Gertrude Stein’s Love Language

Stein’s authority as an arbiter was bolstered by an ambiguously gendered seduction. Genius, she believed, was a masculine trait, and she felt that her own genius was male. After she cropped her hair, friends remarked on her resemblance to a Roman emperor. Her bullish head was perched atop a majestically massive silhouette, and her clothes—Chinese robes and corduroy caftans—gave her a shamanic aura. But if blithe grandiosity was Stein’s armor, there was a chink in it. While waiting to be immortalized, she longed desperately to be understood, if only, she wrote, by one ideal reader—someone who “says yes to it”—and in 1907 she met her.

Alice Babette Toklas, the ideal reader who became Stein’s wife, made a name for herself by writing a witty cookbook that included a friend’s recipe for hashish fudge. She also lent her name to “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas,” a best-selling work of coy ventriloquism, celebrity gossip, and self-promotion by and about Gertrude Stein. Like the penthouse comedies of the Depression, it appealed to a public living through hard times, with its glamorous setting and naughty characters—an operetta cast of artists and their mistresses. In 1934, a year after the book was published, its protagonists embarked on a six-month lecture tour of the United States, where crowds and reporters greeted them at every stop.

One might think that in middle America this odd couple would have been spurned as deviants, but ordinary people didn’t seem shocked that two patrician spinsters should share a home. In many respects, theirs was an old-fashioned marriage. Stein privately called Toklas “precious wifey” and signed herself “little hubby.” In one of my favorite sentences from “The Autobiography,” the Alice puppet reports that Gertrude “always says she dislikes the abnormal, it is so obvious.” The irony is that Stein’s emphasis on Alice’s subservience and her own supremacy as a grand seigneur (she boasted of never lifting a finger for herself) dramatized their deviance. Worldly readers had to wonder what really went on when the geniuses and their wives went home after dinner.

Stein’s latest biographer, Francesca Wade, plumbs that question judiciously in the second half of “Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife,” which begins after Stein’s death, of cancer, in 1946. (The first half, a vivid but condensed account of her life, doesn’t break much new ground.) Wade’s original research relates to the “Katz interviews.” Leon Katz was a graduate student of Talmudic zeal, and Stein’s texts were his Mishnah. But the story of what he learned is something more novelistic: a Jamesian intrigue, in which a persistent sleuth woos a writer’s bereft widow, who knows where the bodies are buried.

Few literary vestals earn a place of their own in the pantheon of writers. Vera Nabokov is one. Toklas is another. In both cases, their cultish devotion to a spouse has generated enduring curiosity, part of which may be envy, since many women have aspired to serve as a muse to genius. But ostentatious self-abnegation in any of its guises—religious, sexual, domestic—arouses uneasy feelings. What magnetic force keeps such a union intact? Is the enthrallment mutual? Is the resentment?

Katz wondered, too. In 1952, he wrote to Toklas deferentially, asking if they could meet. Despite her wariness of snoops, she agreed, and beginning that autumn they spent eight hours a day for the better part of four months talking in her Paris apartment. He’d done his legwork before he arrived, tracking down key figures from Stein’s youth, some of whom she had snubbed when fame went to her head, or to placate Alice, who was jealous of her past. They were happy to debrief him on an unknown Gertrude: a “gawkish,” “slovenly,” and “naïve” figure, opinionated but inconsistently so, who was discovering her attraction to women.

But Katz also came with a unique credential: exclusive access to Stein’s early notebooks in her archives at Yale, a trove of documents that she began shipping to America ahead of the Second World War. They included nearly every scrap of paper in her possession: manuscripts, journals, scrawled love notes, laundry lists. When Alice had “urged her to be more selective,” Wade writes, “Stein had replied that it wasn’t for her to dictate what future readers might find useful,” and she quotes Stein’s dictum that “facts of life make literature.”

By holding nothing back, Stein seems to have foreseen Katz’s great epiphany: that her work needs a Rosetta stone, and that her life provides one. Toklas filled in the blanks for him, sometimes unwittingly. Back at home, he typed up his notes, but he never got around to making them public. He died in 2017, at ninety-seven, leaving his papers to Yale, and Wade, she says, was the first to read them.

One of the bodies Katz exhumed was that of May Bookstaver, Stein’s first great love. The two met in Baltimore when Gertrude was a student at Johns Hopkins and May a recent graduate of Bryn Mawr. In later life, Stein was impossible to argue with. As James Lord writes in an elegantly caustic memoir, if anyone had the temerity to contradict her, “she would repeat herself . . . in a louder voice . . . then if necessary yet again and louder still.” But she wasn’t yet “Gertrude Stein” when she met May, who “baulked at the way [Gertrude] ‘intellectualised everything,’ ” Wade writes. They clashed about feminism, Bookstaver as “a passionate campaigner for women’s suffrage” and Stein as the author of “Degeneration in American Women,” an essay which “affirmed that a woman’s natural place was . . . in the home.”