No Modernism Without Lesbians, Diana Souhami [love books to read txt] 📗

mean what did she say that for? I mean if you’re going to say something about a person… I couldn’t stand her. She had to be the centre of everything. A monstrous ego.

It was Alice, not Gertrude, who chose to consign women to the kitchen. At college, Gertrude’s company was essentially with lesbian or lesbian-friendly women: the Cone sisters Claribel and Etta, the artists Ethel Mars and Maud Hunt Squire, Mabel Weeks, May Bookstaver. But Alice let no other woman get near. And Gertrude’s ‘bottom nature’ was essentially passive; with Leo she was the complaisant sister, with Alice the compliant spouse. Why make decisions was Gertrude’s view.

Natalie Barney was not seen by Alice as a threat. She and Gertrude used to take an evening walk with Basket. Natalie liked Gertrude’s ‘staunch presence, pleasant touch of hand, well-rounded voice always ready to chuckle’.

Sylvia Beach said she felt like a guide from a tourist agency because so many young American writers called at Shakespeare and Company and asked her to introduce them to Gertrude Stein.

Sherwood Anderson

Sherwood Anderson was one suppliant:

‘Dear Miss Gertrude Stein’

Would you let me bring around Mr Sherwood Anderson of White and Winesburg Ohio to see you this evening? He is so anxious to know you for he says you have influenced him ever so much & that you stand as such a great master of words. Unless I hear from you saying NO I will take him to you after dinner tonight

Yours affectionately

Sylvia Beach

Anderson arrived at the rue de Fleurus in 1921 with Tennessee Mitchell, the second of his four wives. They were, Anderson wrote in his memoirs, ‘persistently unhappy together’. They married with the understanding they would come and go as they pleased and she would retain her own name. He was forty-five, had given up his paint business in Ohio, had a breakdown, walked out on his first wife and three children and married Tennessee. Small towns in Ohio were the setting for the two works of fiction he gave to Gertrude. Poor White was set in a farming town that becomes industrialized. Winesburg, Ohio was a book of interrelated short stories, about characters thwarted by small-town life.

Gertrude told him: ‘You sometimes write what is the most important thing of all to be able to write, passionate and innocent sentences.’ In his diary, Anderson described her as ‘a strong woman with legs like stone pillars sitting in a room with Picassos’. Tennessee, a sculptor, music teacher and suffragist, wore big hats and floating scarves like Isadora Duncan and when she tried to join in the conversation, Alice took her across the room to show her something interesting. ‘I couldn’t see the necessity for the cruelty to wives that was practised in the rue de Fleurus,’ Sylvia Beach wrote in her memoir. She was critical too of the way French people were isolated from the Gertrude Stein court. She never met any French people there and thought Gertrude looked at the French without seeing them.

Gertrude and Ernest

Ernest Hemingway was twenty-three when he arrived at Gertrude’s in 1922 with a letter of introduction from Sherwood Anderson. Hadley, his first wife, eight years older than he, was consigned to the kitchen. Hemingway was besotted with Gertrude, who was about the same age as his mother, Grace. He wrote of Gertrude’s thick hair, beautiful eyes, and ‘strong German-Jewish face’. He described her as heavily built ‘like a peasant woman’ and was intrigued by the size of her breasts. He wondered how much each one weighed: ‘I think about ten pounds, don’t you Hadley?’ he asked when they left.

Hemingway’s mother, when he was a child, dressed him and his elder sister, Marcelline, in identical clothes. She had wanted twins. ‘Summer girl’, she captioned a photo of Ernest aged two in 1901, in a white frock and flowered hat. Sometimes she dressed him and Marcelline as girls, sometimes as boys. She gave them the same hairstyle, they slept in the same room in identical cots, had the same dolls and were expected to do everything together. She bought clothes in twos: lacy dresses, flowered hats, sailor suits, though Ernest was soon larger and taller than his sister, who was eighteen months older.

Ernest Hemingway as a child © Everett Collection Inc / Alamy

Ernest’s father, in contrast, determined to make him a manly man. Dr Hemingway taught each of his six children to shoot and fish and not complain if hurt. He, like Gertrude’s father, had volatile mood swings and violent outbursts of rage. Marcelline wrote:

Sometimes the change from being gay to being stern was so abrupt that we were not prepared for the shock that came when one minute Daddy would have his arm around one of us, or we would be sitting on his lap laughing and talking and a minute or so later, because of something we had said or done, or some neglected duty of ours he suddenly thought about, we would be ordered to our rooms and perhaps made to go without supper. Sometimes we were spanked hard our bodies across his knee. Always after punishment we were told to kneel down and ask God to forgive us.

He hit them with a razor strop, made them wash their mouths out with soap, did not speak to them for days at a time. Their mother hit them too, though not as hard.

Grace Hemingway felt superior to her husband. She saw herself as an unfulfilled opera star and earned more as a singing teacher than he as a doctor. Ernest referred to her as ‘that bitch’ and said he hated her. She did not go to his wedding in 1921 and when he told her, in February 1927, of his impending divorce, she wrote:

I’m sorry to hear that your marriage has gone on the rocks but most marriages ought to. I hold very modern and heretical views on marriage but keep them under my hat.

The following year, her husband shot himself in the head with his own father’s