Gertrude Stein: A Life Well-Spent (3rd Annual Resurrection W/O)
Written: Oct 24 '05 (Updated Oct 24 '05)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Detailed and completely fascinating
Cons: None for me
The Bottom Line: This book deserves to be read again and again! It has very nice picture sections.
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| ed_grover's Full Review: Everybody Who Was Anybody:A Biography Of Gertrude ... |
This is my entry in the 3rd Annual Resurrecting The Oldies Book Write Off hosted by Msmorvay. To find out the particulars about joining in, just click on the link and scroll down to get all the information.
Janet Hobhouse, the author of Everybody Who Was Anybody: A Biography of Gertrude Stein obviously took a clue from one of Gertrude Stein's titles, Everybody's Autobiography, written in 1938. This amusing and easy to read biography tells the fascinating story of Gertrude Stein the public personality, the private person, and the deeply serious writer who saw herself as "the most important thinker" of her time. Stein is said to have dragged writing kicking and screaming from the end of the 19th century right into the beginning of the 20th.
This coffee-table-sized book has four 8-page-photo inserts consisting of personal photographs and artwork, some of them in color. In one early photo of Gertrude, she is posed under her now famous portrait by Pablo Picasso. The "look," at age 36, is a prelude to the mannish attire she sported throughout the rest of her life. In it she looks curiously like a younger Harvey Fierstein (he of the gruff, yet soft, voice) who played the role of the mother in the Broadway musical version of Hairspray, originally made famous by Divine.
Aside from the author giving us the usual detailed rundown of the Stein's childhood and early life, we find out that Gertrude lived with her mother and her four siblings in Europe (mostly Vienna) from 1875 to 1879. One day Mama abruptly packed off her brood to America via London and landed in Oakland, California. None of the children were overly in love with either of their parents. When mama died of cancer in 1889, "few of the children were shaken by her death, they had already had the habit of doing without her." When papa Stein died, the general consensus was "our life without a father began a very pleasant one."
Gertrude recalls all this and more in The Making of Americans. She was the well-loved youngest sister and was more than happy with that situation. There are some lovely, lyric passages quoted that will soon give way to her repetitive phrasing and lack of her frowned upon punctuation, question- and exclamation marks. From then on, we learn immense amounts about the way that Gertrude Stein wrote.
Stein's difficult pieces of the early 1900's were, are and remain difficult to to read. I won't attempt any Stein-isms here, except to add a few direct quotes. I clearly remember my first essay in English at the University of Wisconsin. I almost got tossed out on my ear because I was trying to impress the teacher as I tried to emulate ee cummings. He used neither caps nor punctuation and I thought, if he could I could. I got a rousing "F" and quickly learned the error of my ways. Maybe too well, since then, I've been accused of being a bit heavy handed with those marks . . . but not always.
Most of the examples are abstract portraits proceeded by little or no logic. They depend on rhythmical reading to sustain them. I tried early on to read them aloud to myself and only this last time was I able to make sense of them. Believe me when I say that I could only do it if I stood up and read them aloud, remembering where the punctuation would have been . . . and then as it turned out, I had to read the piece three times or more to just get the gist of it.
They were totally abstract writing, just as Picasso's paintings of the period were totally abstract. Here's a line or two from the 1912 Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia: "All the attention is when there is not enough to do. This does not determine a question. There are many going. A delight is not bent. There had been that little wagon. There is that precision when there has not been an imagination. There has not been that kind of abandonment. Nobody is alone."
Gertrude's other writing was based on repetition and phrases that were alike but different. A Rose is a Rose is Rose, was a phrase she became famous for. There is mention of a hand-painted plate above the fireplace with the words around the rim. It gave thge impression that there was no beginning or no end. I had no idea whether the plate was made for her or whether she had it made or if it was a found object that she got the phrase from in the first place.
As for repetetive actions that she carried into other parts of her life, Gertrude insisted on purchasing Ford cars because she said they were "alike yet different." She was also an avid American and truly loved her birth country. In another example, when Basket, her standard poodle died, she got another of the same type and color and named it Basket 2 to carry on the theme of alike but different. My friends C&D are up to Sarah 3 with the name of their German Shepard.
Gertrude's older brother, Leo, her staunchest supporter and protector, moved to Europe to study Art in 1901. She joined him in Paris in 1902 and quickly fell in love with her adopted country. It was at this time she met Picasso and started collecting modern Impressionists. Cubism came later. While Gertrude was at Harvard's Women's college (later to become Radcliffe), she had her first lesbian experiences and wrote her first book, Q.E.D (Quad Erat Demonstratum). The book was not published until after her death.
In 1907 she met Alice B. Toklas, who said she heard a bell ring when she met her. Alice has been described as an exotic Jewess, sitting in the background manicuring her nails. Many people accused her of setting a trap for Gertrude. Whether she did or not, the young woman with the beautiful gray eyes and the Jewish nose was soon living at 72 Rue Fleuris, where she cooked, typed Gertrude's manuscripts and generally made life easier by screening guests for the young writer she called a genius. Eventually she was accepted as Gertrude's companion and that was that!
As for the title, well,. Hobhouse included everybody who was anybody in Gertrude's life. Another biography I reviewd was titled The Charmed Circle, and although it was interesting it didn't read as smoothly as this book did.
After she published The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, the American public seemed to fall in love with the character of Gertrude Stein and she and Alice were soon off on a speaking tour of America. Along the way she met more and more artists and writers who fell in love with her. She met Virgil Thompson, who asked to make an opera out of "Four Saints in Three Acts." There are lengthy sections that tell about the coming together of that effort.
In London, she met the Sitwells: Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell, along with Lord Berners, who wrote the music and choreographed a ballet that is still popular today. It was titled A Wedding Bouquet, and was taken from one of Gertrude's works called "They Must. Be Wedded. To Their Wife."
In the chapter on Billingen, the country house they lived for 20 years during World Wars One & Two, I was reminded of a book of the lettersthat had been published by Sam Steward. Steward was a writer from Chicago who sent her a comlimentary letter and they became friends. During WW II he sent them cooking supplies, cigarettes and other items that were hard to come by. Many of them went on the black market, but life was not all that hard. Other persons who showed up on their doorstep at this point were artists Sir Francis Rose and Pavel Tchelitchev.
This is a rather long and interesting read. One should not skip pages at random. There is often a gem of information included in that paragraph you thought about skipping over. This was one of those books that glowed like a beacon in the last stack of books I got from my SAGE/Milwaukee buddies. They arrived while my niece was cutting down the last dregs of my garden and saving a few bits and pieces for herself and my sister. The garden will go on even if I don't. This book deserves to go on and to be included in this 3rd Resurrection Write-Off. (G.P. Putnam's Sons, Published 1989, ISBN: 0385263317, Book Club Edition)
Ed Grover – November 2005
A note on the author: Janet Hobhouse (1948�) was raised in New York City and educated at Oxford. She lived in London and New York and was the author of two works of non-fiction, "The Bride Stripped Bare", a study of the female nude in art, and "Everybody Who Was Anybody: A Biography of Gertrude Stein." She also wrote four novels. Her final work was The Furies, "an exhilarating, fiercely honest, ultimately devastating book that confronted the difficulties of independence, and the approach of death." It is beautifully written, deeply felt, and above all utterly alive, as is her biography of Gertrude Stein.
Recommended:
Yes
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Member: Ed Grover
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