No Modernism Without Lesbians

by Diana Souhami

  They distributed medicines, blankets and food parcels to hospitals in the South of France. It was like a continuous Christmas, Alice said. She did the stocktaking and paperwork and sent weekly reports to the Fund. They also used Auntie to ferry wounded soldiers to hospitals. Gertrude, with her own money, bought X-ray equipment, thermometers, bandages and cigarettes. If inspired, in the car or a field, she wrote poems:

  The wind blows

  And the automobile goes

  Can you guess boards.

  Wood.

  Can you guess hoops.

  Barrels.

  Can you guess girls.

  Servants.

  Can you guess messages.

  In deed.

  Then there are meats to buy.

  We like asparagus so.

  This is an interview.

  Soldiers like a fuss.

  Give them their way.

  Yes indeed we will.

  We are not mighty

  Nor merry.

  We are happy.

  Very.

  In the morning.

  We believe in the morning

  Do we.

  A second assignment was to distribute supplies from a depot at Nîmes to military hospitals in southern France in the Bouches-du-Rhône and the Vaucluse. Braque encountered them at Avignon. Gertrude was wearing a greatcoat and Cossack hat and Alice a pith helmet and officer’s jacket with lots of pockets:

  Their funny get-up so excited the curiosity of the passers-by that a large crowd gathered around us and the comments were quite humorous. The police arrived and insisted on examining our papers. They were in order, but for myself, I felt very uncomfortable.

  At Christmas 1917, Gertrude and Alice hosted a dinner and dance at their Nîmes hotel for convalescing British soldiers. They danced with the wounded men. ‘It was as gay as we could make it’, Alice said. ‘But the British army was not cheerful.’

  On the day of the victory procession, the Armistice, the défilé, on 11 November 1918, they got up at sunrise to join the celebrations:

  ‘It was a wonderful day’, Gertrude wrote:

  Everybody was on the streets, men, women, children, soldiers, priests, nuns, we saw two nuns being helped into a tree from which they would be able to see.

  They all marched past through the Arc de Triomphe…

  Everybody except the germans were passing through. All the nations marched differently, some slowly, some quickly, the french carrying their flags the best of all…

  However it all finally came to an end. We wandered up and we wandered down the Champs Élysées and the war was over and the piles of captured cannon that had made two pyramids were being taken away and peace was upon us.

  She and Alice were awarded Reconnaissance Française medals for their war service to the French.

  Gertrude the oracle

  Gertrude thought that painting, after its cubist high point, lapsed into a secondary form of expression. After the 1914–18 war ended, the focus of the Saturday salons shifted from painters to writers, mainly young and American, who sought her views on their work. Her approval furthered careers. Her prestige was enormous. She had been the person to promote and encourage Picasso and cubism and there was high respect for her opinions, even if few managed to read her work.

  Leo wrote to her in December 1919, hoping yet again to repair the breach between them. He told her he had spent nearly all his time in New York trying to cure his neurosis.

  But they’re damned hard things to cure… and I was in almost utter despair. Then I got on a tack that has led to better states… and brought about a condition where it was possible to write to you.

  The “family romance” as it is called is almost always central in the case of a neurosis, just as you used to get indigestion when we had a dispute. So I could tell pretty well how I was getting on by the degree of possibility I felt of writing as I am doing now.

  Gertrude did not answer. She did not want to revisit neuroses, disputes, indigestion and the family romance. She had Alice.

  Bravig Imbs

  The American novelist and poet Bravig Imbs, author of Confessions of Another Young Man, said Gertrude had the secret of imparting enthusiasm, though she preferred to talk about baseball, or gardens, or the cuisine of the Ain rather than literary things. ‘It was those things that made her laugh and radiate,’ he said. He first met her when she was walking Basket by the Seine docks. He sought her guidance about his writing and showed her his short stories: ‘You have the gift of true brilliancy,’ she told him.

