Finding Lost Voices: A New Biography about Gertrude Stein by Francesca Wade
A weekly email that brings back the voices of those who have been forgotten or misremembered
When I was in London a few months ago, I visited Foyles bookstore and picked up a signed copy of the new Gertrude Stein biography by Francesca Wade, called Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife. Normally, I wouldn’t have just splurged on a book in the middle of a research trip, but here was a new biography about one of my favorite authors! And the book hadn’t yet been released in America. So I picked up the book and devoured it on the plane ride home.
To say, I am a Stein fan, might be an understatement. The first first edition book I purchased was Bee Time Vine (1953), the third of the eight volumes of works published posthumously by Yale University Press per Stein’s request. Then, I named my first Shi-tzu after Gertrude Stein’s dog Basket. Stein was one of the authors I’d read young who’d given me permission to challenge the strict narrative boundaries that I saw around me in the literature I was taught in school and so I feel forever indebted to her.
So, you can imagine my immense pleasure when I was able to arrange an interview with Francesca Wade and her it is for you, just in time for the American release of Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife.
But before the interview, three quick announcements:
First, I’m thrilled to announce that my latest biography, Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb is now out on audiobook!
Second, for those in the Bay Area, come join me at Liquake, Tuesday, October 14 at 7pm for the panel, “Scribbling Women” Strike Back: How Long-Silenced Voices Have Fueled a New Resistance” — where I get to talk with with Emily Van Duyne (Loving Sylvia Plath), Jessica Ferri (Womb House Books), Kim Askew and Amy Helmes (Lost Ladies of Lit Podcast) Mimi Pond ( Do Admit: The Mitford Sisters and Me) and Jessi Haley (Cita Press) at Mrs. Dalloway’s, 2904 College Ave, Berkeley, CA 94705. I can’t wait to be a part of this conversation!
I’ve secured incredible interviews at Rogue Invitational with Crossfit and Strongwomen athletes for my book, Strong, about the history of strong-bodied women in America. I’m looking for help funding this trip. Please consider contributing to my Go Fund Me site for this project! Every donation helps!
I hope you enjoy this interview about Francesca Wade’s must read biography, Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife.
Francesca Wade is the author of Square Haunting: Five Writers in London Between the Wars (2020). She has received fellowships from the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center, the Leon Levy Center for Biography and the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, and her writing has appeared in The New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, Paris Review, Granta, and elsewhere.
Iris Jamahl Dunkle
Thank you for joining me for an interview for Finding Lost Voices! This is a Substack that I’ve been doing for about a year and a half, and the idea behind it is to bring back voices that have been forgotten, or to bring in new ways of looking at women who have been misremembered in some way. And so, it feels like Gertrude Stein and your approach to this biography is a perfect fit.
For my first question, I just want to begin with the obvious, which is what made you decide to split the biography in two? And how did you come upon that form because it’s brilliant.
Francesca Wade
Oh, thank you. Well, the biography’s form is something that evolved during the process of researching and writing it. When I started this book, I anticipated writing specifically about her posthumous life, because I’d come across interviews which Leon Katz, when he was a PhD. student, had done with Alice B. Toklas in the 1950s after just having read Janet Malcolm’s book about Stein and Toklas, Two Lives where she writes about this legendary scholar who had had unprecedented access to Toklas just after Stein’s death. He was the first person she opened up to about her life with Stein and Katz had never shown the transcripts of their interviews to anyone. And so, Janet Malcolm, whose work I love for her investigation of biography and the ethics and questions surrounding legacy and memory, was never able to see this material.
Katz died a couple of years before I’d read Malcom’s book, so his papers were available at the Beinecke Library. Having access to those transcripts is what started the project. I was interested in writing about how Toklas was the steward of Stein’s literary estate. And the more I investigated Stein, the more drawn in I became: her self-mythologizing, and, above all, her writing, and in the process of writing it just became clearer that I needed somewhere to tell the stories of Stein’s life to show how some of those stories were undercut or challenged or enhanced by material that came out after she died. So after various rounds of writing and rewriting, I came upon this idea of starting with her life, and then continuing the narrative after her death.
