Gertrude Stein: an Afterlife by Francesca Wade – how a literary legend was made

The Guardian

26-05-2025

When The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas was published in 1933, it made 60-year-old Gertrude Stein famous after decades of obscurity. The book painted a thrilling picture of life among the Parisian haute bohème in the early years of the 20th century. Picasso, Matisse, Scott Fitzgerald and Ezra Pound all made repeat appearances at the apartment in Rue de Fleurus which Stein shared with her partner Toklas. After decades of pushing language to its limits, Stein had written The Autobiography in a comparatively accessible style with jokes and anecdotes and full sentences. Or, as one relieved critic noted at the time, Gertrude Stein had finally started making sense.
In this thoughtful and deeply researched book, Francesca Wade explains that the success of The Autobiography had the unintended effect of moving the focus from Stein as a writer to Stein as a celebrity. While she loved the fame and money, what Stein really wanted was to be acknowledged for her earlier, more radical work in which words were set free from the shackles of meaning and grammar. The fact that her epic The Making of Americans, composed between 1902 and 1911, failed to find a publisher until 1925 had meant that James Joyce and TS Eliot, whose respective breakthroughs came in 1922 with the publication of Ulysses and The Wasteland, were regularly hailed as the founders of literary modernism. This left Stein looking like a latecomer or, worse still, a copycat.
To have a chance of asserting her primacy, Stein wanted her entire archive, published and unpublished, novels as well as shopping lists, deposited at Yale where it would be made available for generations of scholars and critics (not biographers, whom she hated). Their job, as she saw it, would be to restore 'Gertrude Stein' to her rightful place as the true originator of what she called 'modern writing'. Mostly, the plan worked. Gradually the suggestion that Stein was a pretentious fraud faded away to be replaced by the idea she was a dazzling innovator who had blown the cobwebs off literary language and ushered in an entirely new way of recording human experience.
By giving her book the subtitle 'An Afterlife', Wade signals that it is this process of making and remaking Gertrude Stein's posthumous reputation that is her main focus. So it is odd that she spends half her lengthy text retelling Stein's very well-known life, from the early days as a medical student in Baltimore to the last scary years hiding out from the Nazis in the French countryside (although they seldom acknowledged their Jewishness, Stein and Toklas knew that they were at high risk of being sent to a concentration camp). As a result, it is not until page 204, following Stein's death from cancer in 1946, that Wade embarks on the more interesting and original aspects of her investigation.
At this point we are introduced to a new cast of characters – the librarians, academics and even despised biographers – who pile into Yale and rifle through the enormous archive. Inevitably there are rivalries and fallings out. One of the chief actors is Leon Katz, who interviewed Toklas in the winter of 1952 and plucked up the courage to show her a vitriolic attack that Stein had written in 1907 describing her future life partner as 'ungenerous, conscienceless, mean, vulgarly triumphant and remorselessly caddish, in short just plain low'. Katz guarded his notes like a terrier, even refusing to show them to the equally tenacious Janet Malcolm when she was writing her own study of the Stein-Toklas relationship in 2007. But on Katz's death in 2017 his notes passed into the archive and Wade believes she is the first person to have made use of them, although they were published in 2021.
This is a big win, not least because it throws new light on the genesis of The Autobiography. Far from being a celebration of a serene and settled relationship, it now looks as though the crowd-pleasing classic was composed by Stein in a desperate attempt to keep Toklas from storming out after one provocation too many. But if Wade had written a shorter and more focused investigation of Stein's posthumous reptuation, perhaps it would have showcased her achievement to even better effect.
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Gertrude Stein: an Afterlife by Francesca Wade is published by Faber (£20). To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.