  And less than anyone should you use crutch phrases. Either the phrase must come or it must not be written at all. I could never understand how people could labour over a manuscript, write and rewrite it many times, for to me, if you have something to say the words are always there. And they are the exact words and the words that should be used. If the story does not come whole, tant pis, it has been spoiled, and that is the most difficult thing in writing, to be true enough to yourself, and to know yourself enough so that there is no obstacle to the story’s coming through complete. You see how you have faltered, and halted and fallen down in your story, all because you have not solved this problem of communication for yourself. It is the fundamental problem in writing and has nothing to do with metier, or with sentence building or with rhythm. In my own writing as you know, I have destroyed sentences and rhythms and literary overtones and all the rest of that nonsense to get to the very core of this problem of the communication of the intuition. If the communication is perfect, the words have life, and that is all there is to good writing, putting down on the paper words which dance and weep and make love and fight and kiss and perform miracles.

  In the art world, Gertrude ‘could make or mar an exhibition with little more than a movement of her thumb’, Imbs said. With writing, as with painting, she was emphatic about what and who was good and what and who was not. With Alice managing them, her callers became like a court seeking the sovereign’s favour. Virgil Thomson thought the line that applied was: ‘Will you come into my parlour said the spider to the fly.’

  only the men

  Annette Rosenshine revisited after the war and found how impenetrable Alice’s power had become. She went to tea wearing a new Paris hat, hoping to show her small sculptures to Gertrude. Alice looked at the pieces in silence then, when Gertrude came over, turned off the lights. She answered questions Annette put to Gertrude, and when they went for a drive she chose what streets Annette should see. ‘I was ostracised as far as Gertrude was concerned,’ Annette said.

  Only the men got to Gertrude’s sanctum. Alice directed wives to the kitchen. They sat with her. She said she would one day write her memoir and call it ‘Wives of Geniuses I Have Sat With’. When she did write her memoir, after Gertrude’s death, she called it What is Remembered. Time’s reviewer described it as the ‘book of a woman who all her life has looked in a mirror and seen someone else’.

  Even Bryher was downgraded in the salon evenings:

  the atmosphere seemed full of gold. There was a table piled with books and beyond this a high chair where Gertrude sat, surrounded by a group of young men. At first there was a little general conversation, then she would pick up a phrase and develop it, ranging through a process of continuous association… She offered us the world, took it away again in the following sentence, only to demonstrate in a third that it was something that we could not want because it never existed…

  Gertrude had no use for me but she did not dislike me. I had nothing to offer her in the way of intellectual stimulus and, unlike her young men, brought her no personal problems. I knew this and so, whenever I could, I slipped away to join Miss Toklas in her corner.

  Djuna Barnes thought Gertrude chauvinistic and disliked the Stein Toklas ménage:

  Do you know what she said of me? Said I had beautiful legs! Now what does that have to do with anything? Said I had beautiful legs! Now I mean what did she say that for? I mean if you’re going to say something about a perso
n… I couldn’t stand her. She had to be the centre of everything. A monstrous ego.

  It was Alice, not Gertrude, who chose to consign women to the kitchen. At college, Gertrude’s company was essentially with lesbian or lesbian-friendly women: the Cone sisters Claribel and Etta, the artists Ethel Mars and Maud Hunt Squire, Mabel Weeks, May Bookstaver. But Alice let no other woman get near. And Gertrude’s ‘bottom nature’ was essentially passive; with Leo she was the complaisant sister, with Alice the compliant spouse. Why make decisions was Gertrude’s view.

  Natalie Barney was not seen by Alice as a threat. She and Gertrude used to take an evening walk with Basket. Natalie liked Gertrude’s ‘staunch presence, pleasant touch of hand, well-rounded voice always ready to chuckle’.

  Sylvia Beach said she felt like a guide from a tourist agency because so many young American writers called at Shakespeare and Company and asked her to introduce them to Gertrude Stein.

