Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway. I should begin by admitting that the off-beat pairing of this renegade literary couple
has fascinated me since before I can remember. On paper Stein, the sedentary, upper-crust salon matriarch, and Hemingway, the piratical Midwestern journalist, sit on very opposite sides of the cultural equator. But if they were worlds apart in terms of their physical backgrounds, they were close as cousins when it came to their city of inspiration—Paris; their temperaments—surly, stubborn and highly inventive; and their mutually compatible raison d’êtres—to radically reshape the language of American prose. On a superficial level, I was intrigued for personal reasons. I am a Midwesterner, a woman and an aspiring writer. On a deeper level though, my fascination had more to do with their human chemistry, their writerly bond, their influential friendship and the strange shift in alliances that mysteriously ended it. As the story goes, Hemingway first met Stein at her apartment at 27 Rue de Fleurus, where they almost instantly fell sway to the spell of first crush inebriation. Hemingway would stop by Stein’s atelier after a morning of writing to decompress and ingest copious amounts of eau-de-vie. Stein revelled in his tall tales of journalistic exploits from abroad and gave him advice on writing. Over time, the two expatriated compadres would alter each other’s lives significantly. It was Stein who introduced Hemingway to bullfighting, Spain and the painting of Cézanne. In return, Hemingway helped Stein find a magazine to publish her monolithic and barely navigable novel The Making of Americans in serial form. In fact, Hemingway revered Stein so deeply that when Stein found his writing unsatisfactory, he would throw it out and start over from scratch. He also named his unlikely mother, mentor and muse the godmother of his first child. I first visited 27 Rue de Fleurus when I was a 19-year-old literature student at Nanterre, the left-leaning wing of the Sorbonne. A friend and I had been invited by an artist couple who lived in Stein’s old haunt for dinner one Sunday. They mentioned Stein in passing, as if she were an admired aunt whose legacy was familiar enough to reminisce over casually during apéritifs; Hemingway was referred to less casually. The conversation moved on to the notorious Stein-Hemingway union once dinner was served. But a bone-chilling hush fell over the room when I asked about their mysterious parting of ways. When the conversation shifted to the topic whether or not “tagging” (i.e. graffiti) was a legitimate art form, I felt a wave of relief and increasing curiosity commingling in my gut. It struck me then that this veiled legacy would remain a closed book unless I came up with a more creative line of questioning. Rather than admit defeat, however, I excused myself and took the long way to the toilettes. As I wandered, phantomlike, through a maze of corridors that snaked through the historical atelier, I thought I could smell the fading ether of Stein’s handwritten pages. As I passed through the downstairs salon, where we’d been served apéritifs, Hemingway’s pugilistic magnetism seemed almost palpable. After this surreal evening of imagined flashbacks and reinvented communions, I became even more determined to unravel the secret behind the initial spark and eventual sputter of such a uniquely creative love affair. I wanted to discover what their special glue had been, and why it had ultimately and irrevocably come undone.
Two Countries “That is why writers have to have two countries,” Stein wrote in her 1940 novella Paris, France, “the one
where they belong and the one in which they really live. The second one is romantic, it is separate from themselves, it is not real but it is really there.” Stein chose Paris as her creative home, as did others of the “génération perdue” (a term she is said to have coined), including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ford Madox Ford, Ezra Pound, James Joyce and Thorton Wilder. Hemingway chose Paris too, though perhaps less intentionally. Stein claims she settled in the city of light because it was “exciting and peaceful,” and because it was “where the twentieth century was”; she had also lived there as a child when her family relocated from Pittsburg. With her literary wife Alice B. Toklas as her transcriber, Stein was free to indulge in her provokingly experimental approach to writing that had either been overly criticized or largely disregarded back home. She had good food, reasonable rent (she was living on her brother Michael’s stipend) and was located within a stone’s throw of the Jardin du Luxembourg. Stein also had
by paul weatherell
The Immortals by Anicée Gaddis
the currency of recognition: “But what [the French] do do is to respect art and letters, if you are a writer you have privileges, if you are a painter you have privileges and it is pleasant having those privileges.” She also had an attentive audience of charming young men to occupy her downtime. There was Picasso, whom she eventually wrote a book about. There were Pierre Leyris and Georges Braque. And then there was Hemingway, her preferred. As a lesbian cum mother figure, with a penchant for discovering new talent in the raw, Stein had little tolerance for own sex. Instead, she and Toklas, whose pet name for Stein was “Baby,” favored men, preferably young men, or anything “in pants” to fill out their literary salon. Hemingway, on the other hand, chose Paris for more romantic reasons. He’d moved there initially as a reporter for the Toronto Star, but eventually took Stein’s advice to put journalism aside and focus instead on his fiction. He was young, slightly starry-eyed and hungry for world experience. Little did he realize how much Paris, in addition two world wars, a succession of wives and various literary alliances would impact on his work. An excerpt from 1964’s A Moveable Feast (which covers
the years 1921-26) in which a young Hemingway admires a stranger while he is writing in a café, reads as follows: “I’ve seen you beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.” Looking back on my own trajectory, I found myself caught somewhere in the middle. I was young and unformed. I had an escapist spirit and a dreamer’s questing restlessness. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, I had also come to Paris to find a new country, a new home. The days of the literary salon and café writing regime were no longer in vogue, but privately I still communed with the ghosts of the past. On the days when I didn’t have to hightail it on the R ER to Nanterre, I sat in cafés or went to the Picasso museum in the Marais or rambled through the Jardin du Luxembourg or the Tuileries or along the quais of the Seine. I didn’t know what I was looking for really. Maybe it was some form of interior channeling. But I do know that my time spent in Paris has stayed with me. To quote Hemingway: “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris
when you are young, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you for Paris is a moveable feast.”
