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

be read immediately. Alice liked her food hot, Gertrude liked hers tepid. Alice began reading.

I thought she was making fun of me and I protested… Finally I read it all and was terribly pleased with it. And then we ate our supper.

The portrait began with an account of what a good daughter Alice had been, how she looked after her mother, then when her mother died she kept home for her father and took care of her brother. ‘There were many relations who lived with them. The daughter did not like them to live with them and she did not like them to die with them.’

Ada went away. Her father wanted her to return. She wrote him ‘tender letters’ but she never went back because she met ‘some one’ who loved her.

She came to be happier than anybody else who was living then. It is easy to believe this thing… Trembling was all living, living was all loving, some one was then the other one. Certainly this one was loving this Ada then. And certainly Ada all her living then was happier in living than any one else who ever could, who was, who is, who ever will be living.

So there it was. Perfect love and perfect bliss. Just like in the songs ‘There Never Was a Girl Like You’ and ‘There’s No Moon Like the Honeymoon’ – except the love was between two women and the prose style distinctly unfamiliar.

In her second word portrait, Gertrude Stein and Her Brother, Gertrude wrote of her disaffection with Leo and her fracture from him:

She was thinking of being one who was a different one in being one than he was in being one. Sound was coming out of her and she was knowing this thing. Sound had been coming out of him and she had been knowing this thing. She was thinking in being a different one than he was in having sound come out of her than came out of him. She was thinking in being a different one. She was thinking about being a different one. She was thinking about that thing. She had sound coming out of her …

Each one of the two was different from the other of them. Each one of them was knowing that thing. She was different from him in having sound coming out of her. She was thinking this thing. She was thinking in this thing. She had sound coming out of her. She was different in being one being one. She was knowing that thing.

She was different in being one having sound coming out of her she was different in being that one from any other one. She was one having had sound come out of her she was different in being that one from any one. She had sound coming out of her. This was a thing she was being. Sound was coming out of her, sound had come out of her, perhaps sound would come out of her.

It continued for 147 pages.

rue de Fleurus to themselves

Gertrude and Alice looked for another apartment. They found one overlooking the Palais-Royal gardens, but Leo settled the matter by moving to the Villa di Doccia in Settignano near Florence. ‘It will take days to have the floor fixed and the closets constructed,’ he wrote to Nina Auzias. In a rough division of spoils, he took most of the Renoirs and Matisses, Gertrude kept the Cézannes and Picassos.

Leo said Alice’s arrival was a ‘godsend’ that allowed separation between him and Gertrude to happen without ‘an explosion’. ‘I hope that we will all live happily ever after and continue to suck our respective oranges,’ he wrote to Gertrude. But he went on calling her writing ‘silly twaddle’, ‘sub-intelligent gabble’ and ‘utter bosh’. ‘Like all children and madmen she adequately communicates only to herself.’

Gertrude and Alice decided never to see him again:

Do you remember how we decided that indeed if he came we would have it said that there would be no admittance. Do you remember that we decided that we had entertained him as frequently as we would and that now when he came we would have him told that we would not receive him. Do you remember that?

For Gertrude, the split was as radical as that of Sylvia Beach from James Joyce. Most of the lesbians of the era, to flourish in their self-styled lives, needed to free themselves from domination by men, be they brothers, fathers, husbands, legislators. It was as if men could not accept being other than the dominant force. Or worse, they expected women to be in service to them in order to merit an identity.

Leo made reparative overtures, which Gertrude rebuffed. She did not reply to his peace offerings and letters. For her, the rift was absolute. Once, in Paris, they passed each other in the street on opposite sides of the road. Leo raised his hat and that was all, a sad end to a sibling love affair, a childhood romance.

Mabel Dodge

Mabel Dodge, at her Villa Curonia near Florence, blamed Alice for the break between Gertrude and Leo:

Alice Toklas entered the Stein ménage and became a handmaiden. She was always serving someone, and especially Gertrude and Gertrude’s friends. She was perfect for doing errands and was willing to run all over Paris to get one a special perfume or any little thing one wanted… But lo and behold she pushed Leo out quite soon. No one knew how exactly and he went off to Florence and from that time I date his extreme neuroticism… Before that he had a human contact through his sister.

Mabel Dodge Luhan © Donaldson Collection / Getty Images

When Leo moved to Florence, he often visited Mabel Dodge and spoke of his hurt and contempt. She said:

He had always had an especial disgust at seeing how the weaker can enslave the stronger… Alice did everything to save Gertrude a movement – all the housekeeping, the typing, seeing people who called and getting rid