Gertrude Stein Biography and List of Works

American writer, an eccentric whose Paris home was a salon for the Cubist and experimental artist and writers, among them Henri Matisse, Sherwood Anderson, Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. Stein, a brilliant conversationalist, became a legend with her Roman senator haircut and verbal facility. During the German occupation of France in World War II, she survived, against all odds, the persecution of sexual minorities and Jews.

"Most of us balk at her soporific rigmaroles, her echolaliac incantations, her half-witted-sounding catalogues on numbers; most of us read her less and less. Yet, remembering especially her early work, we are still always aware of her presence in the background of contemporary literature - and we picture her as the great pyramidal Buddha of Jo Davidson's statue of her, eternally and placidly ruminating the gradual developments of the process of being, registering the vibrations of a psychological country like some august human seismograph whose charts we haven't the training to read."
(Edmund Wilson in Axel's Castle, 1931)

Gertrude Stein was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, of educated German-Jewish immigrants. Her father, Daniel Stein, was a traction-company executive, who had become wealthy through his investments in street railroads and real estate. When Stein was a child his business took the family to Vienna and Paris for four years. In 1879 the family returned to America. Stein subsequently embarked upon several cultural trips to Europe with her parents.

In 1893 Stein entered Harvard Annex (now Radcliffe College) in Cambridge. She studied psychology under William James (1842-1910) and experimented with automatic writing under his direction. James also visited Stein in Paris in 1908. After studies at John Hopkins medical school, Gertrude Stein moved to Paris. She lived there from 1903 with her brother Leo, and from 1914 with her life companion, Alice B. Toklas, an accomplished cook for the salon's guests at the 27 Rue de Fleurus flat, near Luxembourg Gardens. "America is my country and Paris is my hometown," Stein later said. Her salon attracted intellectuals and artists who discussed new ideas in art and politics. In this atmosphere of creative energy, Stein wanted to produce modern literary version of the new art. Her first novel, Q.E.D. (1903), remained unpublished until after her death - perhaps because of its intimate, lesbian nature.

As a writer Stein made her debut with THREE LIVES (1909), clearly influenced by the two 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 is 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. Leo, who was left in the shadow of his sister, once boasted: "She's basically stupid and I'm basically intelligent." 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.

Stein launched her modernist literary style with THE MAKING OF AMERICANS, a family history and the history of all humanity. It was written between 1906 and 1908 but not published until 1925. In the novel Stein attempts to translate Cubist paintings into a prose form and present an object or an experience from every angle simultaneously. The effect is reinforced by a minimal use of punctuation - automatic writing also fascinated her. From the United States Stein's friend Mabel Dodge wrote with enthusiasm about the Armoury Show. It presented for the first time modern, revolutionary artist to the American public. Her article, which compares Stein's writing to Picasso's Cubism appeared in the magazine Art and Decoration, and was sold at the show. Although Stein met Dodge on only a few occasions, their correspondence lasted over 20 years.

In 1914 Stein published the poetry collection TENDER BUTTONS. It presents a series of still lives, such as 'A Chair', 'A Box', 'Roast beef', 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. Thomson's second opera, THE MOTHER OF US ALL (1947), was also based on Stein's text. Stein toured America and returned to France the 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.

We cannot retrace our steps, going forward may be the same as going backwards. We cannot retrace our steps, retrace our steps. All my long life, all my long life, we do not retrace our steps, all my long life, but.
(A silence a long silence)
(from The Mother of Us All, concluding aria)

Stein's best known work, THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ALICE B. TOKLAS, is actually her own autobiography. Throughout the last years of her life 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 works are highly modernistic and experimental, she also had a strong influence on such popular writers as Ernest Hemingway, who combined her use of repetitive patterns with vernacular speech.

For further reading: Gertrude Stein by E. Sprigge (1957); Charmed Circle by James R. Mellow (1974); Everybody Who Was Anobody by Janet Hobhouse (1975); Language and Time and Gertrude Stein by C.F. Copeland (1975); Lesbian Images by J. Rule (1975); Different Language by M.A. De-Kove (1983); The Structure of Obscurity by R.K. Dubnick (1984); The Third Rose: Gertrude Stein and Her World by J.M. Brinnin (1987); Gertrude Stein by B.L. Knapp (1990); Gertrude and Alice by Diane Souhami (1991); Gertrude Stein: In Words and Pictures, ed. by Renate Stendhal (1994); Gertrude Stein Remembered, ed. by Linda Simon (1994) - Note: Stein launched the phrase 'There's no there, there', originally applied to suburbanised American cities, but now used to describe the de-centred Internet. Among her most famous statements was "A rose is a rose is a rose." - See also: Richard Wright

THREE LIVES, (1909)