Human Nature “Life is tradition
and human nature,” Stein also wrote, and those were some of the less obvious but highly indispensable qualities of Paris for writers at the time. If my first venture to Paris was as a dewy-eyed student then my second was as a café worker cum Stein-Hemingway scholar. Earning my living as a waitress was not my first choice but then again life rarely grants us our first choices. The upside was that I met a lot of cool, transcultural people from a cornucopia of international cities. I also had the luxury of being able to read during the afternoon lulls. I was blown away by the slow-burn seduction of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, the melancholic pageantry of his short story A Clean, Well-Lighted Place (which James Joyce called one of the best short stories ever written), and the grainy hyper-realism of Fifty Grand, The Undefeated and The Killers. In hindsight it makes sense that his terse, muscular prose and sentimentalized machismo owe much to the inebriating cocktail of Paris plus Stein. His compulsive allegiance to the “true sentence” (as seen in the following passage from A Moveable Feast) took significant shape in his flat at 74 Rue Cardinal Lemoine, and at the hotel rooms he rented for workspace: “It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say. If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written.” Stein’s writing style and daily routine felt stark in contrast. Unlike the vigorous athleticism, and alcoholism, of Hemingway – a morning of writing might be followed by an afternoon walking tour or a trip to one of the local museums, supplemented by a few bar stopovers along the way – Stein seemed to prefer the comforts of home and Toklas. Her prose, although it is filled with declarative statements and devoid of florid descriptions, is psychologically abstract and monosyllabically alienating; she uses odd combinations of verbs and prepositions (nouns are not favored) in strangely melodic ways. If Stein was a closet fabulist then Hemingway was a blood-and-guts realist. If she carved out sentences like a Cubist painter then he penned them like a minimalist composer. If Stein sometimes overwrote – her longer texts resembled detailed maps of entire countries – Hemingway adhered to the “iceberg principle” in which the writer omits certain things he knows intimately in such a way that the reader has the impression of having read between the lines. Stein is said to have accused Hemingway of biting her style, as well as Sherwood Anderson’s, the mutual friend responsible for their introduction. How much truth lies in this accusation is not the question. The result, Hemingway’s wide-ranging and singular influence over twentieth century literature (he won the Pulitzer in 1953 and the Nobel in 1954 for The Old Man and the Sea) versus Stein’s nebulous legacy as a writer more often talked about than read, is the more compelling query. It was also one of my first clues to their parting of ways.