Iris Jamahl Dunkle
Excellent. When you began this project, were you already somebody who was enamored with Stein?
Francesca Wade
No, not particularly. I knew somewhat about her legend. I’d come across her in relation to some of the women in my last book (Square Haunting: Five Writers in London Between the Wars). So, I thought I knew, who she was, but I hadn’t read much of her writing beyond The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, which is such a wonderful way into her life. But what I quickly came to discover in investigating her further was how unrepresentative of her writing style the book was, and how she’d written it quite deliberately, with an eye to writing a bestseller that would draw attention back to all her real, avant-garde texts she’d been writing for decades without anything but negative attention.
So I didn’t come to the project with an agenda. But what I noticed is that previous biographies had focused on the work; her writing is almost seen as this embarrassing thing that you can put to the side in order to focus on the fun anecdotes about her Bohemian life in Paris. I felt it was important to have the first half of the book to actually assess her intellectual trajectory, which was totally inseparable from the life that she was living.
Iris Jamahl Dunkle
I am a lifelong Gertrude Stein fan and so was thrilled to see your approach. I find it interesting that you didn’t know her work before you began writing this biography, because, like, for example, on page 71 and 72, when you’re talking about her method in Tender Buttons, which is probably her second most famous book, you did such an incredible job of showing her growth to get to that point, and analyzing the method she employed.
Francesca Wade
Oh, thanks! Her work makes the most sense when it’s read in chronological order. And that was something I did to prepare to write the book. So much of her work was published posthumously and out of order, so I went back and started reading everything she wrote in chronological order.
It was a revelatory experience because you can see her development, the way she’s pushing language in different ways, and all of her distinct styles and how her work is one long process.
Tender Buttons is such a breakthrough. It’s when she starts to use words in completely different ways and releases them. It’s the period of her writing career from which everything she did after flowed, and it was also an exciting moment in her personal life, when she and Toklas were moving in together, reconfiguring their home and setting the scene for the rest of their life together.
Iris Jamahl Dunkle
What you did was so extraordinary to put her work first, but still in conversation with all of those events associated with her iconic status as part of the Lost Generation. Can you talk about what you discovered to be the touchstone points of her literary career?
Francesca Wade
The touchstones start with her scientific background and medical training. She was one of the first women students at Radcliffe, where she worked in William James’s psychological laboratory, conducting experiments on the way the brain works and how the mind processes perception. She went on to be one of the first medical students at Johns Hopkins and she spent a year making diagrams of the brain stem. She glosses over this period in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. She says she just dropped out of medical school because she was bored and moved straight on to her immersion in Paris and the world of modern art. But actually, there is so much more to know about this period of her life in relation to her writing. How it provided the grounding for her idea of using words in ways they’d never been used before to try to encourage the neurons in the brain to work in a different way. Then, combine that touchstone moment with her arrival in Paris when she met Picasso, who was on the verge of the breakthrough to cubism, but not quite there yet. Stein liked to say that it was making her portrait that gave him the tools he needed to get to the next stage, but really they were working in tandem. In her notebooks, there is an ongoing dialogue with Picasso about the nature of perception, and how to how to combine words or shapes in new ways.
Iris Jamahl Dunkle
That’s amazing. Are those journals published, or do you have to see them in the archives?
Francesca Wade
Yes, they actually have been published. But it’s a long saga. Stein set her sights on her posthumous reputation and saved absolutely everything. She had cabinets in her apartment, full of her old notebooks, her manuscripts, letters. shopping lists, everything. And so, when Yale University got in touch with her in the thirties, inviting her to give her materials to the archive of American Literature they were establishing, she had it all ready to go. It’s impossible to know how careful she was about deciding what to send.
A large part of the drama of the second half of my book is about the things that turned up in the archive that may or may not have been intended to get there, including these notebooks which covered her first decade in Paris. It was a transformative time: she transitioned from America and science to Europe and art, there was a schism between her and her brother, whom she’d been so close with, the arrival of Toklas in her life, and her emergence as a writer.
