Gertrude Stein had no doubt that she was a genius. “I have been the creative literary mind of the century,” she once boasted. “Think of the Bible and Homer think of Shakespeare and think of me.” Some years earlier, she informed a baffled magazine editor who had rejected her writing that she was producing “the only important literature that has come out of America since Henry James.” She knew her work was unconventional—repetitive, hermetic, its apparent crudeness belying immense psychological and literary sophistication—but was supremely confident that, in time, it would be recognized as something of enduring cultural value. “For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause everybody accepts,” she observed in 1926 about the reception of avant-garde art. There was no question in her mind that her own contribution would eventually be accepted: She simply had to wait.
But what do you do while you’re waiting around to become a classic? And how can you help the process along? Francesca Wade’s Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife is an attempt to answer that question. The book is a biography of Stein, but an oddly structured one, in which the subject dies about halfway through. “Biography, like detective fiction, tends to begin with a corpse,” Wade writes (a killer line), “but Stein well knew that a writer’s life does not end at death, if their work has the power to survive them.” Stein, she contends, was unusually concerned with her posthumous reputation: Having accepted that her work wasn’t destined to be appreciated in her lifetime, she put her faith in posterity. “Those who are creating the modern composition authentically are naturally only of importance when they are dead,” Stein once wrote. Accordingly, she spent a good portion of her life making arrangements for her afterlife.
The first half of Wade’s book is a detailed but necessarily compressed account of Stein’s remarkable, if already well-chronicled, existence. In its second half, though, Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife becomes something trickier and more original: a narrative about literary scholarship, and the discomforts it can cause those left behind to tend a legacy. Stein—whose work was a mystery to so many and yet encoded facts about her personal life that would have been unspeakable during her lifetime—turns out to be the perfect case study for such an investigation.
Stein was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, in 1874, the child of well-heeled second-generation German Jewish immigrants. When Gertrude was five, the family relocated to Oakland, California, where her father made his fortune investing in the nascent public transportation industry. (The adult Stein’s famous pronouncement on Oakland—“There is no there there”—is one of several Steinisms that has achieved proverbial status.) Gertrude, the youngest of five children, was called “Baby,” a nickname she retained for the rest of her life. She was cosseted and indulged by her parents and siblings, establishing a lifelong pattern of contented dependence on the ministrations of others. “It is better if you are the youngest girl in a family to have a brother two years older,” she wrote of her early bond with her brother Leo, “because that makes everything a pleasure to you, you go everywhere and do everything while he does it all for and with you which is a pleasant way to have everything happen to you.”
Gertrude showed early signs of intellectual distinction—she was a strong student, and spent much of her free time at the public library consuming vast quantities of eighteenth-century literature—and in 1893 she was admitted to the Harvard Annex, soon to be renamed Radcliffe College. There she studied with the famed psychologist William James, who called her his “most brilliant woman student,” and began conducting research on automatic writing that presaged her later literary experiments with documenting consciousness. James encouraged her to attend medical school at Johns Hopkins, which she briefly did, but she soon grew bored and decided to join Leo in Europe, where he was pursuing a career as a painter. By the fall of 1903, Gertrude and Leo were living together in Paris on the rue de Fleurus, where they hosted a glittering salon that attracted avant-garde artists such as Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso.
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.”
All of this rich biographical material is covered at a breakneck pace, because Wade’s primary concern, as her subtitle intimates, is not Stein’s life but her afterlife. By the time Stein died of stomach cancer in 1946, her campaign for literary immortality was still unfinished. She had had one unqualified commercial success—The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, a lively memoir, written in a more accessible prose style, which became an improbable bestseller in 1933—but was otherwise a cult figure, infamous for her eccentricity but hardly regarded as “the creative literary mind of the century.” She envied the acclaim that her male modernist peers, such as James Joyce and Ezra Pound, were beginning to receive, even as her own work seemed on the verge of slipping into oblivion. Her published books were little read and much derided; even more frustratingly for the prolific Stein, who regarded everything she wrote as worthy of attention, many of her texts had never been published at all.
