About Gertrude Stein

James Laughlin

It was quite by serendipity that I met Gertrude Stein. “Miss Stein,” I should say; like Marianne Moore, she was someone whom one instinctively called “Miss” even if one knew her well.

In the summer of 1934, after my sophomore year at Harvard, I had taken a leave of absence to go to Europe. I was determined to become a writer, and in those days Europe was the place a young American went to do that. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Pound had set the pattern. August found me and my portable Corona at the Salzburg Festival, staying at the Goldene Rose on the wrong side of the river. The Goldene Rose had bedbugs but it was inexpensive. There was a handy tram to the old city, which was on the right side of the river.

Each morning at breakfast in the graveled courtyard under the lindens I thought about what I would write first. Some days I even composed a few sentences before setting off to walk in the peasants’ fields outside of town or on the Kapuzinerberg. From the top of that miniature mountain, intrepid youths in lederhosen took off in their gliders, hovering like giant birds over the city or circling to climb on the updrafts.

If the weather was warm enough I would head for the municipal swimming pool. It was there that I made the acquaintance of Monsieur Bernard Faÿ. Or rather he made mine. I often tried out my halting German on young men my own age but I never would have dared approach the distinguished-looking gentleman who sunbathed in a red deck chair. Faÿ’s English was almost perfect—quite natural, since, as I soon learned, he was Professor of American Civilization at the Sorbonne. A charming man and an elegant one, a bit portly in the midriff, he had a bad limp from a war wound and walked with a cane. His manner toward me was avuncular. He had come to Salzburg alone and wanted occasional company from someone whom he could impress with his knowledge of America and its rustic ways. He knew some of the Harvard professors of literature. What contemporary writers were they teaching? Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald, I told him, and among the poets, Frost and sometimes Eliot. Gertrude Stein? Of course not. Did I also think she was mad? No, I didn’t; I found her work intriguing if at times puzzling. Only then did he reveal that Miss Stein was an old friend and that they saw a good deal of each other. She was, he said, a superbly witty conversationalist.

I asked Faÿ if he could give me an introduction to Miss Stein. Yes. But better than that, it soon happened that he was invited to visit her at her country place near Belley in the Ain. Would I care to come along? She liked young people. A wire was dispatched and answered promptly. “Can he type? Will he work?” He could and would. And so, not long after, I found myself living in an attic guest room of an old house near the village of Bilignin and savoring Alice B. Toklas’s poularde de Bresse aux morilles noires and her omble chevalier.

The house was what is called a château ferme, more substantial than an ordinary farmhouse but not so heavily fortified as a chateau. There were numerous outbuildings for the farming which Miss Stein did not carry on. The house was of weathered stucco over native stone and had been built in the seventeenth century. It perched on a hillside above a retaining wall with a long view to distant hills over a shallow valley in which the peasants’ fields were separated by rows of poplars.

In fine weather the life of the house centered on grass-covered terrace, where French doors brought inside and outside together. Miss Stein spent so much of her time on that terrace in a deck chair, meditating or writing or talking if there was anyone near. Sometimes Alice B. Toklas would lean out of a second-floor window to listen. The deck chair always faced toward the house because, as everyone knows, the only way to take in a view is to sit with your back to it.

Unless she was writing with her notebook in her lap, Miss Stein would have the white caniche, Basket, sitting on her knees. Basket was a large poodle, but Gertrude Stein was a large lady. Basket had come to Bilignin as a puppy. He was so named because it was hoped that he would be useful and learn to carry a basket in his mouth. Basket was intelligent but he didn’t want to be useful. Still, he kept the name. I found him a hateful dog, but he was important to Miss Stein, who wrote that “listening to the rhythm of his water drinking made me recognize the difference between sentences and paragraphs, that paragraphs are emotional and sentences are not.”

She was a great raconteur with an endless supply of anecdotes and often bizarre psychological interpretations to illuminate them.

