N° 3193
"Twentieth century literature is Gertrude Stein". Or at least so
thought Gertrude Stein, a sentiment she shared with few others,
except of course Alice B Toklas. Gertrude and Alice met in 1907 in
Paris and famously shared their lives from that day forth, souls in
perfect complement; two magnificently eccentric and idiosyncratic
women who became a legendary entity, photographed by Man Ray and
Cecil Beaton, painted and fêted by Picasso and visited by writers
such as Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Eliot. Theirs is a fascinating
story, and they have found a wonderful and oddly sympathetic
chronicler in Diana Souhami, whose book The Trials of Radclyffe
Hall met with critical acclaim, and who proves the perfect
counterfoil to the "Steins". Her own touch of genius is to barely
consider Gertrude's grand oeuvre, sparing the rod to an already
spoilt child and freeing her readership from the unpalatable fare
she generally served up (by contrast, Alice was a dedicated and
talented cook).
Literary success came late to Stein--she was 57 when The
Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas was published-- but like Edith
Sitwell she became, to use a Leavis phrase, more a figure in the
history of publicity, and the curious thing is that one senses that
behind the rhetoric, she knew it. After her death in 1946, Alice
became the classic devoted author's widow, finally dying just short
of her 90th birthday. She was buried with Gertrude in Père Lachaise
cemetery, though her inscription is on the back of the tombstone,
as ever behind her lover. Souhami's two lives, refreshingly
stripped of biographical dead wood, positively crackle with
high-powered gossip and bristle with bitchy anecdotes, though her
laconic touch is never asleep to the touching cadences as well as
the wonderful absurdities. As a writer, a "literary cubist", who
once tried to give up nouns, Stein is more to be admired than
respected. As a life force, a mover and shaker, and as a partner
for Alice, she was massively successful. Their life together, a
third life so to speak, was their greatest creation, and it's done
justice by the talented Souhami's glorious account. Gertrude and
Alice would have hated it. --David Vincent
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