Gertrude Stein : An Afterlife

American expat writer Gertrude Stein always knew that she was a genius, but it took the 20th century some time to catch up. Although her stature in modernist art and literature is now assured, it was not as recognized during her own lifetime. In fact, as biographer Francesca Wade notes in Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife, “everyone knew she was famous, but no one was quite sure why.” Was her celebrity due to the legendary collection of Picasso and Matisse paintings that lined the walls of her apartment at 27 Rue de Fleurus in Paris? Her longtime partnership with Alice B. Toklas, who occupied women in conversation while Stein held court with male writers like Ernest Hemingway and Sherwood Anderson? Gertrude Stein’s writing, beginning with The Making of Americans (published in 1925, but written much earlier), married the visual Cubism of her friend Picasso to a philosophy of language all her own. Although the popular press of the time made fun of phrases like “a snake is in the grass, alas!”, Stein’s experiments with language predate the stream of consciousness style of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Wade offers a useful entrance into Stein’s work by calling her a “writer-scientist” whose experiments with words, sentences and paragraphs “rewire” the neural circuits of her readers’ minds. Wade approaches biography as a detective, piecing together the story of not only Stein’s life, but also her posthumous literary reception. In the stunning second half of the book, Wade explores Toklas’ role as a widow and the keeper of Stein’s fame. During their life together, Toklas very much ran the household, setting the material conditions for Stein’s writing to flourish, but as Wade reveals, she did not submit to the role of passive cheerleader in their marriage. In fact, Toklas’ furious response to the revelation of Stein’s early relationship with May Bookstaver may have resulted in Stein’s removal of every instance of the word “may” from Q.E.D., a novel Stein wrote in 1903 that was published posthumously. After Stein’s death, researchers, biographers and publishers alike had to gain Toklas’ trust to publish their work on Stein. Wade's access to a previously unattainable notebook containing interviews with Toklas after Stein's death provides profound insight into their lives together. Along the way, Wade introduces us to a fascinating cast of characters, from the guests at Stein and Toklas’ salon in Paris to the villagers who protected this Jewish lesbian couple from the Nazis during the German occupation of France. The archivists, researchers and literary executors who crafted Stein’s posthumous reputation are no less compelling. Wade’s careful scholarship and propulsive narrative offer readers an intellectually engaging experience. It is a joy to watch Wade fit the pieces of Stein’s life into place, revealing an artist who is “like a Cubist portrait: distorted, many-angled, brightly coloured, complex and human.”