In the fifties, Leon Katz was writing his dissertation on Stein’s early work, when he came across this trove of notebooks that even Toklas had never seen. And so, Katz got permission to transcribe those notebooks, meaning that no one else would be allowed to use them while his work was in progress.
He then spent the rest of his life working on the book that was going to reveal what he found in those notebooks which he didn’t finish. So it wasn’t until the eighties that other scholars were able to go and consult the journals at the Beinecke, and so there’s been Stein scholarship since then that has drawn on the notebooks.
While I was working on this book, Katz’s sons self-published an edition of his annotations of Stein’s notebooks. So, they are now available, although without scholarly apparatus.
But the originals are all at Yale, and some amount of the material has been digitized as well.
Iris Jamahl Dunkle
Why do you think it took Katz so long?
Francesca Wade
I get the sense that life caught up with him. He prioritized his teaching and his work as a playwright. And he probably didn’t want to finish because he didn’t want to let go of it. And in a way, the work is probably never done. I mean. His essential project was annotating Stein’s early notebooks and analyzing the way that they fed into the writing of her enormous novel, The Making of Americans which took her ten years to write, and which she believed was the was the most pioneering work of modernism. The novel is a thousand pages, and the notebooks are more than that. They’re full of references to people, events, and it was quite an endless project to pull apart. Also, studying Stein is addictive because there is always more to think about, and she left this enormous body of work that can be absolutely mined for clues if you have that mindset.
There are some funny letters in the in the archive, where he complains about Janet Malcolm’s portrayal of him as this somewhat shady guy who’s holding on to this material. And he says, I’m just working on my book. It’s not ready to share it yet. I will share it when I’m done.
It was exciting to be able to draw from his work, particularly the interviews he had with Toklas after Stein’s death which are so fascinating both for the light she sheds on Stein’s thought and writing process and their relationship. Just the fact that he captured her talking about Stein is so rare because she was so guarded, particularly during Stein’s lifetime, and so to watch her flourish as a character through the second half of the book was fascinating.
Iris Jamahl Dunkle
I loved how you did some scene building in that second section of the book especially when you transition to their interviews, so that we could walk into that room with him and feel that intimacy that they must have had.
Let’s go back to what you said in regard to James Joyce, and what was later said by Elliot and Pound about the guise of modernism. Why wasn’t Stein included as one of the “guys.” Why was her work excluded from the definition of modernism? Can you talk a little bit about the sexism and the patriarchy of what is remembered about the Modernist movement?
Francesca Wade
Yeah, I mean, how long have we got?
Iris Jamahl Dunkle
Ha! Right?
Francesca Wade
Stein has always been dismissed and continues to be dismissed.
She incited pretty strong reactions. For example, Wyndham Lewis wrote a whole series of incredibly vitriolic attacks against her and Joyce and it’s pretty clear that he hadn’t read her. He claims she’s just too much. There’s a sense to his writing that’s very antisemitic, very misogynistic. He calls her things like a suet pudding and claims she’s excessive and arrogant.
To some extent Stein played up to his image of her. She inspired cult-like devotion in admirers. She presented herself as a genius. Essentially, she believed she was doing something completely new. While other modernists were looking to the past to create new forms. She was making language completely new, doing things with words that had never been done before, and reinvigorating literary tradition.
When modernism became canonized as an academic discipline, Stein was part of a wider exclusion of women from the boundaries of what modernism is supposed to be. And it’s not until feminist and queer theory emerges and new anthologies like Bonnie Kaim Scott’s The Gender of Modernism come out to reassess these figures and reimagine people like Stein, Amy Lowell, H.D. and Marianne Moore as central literary figures.
Iris Jamahl Dunkle
It’s interesting that when you come across James Joyce for the first time, it is incomprehensible, right? But some license was given to him that was not given to her. You are taught to stick with his work until you get it because his writing is “difficult” while Stein isn’t given the same time and attention.
