Latest news with #GertrudeStein
Hindustan Times
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Hindustan Times
Trapped between two wars: The art of the Lost Generation
Sometime in the early 1920s, Gertrude Stein took her ancient Ford Model T from her home in Paris's Rue de Fleurus to a local mechanic. The car had been having starting trouble, and the young mechanic assigned to it was making heavy weather of it. Eventually, Stein deemed his efforts unsatisfactory and complained to his boss, who berated the boy, saying: 'You are all a generation perdue.' When Ernest Hemingway, a friend, next visited her home, she applied it to him and others of his generation. 'All of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation,' she said. Hemingway, who understood the value of phrases like that, used it as an epigraph for his first novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926), which follows the lives of a group of American and British expatriates in Paris in the mid-1920s, rootless people wounded physically and emotionally by the Great War, looking for, and not always finding, an anchor. The expatriates in Paris at the time, incidentally, made up a sort of who's who of the cultural icons of the first half of the 20th century. The poet Ezra Pound moved to Paris in 1921. Writer Ford Madox Ford in 1922. Novelist John Dos Passos in 1919. James Joyce came to Paris intending a two-day layover en route to London, and ended up staying until France fell to the Germans in World War 2. Sylvia Beach, the daughter of American missionaries, moved to Paris in 1917, and set up Shakespeare and Company, one of the world's most famous bookshops. F Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda Fitzgerald visited in 1921 and '24. (A year after that second visit, he would release his best-known work, set in this era, but in New York: The Great Gatsby. It is 100 years old this year.) Back to Paris, in the wake of the Great War, this was a city where people caught fish in the Seine for dinner, and toilets with aluminium containers were still emptied into cesspools that were cleared by horse-drawn wagons. But it was also the home of Picasso, Modigliani, Chagall and, on occasion, Salvador Dali. It was the city of Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, of Coco Chanel and the singer Josephine Baker. It was a world of people who had been in the war young, were trying to build their own anchors — through art and sculpture and dance, stories and fashion and architecture — and didn't yet know another war was coming. *** The rootlessness was not restricted to Paris. In England, in 1922, TE Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia, dissatisfied with life as a civil servant, applied to the Royal Air Force under the name TE Ross and was initially rejected, before people like Winston Churchill recommended he be accepted. The poet Robert Graves suffered so badly from shell shock that even the smell of flowers reminded him of the gas warfare attacks he had suffered as a soldier. Siegfried Sassoon, awarded the Military Cross, one of the war's highest decorations, became a poet and a conscientious objector. Wilfred Owen, generally considered one of the great poets of the war, was killed a week before its end, aged 25. What passing-bells for these who die as cattle? / Only the monstrous anger of the guns. / Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle / Can patter out their hasty orisons. / No mockeries for them; no prayers nor bells, / Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, — / The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells; / And bugles calling for them from sad shires… he wrote, in Anthem for Doomed Youth (1917). *** This was also the beginning of a new world for the Western woman. First, with the men off in the battlefields, they took up jobs in factories. Many lost their menfolk and breadwinners; the lucky among them received war-widow pensions, but others struggled. More women were forced to seek permanent employment. This, directly and indirectly, contributed to the movement for women's suffrage, and the right to vote was finally extended to them. Back to Stein's phrase, 'Lost Generation' soon began to be used beyond its original context of her inner circle of artists, poets and writers who flocked to Paris in the 1920s. It became the tag for anyone born between 1883 and 1900. Franz Kafka (1883-1924) would fit the bill, even though he never fought in the war, having been found medically unfit. The Trial (1925) and The Castle (1926), his best-known novels, deal with the sense of despair, alienation and fruitless search for meaning that would come to define the young adults of this age. But what about Hugh Lofting of Doctor Dolittle fame, or PG Wodehouse? Well, there never has been just one kind of art. This is a period that saw the rise, for instance, of the crime novel, with people essentially binge-reading the work of great British pulp-fiction writers such as Sax Rohmer (a former soldier and creator of the Chinese criminal mastermind Fu Manchu); Hermann McNeile aka Sapper of the Bulldog Drummond adventures (who was still serving when he began to write these tales, and would inspire authors such as Ian Fleming and Alistair MacLean); Dornford Yates, who alternated been funny stories of upper-class Englishmen dealing with declining fortunes, and hard-edged spy thrillers, with characters that moved between genres. It wasn't just the men. Three of the four Queens of Crime who dominated the Golden Age of Mystery: Agatha Christie and Dorothy L Sayers in England, and Ngaio Marsh in New Zealand, were from this