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

depart from nineteenth-century thinking, but in her lifestyle, apart from her and Alice both being women, she did not want to change the recognized values of harmonious married life. It was in art and literature that she departed from patriarchal ideas, dogmas and past conventions of style and content, left behind old ways of seeing and saying, forged new ways of expression and took credit as the mother and father of modernism.

She resented the attention given to James Joyce’s Ulysses and cancelled her subscription to the Shakespeare and Company lending library when Sylvia Beach published it. She viewed Joyce as her rival and said he smelled of museums and that was why he and not she was accepted. ‘You see it is the people who generally smell of the museums who are accepted and it is the new who are not accepted.’ They only met once, at a party given by the American sculptor Jo Davidson, who did a sculpture of Gertrude. Sylvia Beach introduced them. Gertrude said to Joyce, ‘After all these years.’ Joyce said, ‘Yes, and our names always linked together.’ Gertrude said, ‘We live in the same arrondissement.’ And with that their one and only exchange ended.

Gertrude’s parents

In her writing, the bones of biography, what happened when and where, did not concern Gertrude. She was laconic about her early years:

I guess you know my life history well enough – that I was in Vienna from six months of age to four years, that I was in Paris from four years of age to five, that I was in California from six years of age to seventeen and that I was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania.

That was as empirically revealing as Gertrude felt she needed to be. Her concern was with philosophical and psychological concepts: existence, identity, descriptions of fundamental aspects of human nature: ‘bottom nature’, she called it.

The Steins were German-Jewish immigrants for whom English was a second language. For the first four years of her life Gertrude heard ‘Austrian German and French French’ then, when she was five, ‘American English’. ‘Our little Gertie is a little schnatterer,’ her Hungarian governess wrote in 1895:

She talks all day long and so plainly. She outdoes them all. She’s such a round little pudding, toddles around the whole day and repeats everything that is said or done.

Repeating everything figured in Gertrude’s adult writing too. Her detractors ridiculed the extent of it. ‘The hymn of repetition,’ she called it. It became her stylistic stamp:

She had sound coming out of her. She was knowing that thing. She had had sound coming out of her she was knowing that thing. He had had sound coming out of him she was knowing that thing. He had sound coming out of him she was knowing this thing…

was immediately recognizable as Gertrude’s inimitable or imitable innovative prose. But her father, Daniel Stein’s, discursive letters, scornful of syntax, grammar or punctuation and eliding into a rambling outpouring, perhaps found echo in her own modernist, unbridled style. And her youngest brother, Simon, whom she described as simple minded, did seem to suffer from some sort of echolalia – a prolix rambling that Gertrude’s critics thought infused her writing too.

Daniel Stein and his four brothers dealt in imported textiles. They prospered but quarrelled. Gertrude said her father ‘liked to buy things and have big undertakings’. He was uncertain whether to live in Maryland, Pennsylvania, California or Europe. He had little brown eyes, ‘sharp and piercing and sometimes dancing with laughing and often angry with irritation’. He had rapid mood swings and could be terrifying – he would pound the table, say he was the father, they were his children, they must obey him or he would know how to make them. They were afraid of and confused by him and never knew when playfulness would change to an outburst and how far that would go. In the street he muttered to himself, swept the air with his stick and held forth about the weather or the fruit and made them feel embarrassed. ‘Come on papa, all those people are looking,’ they would say. He took cake or fruit from street stalls and gave it to them, leaving them uncertain whether he would pay the vendor. Sometimes he forgot about Gertrude and her brother Leo if he was with them. He dragooned his children into card games then, after a few minutes, got impatient and told the governess to take over because he hadn’t time to go on playing. Then he left them with a game none of them was interested in or would have thought of beginning and nor could they abandon it because he would keep coming in to see who was winning.

He was an ever-increasing problem as Gertrude and Leo grew up. They were ashamed of him because he was so peculiar, and frightened of his unpredictability. He was eccentric and even a little mad:

His children never could lose, until they grew up to be queer themselves, each one inside him, the uncomfortable feeling his queer ways gave them.

Leo in particular disliked and resented him. He described him as stocky, dominant, aggressive and ill-educated and felt afflicted by him with a deep neurosis. When adult, in an autobiographical book Journey Into the Self, Leo tried to make sense of what he saw as his father’s malign influence.

Gertrude conceded her father encouraged a sense of freedom in his children, but she had no love for him, though she looked like him and felt there were similarities in their temperaments. He was not appreciative of her. Like Sir John Ellerman and Albert Barney, he let his daughter know she was not the kind of daughter she ought to be. ‘She was not very interesting ever to her father,’ Gertrude wrote of herself. He criticized how she looked and said she was never thorough in anything. He wanted her to do housekeeping, dressmaking and cooking. Nothing Gertrude cooked turned out right.

And then he would be full up with impatient feeling