“Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife” by UK writer Francesca Wade has just hit the bookshops! Cue rapturous applause and rhapsodic reviews in august journals such as The Times, The Times Literary Supplement, the Guardian, the Financial Times, the New Statesman, the Spectator … need I say more. Oh joy! Can you imagine the thrill of discovering this brilliant biographer has just launched this extraordinary piece of scholarship into the world, when after ten years of gruelling toil, grinding research and toilsome digressions almost as circumlocutory as the prose of Gertrude Stein herself, I’m still plodding like the legendary tortoise towards a finishing line as insubstantial as a mirage in the desert.

Jesting aside, this is a brilliant achievement by Francesca Wade, setting a precedent for insightful, sensitive and compassionate biography. It’s as informative about Stein’s development as a writer as it is about Stein the larger-than-life persona. It’s rare to find a biography that gives equal weight to both.

It was especially inspiring for me to read Wade’s interpretation of the Stein/Toklas history, having drenched myself in it, as mentioned, for forever, and I contacted Wade by email in the hope that she might be willing to answer some of my questions. She’s very generously done that, and we’ve had a little email ‘chat’ about the book (where would we be without email?) some of which will inform my ramblings.

In researching Alice, I’ve also had to immerse myself (often unwillingly) in Gertrude Stein, given both women were complicit in creating and nurturing the Stein myth. As a result, I was reluctant at the outset to read yet another account of her life. But because Wade’s is possibly the first biography that confronts the many contradictions and idiosyncracies of Stein’s character with an unsparing yet empathetic gaze, I was encouraged to look at her in a new light. She’s also achieved what may be a first in Stein biography, which is to recount her subject’s journey as a writer in a manner that’s highly readable and engaging.

The book is structured in two parts, the first being a chronological biography and the second an exploration of Stein’s legacy and how it’s evolved in the seventy-nine years since her death. Some reviewers have questioned the need for the first part of the book, on the grounds that concerned me, that Stein’s life had been so thoroughly documented elsewhere. Near the beginning of the book Wade explains why she included the first part. 

One of her aims in writing the book was to explore the nature of biography itself, a subject perhaps even more cryptic than Gertrude Stein. Specifically, she was fascinated by the relationship between biography and history and the dichotomy between the literary reputation a writer builds during their lifetime and the fate of that reputation posthumously. In Stein’s case, she, perhaps more than any other writer, made it her life’s work to shape an identity that was larger than herself, one that would expand and thrive after her death. “I always wanted to be historic from almost a baby on” she says in “Wars I Have Seen.” 

Wade therefore decided it was necessary to include both components – the life and the afterlife. In choosing this structure, she’s created a cleverly crafted interrogation of Stein’s life on two interrelated levels. No mean feat considering the overwhelmingly enigmatic nature of both the subject and her work.  

Stein’s posthumous legacy has evolved over the years to the point where she’s now regarded as a cultural icon. At least in the US. Having discerned pretty quickly when I first got the idea of writing about Stein and Toklas that they were virtually unknown to most Australians, outside academic circles (and thus not hot prospects for Australian publishers), I was curious to find out if that was the case in the UK. Wade said the situation there is much the same – Stein’s not well known, but she’s hoping her book will draw readers back to her. She’d also like to think her book will encourage people to see beyond the “caricature” that she’s unfortunately become and consider her as a serious writer. If anyone can do that, I’m sure she can!

In these days when overnight celebrity is the norm, and today’s star is likely to be replaced by someone else tomorrow, one wonders how Stein would have fared. During her lifetime fame was much harder won and the public generally was far more suspicious of overnight sensations. Those who tried to self-anoint themselves without sufficient credibility were likely to be held in contempt (which Stein often was). Negativity however never fazed her for long and she went on to create her own legend in her own time. This is one of the most extraordinary aspects of her story and it’s one that Wade analyses with a particularly keen eye.

Stein’s genius for self-invention was such that it far outranked her self-professed genius for writing. “She was more famous for being Gertrude Stein, than for what she wrote, and that was by design,” Wade tells us. But, in apparent contradiction, Stein herself claimed she only wanted to be remembered for her work. “It always did bother me that the American public were more interested in me than in my work and after all there is no sense in it because if it were not for my work they would not be interested in me so why should they not be more interested in my work than in me”. It’s these kinds of circumlocutions that must have made Wade’s task an unenviable one at times. She notes that Stein suffered something of an identity crisis after “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas“ became a best-seller and catapulted her to international fame. Paradoxically, considering this was what she’d always wanted, she became anxious that readers still weren’t taking her “serious” work seriously. As Wade puts it, in writing the “Autobiography” she’d inadvertently created herself as “the comic heroine of Alice B. Toklas’s fictional autobiography”. This is at the heart of the Gertrude Stein enigma. In her many grabs at celebrity, she compromised her supposedly major goal, which was to be a major literary figure of the twentieth century, on a par with Pound, Joyce, Eliot and co. It’s an unsolvable enigma and Wade sensibly doesn’t try to solve it. She does allude to the fact that misogyny played a part in the animosity of critics towards Stein, an issue which many biographers don’t, but should, address.

