Gertrude Stein’s Preparations for the Afterlife

Seeing the astonishing innovations in painting of the time encouraged Stein, who was already writing fiction, to experiment more radically in her own work. Cézanne, she later remembered, “gave me a new feeling about composition … it was not solely the realism of the characters but the realism of the composition which was the important thing.” Her formal breakthrough as a writer came in 1909 with Three Lives, a trio of novellas that adapted Cubist aesthetics to fictional portraiture, making a first, decisive break with literary realism. From there Stein was off and running, moving on to the exhaustive character analysis and intricate repetitions of The Making of Americans—a monumental novel charting the “History of a Family’s Progress” over the course of nearly a thousand pages—and the playful abstractions of Tender Buttons (“A shawl is a hat and hurt and a red balloon and an under coat and a sizer a sizer of talk”). More than a century on, these works are still bracingly strange, written according to an internal logic that is as implacable as it is inscrutable. And yet they are also, as Wade emphasizes, deeply pleasurable, if one gives oneself over to the experience: by turns funny, sexy, touching, and deeply bewildering. “The way to read Stein is to trust her,” Wade assures her reader early on. There’s no other way.

Though Leo scorned her work—while she was writing The Making of Americans, he would pluck pages of the manuscript at random and mock them in front of their mutual friends—Stein soon found other true believers. One of them was the New York heiress Mabel Dodge, who, after reading a draft of The Making of Americans, was “convinced” that it was “the forerunner of a whole epoch of new form & expression.” She poured her energy into drumming up publicity for Stein—“I am working like a dog over you,” she wrote in 1913. Another early acolyte was the novelist Carl Van Vechten, who talked her up in smart literary circles and published one of the first critical articles on her work, “How to Read Gertrude Stein,” in 1914. He often wrote to Stein to tell her of her burgeoning reputation in her home country: “You are as famous in America as any historical character,” he reassured her in 1916.

Stein’s most important early supporter, however, was Alice B. Toklas, who first entered her life in 1907 and quickly became her secretary, muse, lover, and “wife.” (Though the two were not, of course, legally married, Stein consistently used this word to refer to Toklas in private.) A native of San Francisco who, like Stein, had grown up in a well-to-do Jewish family before immigrating to Paris to sample la vie bohème, Toklas was immediately taken with Stein. Recalling their first meeting in her 1963 memoir What Is Remembered, Toklas wrote that “it was Gertrude Stein who held my complete attention, as she did for all the many years I knew her until her death, and all these empty ones since then.” Toklas did everything for Stein—whom she called “Baby,” as her parents and siblings had—from typing up her manuscripts to cooking her meals to organizing her social life. Stein quickly became completely reliant on her; Van Vechten observed that Stein could not “cook an egg, or sew a button, or even place a postage stamp of the correct denomination on an envelope.” Toklas believed completely in Stein’s genius and did everything she could to cultivate and protect it, subsuming her ambitions into her partner’s without remainder. The two became so closely entwined that Stein merged their names in the margin of one of her notebooks: “Gertice. Altrude.”