21 May 2025

Gertrude Stein’s quest for fame

The modernist phenomenon believed bad attention was better than none at all.

Photo by Cecil Beaton / Conde Nast via Getty Images

Gertrude Stein is, famously, one of those authors whose name is better known than her works. This was so during her lifetime, as the biographer Francesca Wade demonstrates in her readable and illuminating account of Stein’s life and literary afterlife. Wade explores how we have come to perceive Stein, as a writer and as a character. And a “character” she was: a self-created literary phenomenon, keen to have her name in the press and to have herself talked about, for good or ill. It was FR Leavis who made the comment that Edith Sitwell belonged “to the history of publicity rather than poetry”, and the same could have been said of Stein, her American contemporary and acquaintance. The story of her journey from her birth in 1874 to a cultured and wealthy middle-class émigré Jewish family in Pennsylvania to the Rue de Fleurus and the salons of turn-of-the-century Paris, and of her survival with her companion Alice B Toklas in France through two world wars, is gripping and full of surprises. Her friendships and quarrels with celebrities such as Hemingway, Picasso and Matisse have been well documented: less so her intrepid wartime adventures at the wheel of her Ford motor car, “Auntie”; her love of a succession of dogs called Basket; and her brief flirtation after the Armistice with the notion of translating Pétain’s speeches into English.

One of the most curious features of Stein’s career was her compulsion to keep, preserve and deposit every scrap of her own literary output, a habit which must have made the biographer’s task both more arduous and, one hopes, ultimately more rewarding. Wade has examined on our behalf the vast archive Stein left, and untangles for us the complicated posthumous story of her acolytes, admirers, editors and bibliographers and their relationships with Toklas, the survivor: nearly half of the volume is devoted to what occurred after Stein’s death at the age of 72 in July 1946. By the time we reach this point in the narrative, we have become familiar with and fond of Stein’s eccentricities: her generosity and stubbornness and courage and wit and relentless self-promotion. Her earlier years, less well known by most of us, are recounted with insight: her studies at Radcliffe and Harvard; her developing understanding of her own sexuality, which she addressed in her early fiction; and her relationships with philosopher and psychologist William James, and her brother, the art collector and critic Leo (with whom she lived in Paris until they fell out – Stein’s description of her estrangement from Leo is peculiarly and delightfully Steinian: “Little by little we never met again”). The growth of her extraordinary self-confidence, and the style with which she expressed it, are carefully traced, and remain astonishing. She entitled herself, and she succeeded in living up to her own expectations of fame.

However, all was not plain sailing in her drive for recognition. Although she was comfortably off financially, and lived a pleasantly independent rentier life, she longed to be a popular commercial success, and not surprisingly she found it very hard to find publishers to take her on. Her work was too difficult, too obscure, too provocative. She had many overtures but few offers. She found a home in little magazines such as Paris’s surrealist journal transition, which welcomed experimental work, but she had to pay the costs of some of her publications. For example, in 1922 she forked out $2,500 to the Four Seas Company of Boston to take on her collection of 52 short pieces, Geography and Plays, for which she wrote her own autobiographical note praising her “brilliant work” on the brain as a medical student and the “profound influence of Cézanne” on her writing. This volume was greeted by what Wade describes as “some of the most hostile reviews Stein ever received”: the Baltimore Sun announced that “Miss Stein applies cubism to defenceless prose”, one critic described her work as “419 pages of drivel”, and the New York Herald Tribune compared her to the emperor with no clothes. It was hard going, but she persevered unapologetically with her unique agenda, seeming to believe, as she bravely declared in The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas, that bad attention was better than no attention at all.

