Gertrude Stein

(1874-1946) She has been called a Genius and a Fraud, a Bitch, a Saint, Overrated and Underrated. In reality Gertrude Stein was all of them. With her Roman pageboy haircuts, stark clothes and no nonsense style she influenced the modernists in the early 20th century, the beat generation, hippies, and is being discovered again at the beginnings of the 21st century.

Stein was born on February 3, 1874 in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, to educated German-Jewish immigrants. Her father, Daniel Stein, was a businessman who had become wealthy investing in railroads. As a child she frequently travelled the US and Europe.

In 1893 Stein entered Harvard Annex, now Radcliffe College, in Cambridge, Massachusetts where she studied psychology under William James and under his direction experimented with automatic writing. James's influence in automatic writing runs through her work.

After studies at Johns Hopkins medical school, Gertrude Stein moved to Paris. It was in Paris in 1907 that she met San Francisco-born American literary figure Alic B. Toklas.

Toklas was a chain smoker with a slight mustache, given to exotic dress, Gypsy earsings and manicured nails. Alice was "Pussy" to Gertrude, and she was "Lovey" to Alice. From 1903 to 1909 Stein lived solely with her brother Leo, and when Toklas moved in with Leo and Gertrude in 1914, Leo moved out. 

The flat at 27 Rue de Fleurus flat, near Luxembourg Gardens became a salon that attracted intellectuals and artists to discuss new ideas in art and politics. In the atmosphere of creative energy, Stein also wanted to produce a literary version of the new art.

As a writer Stein made her debut with THREE LIVES (1909), clearly influenced by the Jameses, novelist Henry and psychologist William. The book was based on a reworking of a late Flaubert text called Trois Contes. She and her brother started to collect works by contemporary painters.

She also tried to connect theories of Cubism to literature, as in the essay COMPOSITION AS EXPLANATION (1926), which was based on her lectures at Cambridge and Oxford. After differences emerged between the Cubists and the post-Impressionists, Stein sided with the former while her brother Leo championed the latter. In her book about Picasso (1938) Stein recalled that in 1909 the artist showed her some photographs of a Spanish village to demonstrate how Cubist in reality they appeared. According to Stein, Picasso's paintings, such as 'Horta de Ebro' and 'Maison sur la colline' were almost exactly like the photographs.

Her modernist literary style Stein lauched with THE MAKING OF AMERICANS, written between 1906 and 1908 but not published until 1925. Stein tried to translate in it Cubist paintings into a prose form and present an object or an experience from every angle simultaneously. The effect was reinforced by minimal use of punctuation. In the course of the book's 925 pages Stein's family history became a history of whole humanity.

In 1914 Stein published the poetry collection TENDER BUTTONS. It presented a series of still lives, such as 'A Chair', 'A Box', 'Roastbeef', and 'End of Summer'. Each of these is characterized by unexpected phrases that collide. When England declared war on Germany, Stein was visiting the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead in England, with her lover Toklas. After a brief trip to Majorca in 1915 they returned to Paris, joining the American Fund For French Wounded. She and Toklas received the French government's Medaille de la Reconnaissance Française in 1922.

"America is my country and Paris is my home town and it is as it has come to be. After all anybody is as their land and air is. Anybody is as the sky is low or high, the air heavy or clean and anybody is as there is wind or no wind there. It is that which makes them and the arts they make and the work they do and the way they eat and the way they drink and the way they learn and everything" (from 'An American and France,' 1936)

In 1934 Stein travelled to New York. Her opera, FOUR SAINTS IN THREE ACTS, music composed by Virgil Thomson, had become A huge success with an all-black cast. She toured America and returned to France next year. Toklas and Stein were both Jews, but they remained in France during World War II, living under the protection of Pétain in various country houses. In December 1944 they returned to Paris. Stein's war memoirs, WARS I HAVE SEEN, appeared in 1945.

Stein's best known work, THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ALICE B. TOKLAS, is actually her own autobiography. The last years of her live Stein suffered from cancer. She died on 27 July 1946 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France. Toklas lived on until 1967. Her memoirs, What is Remembered, appeared in 1963. Although Stein's output is characteristic of high modernism, she also had a strong influence on such popular writer as Ernest Hemingway, who combined her use of repetitive patterns with vernacular speech.

I love my love with a v

Because it is like that

I love my love with a b

Because I am beside that

A king.

I love my love with an a

Because she is a queen

I love my love and a a is the best of them

Think well and be a king,

Think more and think again

I love my love with a dress and a hat

I love my love and not with this or with that

I love my love with a y because she is my bride

I love her with a d because she is my love beside

Thank you for being there

Nobody has to care

Thank you for being here

Because you are not there. 

And with and without me which is and without she she can be late and then and how and all around we think and found that it is time to cry she and I.

*by Todd Richmond, 365Gay.com Features Editor