters with repetitive sentences. She said there was no centre to the picture to give it an organizing principle: the composition was the picture and she saw in this what she herself wanted to do. She wanted the mental processes of her characters to shape her prose and for her writing to be at ‘the front edge of time’, smash assumptions of nineteenth-century order and structure, and let a new art emerge.
Cézanne gave me a new feeling about composition. I was obsessed by this idea of composition. It was not solely the realism of characters but the realism of the composition which was the important thing. This had not been conceived as a reality until I came along but I got it largely from Cézanne.
Years later she claimed that Melanctha was ‘the first definite step away from the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century in literature’, but at the time of writing she was unconfident. Leo saw no artistic merit in her stories and she was disheartened by his lack of praise or even minimal encouragement. She wrote again to Mabel Weeks:
I went to bed very miserable… there ain’t any Tschaikowsky Pathetique or Omar Kayam or Wagner or Whistler or White Man’s Burden or green burlap in mine… Dey is very simple and very vulgar and I don’t think they will interest the great American public. I am very sad Mamie.
Over time, Leo’s refusal to validate Gertrude’s work – and he never would give her a morsel of encouragement – caused an irreparable break in their relationship.
Gertrude wrote Melanctha at night with Madame Cézanne on the wall in front of her. There was no particular beginning, middle or end to her story. She wrote in what she called a ‘continuous present’ and thought this closer to people’s true experience of reality: a multi-facetedness, ‘Always and always. Must write the hymn of repetition,’ she said.
Matisse
The following year, 1905, Gertrude, Leo, Michael and Sarah Stein and Claribel and Etta Cone all went again to the salon d’automne at the Grand Palais. Claribel Cone wrote of:
a riot of colour – sharp a
nd startling, drawing crude and uneven, distortions and exaggerations – composition primitive and simple as though done by a child…
The walls were covered with such canvases. The influential art critic Louis Vauxcelles, seeing a Renaissance sculpture by Donatello displayed among these riotous paintings, wrote of ‘Donatello parmi les fauves’ – Donatello among the wild beasts.
So these groundbreaking artists became known as ‘les Fauves’. Vauxcelles thought them dangerous and a new and horrible departure in art by a group of youngsters who proscribed classical drawing ‘in the name of I-don’t-know what pictorial abstraction’.
This new religion hardly appeals to me. I don’t believe in this Renaissance… M. Matisse, fauve-in-chief; M. Derain, fauve deputy; Monsieurs Othon Friesz and Dufy, fauves in attendance… and M. Delaunay…, infantile fauvelet…
The Cone sisters were among the mystified viewing the exhibition:
We asked ourselves ‘Are these things to be taken seriously’… Across the room we found our friends earnestly contemplating a canvas – of a woman with a hat tilted jauntily at an angle on the top of her head – the drawing crude, the color bizarre.
Woman with a Hat (1905) by Henri Matisse © Art Library / Alamy
Their friends were the Steins – Gertrude, Leo, Michael and Sarah – and the painting they were earnestly contemplating was Henri Matisse’s Woman with a Hat, a portrait of his wife, Amélie, who worked as a milliner to feed him and their children. Gertrude thought it ‘perfectly natural’, did not understand why it infuriated people and wanted to buy it. Leo said: ‘It was what I was unknowingly waiting for… a thing brilliant and powerful but the nastiest smear of paint I had ever seen.’ And Sarah Stein wanted to buy it because it looked like her mother.
No Modernism Without Lesbians Page 29