In a sea of rhapsodic book reviews, one dissenting opinion emerged, that of Rachel Cooke whose review in “The Observer” was titled “Don’t Waste Your Time with Gertrude Stein“. Cooke comments that “Wade takes Stein seriously at all times, and this is silly”. What she means by this, I’m guessing, is that Wade is silly to take Stein’s writing seriously. Ms Cooke obviously doesn’t, remarking that “Surely she was making it up as she went along”. Many others have shared this view, but Wade takes pains to explain why they shouldn’t dismiss Stein’s work so hastily.

According to Wade, Stein “was beginning to imagine a kind of writing so original that to read it would almost require a rewiring of the brain’s neural architecture, to unlearn all the ways we expect written language to behave.” She goes on to propose that what precipitated Stein’s deep dive into experimental writing was her “desire to wring every ounce of meaning from a limited set of words … to shed language of all its previous associations, so that her words would mean something fresh and specific, unique to the particular context she was giving them”. This may, she suggests, have been sparked by the neurological studies she did at Johns Hopkins in her twenties under the guidance of William James.

Wade’s rationale for Stein’s literary radicalism is elegantly articulated and one of the most well-reasoned I’ve read. That she finds it rewarding to read is obvious. “The way to read Stein,” she advises “is to trust her: perhaps to say her words aloud, to savour the oddities of her phrasing and to resist the urge to explain what her writing means.” If the reader approaches her writing hoping to understand it, Wade says, they will “miss the pleasures her work can offer.”

Stein famously said of her work to a reporter “if you enjoy it you understand it.” Sadly, I’ve never remotely enjoyed, let alone understood it. My brain’s neural architecture is clearly not amenable to the kind of rewiring necessary to do either. Or maybe I’ve just got trust issues. Wade describes Stein’s style as “incantatory” which might explain why it does something weird to me. Trying to read her makes me feel like I’ve taken a hallucinogenic drug, and not in a good way. My eyes glaze over, everything begins to go foggy and my connection to the world of solidity and reason, tenuous at the best of times, slips its anchor and floats away. But this is absolutely my problem, my loss, as it were. 

That others relish this kind of writing and find something inspirational in it, as Wade does, is reassuring. Those who disparage and scorn anything they don’t personally care for are on a par with those unenlightened souls who attended the Salon d’Automne art exhibition in Paris in 1905 and neither enjoying nor understanding Matisse’s “La Femme au Chapeau“ attacked the canvas with their fingernails. It’s curious that dislike of a particular form of artistic expression should provoke anger, ridicule and contempt, but it continues to do so.

Whether or not you’re a fan of Stein’s highly contentious style will become instantly clear the moment you take a glance at it. I recently read a book review by the literary critic Terry Castle called “Very Fine Is My Valentine” in which she discusses “A Stein Reader“ compiled by the late Stein scholar Ulla Dydo. In illustration of Dydo’s groundbreaking thesis that Stein’s work should be approached “through the words, not through what we know of the subject” she quotes several of her more “baffling” pieces, for example, the word portrait “Apollinaire”, which reads:

“Give known or pin ware. Fancy teethe, gas strips. Elbow elect, sour stout pore, pore caesar, pour state at. Leave eye lessons I. Leave I. Lessons. I. Leave I lessons, I.”

Dydo interprets this according to an esoteric code she managed to decipher which necessitates looking at the work “as words or even to the letters that make them up”, in other words dispensing utterly with trivial fancies such as meaning. Thereby she makes of this word jumble “a bilingual eye lesson that is also an ear lesson in new reading”. Lacking the capacity to understand this, or, it must be admitted, the will to even try, I’ve felt at a real disadvantage over the years. In the beginning I couldn’t help but agree with what a reviewer once said of Stein, that “we see the ripples expanding in her consciousness but we are no longer supplied with any clue as to what has sunk there.”

That Wade has been able to plumb the depths and bring up the buried treasure increases my admiration for her breadth of vision.

The second part of the book deals, as mentioned, with Stein’s posthumous legacy, and in particular with Alice B. Toklas’s role in shoring this up. Much of this involved the execution of instructions in Stein’s Will, particularly that as first priority her estate pay for the publication of all her unpublished manuscripts. Given their sheer volume, this was an arduous task. 

In performing it, Toklas reinvented herself as handmaiden to a legacy, nurturing and guarding Stein’s literary reputation with the bristling ferocity of a pint-sized Doberman. 

As Wade makes clear, Toklas’s devotion to duty, albeit laudable, was inversely proportional to any benefit accruing to her personally from Stein’s will.

As discussed in my post Alice Among the Gourmands, Stein’s Will was messy. In order to access funds to support herself, Alice was obliged to negotiate with an increasingly recalcitrant executor who for whatever reason (maybe he disapproved of same sex relationships) made it his mission in life to make things as difficult as possible. 