Francesca Wade
Yeah, there is an assumption that Joyce’s work is meaningful and that it’s worth spending the time to try and understand it, whereas so often, we are taught to look at Steins work as nonsense as if she’s mad. This speaks to a wider misogyny, plus a lack of intellectual curiosity.
Iris Jamahl Dunkle
She was so prescient to be able to block the archival violence that would have occurred had she not created and controlled her own archive. I liked how in your book, you brought to light how so many women’s stories experience archival violence and get flattened or erased. I love how you were able to show how Stein controlled the story of her afterlife.
Francesca Wade
She also had this absolute, steadfast belief that what she was doing was important, and that would be vindicated someday.
Iris Jamahl Dunkle
Could you talk more about how you depicted Alice B. Toklas in your book?
Francesca Wade
Their relationship was fascinating; it was so theatrical and performative. I’ve been thinking a lot about The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in which Stein writes as Toklas, totally appropriating her voice in a book that is all about herself. And how Toklas’s role was just to puff up Stein’s achievements. So it’s audacious in that way. But there’s another way in which Stein is putting Toklas at the absolute center of everything she does. And I would read the book as a tribute from Stein to Toklas, and almost a excavation of her invisible household labor. Toklas did the shopping, the cooking and the typing. She had the tradition wifely roles. Some argue they had a patriarchal relationship where Stein was in charge and Toklas was subservient. While others (like Hemmingway) argue that Toklas was secretly in control.
So , their relationship can be read in so many different ways, most of which are caricatures, or stereotypes, and I just think that their relationship was so much more human and complex. A sentiment that arose when I looked at the way Toklas redefined herself after Stein’s death. Their lives had been so intertwined, and she lived another 20 years without Stein. After Stein’s death, she redefined her devotion so that it became a devotion to Stein’s work.
Stein was so and public and loved being a public figure, whereas Toklas was a private person, who was thrust into the limelight. She became a household name because of her autobiography, (which wasn’t even written by her.) So, she was well known, but people realized no one actually knew who she was. And I’m not sure she even knew who she was without Stein, but her unwavering commitment to Stein’s work and the importance of what Stein was doing had characterized their relationship from the very beginning.
When Toklas arrived in Paris, Stein was living with her brother, who thought her work was nonsense, and mocked her. This is at the time that Stein was writing The Making of Americans. And almost immediately, Toklas believed in her work, and encouraged her. Toklas would do this for the rest of Stein’s life.
After Stein died, Toklas was left with many roles. One was the job of publishing the rest of Stein’s work. Stein left strict instructions in her will that she wanted all her unpublished work to be published and left instructions that they could sell paintings if they needed money to finance the publication of her work.
Another was that Toklas had to deal with biographers and researchers visited the Stein Archive to write about Stein. I enjoyed untangling Toklas’ complicated relationships with a succession of quite hilarious figures, the earliest biographers of which there are quite a few, most of whom fell afoul of her for various reasons, usually because they wanted to put Toklas in the story as well and were quite bemused when she insisted that she shouldn’t be part of it at all.
She threatened to take legal action against anyone who used her name outside of being Stein’s editor for the brief period where they ran their own publishing house. So, it’s fascinating in terms of queer history as well. The ethics and stakes, of being open about their same-sex relationships when it wasn’t much talked about.
In a way, Toklas, Stein and Toklas were were never secretive about their relationship. They just took it for granted. Nor were they particularly out about it. It just was what it was.
Stein’s writing is so full of eroticism. But in a way no one had noticed, probably because people didn’t read her work closely enough. And so it wasn’t until the fifties after Stein’s death that her work began to be discussed in relation to her sexuality, which is a very fruitful way of reading her work.
Iris Jamahl Dunkle
The lasting image from your biography for me was when later in her life, Alice was staying at a covenant in Italy and then when she came back all the paintings were gone from the walls in her apartment. It was so visceral. How the art had been such a part of her life, of their life together and she kept the walls with the spaces there because she was so distraught to have lost them.
