Man Ray's portrait of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas via Forward. Article excerpt:
Stein turned part of her Paris apartment into a gallery, where artists could see their own works on display and, in some cases, even add to the collection by creating on site. The apartment housed two Louis XIV chairs with upholstery based on Picasso’s designs, and also displayed extraordinary wallpaper, which the Contemporary Jewish Museum has replicated on one large wall so that so visitors can enjoy the decorative élan of its design, featuring dozens of pairs of white pigeons. Those who know Stein’s opera librettos may recall a lyric about “pigeons in the grass, alas”; here, the birds know only a blue sky.
The pigeon-covered wallpaper served as a backdrop for Stein’s own de facto performance art — self-presentation, with Toklas, in scenes of domestic life. She may not have known that these scenes would someday be framed and shown in museums, but at the very least, when posing for gifted photographers like Man Ray and Beaton, the couple must have been aware their portraits would appear in high-fashion journals, and be seen around the world in print. In these meticulously composed domestic scenes, the apartment becomes a stage. Toklas costumes herself in traditionally feminine clothing, unlike Stein, and sits farther away from the camera, as a reserved wife might sit in a picture with her husband. But this is no ordinary couple, as both parties knew; and the visual documents of their life now can be appreciated as harbingers of today’s celebrated same-sex marriages, especially in San Francisco.
At night, I follow the hum of the fridge to a feast of Greek yogurt and honey. Osama bin Laden's favorite meal consisted of yogurt and honey. Getrude Stein might have liked yogurt with honey, but there is nothing comparable to Tender Buttons. Nothing that so gently catalogues the material characters of domesticity. Alice fit the set, or made the set the scene. She knew how "to make everything be something". Ayn Rand expressed her horror at the Stein way and the ways in which a home deserved love in its humility, so close to the ground. To the ideologically-profound and the foot-soldiers of movements, Stein's love for the little things suggested a stylistic flippancy that extended from content to cover the soul in lightly laundered sheets. Michael Gold couldn't help but notice that she was a "literary idiot":
In essence, what Gertrude Stein's work represents is an example of the most extreme subjectivism of the contemporary bourgeois artist, and a reflection of the ideological anarchy into which the whole of bourgeois literature has fallen.
What was it that Gertrude Stein set out to do with literature? When one reads her work it appears to resemble the monotonous gibberings of paranoiacs in the private wards of asylums. It appears to be a deliberate irrationality, a deliberate infantilism. However, the woman's not insane, but possessed of a strong, clear, shrewd mind. She was an excellent medical student, a brilliant psychologist, and in her more "popular" writings one sees evidence of wit and some wisdom.
And yet her works read like the literature of the students of padded cells in Matteawan.
Stein's social conscience was that of the dedicated dabbler. She wrote Reflections on the Atom Bomb (reproduced below) in 1946.
They asked me what I thought of the atomic bomb. I said I had not been able to take any interest in it.
I like to read detective and mystery stories. I never get enough of them but whenever one of them is or was about death rays and atomic bombs I never could read them. What is the use, if they are really as destructive as all that there is nothing left and if there is nothing there nobody to be interested and nothing to be interested about. If they are not as destructive as all that then they are just a little more or less destructive than other things and that means that in spite of all destruction there are always lots left on this earth to be interested or to be willing and the thing that destroys is just one of the things that concerns the people inventing it or the people starting it off, but really nobody else can do anything about it so you have to just live along like always, so you see the atomic [bomb] is not at all interesting, not any more interesting than any other machine, and machines are only interesting in being invented or in what they do, so why be interested. I never could take any interest in the atomic bomb, I just couldn't any more than in everybody's secret weapon. That it has to be secret makes it dull and meaningless. Sure it will destroy a lot and kill a lot, but it's the living that are interesting not the way of killing them, because if there were not a lot left living how could there be any interest in destruction. Alright, that is the way I feel about it. They think they are interested about the atomic bomb but they really are not not any more than I am. Really not. They may be a little scared, I am not so scared, there is so much to be scared of so what is the use of bothering to be scared, and if you are not scared the atomic bomb is not interesting.
Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense. They listen so much that they forget to be natural. This is a nice story.
Some people have created impressive tributes to Stein, while others have made her work available online. Stein doesn't read well on a Kindle, and there are more ways to demonstrate love than the gentle tickle of lips pressed to a forehead.
- The World of Gertrude Stein, someone's mediated love song.
- "The Making of Americans" in audio format read by Stein.
- "A Valentine to Sherwood Anderson" in audio format read by Stein.
- "How She Bowed to Her Brother" in audio format read by Stein.
- An audio excerpt from an interview with Stein somewhere around 1942 somewhere around the Algonquin.
- Ziarek on "Patriarchal Poetry".
- Karen Ford on "Patriarchal Poetry".
- Three Lives by Gertrude Stein.
- What Happened, a play by Gertrude Stein.
- "What are the Master-pieces, and why are there so few of them", an essay by Gertrude Stein.
- "Composition as Explanation" by Gertrude Stein.
- A bibliography of Stein's work.
- Portraits by Carl van Vetchen. The famed flag portraits are here.
- John Ashbery on Stein.
- The Gertrude Stein Repertory Theater in New York.
- "Toward A Digital Stage Architecture" by Cheryl Faver, a look at Stein on stage with electric lights. Also worth exploring is the Digital Performance Institute.
