She was derided as a charlatan – but was Gertrude Stein a genius?

Telegraph

11-05-2025

Gertrude Stein, as Francesca Wade puts it in this masterpiece of biography, was a character of 'bewildering contradictions'. Depending on who you spoke to, she was either a genius or a charlatan. A central figure of the Roaring '20s in Paris, she presided over the artistic salon of 27 rue de Fleurus, the flat she shared for over three decades with her partner Alice B Toklas, and from that room she supported many of the most significant artists and writers of the modern era.
Without Gertrude and her brother Leo's patronage, for instance, it's unlikely we'd know the work of Matisse and Picasso: the Steins helped them both early in their careers. She was a mentor to the greatest young expatriate American writers of the 1920s, not least Fitzgerald and Hemingway, for whom she coined the phrase 'the Lost Generation'. Stein was at the cutting edge of the aesthetic revolution. Even the exaggerations around her are telling. When her close friend (and later publisher) Carl Van Vechten claimed he and she were present for the riotous 1913 premiere of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, it was a terrible lie – they only got there on night two.
Even casual readers, however, will know the reception Stein's own writing received at the time, and still receives today: some excitement, but plenty of bafflement. The publisher Arthur C Fifield responded to one manuscript with a parody of her repetitive style: 'Only one look, only one look is enough. Hardly one copy would sell here. Hardly one. Hardly one.' When her writing did appear, it was often in fitful serialisation, or self-published, or published by houses beneath Stein's worth. Her great work Tender Buttons came out in 1914 with Claire Marie Press, an operation that Stein's friend and agent Mabel Dodge deplored as 'absolutely third-rate… effete and decadent'.
Tender Buttons gives you a good flavour of Stein's style. It's a series of extended, expressionistic prose poems sorted into the categories 'OBJECTS', 'FOOD' and 'ROOMS'. Take this short passage from 'Roastbeef': 'Bargaining for a little, bargain for a touch, a liberty, an estrangement, a characteristic turkey… Cloudiness what is cloudiness, is it a lining, is it a roll, is it melting.' You may feel baffled by the repetitions, the anchorless strangeness: but what helps the wary reader, as Wade explains, is that Stein wanted to do to language what Picasso, who owed her so much, was doing to visual representation in Cubism.
Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife is in two substantial halves. The first concerns Stein's life and education. Born in 1874 in Pennsylvania, she was the youngest daughter of an upper-middle class Jewish family. In 1893, she became one of the first female students admitted to Harvard, where she studied medicine and psychology under William James, and rapidly tired of the field. Enter her older brother, Michael Stein. Having achieved quick success in the San Francisco locomotive industry, he sent a generous stipend to Gertrude and Leo so they could live comfortably for the rest of their lives, an act of devotion and responsibility that feels almost unheard of in the 21st century.
Her brother Leo moved to Paris in 1902, renting the famed rue de Fleurus apartment. After a brief, unhappy stay in London, Gertrude joined him, and he introduced her to a more vibrant creative scene. Alice Toklas, only three years younger than Stein and also America-born, moved to Paris at the age of 29, some time after the catastrophic San Francisco earthquake in 1906 destroyed her family's business prospects. By this point, Stein had already been a mentor and putative therapist (pre-Freud) to a couple of 'anxious young women', family friends with whom she'd take long walks, trying to understand why they found being alive so difficult. Stein met Toklas on September 8 1907, the day the latter arrived in Paris; she found her initially offputting, if a little intriguing. But soon she was infatuated, both with Toklas and, it seems clear, Toklas's almost immediate devotion to Stein and Stein's prodigious talents. Toklas moved in with Stein and Leo, and the famous salon evolved through a combination of generosity, vision and chance.
Gradually, however, the energy of the early years abated. People begin to blame Toklas for Stein freezing people out: Hemingway, not a notable friend to woman, felt this way, but so did Leo, after cohabiting with them for just over a decade. Wade presents these tensions with novelistic subtlety: Leo may have had good reason for resentment as his close and long-standing relationship with his sister was taken from him, but he was also petty and jealous whenever Stein had so much as a poem published in a journal. He made a great show of dismissing her talents. Toklas, already a staunch protector of Stein's genius and legacy, had little desire to keep him around.
At this point, Stein's reputation was based mostly on her salons and the unwavering support of other radical artists and writers. Her literary career was marked by one disappointment and frustration after another – bitterly exacerbated by the burgeoning success of writers who largely failed to acknowledge her. Stein and Toklas had already rented a country house near the Swiss border in Bilignin – Stein used some military contacts to have the former occupant, a military man, promoted, so that he would vacate it – and they spent more and more time in this retreat, seeing few people other than their rural neighbours. Stein wrote all day; Toklas knitted, cooked, kept house and typed up Stein's hand-written pages at night.
