The Mama of Dada

“Gertrude Stein Comes Home” by Seymour I. Toll, in The Sewanee Review (Spring 2002), 735 University Ave., Sewanee, Tenn. 37383.

When Gertrude Stein returned to America to begin her now-legendary lecture tour in 1934, it seemed that no one, perhaps not even the author herself, knew what Stein’s writing was all about. “I wonder if you know what I mean,” she mused to her audience on one occasion. “I do not quite know whether I do myself.” Yet Stein was such a celebrity that 15 reporters sailed out to meet her ship in New York harbor.

Though she’s been dead since 1946, Stein’s celebrity remains as intact as the mystery of how she won it, writes Toll, a Philadelphia attorney. By the time of Stein’s homecoming, she had been living the comfortable life of an expatriate American intellectual in Paris for more than 30 years. With her partner, Alice B. Toklas, she had gained a certain renown for her salons (she befriended Picasso and Hemingway), her unconventional attire (sacklike dresses and thick stockings, “as if she wanted to be seen as a promenading stump”), and her impenetrable, “numbing” prose. The work she always considered her masterpiece, The Making of Americans, published in Paris in 1925, sold about 100 copies. It consists of 904 pages of sentences such as this: “Soon then there will be a history of every kind of men and women and of all the mixtures in them, sometime there will be a history of every man and every woman who ever were or are or will be living. . . .”

In 1933, Stein temporarily broke with her own literary conventions to publish a book written in com­pre­hensible English, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (serialized in The Atlantic Monthly), though it retained one signature convention: It was Stein writing about Stein. The book put her in the public eye. She also wrote the libretto for Virgil Thomson’s 1934 opera Four Saints in Three Acts, which Toll compares to the writing of Dr. Seuss. The artsy crowd loved it. A few critics of the time—like some today—championed Stein as a kind of founding mother of modernism. But her disavowal of punctuation (“necessary only for the feeble-minded,” she claimed), chronology, and recognizable syntax flummoxed the American reading public, and even the great critic and early Stein supporter Edmund Wilson eventually threw up his hands.

On tour, Stein charmed the crowds by playing the “lighthearted aunt,” mixing witty aperçus with surprisingly straightforward talk. The reporters who dogged her steps hoping to make her seem a joke were instead made to look like “dullards,” says Toll. “Why don’t you write the way you talk?” one demanded. “Why don’t you read the way I write?” Stein shot back. She showed a natural instinct for self- promotion. For example, she limited the number of tickets sold to each lecture, ensuring that wherever she traveled, she would be the hottest attraction in town. Everybody clamored for face time with the new literary sensation. Stein, who was a conservative Republican, gladly had tea with Eleanor Roosevelt and dinner with Charlie Chaplin.

Stein’s incomprehensible prose became a running joke, inviting parodies in The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. The dust jacket of one of the 26 books she published during her lifetime bore this note from publisher Bennett Cerf: “I do not know what Miss Stein is talking about. I do not even understand the title. I admire Miss Stein tremendously, and I like to publish her books, although most of the time I do not know what she is driving at. That, Miss Stein tells me, is because I am dumb.”

Perhaps the secret to Stein’s continuing fame lies in the lingering idea that we’re just not getting it. More than 50 years after her death, she’s the subject of new publications, websites, and academic conferences. Lexus ads make knowing allusions to Stein’s work, and journalists quote her—“Remarks are not literature,” she once quipped. “Legends endure because their meaning persists,” writes Toll. “Yet the Stein legend flourishes even though its meaning has always been a mess. Its point is pointlessness.”