The other dog, whom I also disliked, was called Pépé. He was a small black nervous neurotic annoying yapping Chihuahua. Pépé was jealous of Basket. If Basket was occupying Miss Stein’s lap, Pépé would jump up onto her copious shoulder and crouch there against her ear. Guests took many a snapshot of Gertrude Stein with Basket below, Pépé above, and her, between, smiling.

Miss Stein devoted many hours to sitting. “It takes a lot of time to be a genius,” she once wrote, “you have to sit around so much doing nothing.” It might have been added that a genius also has to spend a lot of time meditating while soaking in the bathtub.

There had been no running water in the house when Gertrude and Alice moved in. Now there was, but the facilities were not exactly modern. Water was heated by two diabolical contraptions known as chauffe-bains à gaz, one in the kitchen and one in the bathroom. To heat water it was necessary to light the gas burner with a match, producing a small explosion and a jet of flame from the box. Although I stood as far away from the point of ignition as possible, I invariably singed the hair on my hand. I was terrified. Alice got wind of my fear and reported it to Miss Stein, who summoned me for interrogation. “Have you had a bath in the last three days?” I had to confess. “You’re worse than a child. Everyone in this house must bathe every day.” It was arranged that Alice would light the geyser for me—she did it with a rolled-up piece of newspaper to avoid conflagration—and I bathed every day.

Miss Stein wrote every morning. She had obsessive energy. It was easy to understand how she managed to complete in only two years (from 1906 to 1908) her massive The Making of Americans, the history of a “decent family’s progress,” which ran to 925 very large pages in very small type in the original uncut edition. Sitting in her deck chair, using a fountain pen on the pages of a student’s exercise book, she performed with incredible speed—a page every three minutes, as I timed her. No hesitations. No pauses. No corrections. Was it automatic writing? She was later to deny that it was, but it certainly seemed so to me. Her handwriting was indecipherable, though the faithful Alice was able to type it out without difficulty, working at it each evening. What she was writing that summer may have been like this “Storyette H. M.” from Portraits and Prayers:

One was married to some one. That one was going away to have a good time. The one that was married to that one did not like it very well that the one to whom that one was married then was going off alone to have a good time and was leaving that one to stay at home then. The one that was going came in all glowing. [Note the rhyme.] The one that was going had everything he was needing to have the good time he was wanting to be having then. He came in all glowing. The one he was leaving at home to take care of the family living was not glowing. The one that was going was saying, the one that was glowing, the one that going was saying then, I am content, you are not content, I am content, you are content, you are content, I am content.

This is clearly not automatic writing. A reasonable story is being told. Normal syntax is being deliberately confused to liberate the words for comic effect. Gertrude Stein’s myriad manuscripts in the Beinecke Library at Yale evidence much careful composition, so it is clear that she did automatic writing only in one phase of her career. But surely what I observed that summer at Bilignin could be described, at the very least, as compulsive composition.

Miss Stein lost no time in setting me to work. My job, I found, was to write one-page press releases—abstracts, as she called them-to hand out to reporters on her American lecture tour scheduled for that winter. Her lecture agent had told her they would be needed, and he was right. Her lectures were not precisely what women’s clubs or even university audiences were accustomed to. I don’t think I have ever worked harder than when I tried to translate Steinese into everyday English. Again and again she would reject my digests with “no, you haven’t understood it, try again.” Those lectures were simpler than “Composition as Explanation,” given at Oxford in 1926, but there was still more opacity than lucidity. “Though they are clear they are not too easy,” she wrote to her young admirer Bill Rogers. A slight understatement. The talks were presumably literary but they divagated frequently into Steinese epistemology and even ontology. Here are a few swatches from the one which gave me the most trouble, “Poetry and Grammar”:

One of the things that is a very interesting thing to know is how you are feeling inside you to the words that are coming out to be outside of you.

Do you always have the same kind of feeling in relation to the sounds as the words come out of you or do you not…

A noun is a name of anything, why after a thing is named write about it. A name is adequate or it is not. If it is adequate why then go on calling it, if it is not then calling it by its name does no good…

Periods have a life of their own a necessity of their own a feeling of their own a time of their own. And that feeling that life that necessity that time can express itself in an infinite variety that is the reason that I have always remained true to periods so much so that as I say recently I have felt that one could need them more than one had ever needed them…

An American can fill up a space in having his movement of time by adding unexpectedly anything and yet getting within the included space everything he had intended getting.