  Sherwood Anderson

  Sherwood Anderson was one suppliant:

  ‘Dear Miss Gertrude Stein’

  Would you let me bring around Mr Sherwood Anderson of White and Winesburg Ohio to see you this evening? He is so anxious to know you for he says you have influenced him ever so much & that you stand as such a great master of words. Unless I hear from you saying NO I will take him to you after dinner tonight

  Yours affectionately

  Sylvia Beach

  Anderson arrived at the rue de Fleurus in 1921 with Tennessee Mitchell, the second of his four wives. They were, Anderson wrote in his memoirs, ‘persistently unhappy together’. They married with the understanding they would come and go as they pleased and she would retain her own name. He was forty-five, had given up his paint business in Ohio, had a breakdown, walked out on his first wife and three children and married Tennessee. Small towns in Ohio were the setting for the two works of fiction he gave to Gertrude. Poor White was set in a farming town that becomes industrialized. Winesburg, Ohio was a book of interrelated short stories, about characters thwarted by small-town life.

  Gertrude told him: ‘You sometimes write what is the most important thing of all to be able to write, passionate and innocent sentences.’ In his diary, Anderson described her as ‘a strong woman with legs like stone pillars sitting in a room with Picassos’. Tennessee, a sculptor, music teacher and suffragist, wore big hats and floating scarves like Isadora Duncan and when she tried to join in the conversation, Alice took her across the room to show her something interesting. ‘I couldn’t see the necessity for the cruelty to wives that was practised in the rue de Fleurus,’ Sylvia Beach wrote in her memoir. She was critical too of the way French people were isolated from the Gertrude Stein court. She never met any French people there and thought Gertrude looked at the French without seeing them.

  Gertrude and Ernest

  Ernest Hemingway was twenty-three when he arrived at Gertrude’s in 1922 with a letter of introduction from Sherwood Anderson. Hadley, his first wife, eight years older than he, was consigned to the kitchen. Hemingway was besotted with Gertrude, who was about the same age as his mother, Grace. He wrote of Gertrude’s thick hair, beautiful eyes, and ‘strong German-Jewish face’. He described her as heavily built ‘like a peasant woman’ and was intrigued by the size of her breasts. He wondered how much each one weighed: ‘I think about ten pounds, don’t you Hadley?’ he asked when they left.

  Hemingway’s mother, when he was a child, dressed him and his elder sister, Marcelline, in identical clothes. She had wanted twins. ‘Summer girl’, she captioned a photo of Ernest aged two in 1901, in a white frock and flowered hat. Sometimes she dressed him and Marcelline as girls, sometimes as boys. She gave them the same hairstyle, they slept in the same room in identical cots, had the same dolls and were expected to do everything together. She bought clothes in twos: lacy dresses, flowered hats, sailor suits, though Ernest was soon larger and taller than his sister, who was eighteen months older.

  Ernest Hemingway as a child © Everett Collection Inc / Alamy

  Ernest’s father, in contrast, determined to make him a manly man. Dr Hemingway taught each of his six children to shoot and fish and not complain if hurt. He, like Gertrude’s father, had volatile mood swings and violent outbursts of rage. Marcelline wrote:

  Sometimes the change from being gay to being stern was so abrupt that we were not prepared for the shock that came when one minute Daddy would have his arm around one of us, or we would be sitting on his lap laughing and talking and a minute or so later, because of something we had said or done, or some neglected duty of ours he suddenly thought about, we would be ordered to our rooms and perhaps made to go without supper. Sometimes we were spanked hard our bodies across his knee. Always after punishment we were told to kneel down and ask God to forgive us.

  He hit them with a razor strop, made them wash their mouths out with soap, did not speak to them for days at a time. Their mother hit them too, though not as hard.

  Grace Hemingway felt superior to her husband. She saw herself as an unfulfilled opera star and earned more as a singing teacher than he as a doctor. Ernest referred to her as ‘that bitch’ and said he hated her. She did not go to his wedding in 1921 and when he told her, in February 1927, of his impending divorce, she wrote:

  I’m sorry to hear that your marriage has gone on the rocks but most marriages ought to. I hold very modern and heretical views on marriage but keep them under my hat.

  The following year, her husband shot himself in the head with his own father’s Smith and Wesson revolver. He was fifty-seven. The theme of a father’s suicide recurred in Ernest Hemingway’s short stories and in For Whom the Bell Tolls.