Wade quotes correspondence between two of Alice’s friends in which one of them, having become aware of the financial dire straits in which Alice was floundering, remarks “I wish to God Gertrude had drawn up a better will”. After Alice was kicked out of the apartment she’d shared with Stein, she became increasingly penurious and if it hadn’t been for the assistance of a few close friends, she’d have died destitute.

In stipulating that funds from her estate be used first and foremost to publish all her unpublished works, Stein could be accused of being more focused on the glittering lights of posterity than the welfare of her devoted companion of 40 years. However, as Wade describes in this section of the book, there were other factors at play. As the two women were never married, estate and taxation laws may have dictated Stein’s decision. One would like to think that had she known Alice would survive her by twenty-odd years, she would not have condemned her to the role of, as Wade puts it, “temporary custodian” or in other words lodger in an apartment decorated with priceless masterpieces while she scrimped and saved to feed herself and keep warm. And then, after the paintings were taken away by the legal heirs, was obliged to live on surrounded by walls pockmarked with pale blank spaces. Wade quotes Fanny Butcher a friend of both Stein and Toklas who likened the emptiness to “a graveyard of white tombstones marking where the Picassos and Matisses and Braques and Picabias and the whole gay assemblage had once lived.”

Since I began digging into the Stein/Toklas history, I’ve often wondered whether it was Alice who in fact authored “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas” and not Stein (see my post “An Unlikely Muse“). Wade doesn’t think she did, although concedes it’s tempting to wonder. She thinks, as I do, that it would certainly have been the focus of much discussion and lively debate between the two. You probably know the kind of thing … “I’m telling you it didn’t happen like that …” Oh to have been a fly on the wall! 

A question I was particularly interested in discussing with Wade was something she wrote in an article published in Granta called “Laundry Bills and Manifestos” on writing biography. In it she says “researching lives is a complicated, messy endeavour, fraught with practical challenges and ethical dilemmas …”. I asked her what, if any, ethical dilemmas she faced in writing this book (although I had a fairly good idea).

Many would be aware, even without the book’s judiciously impartial case history, of the major scandal that in recent years has dogged Stein’s legacy. Revolving around her political behaviour and activities during World War 2, it was sparked by the 2011 publication of Barbara Will’s book “Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Fay and the Vichy Dilemma.”   In it Wills raises questions about Stein’s reactionary politics and particularly her friendship with the pro-Fascist collaborator Bernard Faÿ. It’s a long story, and doesn’t make for happy reading. However, the book’s publication coincided with two major art exhibitions showcasing the Steins’ legendary art collection and also inadvertently drawing attention to the fact that Stein and Toklas survived the wartime years in Vichy France unscathed, while all around them other Jews were being carted away and killed. The events conspired to attract the gimlet-eyed gaze of certain sections of the media who exploded with self-righteous indignation, churning out wildly vitriolic and hyperbolic accounts in the press. Accusing her of being Pro-Fascist, a supporter of Pétain and a major collaborator with the Vichy regime, reporters labelled both Stein and Toklas monsters.

One, in a particularly liverish attack, declared that “the great gibbering earth mother of ungrammatical gobbledygook is essentially in the same  category as Ezra Pound  (fascist-sympathizing poet), Louis-Ferdinand Celine (collaborationist writer) and Paul de Man (anti-Semitic literary critic).” 

Fuelled by such invective, the controversy simmered away for some time, the public of course drinking it in with ardour. Stein-bashing became for a while every news-hungry journalist’s favourite pastime.  

It would be hard to imagine an ethical dilemma knottier than this. Impossible to skirt around and yet imprudent in the extreme to take sides. Wade’s account is reasoned and well balanced, pointing out that Will’s arguments ignore considerable evidence that refutes her claims and also that her remarks had been sensationalised and taken out of context by those with ulterior motives (like news media desperate for a headline.

The question of whether or not we should judge an artist on his or her reputation rather than their work is an example of a conundrum that’s been raising its head more frequently in recent times, with such phenomena as the Me-too movement, Picasso’s rampant misogyny and so on. As Wade points out, Stein’s case is riddled with inconsistencies (some as a result of her own injudicious remarks) and her political views and actions should only be judged within the broader context of her life, especially “the desperation of her wartime consequences”. It also becomes clear, in much of what Stein said and wrote that she was politically naive and often it would have been in her better interest to just shut up. But that was something she could never do!

One reviewer defined Wade’s book as belonging to a new generation of literary biography. While it’s perhaps premature to announce a new generation, the book does represent a trend in more self-aware and less formulaic biographies. Relating the cradle to grave facts of a life is still relevant but exploring the cultural influences of a character’s legacy in subsequent years adds a new and previously unexplored dimension. For a writer like Stein, whose eyes were fixed firmly on posterity from the start, can we say her efforts were worth it? 

In this masterful study, Wade asks that question among many others, and while there can be no definitive answer, she refocuses our attention on why it’s worth trying to see beyond the history to get to the real character. In so doing, she reinvigorates interest in Stein and presents welcome new knowledge. And if there is to be a new generation of biographers, I predict Wade will be at the forefront!