cohort. (The fourth, Margery Allingham, was born in 1904.) Christie served as a nurse with the Red Cross during World War 1, which left her with a vast knowledge of poisons (and a penchant for murderous nurses). Sayers, credited with popularising the statement 'It pays to advertise', also wrote the original advertising jingle for Guinness. Marsh toured as a stage actress during the war and would use her knowledge of stagecraft to great effect in her Roderick Alleyn books. *** Across the Atlantic, other Lost Generation authors were redefining the crime novel. Dashiell Hammett, an ambulance driver in the war, would define the 'hard-boiled' detective novel; a genre launched by Carroll John Daly's Three Gun Terry (1923). Raymond Chandler (1888-1959) would take up Hammett's mantle with gritty, hard edged crime thrillers such as The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely. The Lost Generation changed children's literature as well. The Australian-British Pamela Lyndon Travers created Mary Poppins in 1934. Antoine de Saint-Exupery's The Little Prince (1943) remains one of the bestselling books of all time. The Englishwoman Richmal Crompton created that irrepressible schoolboy William Brown in 1922. Air Force pilot WE Johns (also the man who rejected Lawrence's application to the RAF) created Biggles. And there was, of course, Enid Blyton (1897-1968). *** World War 1 made Hollywood what it is today. The destruction of European cinema in the war saw a wave of actors and directors make their way to America. There were so many movies being made in the US after the war — 80% of all movies made worldwide — that the studio system evolved, as did the producers who would dominate the industry's golden age: Louis B Mayer, Irving Thalberg, Harry Cohn, Jack L Warner. All the great silent comedians belonged to this generation: Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, and Chico, Harpo and Groucho Marx. So did many of the great directors who would transform cinema: Ernst Lubitsch, Fritz Lang, George Cukor, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Jean Renoir, Rene Clair. And, of course, there were the actors. The South African-born Basil Rathbone crawled to the German side, across no-man's land, disguised as, of all things, a tree, to recover military intelligence that would earn him the Military Cross. He would go on to epitomise sneering British villainy in swashbuckling films, and is still considered one of the best portrayers of Sherlock Holmes. Claude Rains, who made every movie better just by being in it, and whose performance in Casablanca is still remembered, lost almost all the vision in one eye as a result of a gas attack. Within months of the war breaking out, Ronald Colman (A Tale of Two Cities, Prisoner of Zenda) had his leg shattered by a mortar shell, forcing him to crawl back to safety. The experience left him with an air of melancholic reserve that worked well for the characters created by another Lost Generation Englishman: James Hilton. His novels Lost Horizon (1933) and Random Harvest (1941) both featured world-weary protagonists scarred by the war. Colman played both men in the film adaptations. 'It was the war that made an actor out of me,' he would later say. 'I wasn't my own man anymore. We went out. Strangers came back.' (K Narayanan writes on films, videogames, books and occasionally technology)
Wall Street Journal
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
‘Marsden Hartley: Adventurer in the Arts' Review: A Roving Life and Career
Santa Fe, N.M. Afflicted by a lifelong case of wanderlust, Marsden Hartley hobnobbed with some of the greatest cultural innovators of the early 20th century. He was championed by Alfred Stieglitz, who launched the American Modernist movement and gave him a show at his revolutionary New York gallery, 291. In Paris he was briefly part of Gertrude Stein's celebrated circle before moving to Berlin, where he befriended Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc. He was drawn to Mabel Dodge Luhan's orbit in New York's Greenwich Village and Taos, N.M., and he summered in Provincetown, Mass., with the likes of Eugene O'Neill and John Reed.
The Guardian
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Gertrude Stein: an Afterlife by Francesca Wade – how a literary legend was made
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. Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion Gertrude Stein: an Afterlife by Francesca Wade is published by Faber (£20). To support the Guardian order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
Times
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Gertrude Stein — self-declared literary genius and ‘Mrs Cuddle-Wuddle'
For the literary biographer, an archive can be as unreliable and secretive as her subject. The American writer Gertrude Stein began submitting boxes of her papers to Yale University ten years before her death, intoxicated by the idea of an afterlife. Stein had always sought fame — or gloire, as she called it; upon her death, she wanted nothing short of immortality. But while she was happy for boxes of her papers to be sent indiscriminately to Yale, and stipulated in her will that any unpublished manuscripts be printed, her life partner and creative collaborator, Alice Toklas, was determined for some secrets to be kept. In her impressive biography of Stein, Francesca Wade is part researcher, part sleuth. Her book is a story of
Telegraph
11-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
She was derided as a charlatan – but was Gertrude Stein a genius?
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.