It was in the 1930s that Stein began preparing for her posthumous career. Via her friend Thornton Wilder, she learned that librarians at Yale University were beginning to assemble archival collections related to contemporary American literature, and that they were interested in acquiring her papers. Such acquisitions were then highly unusual: Modernism was just beginning to be canonized, and the notion that academic institutions would play a central role in shaping literary history was a relatively novel one. Building an entire archival collection around a still-living author, now a commonplace curatorial practice, was then entirely unheard of.
Stein immediately saw the possibilities. “The idea of an archive fascinated Stein,” Wade writes. With “immortality” in mind, she made the decision to donate her papers to Yale. It meant she no longer had to worry if she could not find a publisher for some of her works during her lifetime:
Through packing her texts into boxes, Stein was able to imagine a reality in which they would be received with pleasure, not derision: recovered, examined, celebrated … This was Stein’s chance to create a paper trail: to project a version of herself into the future.
The latter half of Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife is largely the story of scholars following that paper trail and uncovering various aspects of Stein’s life and work by exploring her vast archive. One secret hiding in plain sight was Stein’s lesbianism. It must have been apparent to most interested observers that Stein and Toklas were more than bosom friends, but the fact was rarely acknowledged explicitly. Anyone who spent time digging in Stein’s archive, however, would quickly come upon evidence of her homosexuality, which she made no effort to conceal. Among the texts she donated to Yale were frankly erotic works like Lifting Belly (which has since become a classic of lesbian love poetry) and “As a Wife Has a Cow: A Love Story.” (“Cow,” Stein scholars soon worked out, was Stein and Toklas’s code word for “orgasm.”) She also sent along private notes to Toklas, using a panoply of whimsical pet names: “darling wife,” “birdie,” “boss,” “little ball,” “little Jew,” “Baby precious,” “Sweet selected sovereign of my soul.” Though Toklas was mortified by the inclusion of these personal documents and insisted that Stein must have donated them to Yale by accident, Wade thinks that “it was just as plausible that Stein wanted future readers to witness the fullness of the relationship, for her archive to anticipate a moment when lesbian sexuality would be more broadly accepted, even offer future lesbian readers a sense of their own history.”
There was more than gossip at stake here. Stein’s sexuality, and the suppression of it, turned out to be crucial to the story of her literary development, as well as to the future of her reputation. One of the first major discoveries in Stein’s archive was an early autobiographical novel called Q.E.D., which told the story of the young Stein’s tormented love affair with a woman named May Bookstaver. The book, written in a much more conventional realist style than her later works, was subsequently reworked into Stein’s story “Melanctha,” the centerpiece of Three Lives, which transposed the characters from white lesbians to a black heterosexual couple. That story had been much praised, including by many black writers and intellectuals, as a nuanced portrait of “Negro psychology,” but before Stein’s death no one had suspected it had any kind of autobiographical basis. Wade speculates that Stein “saw a certain affinity between her own outsider status”—as a lesbian, and a Jew—“and that of the mixed-race Melanctha—that in changing the characters’ races, she had wanted to think through the experience of otherness without being immediately identifiable as the protagonist.”
Whatever the case, when Q.E.D. was published in 1950 under the title Things as They Are, it brought Stein a whole new audience. Edmund Wilson reviewed the book for The New Yorker, calling it “a production of some literary merit and much psychological interest” and proposing that the inordinate difficulty of much of Stein’s mature work might be attributed to “the problem of writing about relationships between women of a kind that the standards of that era would not have allowed her to describe more explicitly.” Wilson’s review, Wade tells us, was “the first time that Stein’s work had been discussed in the context of her sexuality,” and it put her on the path to her eventual reclamation as a queer icon in the 1960s and ’70s. Shortly after the New Yorker review appeared, the small press that had published the novel began receiving orders “from practically every girls’ college in the country,” the publisher Milton Saul reported. “I have an unparalleled mailing list of lesbians by now.”