In Times of War
Another possible clue to the two writers’ affinity for each other lies in the fact that they were both wartime artists, and were very much influenced by the backdrop of the battlefield. Unable to enlist in the U.S. Army due to poor eyesight, Hemingway joined the American Field Service Ambulance Corps and left for the Italian front during WWI; he would later become involved in combat in WWII. Stein’s role was trickier. When England declared war on Germany in WWI, Stein and Toklas returned to France from England, where they volunteered to drive medical supplies to French
hospitals and were later commended by the French government. When WWII commenced, the German-Jewish Stein and Toklas moved to the country in Biligrin, Ain (in the Rhônes-Alpes region), where they eluded persecution thanks to their friend Bernard Fay, a gay collaborator with the Vichy regime who had connections to the Gestapo. “It really takes a war to get to know a country,” Stein wrote, of her ongoing love affair with France. In seeming contradiction, she wrote: “War is more like a novel than it is like real life and that is the eternal fascination. It is a thing based on reality but invented, it is a dream made real, all the things that make a novel but not really life.” Regardless of whether or not Hemingway saw war as a dream or reality, it was something he experienced and studied intimately. From the ill-starred romanticism of A Farewell to Arms to the sweltering feverishness of For Whom the Bell Tolls to the surreal sadness of the short story A Way You’ll Never Be, Hemingway lived, breathed, worshipped and nullified the heroism and insanity inherent in trench-line culture; his very essence as a man seems to have revolved around the triptych of war, sex,
The Daily Miracle When I left Paris for the second time, I came away with an encyclopedic volume of used books,
death, and the long stretches of loneliness he felt in between. Toward the end of Paris, France, Stein relates an anecdote about a neighbor girl living in the village of Biligrin named Hélène Button. “Hélène and I have been kind of wondering just what a child’s feeling about war-time is.” As it turns out, Hélène’s main preoccupation is with her dog William, her new posse of male playmates (“because their big brothers and their fathers were gone away”), falling stars and the fact that school did not start at the usual season. While Hélène is walking by the light of the moon one night, her dog is struck by an oncoming car. In Hélène’s world (i.e. Stein’s), the war is defined by William’s consequent “stiff neck” and the fact that he was always afraid when he “saw a light,” and particularly terrified when he “suddenly saw the moon through the mist.” It is amusing to imagine Hemingway and Stein serving side by side in some invented battalion; the fabulist reflecting on the shape of the stars, while the myopic solider cocks his rifle; the marmoreal Roman Empress ordering a charge at sunrise, while the Midwestern man-child ducks beneath her skirts in guilt-ridden trepidation.
accompanied by a feeling of internal expansiveness. I was more drawn to prose than ever before. I held Faulkner and Fitzgerald, Miller and Céline, Dostoevsky and Balzac in impossibly high esteem. I envied the metaphysical high of committing one true sentence to paper, of communicating an original thought in an original way, of telling a story in a voice that stayed with you long after you’d read it. I envied Stein and Hemingway. I envied their domestic partnership and trail-blazing vision. I still wondered about the magic of their mojo, the salon chats and letters exchanged, and all the secrets and confidences and small transgressions and grand ideas that pass between such intimate strangers. I was still curious, but I was no longer driven to unearth the evidence; in fact, I thought that by keeping the cold hard facts at an arm’s length, by protecting and preserving the spell of their rare charm, I could carry it with me like a padlocked tome, to key to which I no longer coveted. I came away with the realization that in many ways Stein was Hemingway’s spiritual soul mate, his sisterly inspiration, his closet muse and exigent mentor; their glue was that Stein understood the “daily miracle” of writing. She also understood the necessity for absolute and unflinching self-possession in order to create true art. Stein understood the precariousness and self-sacrifice of honing a craft in the face of constant public exposure. She understood the larger picture too: that art is the pulse of a nation. She understood what she was trying to achieve and what Hemingway was trying to achieve, and she was able to explain it to him in clear, simple terms. If their legacy as literary geniuses is still open to debate, it’s fairly certain that they came to perceive themselves as such. Perhaps their ultimate undoing was their spiritual largesse, their outsized egos, their voracious appetites and unusual capacities to ingest and digest and reproduce the world in a startlingly new and inventive and truthful light. In hindsight, the two twentieth century giants were strikingly polar opposites; Stein was a woman, Hemingway was a man; Stein was gay, Hemingway was straight; Stein lived with Alice Toklas for nearly 40 years between France and America, while Hemingway trotted the globe endlessly and married four successive wives; Hemingway committed suicide in Idaho, while Stein succumbed to a more anonymous and inglorious death caused by stomach cancer and was buried in Père Lachaise. And yet they were brother and sister, lyrical paramours, an ongoing and interchangeable combination of mother and mentor, master and muse. What remains of their friendship is a collection of titanic masterpieces and smaller treasures: the novels The Making of Americans, The Old Man and the Sea, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Picasso, To Have and Have Not; the short story collections Three Lives, Men Without Women, The Nick Adams Stories, In Our Time; the experimental texts Tender Buttons and Alphabets and Birthdays. The second time I visited 27 Rue de Fleurus, some nine years after my first invitation, the artist couple who’d been my hosts had separated. I did not inquire about what went wrong – I’d learned my lesson about broaching forbidden rifts the first time around – but I did take one last walk through the apartment. The narrow hallways and low ceilings and famous staircase, at the bottom of which Hemingway is reported to have overheard a conversation between Stein and Toklas that caused his decision to never return to his mentor’s lodgings, seemed blanketed in penumbral silence. As for the true nature of the break between Stein and Hemingway, the real mystery remains unsolved. But sometimes shadows surrounding such immortal legends as theirs are better left in the dark.