Gertrude Stein’s Muse of Prose
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While there’s little that’s new about Stein’s life or work in this slim volume, Daniel synthesizes this material in a lively and readable fashion. She moves with skill from biography to analysis and never gets bogged down with overanalyzing Stein’s motivations or her creative efforts.

The question with Stein is always where to begin her story. Daniel takes the route of most biographers and starts with her childhood and family life, but you quickly become aware that attempts at a singular narrative line is a challenge due to Stein’s efforts at self-reinvention at different stages of her life. The concept of identity was at the heart of her creative work and a constant question for this Jewish, lesbian, expatriate American writer. Early in her life, Stein recognized the “cosmological fluke” that, had her two older siblings not died, she would not have been born, which, according to Daniel, planted the “seeds of her lifelong fascination with personality, character, and identity.” While much of her childhood was spent traveling both in Europe and across the U.S., by the age of seventeen, she was an orphan. Her mother died in her early teenage years and her father just a few years later, in 1890. The family’s wealth was divided between the children and Gertrude inherited $60,000, or about $1.5 million in today’s currency.

After a year living in Baltimore with relatives of her mother, Stein entered Radcliffe College. There she was “known as an unconventional figure who sported a sailor’s cap” and was spirited and well-liked. It was also at Radcliffe that she immersed herself in the study of science, at which she excelled. “It suited her to believe the scientific gaze was implicitly masculine, free of feminine emotion,” notes Daniels. Stein would go on to study medicine at Johns Hopkins, where she studied neuropsychology, authored important scientific articles from her research, and engaged in experiments with language and meaning. But becoming a doctor was not in her future. She failed a course in obstetrics in her final year of study and despite efforts by the faculty to pass her via an additional examination, Stein refused (out of pride or perhaps disillusionment), and left Hopkins without a degree. However, this did not undermine Stein’s deep sense of her unique genius. Writes Daniel: “Just as she saw herself as both bourgeois and outré, normal and unique, she was the exception that proved the rule: a woman and a genius.”

But the Stein we’re more familiar with is the one whose life starts at the beginning of the 20th century, in Paris, at 27, rue de Fleurus, where she and her brother Leo set up the salon that would become the hub for artists and writers in the years before World War I. The two embraced Modernism, which dovetailed with their new status as expatriates: a “self-imposed exile that led to an intellectual rebirth,” writes Daniel. But Stein wasn’t interested in the cross-dressing gender play engaged in by the community of Left Bank lesbian writers led by Natalie Barney. Barney had her own, less well-known salon of women writers that made gender and sexuality central to the discussion. Stein’s salon, on the other hand, was largely heterosexual and didn’t promote women’s rights as much as their own careers. Indeed, Stein served as both mentor and subject for young (mostly male) writers, photographers, and painters, most famously the young Picasso and Hemingway. Stein and Barney maintained a simmering dislike for each other over these differences.

In 1910, Alice Toklas moved into 27, rue de Fleurus. Toklas had met Stein in Paris in 1907. A year later, while on vacation in the Tuscan town of Fiesole, Stein proposed that they live together, and thus began one of the more famous relationships of the century. Stein’s salon, while dynamic and thoroughly progressive in its conversations on Modernist æsthetics, held to conventional gender codes, such that Toklas “would preside over the tea table and talk about hats and perfume” with the wives and girlfriends, as Stein held forth with the male artists and writers. In their public life, their relationship often went unacknowledged. Even in her vast output of experimental writings in the 20th century’s first three decades, such as QED, Tender Buttons, and the tome The Making of Americans, Stein was more conservative about her sexuality than such contemporaries as Barney or René Vivian.

While critics detested her work (like taking “an egg beater to your brain,” wrote one), she found a small following among avant-garde circles in New York and Paris, and her salon became increasingly important despite her low standing among critics. Notes Daniel: “27, rue de Fleurus became a home for those who considered themselves to be strangers and foreigners, refugees from conformity. Stein used her marginality to the most extravagant effect.”

It wasn’t until the publication of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas in 1935, when Stein was 59, that her writing found a national and international audience. Now a classic of 20th-century literature, the book became popular not only for its readability but also for its experimentation with self-representation and engagement with the emerging celebrity culture of the 1930’s. The book, like the salon it chronicles, is decidedly coy about the relationship between Toklas and Stein. “She gave dainty morsels of their domestic life,” writes Daniel, “as would a celebrity interview, but never gave away so much that could be completely pieced together.” Autobiography was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, bringing the story of Stein and Toklas into middle-class homes across America, and the two women embarked on a publicity tour. The press would refer to Toklas as Stein’s “secretary” or “traveling companion,” if they noticed her at all. But despite this willful ignorance in the press, the nature of the relationship was obvious to Stein’s readers.

Stein would come back to the autobiographical form for the rest of her life, though she continued to write fiction as well. Works such as Everybody’s Autobiography (1937), Paris France (1940), and Wars I Have Seen (1945) experimented with language and with autobiography as a genre. Daniel argues that Stein’s public image interfered with her writing, both as a distraction and as a critical monkey wrench: “It has made criticism of her work and speculation about her life eternally intertwined.” Long before controversies began to erupt over the blurring of fact and fiction in memoirs, Stein wrote in Everybody’s Autobiography: “And identity is funny being yourself is funny as you are never yourself or yourself except as you remember yourself and then of course you do not believe yourself.”

Indeed, the conundrum of autobiography has often shaped our interest in Stein’s work. Since the 1970’s, her writings have been reinterpreted by feminists, deconstructionists, and postmodernist scholars. Biographers have also taken different approaches, exploring her relationship with Toklas or her brother Leo, or the more recent exploration in Janet Malcolm’s Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice, which asks how “a pair of elderly Jewish lesbians survived the Nazis?” Novelists, too, have used Stein’s life as a template for more overt homosexual stories. Matthew Stadler’s novel Allan Stein crafts a tale about a contemporary teacher who goes searching for the true story of Stein’s troubled nephew Allan, and The Book of Salt by Monique Truong re-imagines Stein and Toklas’ salon through the experiences of their gay Vietnamese cook.

What these reinterpretations point to is how the biography of Gertrude Stein has been a constantly evolving narrative that, like much of Stein’s writing, maintains an intriguing and at times frustrating uncertainty. As Daniel’s book shows, the story of how this narrative was created by Stein and her admirers has its own compelling history.