  That was the background to Hemingway’s displays of manliness in his life and work. His upbringing stirred confusion in him about gender, identity and the boundaries between one person and another. His younger sister Ursula said that when he came back from the First World War, they shared a bed so she would not be lonely in the night. She was seventeen.

  To Gertrude, as to Sylvia Beach, he recounted his injuries by trench mortar in Italy in July 1918 when serving as an ambulance driver. In his novels he wrote of Spanish bullfighting, aeroplane crashes, big game hunts, deep sea fishing, hard drinking, hard fighting. ‘Killed my 2 buffalo with the 30-06 Springfield – also all lions. Got some beauties and some wonderful heads,’ he recorded in January 1934 when hunting in Nairobi. Of Gertrude, he wrote:

  She used to talk to me about homosexuality and how it was fine in and for women and no good in men and I used to listen and learn and I always wanted to fuck her and she knew it and it was a good healthy feeling and made more sense than some of the talk.

  Gertrude’s view was:

  We are surrounded by homosexuals. They do all the good things in the arts and when I ran down the male ones to Hemingway it was because I thought he was a secret one… I like all the people who produce and Alice does too and what they do in bed is their own business and what we do is not theirs…

  Emerald Cunard, when she met Hemingway in 1944, said:

  I was startled. Not a bit what I expected. You may think it bizarre of me but he struck me as androgynous… It is not the mot juste perhaps but that’s how he struck me. Distinctly emasculated.

  ‘Gertrude Stein and me are just like brothers,’ Hemingway wrote to Sherwood Anderson in 1922. It is unusual to wonder how much each of your brother’s breasts weigh and to want to fuck him, knowing he is lesbian.

  Gertrude, too, pondered the ideas about gender in currency from sexologists and psychologists. She was interested in the theory of the Viennese psychologist Otto Weininger that:

  all women who are truly famous and are of conspicuous mental ability reveal some of the anatomical characters of the male, some bodily resemblance to a man.

  Weininger thought women who were attracted to and by other women were themselves half male. Havelock Ellis had a similar theory about the ‘congenital sexual invert’. But Hemingway, the macho man, wanted to fuck the city’s most fa
mous lesbian whom he viewed as his brother, and Alice, who boasted the moustache, was the wife who did the cooking and sewing. Sigmund Freud might have tried to unravel the confusion felt by a son whose mother had treated him as the twin of an older sister, or that of a girl like Bryher who felt she should have been born a boy. It seemed that male and female, brother and sister, homosexual and lesbian meant different things to different people in the early twentieth century, as at all other times.

  Gertrude, Hemingway felt, understood both him and his work. ‘It was a vital day for me when I stumbled upon you,’ he told her. He said he loved her and she was godmother to his son ‘Bumby’. Alice was frosty about their closeness. ‘Don’t you come home with Hemingway on your arm,’ she told her. Gertrude had ‘a weakness for him’, she said, and she did not like it. For months after first meeting her, Hemingway called Alice Miss Tocraz. He described her as dark, with a hooked nose, a Joan of Arc haircut and a lapful of needlepoint on which she worked non-stop. He particularly liked her fragrant colourless alcohols that tasted of raspberries and blackcurrants but packed a fiery punch.

  Hemingway said Gertrude ‘ruined him as a journalist’ and helped create him as a novelist. She encouraged his early fiction, his short stories and debut novel, The Sun Also Rises. He read ‘a lot of her new stuff’ and took her advice. He said if you mentioned Joyce more than once in her presence, you would not be invited back.

  She and Alice visited Hemingway and Hadley at their lodgings in rue du Cardinal Lemoine. Gertrude sat on their mahogany bed while he read aloud from his Three Stories and Ten Poems. She said the poems were ‘direct and Kiplingesque’ but she did not care for the prose. ‘There is a great deal of description in this and not particularly good description. Begin over and concentrate,’ she told him. Contact Editions published this first work of Hemingway’s in 1923.