“Gertrude Stein Has Arrived”, read the tickertape snaking around the New York Times building, flashing breaking news to all who passed through Times Square. Over seven months, starting in October 1934, the expatriate avant-garde writer known as “the Sybil of Montparnasse” or the “Mama of Dada” toured her home country, delivering lectures about her work to crowds so eager to hear her that she had to limit audience numbers to 500. Everywhere Stein travelled, she was trailed by journalists, who reported on her activities for local and national newspapers. “City Agog Over Author’s Visit”, declared a headline in the Des Moines Register. “It’s a far cry from her salon at 27 rue de Fleurus in Paris to the corn belt, but when Miss Stein and her companion, Alice B. Toklas, appear here they will find university and townspeople Stein-conscious.” Stein’s image appeared in New Yorker cartoons and advertisements for Ford cars, department store windows were festooned with references to her opera Four Saints in Three Acts, she was mentioned in Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers’s popular film Top Hat, and Eleanor Roosevelt invited her to tea at the White House.
It’s astonishing, now, to imagine quite how great Stein’s celebrity was. Nowadays, few authors can aspire to this level of fame: it’s even more astonishing that a writer of experimental poetry, widely denounced as unreadable, became so deeply embedded in popular culture. But, from the start of her career, Stein made it her business to cultivate a personal image that would, she hoped, draw readers towards the writing she considered her most significant achievement. A century before the age of the influencer, Stein was ahead of the curve both in her radical literary style and her sense of the media as a tool for self-fashioning, during the decades in which modernism gradually became mainstream and the cult of celebrity boomed.
By the time Stein landed in the United States—her first trip back after leaving for Paris in 1903—she was already a household name. Her route to recognition had been an unlikely one. Stein’s writing—characterised by long passages of repetition, and words following others without regard for grammar or sense-making—had always been met with bewildered reactions from the friends, agents and editors to whom she had shown it. Quickly sensing that she would need influential champions to drum up interest, she enlisted chosen acquaintances to work on her behalf as promoters, seeking out well-connected (and often wealthy) allies who might praise her work, offer explanations of its stylistic eccentricities and intrigue the publishers who might print it. Stein’s first great publicist was the socialite Mabel Dodge, who pressed copies of her texts into the hands of guests at her glamorous Fifth Avenue salons and published an essay linking Stein’s writing with the postimpressionist art that had recently been introduced to the US via the infamous Armory Show. Stein, Dodge announced, “is doing with words what Picasso is doing with paint. She is impelling language to induce new states of consciousness”. It was a canny association to make, and the label “Cubist Literature” immediately stuck: Dodge soon informed her grateful friend that “the name of Gertrude Stein is better known in New York today than the name of God”.
Dodge was soon supplanted as Stein’s unofficial spokesperson by Carl Van Vechten, an up-and-coming arts critic with an eye for the new and outlandish. He wrote Stein as a character into his bestselling novels, published newspaper guides on how to read her and connected her with willing editors on the lookout for literary innovation. Among these was Donald Evans, an eccentric poet who had founded Claire-Marie Press to publish “new books for exotic tastes”. When the press released Stein’s Tender Buttons in 1914, it caused a sensation. Newspaper articles began to parody Stein’s style and debate the merits of her work: some pointed out that there had been more columns devoted to Tender Buttons than there were copies printed. The Saturday Review of Literature summed it up: “Many take Miss Stein seriously (she is already a cult) and so will we.” Yet being talked about was no substitution, in Stein’s eyes, for actually being read.