But then came the unlikely Broadway success of Stein's experimental 1927 libretto Four Saints in Three Acts, in which two 16th-century Spanish saints, Ignatius and Teresa, experience a series of wild visions drawn only glancingly from hagiography or history. It was followed by the much greater success, and with a popular readership, of The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas, written in Toklas's voice by Stein: it concerns Toklas's life rather less than it does the Parisian glamour and energy with which Stein had surrounded her. Suddenly, having retired somewhat from the social whirl, Stein was in more demand than ever.
The greatest controversy was yet to come. Stein and Toklas had driven ambulances during the First World War, but they believed that a Second couldn't possibly happen; the couple stayed in France despite repeated entreaties to return to the safety of America. When conflict did break out, Stein expressed admiration for Philippe Pétain, head of state of the collaborationist Vichy government: she believed he was the only man who could bring peace. In reality, Pétain's regime deported over 75,000 Jews to Nazi Germany. Stein's trust in Pétain might be understood, to be extremely kind, as blind hope, knowing how closely she witnessed the First World War, but it has remained a stain on her legacy. Stein and Toklas themselves, both of Jewish heritage, survived in large part thanks to the refusal of their neighbours in Bilignin to shop them to the Nazis.
The second half of Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife isn't so much a biography as a reckoning with the biographical form itself. What right does a reader have to the private life of the subject? Wade begins here with Stein's untimely death from stomach cancer in 1946, at the age of 72. The 'afterlife' of the title works on several levels. One was the gargantuan undertaking of publishing her posthumous works and guarding her legacy, which, as stipulated in her will, fell to Toklas and a few trusted editors and supporters such as Van Vechten. Stein's archive, housed to this day at the Beinecke Library at Yale University, was begun in her lifetime, but it contains many intimate drafts, papers and diaries discussed here for the first time (including 39 years' worth of love notes to Toklas).
A second sense of 'afterlife' is another person's grief. Toklas survived Stein by some 20 years, largely bereft, silent and still living in the haunted, beautiful rue de Fleures apartment. She was entrusted with finding publishers for all of Stein's posthumous work, which occupied a lot of her time and energy; she attended operas and plays and had an avid support network; but when she received visitors she spoke only of Stein and her memories. (She eventually wrote a successful cookbook.) Towards the end of her life, she converted to Catholicism, principally because a belief in the afterlife provided a small hope that she might see Stein again.
Wade is especially good at timing. Things intimated in the first half of this book are disclosed in the second with the judicious arrangement of a great detective novel – Hemingway's account of the end of his and Stein's friendship, for instance, or the souring of her relationship with her brother Leo, who lived with Stein and Toklas for years before storming out over a combination of professional and romantic resentment. Wade is always even-handed, never salacious. Stein, she argues, was driven and tirelessly committed to literature, but 'not averse to setting her enthusiasts against one another'. Toklas, while supportive emotionally and materially, could be controlling and manipulative too. Old friends such as Mabel Weeks felt that Toklas 'created a monster' in catering to Stein's every need.
On that theme, one of the most fascinating episodes here is the discovery that The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas was an act of reparation Stein made in 1932 to a furiously jealous Toklas. Toklas had discovered a manuscript of Stein's first novel QED (1903) and found out, for the first time, about May Bookstaver, with whom a youthful Stein was embroiled in a years-long love triangle. (One reason for Stein's move to Paris had been to escape the mess and the heartbreak.) Toklas was so angry that she changed the word 'may' for something else in everything she typed up afterwards.
Stein is less read and celebrated in Britain than in the US and on the Continent. It often feels as though even those willing to try are unable, quite, to place her. She preceded many of the writers we know as 'modernists' by a decade, yet her writing could be more radical and experimental than theirs. One reason, as Wade convincingly shows, is that Stein was a repeated target of misogyny, homophobia and anti-Semitism. Few of the leading lights of canonical literature emerge well in their dismissals. Wyndham Lewis called her an 'arch-fraud', James Joyce an 'eyebold earbig noseknaving gutthroat'; TS Eliot averred that if future writers came under her influence it might bring about 'a new barbarian age of literature'. Stein the writer remains misunderstood, with a less-than-stable place in the canon and the same divided public opinion she had when she was alive. In a contemporary literary climate that persists as if her innovations never happened, I agree with Wade's implicit argument: she's ripe for a revival.
Wade shows a great sensitivity to the morality of biography writing, and the tendency to sensationalism, historical or contemporary. She's an exceptional writer, able to draw out the legend, the contradictions and the reality in a fully coherent, dizzyingly comprehensive triptych: Stein was a genius, imprimatur and also a real and often quite difficult person, in life and after. She at one point expressed in interview what might be the lament of any modern-day artist or celebrity: '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.'
If this is a warning shot across the bows for any would-be future biographer, Wade is undeterred. She cares as much about the work as she does the complex, brilliant and contradictory person who created it. Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife, exhaustively researched and beautifully written, will become the definitive biography.