She soldiered on, and her reputation grew, for both good and ill, and by 1926 she was sufficiently esteemed by academe to received dual invitations to lecture at both Oxford and Cambridge. She describes herself as having been intensely anxious and nervous before these performances, but she spoke to packed houses and received many questions and rapturous applause. She fielded the questions with wit, according to herself and others, and the events made her feel “like a prima donna”. She was backed up, in Cambridge, by Harold Acton and the Sitwells. It is worth noting that her Cambridge lecture was two years ahead of Virginia Woolf’s seminal “A Room of One’s Own”, first delivered in 1928. At this period, the Woolfs were considering taking some of her work for the Hogarth Press: she had tried to persuade them to publish her immensely long and unwieldy novel The Making of Americans, but Virginia could not “brisk [herself] up to deal with it”. But they did publish her lecture, “Composition as Explanation”, and the Sitwells gave a dinner for her in London where she met EM Forster. Stein conquered both Paris and London on her own terms.

Nearly ten years later, in 1934, she conquered America. Returning to her native land for a lecture tour after an absence of decades, she was able to celebrate the success of what many consider her most readable work, The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas, published in 1933. She and Toklas were on the road (and in the air, as they took their first aeroplane) for seven months and took in 37 states. “Gertrude Stein has arrived,” announced the ticker tape in New York to greet them. And arrived she had. They met many celebrities, including Eleanor Roosevelt, who invited her to tea in the White House. Stein enjoyed explaining her idiosyncratic prosody to her audiences, her love of long sentences and her antipathy to the “servile comma”, about which she is very funny. Her glory was compounded in the same year by the production of her opera Four Saints in Three Acts,with music by Virgil Thomson (with whom she had a characteristically turbulent friendship) and choreography by Frederick Ashton. It was “a knockout and a wow”, according to her most devoted admirer (and eventually her executor) Carl Van Vechten, and it transferred to Broadway, where “it played for six weeks to sell-out houses, the longest run for an opera in the city’s history”. It was quoted in the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movie Top Hat and in the Charlie Brown comic strip. The chronology of her American triumphs is a little confusing – but that is probably because so much was going on. She had at last achieved the fame for which she had always longed.

The stories of Stein’s professional success and the intimate details of her domestic and sexual life are equally interesting, and both are well told. But they do leave one with an important question: do they make her work any more readable, any more accessible? The oeuvre which she strove with such determination to see in print is certainly accessible now, in that you can buy (as I did) the Delphi edition of her Collected Works on Kindle for £2.99. Stein would surely have been delighted to have reached the mainstream via a new technology (even if the text of the Kindle edition raises its own problems, as one is often unable to decide whether certain eccentricities, such as the persistent spelling of words like “roumanian” with a lower case “r”, are hers or the device’s, which gives an added piquancy to the pursuit of Stein’s genius). I failed to tackle The Making of Americans but reread the Autobiography and enjoyed some of her early and more conventional shorter pieces. Wade alerts us to the fact that Wars I Have Seen, including its portrayal of village life during wartime near the French-Swiss border, was in its day “hugely successful”, and it is indeed a relatively straightforward read, raising interesting questions about why Stein and Toklas were left unmolested by Pétain’s anti-Semitic regime. Stein’s politics were inconsistent, and she was on good terms with both collaborators and Resistance fighters: the story of the Vichy government official Bernard Faÿ and his putative protection of Stein and Toklas is particularly intriguing.

Wade’s biography is a fine introduction to the riches of Stein’s formidable output, and an encouragement to those unfamiliar with this terrain to travel further. Much has been written about Stein from many critical and ideological viewpoints, and specialists will surely find statements here to correct or dispute, but for the general reader this is an incentive to read on and explore her world. Richard Ellman’s masterly biography of James Joyce (of whose success Stein was jealous) has persuaded many readers to tackle Finnegans Wake, while Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era (1971) re-established the poet Ezra Pound as one of the great modernists. Leon Edel’s The Life of Henry James is another notable marker. Biography can be the gateway to understanding and, more than that, to enjoyment. The Delphi modernists list now includes Carson McCullers, Dos Passos, Camus and Katherine Mansfield. Gertrude Stein is one of its boldest choices and, with Francesca Wade’s guidance, should tempt more of us to get beyond a rose is a rose is a rose.