Francesca Wade
Yeah, which is another indictment of sexist and homophobic laws. Because they couldn’t be legally married, Toklas couldn’t inherit from Stein, and so Stein’s will set up this convoluted system, where the art collection was left to her nephew and his descendants. But with Toklas to have use of it for her lifetime if she needed money, and, Toklas ended her life pretty much in poverty, because, even though she was legally entitled to sell the art. She didn’t want to, and I know, partly out of a pride, and partly because she wanted to keep these paintings around her. And so yeah, it’s a sad story that when the Stein’s descendants realized that they had this, what now amounted to an enormous fortune, which was at risk, because Toklas would go away for months on end, and not close the windows, and so on. So, they staged an intervention and had the art collection confiscated. Toklas was in a legal battle to retrieve it right to the end of her life, and then, of course, very shortly after she died the collection was sold and dispersed.
The art collection has been re-gathered a few times for exhibitions. It’s amazing to see one of those paintings out there. That transition from private paintings on the walls to commodities out there in the public is poignant.
Iris Jamahl Dunkle
It’s a fascinating story. And what an incredible experience that must have been to walk into that that room with all of that incredible art collaged together. I can only imagine.
Francesca Wade
I was in Paris quite recently, and was able to go to the apartment where they lived which has been owned by the same owners since the sixties. Even though it doesn’t have the paintings on the walls, you can still tell that you’re in that room, I mean, I know the dimensions so well from photographs, and it’s actually a lot smaller than I had imagined. Those parties must have been incredibly hot and noisy and crowded. But the apartment has these amazing high ceilings. So you can imagine the paintings stacked up the walls and the Picasso portrait of Stein handing right above her.
Iris Jamahl Dunkle
I loved your story, too, of going to their place near Belly, in France. Can you tell me more about that experience?
Francesca Wade
That trip to the countryside in France was where the whole project came to life for me, because that Stein just loved it there. She had this idea of a play being like a landscape which she recurred throughout her life and work and being there I could see what she meant for the first time. There are these rolling hills with valleys and mountains, and you can see everything all at once, and stuff is happening in different places. But there’s no narrative as such, but there’s a there’s an experience and you’re feeling it. To go to see that house where they where they spent the war made me feel her feel like she was a real person. And in the small town of Kulow (where Stein and Toklas had to move or the second half of the war), I went to a local history museum and it’s got billboards about Gertrude Stein and I talked to one of the volunteers who was talking about her as like she was this eccentric neighbor, who’d been just one of them in this small town, and it was such a different way to approach her, it humanized her. And brought to light how that humanity is something that has been missing from accounts of Stein.
Iris Jamahl Dunkle
Thank you so much, Francesca for visiting Finding Lost Voices!
For More Information
Read Francesca Wade’s biography, Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife.
Go to a her reading at Womb House Books in Oakland on Tuesday, October 28
Many of Gertrude Stein’s books are available for free online here.
Upcoming Events
October 11, 9:00 AM - “Echoes of the Sierra: A Poet Laureate Conversation” with Karen Terrey (Nevada County), Jesse James Ziegler (Reno), Moira Magnessen (El Dorado), Melinda Palacio (Santa Barbara), Iris Jamal Dunkle (Sonoma Co. emerita), and Lara Gularte (El Dorado emerita)at the Tahoe Art Haus in Tahoe City as part of the Tahoe Literary Festival.
Tuesday, October 14 at 7pm - “Scribbling Women” Strike Back: How Long-Silenced Voices Have Fueled a New Resistance” — with Emily Van Duyne (Loving Sylvia Plath), Jessica Ferri (Womb House Books), Kim Askew and Amy Helmes (Lost Ladies of Lit Podcast) Mimi Pond ( Do Admit: The Mitford Sisters and Me) and Jessi Haley (Cita Press) at Mrs. Dalloway’s,2904 College Ave, Berkeley, CA 94705, as part of Litquake.
Tuesday, October 21 at 7 pm - “The Who, What, When & How of Literary Prizes” — with May-Lee Chai, Jane Chiabattari, Iris Jamahl Dunkle and Oscar Villalon, at Page Street Writers, 297 Page Street, San Francisco, as part of Litquake.