#gertrude stein
Proud to be an American
I love my love with a v
Because it is like that
I love my love with a b
Because I am beside that
A king.
I love my love with an a
Because she is a queen
I love my love and a a is the best of them
Think well and be a king,
Think more and think again
I love my love with a dress and a hat
I love my love and not with this or with that
I love my love with a y because she is my bride
I love her with a d because she is my love beside
Thank you for being there
Nobody has to care
Thank you for being here
Because you are not there.
And with and without me which is and without she she can be late and then and how and all around we think and found that it is time to cry she and I.
Let there be black again.
The Irish lady can say, that to-day is every day. Caesar can say that every day is to-day and they say that every day is as they say.
In this way we have a place to stay and he was not met because he was settled to stay. When I said settled I meant settled to stay. When I said settled to stay I meant settled to stay Saturday. In this way a mouth is a mouth. In this way if in as a mouth if in as a mouth where, if in as a mouth where and there. Believe they have water too. Believe they have that water too and blue when you see blue, is all blue precious too, is all that that is precious too is all that and they meant to absolve you. In this way Cezanne nearly did nearly in this way. Cezanne nearly did nearly did and nearly did. And was I surprised. Was I very surprised. Was I surprised. I was surprised and in that patient, are you patient when you find bees. Bees in a garden make a specialty of honey and so does honey. Honey and prayer. Honey and there. There where the grass can grow nearly four times yearly.
- Gertrude Stein, Cezanne
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The old saw has it that “behind every great man is a woman cheering him on.” If we were to come up with a less overtly sexist version, it might be “A person who wants to achieve things needs a supportive partner.” In Cecil Beaton’s famous photograph of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Stein is large and imposing, and Toklas looks small and vulnerable behind her. Yet it is doubtful that Stein could have achieved what she did as a writer without her. Stein never learned to type, and only wrote in long-hand, a script that she herself sometimes found difficult to read. It was Alice who transcribed this scrawl into typescript, and who encouraged Stein to submit her work to publishers. Toklas was much more than housekeeper and “wife” to Stein: she was secretary, editor, and agent as well.
In this later, more casual picture of the two, they’re out walking their poodle Basket. This was at the end of World War II. Read Janet Malcolm’s biography of Stein and Toklas, Two Lives, for a picture of how complex things were to allow two elderly Jewish Americans to somehow survive unscathed in Nazi-occupied France through WWII. The two had the unprecedented support of friends and neighbors to accomplish this miracle, but I wonder if Stein would have made it without Toklas’s support? Stein was an Aquarius, a good Astrological sign for a writer, because Air signs tend to live in their heads, and language and ideas are as real to them as things are. They are well-balanced by Tauruses (like Toklas), who are eminently pragmatic and anchored in the reality of the quotidian. “Yes, dear, I understand you’re on page 900 of your novel, but it’s time for dinner. Put down your pen.” Stein looks thinner in this photo, no doubt already showing signs of the cancer that would kill her the year after the war ended, leaving Toklas to linger on alone.
Many of Stein’s creative friends were supportive of Alice after Stein’s death, but the Stein family certainly was not. Sensing the value of the art collection that was supposed to be used as a legacy for Alice, the Stein family swooped in and confiscated the paintings, evicting Alice from the apartment. In the last years of her life, nominally converted to Catholicism, she was under the care of French nuns. Shameful treatment of the person who enabled Stein’s “genius.”
Even in death, Alice would stand behind Gertrude, careful not to assume the limelight, but simply to be there. This is a picture of the grave of Gertrude Stein at Père LaChaise cemetery in Paris. You can see the stones left by visitors - which honors bother her name and Jewish customs. One must leave the main path, and walk behind the grave, to see that there is another name carved on the back of the tombstone: Alice B. Toklas.