Miss Stein’s tour was an immense success, with feature articles in all the papers and lavish entertaining in the castles of the bourgeoisie. The two ladies were even served tea at the White House by Mrs. Roosevelt. It wasn’t so much a succès de scandale as a succès de surprise. Nothing quite like it since Oscar Wilde—the pyramidal figure one sees in the Picasso portrait at the Metropolitan; the overwhelming charisma; the discourse, so baffling, yet presented with such conviction it could hardly be a hoax. From Boston to Los Angeles, from Minneapolis to Houston, she criss-crossed the country raising her special kind of dust. Her gift for public relations was remarkable: she had sensed that one way to get attention was to be patronizing, even insulting. For example, I had arranged to have my cousin Duncan Phillips escort her through the galleries of the renowned Phillips Collection when she was in Washington. Duncan was a true connoisseur and a dear man but he did run on about his paintings, stationing himself before each one to point out its unique qualities. A little oration for each. After two rooms of this Miss Stein abruptly turned on him: “Please shut up, Mr. Phillips, you’re spoiling the pictures.”

Like a child in a tantrum, she would beat the keys with all the fingers of both hands at once, creating a cacophonous din—which, some claim, is how she wrote.

My morning work was cerebral; my afternoon work was menial. Each day, unless it was raining, the ladies would set out with the dogs in Godiva, their little Model A Ford, for a scenic drive. There are hardly more beautiful landscapes in France than those in the Ain: the alps of the Savoie off to the east in the distance, the big Lac d’Annecy in the foothills, small villages and winding unpaved country roads to explore. Miss Stein was the driver; Alice sat in the front seat beside her. Miss Stein usually wore a long, shapeless brown woolen skirt and a blue shirt with a knitted vest-type cardigan over it. No hat; her thick, close-cropped, slightly graying hair was like a helmet. Alice, who was anything but pretty—a big nose in a pinched little face but with large, animated dark eyes—always wore a rather formal dress and a perky cloche with two ill-shaped cloth poppies (I think she had made them herself) sewn to the band.

The dogs sat with me in the back seat, but they weren’t trained for automotive travel and clambered all over me in constant motion. Worst of all, they both wanted to lick me—my hands, my face, and especially my ears. It was all very affectionate but they drooled, and when I gave Basket a whack, Alice turned to me severely: “J, you must be nice to the dogs!”

When we had first boarded Godiva I noticed something odd. In addition to the regular spare, there were four extra tires strapped to the luggage rack on the roof. I soon found out why. Half an hour into our trip we had our first of several flats. The Ain is a favorite territory for hikers. Vibram-soled boots were then unknown, so the roads were mined with lost hobnails. Miss Stein pulled off to the side, opened the trunk, and presented me with the jack and tools. The dogs leapt joyfully from the car to frolic while the ladies planted folding campstools in the grass—with their backs to the view, of course.

The first day there were only two tires for me to change. Other days there were more. When we were down to one spare we would return to Beley to leave the flats for repair with Armand the bereted garagiste against the next day’s need. Some days we drove to Artemas, some days to Verieux or Saint-Germain-les-Paroisses. One day we went for lunch to Aix-les-Bains. That was a main road: no punctures. Another day we drove to the top of the Lac d’Annecy to have a picnic at the very spot on the shore where Lamartine is supposed to have composed his immortal poem “Le Lac.”

Evenings at Bilignin were spent in conversation, which meant a monologue from Miss Stein. Fascinating it always was. She was a great raconteur with an endless supply of anecdotes and often bizarre psychological interpretations to illuminate them. Alice, to be sure, had to spend most of the evening typing up the day’s product at the dining room table.