Stein’s fame was helped along by the formidable persona she had developed. She had lived a public life ever since moving to Paris, with her brother Leo, in 1903, and began to spend her allowance on cheap paintings by unknown artists. Within a couple of years, their art collection was so renowned that they opened their doors each Saturday night to show off the latest works by Picasso and Matisse to throngs of tourists, artists and writers who wanted to see the paintings and meet the Steins. After Leo left Paris in 1913, Gertrude began to hold court at these salons: crowds of young, expatriate writers came to hear her talk, show her their manuscripts and see her famous home. Stein always sat underneath her Picasso portrait, creating a sense of mystique and immortality; she enlisted Man Ray as her official photographer, sitting for a series of dramatic images which appeared in magazines to accompany the occasional pieces she was able to publish. As she grew in confidence, she cut her hair to an iconic crop, projecting a monkish, masculine image. Friends often compared her to the Buddha; to meet her, as one visitor put it, was to feel in the presence of “remarkable power”.
Yet even as interest in her personality boomed, Stein still struggled to persuade readers to properly engage with her writing: she was known best as a collector of other talents, a patron and salonnière, not as a literary figure to be taken seriously for her work. She had achieved the fame she had always wanted—but not for the right reasons. Stein’s most deliberate act of self-promotion came in 1933, with the publication of her memoir, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Stein wrote it with an eye to the marketplace, hoping to earn herself a place in literary history; it’s a delightfully gossipy (and highly readable) account of her life in bohemian Paris, told through the eyes of her adoring partner. The book was an immediate bestseller. It was published at a moment when modernism was at the height of interest in the US: James Joyce’s Ulysses had just been printed for the first time after the lifting of a government ban for obscenity charges, while Stein’s opera Four Saints in Three Acts had been an enormous (and unexpected) hit on Broadway, thanks to its extravagant cellophane set-design, its cast of black singers and Virgil Thomson’s cheerful music. She was, as one headline put it, “one of the least-read and most-publicized writers of the day”.
“Neither you nor I have ever had any passion to be rare”, Stein wrote to Thomson, expressing her hopes that Four Saints would be a commercial success, “we want to be as popular as Gilbert and Sullivan if we can”. Yet even as she cultivated fame, Stein was ambivalent about its effect on her writing. “It always did bother me that the American public were more interested in me than in my work,” she wrote in Everybody’s Autobiography, her memoir of the US trip. She had undertaken the lecture tour in order to explain what she called her “real” work to the public who loved the Autobiography; to make a case for its pleasure and importance. But she remained anxious that her strategies had backfired, that her personal fame was at an all-time high while interest in her actual writing remained low.
From this point, celebrity became Stein’s subject. Soon after her return to Paris, she began work on a novel she titled Ida, which she described to a friend as “a novel about publicity, a novel where a person is so publicised that there isn’t any personality left”. Ida becomes famous overnight, for no particular reason—she is famous simply for being famous. She is recognised everywhere she goes, people follow her around—and the more widely she finds herself known, the less she feels she exists. Drawing on Stein’s brushes with Hollywood and the disconcerting experience of writer’s block that had followed her rise to stardom, Ida is a fascinating musing on identity, asking what makes us real to ourselves and suggesting that being seen by others is not always the same as being known. Stein was increasingly interested in the idea of celebrity as something manufactured by the media: an illusion of intimacy, which not only renders authentic connection impossible, but risks losing the person in the cloud of their own inflated—and false—image. Stein’s main fear was that, in cultivating her celebrity, she had put her creative life at risk. Her awareness of her audience made her self-conscious, and she found their expectations stifling.
Stein spent the rest of her life examining the questions thrown up by her experience of celebrity: how to maintain privacy while being a public figure, how to balance the solitude she needed for writing with the demands of a commercial economy, how to negotiate the necessary, but potentially fraught, relationship between writer and reader. Over the last years of her life, she began to create her own archive, to ensure that her legend would outlive her. Posthumous fame, she decided, was the ideal to aim for. Her work, she believed, would last longer than the glimmering magic of the Saturday salons or the glitz of her American tour. As for herself, she was satisfied with the love of those who truly knew her: Alice B Toklas, and her beloved dogs.
Francesca Wade’s Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife (Faber) is published on 22nd May