Q.E.D. had other significant consequences for Stein’s oeuvre. She wrote the novel in 1903, while still in the throes of her youthful infatuation with May Bookstaver. Almost three decades later, in the summer of 1932, she came across the manuscript again. Toklas, who had not previously known of the Bookstaver affair, was gripped by jealousy, resentment, and insecurity. According to Wade, Stein embarked on The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas around this time “as a form of reparation”: Her intention was “to compose a work that would affirm her commitment to Toklas once and for all, uniting their names, publicly, for ever.”
A further bizarre repercussion of Q.E.D., which demonstrates the intensity of Toklas’s feelings, was discovered by the scholar Ulla Dydo in the late 1970s. Examining the handwritten manuscripts of Stein’s long poem Stanzas in Meditation, composed around the time of Q.E.D.’s resurfacing, Dydo noticed that every instance of the word “may” had been struck out and replaced, often with words that made no grammatical or contextual sense: “may be they shall be spared,” for example, became “can they shall be spared.” Toklas, Dydo hypothesized, had been so madly jealous of May Bookstaver that she had forced Stein to eliminate May’s name from the text she was composing, even at the risk of disfiguring its meaning.
Though Wade’s discussion of such scholarly intrigues is deft and will be fascinating to connoisseurs of literary history, it can’t be denied that Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife loses some narrative momentum in its second half. The decision to bifurcate the book into a conventional, if truncated, full-life biography followed by a posthumous reception history is a clever one, but the book inevitably suffers from the absence of Stein as charismatic main character. To some extent, Toklas fills the vacuum, becoming the narrative’s de facto protagonist. In Wade’s telling, she is indeed a compelling, albeit tragic, figure. After Stein’s death, she was utterly bereft. Her friend, the journalist Janet Flanner, called her “the most widowed woman I know.” “Without Baby,” Toklas wrote to another friend in 1948, “there is no direction to anything—it’s just milling around in the dark.”
What purpose Toklas had she found in tending to Stein’s legacy: overseeing the posthumous publication of her unpublished writing, vetting would-be biographers and scholars, and, in Wade’s words, “cementing a narrative in which Stein was a saint, an angel, a genius.” She continued to dwell at the rue Christine, where she and Stein had settled in 1938; when visitors arrived, she would say, “Welcome to Gertrude Stein’s home.” “Some disconcerted visitors compared the apartment to a shrine, or a mausoleum,” Wade writes. “Toklas, distraught and hollow, seemed almost to fade into the furnishings.” “A more enslaved woman would be hard to find,” the writer Max White, who briefly worked with Toklas on her memoirs, reflected. “And when Gertrude was dead, she continued as the slave to a legend.”
But without Toklas, would the legend of Stein have existed at all? Genius takes work, with only a small portion of that work done on the part of the genius herself. Without Toklas—and Mabel Dodge, and Carl Van Vechten, and Thornton Wilder, and dozens of other willing helpmeets—there would be no “Gertrude Stein”: Her achievement was the work of many hands.
Almost 80 years after her death, it seems safe to call Stein’s strategy to secure her posthumous fame a success: She is now a canonical American author, central to the histories of modernism, of queer literature, and of twentieth-century culture writ large. If not quite at the level of Shakespeare or Homer, she is at least as famous as Joyce and Pound. “Stein didn’t believe in an afterlife,” Wade comments. “Her fervent desire for posthumous recognition was her bid for immortality.” Toklas wasn’t so sure: At the age of 80, she converted to Roman Catholicism, largely because she had become fixated on the idea of reuniting with Stein in heaven. Her belief in Stein’s genius was inextricable from her love, just as her life had been inextricable from her devotion. As Toklas put it in a letter to Van Vechten in 1958: “I am nothing but the memory of her.”