Miss Stein was a very rapid reader, so once a week there was a fat package from the American Library in Paris. She favored memoirs, English and American history, obscure nineteenth-century novels, and detective stories. One night my own choice of reading matter got me in trouble. I had brought with me a volume of Proust. There was an eruption from the oracle: “Put that book away! Don’t you know that he copied from my Making of Americans? And so did Joyce!”

There was no radio or gramophone at Bilignin. It was Miss Stein herself who provided our music, hammering on an ancient out-of-tune upright in the dining room. “Hammer” is the mot juste. She couldn’t read a score or pick out a tune. Like a child in a tantrum, she would beat the keys with all the fingers of both hands at once, creating a cacophonous din—which, some claim, is how she wrote. She said she was inspired by the rhythms of Bach.

When Bernard Faÿ came down for weekends from Paris there really was conversation. The two old friends knew each other so well they could play off each other’s interests and eccentricities. It was like hearing a duet, and Alice and I just listened.

An exchange I heard one night troubled me deeply, though. They got on the subject of Hitler, speaking of him as a great man, one perhaps to be compared with Napoleon. I was stunned. Hitler’s persecution of the Jews was well publicized in France by that time, and Miss Stein was a Jew. Faÿ, in his turn, had nearly gotten himself killed fighting the Germans in World War I. I couldn’t forget that strange exchange, but later it came into sharper focus, at least in respect to Faÿ. Apparently he believed, as did some other intellectuals, that the political chaos in France was destroying her culture, and after the collapse he became a collaborator with Vichy, serving through the war as Director of the Bibliothèque Nationale. He was later tried and sentenced to a long term in one of the island fortresses.

I hated to leave Bilignin and those kind ladies, but Paris was Paris, the place above all places where a young would-be writer felt he belonged. I had little money. My parents, eager to have me return to college, had cut off my allowance, but they hadn’t reckoned on the soft heart of my mother’s blessed Cousin Anne. Secretly, she sent me a hundred dollars a month. I found a tiny room on the second floor of an immeuble on the rue Saint Dominique not far from where it ends at the Champs de Mars. It wasn’t meant to be lived in. It was a cubbyhole in an insurance broker’s office with no window and no running water. The rent came to eight dollars a month. I had my typewriter on the chest of drawers and kept the door into the office open for ventilation. There were several good workingmen’s bistros in the neighborhood where a plain but substantial meal with a carafe of Algerian red could be had for about a dollar. That left me money for books, as essential as food. Sylvia Beach at Shakespeare and Company in the rue de l’Odéon gave me credit when I ran short. From Sylvia I picked up several of Miss Stein’s privately printed books in the series Alice had christened “Plain Editions.” Those exquisite little slipcased volumes printed in Dijon by Maurice Darantière, the same printer who had done Ulysses for Sylvia, were anything but plain.

That fall I walked all over Paris, wearing on brisk days the brown loden cape I had bought in Salzburg. Each day I would descend into the Métro and take the cars to a district I hadn’t yet explored. I can still remember the pleasant smell of the Métro cars; they must have been cleaned with some aromatic fluid. And I still hear the evocative names of the Métro stations, so much of French history in them: Invalides, Sebastopol, Bastille, Marbeuf, Gobelins, Malesherbes, Palais Royal, Varenne, Liège…My favorite walks were along the quais of the Seine, past the bridges and bookstalls, past Notre-Dame and l’Ile Saint-Louis. The first story I finished was called “The River.” Not surprisingly, it was about a lonely writer in Paris. And not surprisingly, it employed the repetitions and rhythms of Gertrude Stein:

And so as fall came on and the heat of summer fell away, I came to be working every day, telling the things I saw and what I thought I knew about them, making a picture of this slow and steady movement, this gradual onward flowing, this simple waiting that I felt and lived. As the leaves fell and the nights grew cold, as each day the lights came on a little earlier, as each day the air told more of winter’s coming, as each day there was less struggle inside me between what remained of the life at home and what was building of my own life, I came to have, to really have and really know, whatI had tried so hard to find and never found, I came to be a writer and began to be a man.

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James Laughlin (1914–1997) was an American poet and publisher best known for founding New Directions Publishing.